So you can understand my shock when I read last week that learned members of the Independent Electoral Review Panel have decided to recommend that migrants be stripped of their right to vote. Journalists haven’t focused on this part of the recommendations. If Kiwis remain unaware of this implication, we will permit a covert raid on the rights of many in our community.
The panel recommended “extending the time that permanent residents must spend in Aotearoa New Zealand before gaining the right to vote to one electoral cycle”.In essence, this means that permanent residents will be required to wait three to four years before they are permitted to vote.
In my view the panel doesn’t go far enough. New Zealand is almost unique in the developed world in giving the same electoral voting rights to residents as citizens.
I believe we should follow Australia, and restrict the right to vote to citizens. Not to have fewer people voting, but to encourage people who have permanent residency, to become citizens. Shared citizenship is important for a country. It is when a country becomes your home, not just the place you live.
Any change should of course not be retrospective. Once someone is qualified to vote, they should keep it if their circumstances don’t change. So all existing migrants should be grandfathered onto the electoral roll. But we should tell future migrants (and I want more migrants, not less) that we’re glad you’re here, but we want you to become a citizen.
Firstly they find the average profit margin was 14.7% in 2019 and 12.7% in 2022, so has actually decreased.
The only industries that have had their profit margin increase was mining and transport.
Most usefully they calculated that of the 14% increase in prices from 2019 to 2022, the major factor was an increase in input costs, being 71% of the increase. An increase in labour costs was 15% of the increase and an increase in gross profits just 14%.
he Covid-19 “patient zero” was a Wuhan scientist carrying out experiments on souped-up coronaviruses, a new report has sensationally claimed.
According to the report, the scientist, Ben Hu, was conducting risky tests at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with two colleagues, Ping Yu and Yan Zhu.
It’s understood all three fell ill with Covid-like symptoms and needed hospital care weeks before Chinadisclosed the virus outbreak to the world.
They had never been named until now, The Sun reports.
It wasn’t that long ago that suggesting the virus was a lab leak could get you suspended from social media for spreading misinformation. This is why we should be very wary of those who use such labels to suppress debate.
Too many Māori MPs has created a parallel universe of tangata whenua tokenism and anti-growth, woke-ish programmes.
They should be leading a new covenant for their community. One denouncing gangs and stressing duty rather than rehashing indigenous rights and devaluing the ethic of service.
Sadly the legacy of the Te Pāti Māori, Greens and Labour is co-governance and the diffusion of te reo names such Te Whatu Ora, the health agency. The name of a thing does not matter as much as the quality of a thing. Tossing about Māori nomenclature does not lead to superior health outcomes. …
Prison life does not guarantee rehabilitation, it does however spare the community from further intimidation and violence.
The brazen display of Mongrel Mob colours and coercion in Ōpōtiki shows how far our standards have sunk. It is offensive that these yelping pups think they have a right to destroy our national qualities of industry; blood, sweat and tears. Their code is death and destruction and it was odious to see misguided locals trying to rationalise their standover tactics due to a tangi.
Now when her husband and children wake, she prepares them a breakfast of corn. Gone are the days they could eat plain rice.
The markets, where most North Koreans buy their food, are now almost empty, he says, and the price of rice, corn and seasonings has soared.
The first family in his village to succumb to starvation was a mother and her children. She had become too sick to work. Her children kept her alive for as long as they could by begging for food, but in the end all three died.
She is haunted by the week she was forced to eat puljuk – a mash of vegetables, plants and grass, ground into a porridge-like paste.
His friend’s son recently witnessed several executions carried out by the state. In each instance three to four people were killed. Their crime was trying to escape.
Weirdly media never refer to Marxism as a far left ideology!
Stuart Nash, Meka Whaitiri, Michael Wood and Jan Tinetti are all names that have haunted Chris Hipkins’ thinking far too often in the short five months he’s been Prime Minister. …
Hipkins started his tenure in February leading a national emergency disaster, but ever since he’s been riding out a storm brought upon him by his own team, dealing with one ministerial disaster after another.
The group of people around him who he can actually trust diminishes each week, and questions are rightly being asked as to whether his ministers simply don’t respect the office of the prime minister.
Nash and Wood both lied to Hipkins – hamstringing his ability to act fast given he chose to believe them – and Whaitiri waited until he’d left the country to announce her defection to Te Pāti Māori.
Can’t imagine it happening to Helen Clark!
And in his statement following his resignation Wood still hadn’t quite clocked on to the fact that he was solely responsible for the mess he had found himself in, saying “in some respects my de-prioritisation of my personal financial affairs has led to this situation”.
There’s no “some” about it, Wood’s inability to sort out his conflicting shares is completely to blame.
It’s no longer fathomable that Wood is a victim of his own forgetfulness, not even Hipkins believes that anymore.
If Wood had just been a beneficiary of the shares he may well have forgotten, but he was an active trustee and Hipkins told media it just isn’t plausible anymore that he didn’t realise the conflict and manage it.
A trustee is actually required by law to know on and report on what is in the trust.
Hipkins will be dreading getting on a plane to China at the weekend for a week-long trade mission while his scandal-prone caucus stays behind.
If he can’t nip the screw-ups in the bud, even the smaller-scale ones like Tinetti facing the Privileges Committee, he doesn’t have a hope of going on the campaign trail with a straight face and claiming he has a competent team to run the country for the next three years.
The UK Privileges Committee recommended Boris Johnson get a 90 day suspension (leading to his resignation) for misleading the British House of Commons. Will Tinetti get anything for misleading the NZ House of Representatives?
The Ministers in trouble in NZ are not lowly ranked ones. Tinetti is No 6 and Wood was 7 so both front benchers. Kiri Allan is No 10 and Nash was No 11.
(NB: A hard choice on a topic today. I was going to write again on how the PPTA continue to trample on children and families through “rostering home” two year groups a day. I was going to talk about how they are bringing the whole sector into further disrepute and shooting themselves in every body-part by driving high aspiration young people aware from a career in teaching (or driving teachers overseas) I was going to say that teachers need an oath, equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, to “first do no harm”. But I have decided to talk about something else.”)
On Monday the NZ Herald carried this opinion piece:
We don’t have enough of the right specialist teachers and the programmes continue to be diluted. The tinkering at NCEA level 1 is a case in point.
Our long-term decline in the international PISA tests should have been a big wake-up call that all is not well.”
This graph backs up his assertion:
Dr Rogers can speak with authority as not only is he exceptionally well qualified but he is also the HOD Chemistry at one of New Zealand’s very best performing schools: St Peter’s College in Epsom.
He notes: “The reality is that science is not well supported by the Ministry of Education (MoE) regardless of the rhetoric we hear. Notably, only one of the MoE senior leadership team has ever taught in a school (primary).
Of concern is that only a very small proportion of MoE employees (I estimate fewer than 1 per cent) has a science degree, and I couldn’t find anyone who had taught chemistry or physics. No doubt my statistics are wrong, but you get the picture. Sciences don’t register as important on the MoE radar.”
I wish Andrew was wrong but he isn’t. Science education is in deep trouble in NZ. Very few primary teachers have a background in Science subjects let alone the competence to teach it well. The subject is being significantly diminished in the “curriculum refresh” and the collective contract prevents incentivising this area where the shortages are already crippling.
The Ministry of Education is incompetent, disconnected from school level reality, captured by idealogues of all manner – and clearly completely disinterested in academic rigour in Science and Math. A new government needs to completely restructure/repurpose the Ministry, completely sweep out the current leadership and bring in 10 of NZ’s most outstanding Principals to lead the organisation