This op-ed was offered to Stuff, NZ Herald and Newsroom to publish. They all declined.

There has been some interesting discussion in the past week about who can enter women’s bathrooms and changing rooms, or play on women’s sports teams, as New Zealand First and then the Act Party have announced policy positions. 

In brief, NZ First plans to ban transgender women (biological males who identify as women) from women’s toilets, changing rooms and sports teams, and Act has said it will review the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill (that enables people to change the sex on their birth certificate or ‘sex self-ID’) and the Human Rights Act.

Our media and major political parties would have us believe this is a non-issue and most New Zealanders don’t care. They say the cost of living, crime, health and education are more important, and I agree. But that doesn’t mean New Zealanders don’t care what happens when we allow males who identify as transgender in women’s spaces and sports teams. They do.

Last month I attended the International Women’s Sports Summit 2023 in the US, and presented as co-founder of the International Consortium on Female Sport (ICFS). We established the consortium earlier this year as we saw the need for a strong and united voice to advocate for the preservation of the female category in sport. We want to ensure the fairness and safety for those athletes born female.

For many years women’s groups from around the globe have been fighting to have fairness for females restored in sport, collaborating and supporting each other where we could. Yet we found the concerns we raised were dismissed and ignored, and we weren’t being given a seat at the table when these policies were being developed, while well-funded trans activist lobby groups have had the ear of our sporting leaders all the way up to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). 

Women deserve proper representation when decisions are to be made about their sports category and the ‘female voice’ must be considered when sports organisations undertake consultations regarding eligibility at every level – that’s local, regional, national, and international. The ICFS serves in this capacity and now includes members from the USA, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, NZ, Central America and Mexico. Our members stand united in the conviction that sport governing bodies must abide by fundamental principles of safety, privacy, and fairness, along with international laws prohibiting sex-based discrimination against biological females.

Recently there has been some movement. The Union Cycliste International (UCI) now prevents males (who have been through male puberty) who identify as transgender from competing in women’s cycling. It has joined World Rugby, FINA (world swimming’s governing body) and World Athletics to recognise the biological implications of sex and respect women’s rights to fair and safe sport.

While this sounds positive, Cycling New Zealand’s policy allows a person to compete in the sex category they identify with and New Zealand Rugby is yet to announce its policy but is aligned with Sport New Zealand (the major funder), which released guidelines that support a person competing in the sex category they identify in.

Many sports, especially at community level – which makes up by far the majority of sport in the world – have begun allowing total self-identification, prioritising the feelings and inclusion of males who identify as transgender in the female category over the feelings, fairness and safety of all females. 

Unfortunately, our political and sporting leaders have decided to believe that male advantage no longer exists in sport, when males who identify as transgender wish to participate in the female category. Or at least they think it doesn’t undermine meaningful competition for females enough to matter.

This position has seen sports allow biological males to take sporting opportunities from females, to injure female athletes and to attain female podiums and prizes. The fundamental rights of females to safety, privacy and fairness, along with international laws prohibiting sex-based discrimination against biological sex are being completely dismantled.

One of the first actions our Consortium did was to define key words that allow women to clearly articulate the objective reality of their physical bodies, so that sex-based discrimination cannot be ignored. This language, like the biology of sex, is not hateful or hurtful. Language is important in sports policies as it’s the only way we recognise women and girls in sport. It’s the only way we can defend their rights. And it’s the only way we can recognise when our rights to fairness, safety and inclusion are compromised. 

It goes without saying that everyone has a right to play sport, but just not in the category they choose for good biological reasons.

All sports should enshrine the significance of biology in their rule books to make it clear that the women’s category will always be protected for those athletes born female – from community sport to elite as, if fair and meaningful competition matters, then it matters at every level.

I encourage you to listen to these three key presentations given at the summit to understand why the female category in sport needs protection.

• British philosophy and ethics Professor Jon Pike discussing the IOC’s theory of fairness in sport, explores category and competitive advantages in sport, and where male advantage fits within those. (22 mins)
• World Rugby Head Scientist Ross Tucker PhD, who has also consulted with multiple governing bodies around the world, on how safe and sensible policy has resulted from apolitical data analysis and systemic processes and sometimes has been ignored. The implications for other sports and countries are clear. (1hr 22 mins)
• Dr Greg Brown shares the data from pre-puberty athletic performance studies from around the globe. (28 mins)

Ro Edge is the co-founder of the International Consortium on Female Sport and established Save Women’s Sports Australasia in 2020. She has been leading the movement to protect the female category for sport in New Zealand and aims to work proactively with sports.

National announced:

A National Government will pay for 13 cancer treatments that are helping extend survival rates in Australia, by making them available to patients in New Zealand, National Leader Christopher Luxon says.

“Each year, more than 25,000 Kiwis are diagnosed with cancer and more than 10,000 tragically lose their lives. Almost every New Zealander will have some experience with cancer in their lifetime – either personally or through a friend, colleague or loved one.

“But despite the hard work and dedication of New Zealand’s trusted healthcare professionals, cancer survival rates here lag behind Australia, partially due to Australia’s broader funding of cancer medicines.

“The New Zealand Cancer Control Agency recently identified 13 treatments for lung, bowel, kidney, and head and neck cancers that provide significant clinical benefits and are funded in Australia but not in New Zealand.

“Under National, New Zealanders will not have to leave the country, mortgage their home, or start a Givealittle page to fund potentially life-saving and life-extending treatments that are proven to work and are readily available across the Tasman.

“National will allocate $280 million in ring-fenced funding to PHARMAC over four years to pay for these therapies. We think this is a better use of taxpayers’ money than paying $5 prescription fees for everyone, including those who can afford to pay it themselves.

“Under National, superannuitants and those on low-incomes will receive free prescriptions. For everyone else, the total amount any family will pay for prescriptions in a year will be capped at $100.

This is politically a very smart policy. Chris Hipkins now has to defend him getting free prescriptions, rather than funding cancer drugs. National has taken an issue they were on the back foot about, and turned it back on Labour.

Ideally National would not be dictating to Pharmac what they spend the extra funding on, but politically I understand the need to specify what the prescription fee revenue will go towards.

Tova O’Brien writes:

Labour has been sent its most violent wake-up call yet in the latest 1News Verian poll with a four point tumble tipping them into the terrible 20s on 29%.

Anything with a two in front for major parties in a public poll this close to an election campaign will have apparatchiks freaking out that the rot has set in.

And when you have Luxon and Hipkins neck and neck in the preferred Prime Minister stakes there will be no more campaign consolation for Labour – only crisis stations.

Remember former National Party leader Simon Bridges was rolled when he took the party to 30.6% in 2020.

The problem for Labour is there is no Jacinda waiting in the wings.

A guest post by Carl Cerecke of NMIT | Te Pūkenga:

The TEU is losing its understanding of what its purpose is. In a time of university cuts and Te Pūkenga shambolics, the TEU is spreading its focus to social and ideological issues that, while arguably important, have the capacity to dilute and weaken the union’s core focus on advancing the industrial and professional rights of members, advocating for members with their employers, and upholding academic freedom. While the current TEU president stated in 2022 that “Industrial matters are the heart of any union”, the changes voted in at the May national conference (and at previous conferences) are crowding out that heart with side issues.

The two most controversial changes are a move to a co-governance and an expanded set of purposes beyond industrial relations: Co-governance will be with a large 24-member (12 Māori, 2 Pasifika, 10 non-racially-specified) council.  The purposes are collected under 5 headings: Mana Tiriti, Mana Mahi, Mana Taurite, Mana Mātauranga, and Mana Taiao. Let us consider the changes to the purposes first and the changes to the governance second.

As well as the standard purposes expected of a union in the tertiary education sector, the new purposes also include these statements: “The Union shall advocate for a tertiary education system that is accessible to all; acknowledges, values, and validates Mātauranga Māori and cultural provision” and “The Union will take action to transform the relationship of the Union and the tertiary education sector with Te Taiao (Papatūānuku and Ranginui) by supporting climate justice, just transitions and kaitiakitanga of the natural environment”. Note that I’m not arguing against these ideas here (for some ideas it is not even clear what the union means), I’m only arguing that these should not be part of the core purpose of a union.

Here are some reasons to reject the broadening of the purpose of the union:

The full results are here.

Party Vote

• National 37% (+2% from last poll in July 2023)
• Labour 29% (-4%)
• ACT 13% (+1%)
• Greens 12% (+2%)
• Maori Party 2.6% (-0.2%)
• NZ First 3.7% (+0.6%)
• Freedoms NZ 0.7% (-0.1%)
• TOP 0.6% (-1.1%)
• New Conservatives 0.3% (-0.1%)
• DemocracyNZ 0.0% (-0.6%)

Seats

• Labour 37 (-28 from election)
• National 48 (+15)
• ACT 17 (+7)
• Greens 15 (+5)
• Maori 3 (+1)

Government

• National/ACT 65/120
• Labour/Greens/maori 55/120

Preferred PM (unprompted)

• Chris Hipkins 21% (-4%)
• Christopher Luxon 20% (nc)
• David Seymour 6% (-1%)
• Chloe Swarbrick 2% (nc)
• winston peters 3% (+1%)
• Jacinda Ardern 2% (+1%)
• Nicola Willis 2% (+1%)

This shows the annual net departures of NZ citizens. In the year to June 2014 it was 12,224 and then it reduced over the next three years to 2,915 – only losing 55 Kiwis a week. It doubled during 2018 and 2019, but still relatively low. During the Covid-19 pandemic Kiwis returned home, of course.

But look at what is happening now. Almost 35,000 Kiwis have left in the last 12 months. That’s 670 a week.

A guest post by Phronesis

There is an ongoing debate in NZ around violent crime, sentencing, and prison numbers. This debate seems to me to always miss the point because it never deals with the fundamental question of what are we actually trying to achieve? What is the goal here?

The system is often called the Justice system but this presupposes a number of problematic ideas. Primarily that the world is or could ever be a just and fair place. It is obvious to everyone that the world is not just and fair, and (sadly) only the deluded believe that it ever could be.

So, in our “justice” system a criminal who “does the crime” then “serves the time” is held to have paid some sort of price to balance out the harm that they caused to their victims. Justice is achieved by individuals receiving the punishment which they deserve for their crimes. Of course this punishment doesn’t help the victim in any way, it’s only practical use is as either a deterrent to potential offenders or in the case of prison, an effective limitation on further offending (against the public at least).

The logical endpoint of this punitive conception of justice is that when an offender is not entirely culpable for their actions then the punishment should be reduced. So when an offender has been exposed to a childhood of abuse, poverty of parental input, and general uncivilness we should punish them less than we would the average member of society. The reasoning is perfectly valid but the outcome is that we should punish the most violent and psychopathic criminals the least.

This is Justice but is this what we actually want?

Alternatively we could take the view that what we actually want is a society with the least amount of violence and victims as possible. How would we achieve this? Well when a violent offender comes before the courts we would look at their history of criminal behaviour, we would look at their upbringing, and we would remove the most violent and psychopathic offenders from society for the longest. Not it must be clear to punish them, but to protect society from their near inevitable reoffending. Prisons would not be places of punishment but exist primarily to physically prevent reoffending. I would like to see them be much nicer places to live but I suspect that given the nature of the occupants this would be difficult.

We actually already do this in the case of those violent offenders who are found to have such diminished capacity that they are not punishable for their crimes by reason of insanity. We don’t just let them out on the streets to commit further crimes, we attempt to help them get better, and we don’t let them out till they are (in theory at least).Our Justice system is failing because it accepts the reality that many of those who come before it have diminished responsibility for their crimes but then fails to consider that true Justice must consider present and future victims. In many ways it even lets down the criminals themselves by failing to prevent them from reoffending. Can you imagine what it would be like living with having committed violent crimes, often against those you love? We need to move away from a punitive understanding of justice and towards a preventative understanding. It is clear that threats of future punishment are insufficient to prevent crime, or there would be no crime now, so the reality is that only segregation will prevent repeat violent offenders from reoffending and creating more victims. It’s an unfortunate situation, particularly for the individuals in question, but the world really isn’t fair.

The annual cost of Labour’s pledge to remove GST on fruit and vegetables is $515 million. Over four years that is $2.06 billion. You can do a lot with $2 billion. Now if all that $2 billion went into reduced prices, then that would be one thing. But Sir Michael Cullen’s Tax Working Group assessed that any such reduction of GST for food would only be passed on at 30%. This was based on actual empirical data from other countries.

So of that $2.06 billion in reduced revenue, $1.44 billion would go to supermarket chains.

The remaining $618 million would go to households.

That is $154 million per year that would go to households.

Per week that is about $3 million a week, for around 2.3 million households. That is $1.30 a week per household.

So the centrepiece of Labour’s plan to help with the cost of living crisis they are partially responsible for is to give $1.44 billion to owners of supermarkets and to give $1.30 a week to households.

This is a very powerful graphic. It shows that the authors of the highly cited article that dismissed the lab leak scenario actually thought it was highly plausible.

This isn’t a case of we thought one thing at the time and changed our minds later as more evidence emerged. They published an article that directly contradicted their own internal messages.

This is why we must be wary of people who say “trust the science” because that relies on trusting all scientists to be honest. These ones were not.

Nate Silver has an excellent piece on how this should be a major scandal, widely covered by media. Sadly it has not been.

National has released its 2023 List, which is below.

To work out who may get in, we need to make assumptions over which seats National wins. These are not prediction, just an explicit assumption. National won 23 seats in 2020. They also won Hamilton West. There are 12 seats they were less than 4,500 votes behind Labour – Northland, Whangarei, Maungakiekie, Tukituki, Upper Harbour, Northcote, New Plymouth, Hamilton East, Otaki, Ilam, Hutt South and Rangitata. If they win all of those that is 36 electorate seats.

The last three polls all have National at 35%. The number of seats will depend on the wasted vote but let’s say that gets them 46 seats. so who would come in on the list:

1. Nicola Willis
2. Paul Goldsmith
3. Melissa Lee
4. Gerry Brownlee
5. Nancy Lu
6. Katie Nimon
7. Agnes Loheni
8. Maureen Pugh
9. Emma Chatterton
10. James Christmas

Every 0.8% they get over 35% they get another MP.

A reader has watched every episode of The Nation so far in 2023 and recorded down who the panelists were, and analysed their comments to categorise them from hard left to hard right.

His summary is:

So 24% of panelists had right-leaning views and 62% had left-leaning views. A 2.5:1 ratio.

Marc Daalder at Newsroom writes:

One has to wonder whether the Labour Party has replaced all of its policy staff with the reckons of a ChatGPT bot that has been fed a steady diet of Talbot Mills polling numbers and focus group transcripts.

That’s one way to explain the unambitious tax policy released on Sunday: To strip GST from fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables, saving the lowest-income households a little more than $2 a week – and to boost family tax credits for low- and middle-income workers with children.

Yep $2 a week for the lowest-income and some of the WFF changes such as the abatement threshold don’t come in until April 2026!

Bad policies parties believe in are understandable. Policy that clashes with a party’s values can be excused if it works.

This is neither. This isn’t a policy Labour believes in, it’s a policy Labour believes will win. The party has made policy by focus group rather than by principle or evidence base.

The tax policy also doesn’t help answer the key question that still looms over Hipkins: We’ve seen what he doesn’t believe in (wealth taxes, hate speech laws, the public sector media merger) but what does he want? Sunday’s announcement leaves the impression the Prime Minister supports whatever gets him another term of Parliament.

A fair summary.

Bryce Edwards writes:

Labour is budgeting $500 million per year on this tax cut. But how much of that will end up in consumers’ pockets? And how much will end up with poorer citizens?

The consensus among economists seems to be that when such tax exemptions are introduced, companies avoid passing the bulk of the savings on to consumers. Labour’s own 2018 Tax Working Group concluded that only about 30 per cent of a tax cut normally gets passed on. The rest goes into increased profits.

That TWG was chaired by Michael Cullen. So Chris Hipkins is going to give $350 million to the supermarkets as a tax cut and $150 million will flow through to consumers.

So Labour are saying this policy will save $5 a week for the average family. Well if Dr Cullen is right, it will in fact only say $1.50 a week.

I like National’s policy to allow people to have more than one KiwiSaver provider. If you are not 100% happy with your current provider you may be hesitant to transfer your entire savings over to a new one.

But if you like the look of another provider, and you had the option of say 50% of your savings going into your current provider and 50% into a new one, then you would be more likely to do so. And the increased competition between providers should lead to reduced fees.

1. Any convictions are state convictions are can’t be pardoned by the President. So even if Trump (or another Republican) wins, he can’t pardon himself.
2. The Governor can’t pardon state crimes. Only the board of pardons and paroles can, whose five members serve seven year terms
3. Even the board can only consider a pardon after the sentence has been served – not before
4. The RICO law in Georgia is very wide-ranging and makes it easier to secure convictions than under federal law
5. The minimum jail time for a conviction on the RICO charge is five years. The other indictments leave sentences more to the discretion of a Judge, but in Georgia there is a minimum five years.
6. Trump faces 13 different counts, and even some of the lesser ones carry a minimum one year jail term.
7. It is inevitable that some or most of the 19 co-conspirators will cut a plea deal and become prosecution witnesses
8. The trial is highly likely to be televised
9. It has transpired that Trump refused to pay many of his lawyers who tried to overturn the election result for them. They are co-defendants and are more likely to flip, considering working for him has left them near bankrupt
10. The Judge is a Fulton County Superior Court Judge. He is a former state and federal prosecutor and state inspector general. He was appointed by the current (Republican) Governor Brian Kemp.

The Herald talked to 12 tax experts on Labour’s Get policy. Here is the summary.

• VUW Taxation Professor: “I think it’s one of the worst ideas I’ve heard for a while.”
• NZ Initiative Chief Economist: “It’s complicated, it’s annoying, it adds an awful lot of cost to running a tax system, it makes everybody’s tax returns more complicated… and it’s all for nothing. It doesn’t give you any benefit.”
• CTU Chief Economist (and former Advisor to Grant Robertson) – not his first choice, worth exploring, but better than anything National and ACT would do
• AUT senior taxation lecturer: “Inequity will increase because the benefit will go more in the pockets of rich people.”
• Infometrics principal economist: “If you can find an economist that supports this policy, they don’t deserve the title”
• Chair of GST design committee in 1985: “It’s a very inefficient way of helping the people you most want to help – presumably, low income people. Most of the money spent on food and vegetables is spent by middle and high income people, so you give away a lot of revenue as a government for very little benefit to the people you most want to help.”
• Tax specialist: “It’s an expensive option for little gain,”
• EY tax partner: “From a tax policy perspective, it is not a good idea,”
• Former head of policy for IRD: “Once you take it off something, how do you stop? We also have GST on doctors’ fees. How do you justify that? “Eventually, you end up with a very narrow base and if you want to collect the same amount of GST, you would have to massively increase the GST rate on everything else that you do catch.
• Child Poverty Action Group economics spokeswoman: “It’s probably one of the least cost effective ways for helping people who are struggling to feed their families.
• Tax specialist and member of 2009 Tax Working Group: “The compliance and administration costs in tax is large, and people tend to ignore those… indeed, there are some studies that suggest that those administration and compliance costs are the biggest component of the deadweight loss of taxes, tax costs, and they go through the roof as soon as you complicate the design of the system.
• Findex tax partner: “The basic bottom line is that removing GST just isn’t a smart way of lowering food prices,”

Labour know this is a terrible policy. Both the Minister of Finance and Associate Minister of Revenue have condemned it in the past.

Tova O’Brien writes:

What could possibly be worse than having your flagship cost of living policy leaked and announced by the opposition? 

Finally announcing your leaked and already announced flagship cost of living policy but buggering up the cost.

You also have to wonder who in Labour is leaking to Nicola. Their policy was Labour policy, not Govt policy, so the leak can’t be a public servant. It also wasn’t leaked (as is more usual) to a media source, but direct to Nicola. So really has to be a Labour MP or very senior staffer.

C’mon Labour! The Finance Minister pitched his election year budget as ‘getting the basics right’.

Someone hand that man a calculator. Just a basic one mind, let’s not confuse things with all those extra buttons on a scientific calculator.

Maybe an abacus?

So to miss the mark with the cost of its GST off fruit and veg policy by about $250million dollars is the gnarliest own goal we’ve seen since the FIFA Women’s World Cup kicked off. 

Making matters so much worse for Labour, the person who alerted the masses to the miscalculation was the very same person who was leaked the policy and cut Labour’s lunch in the first place, National’s Finance Spokesperson Nicola Willis.

To be fair, Labour did notice the error themselves. They just decided not to tell any and hope no one would notice the difference between the embargoed documents and the speeches.

The spin machine was quick to fire up about falsehoods from the opposition with a government spokesperson telling journalists, “the fact sheet was an earlier version that was only sent to media under embargo ahead of the announcement”.

“The materials that were publicly released at the time of the announcement were all correct.”

Problem was there were no materials publicly released at the time of the announcement – or at any point after it for that matter.

So they never told anyone about the hole and never issued new material correcting it until after Willis pointed it out.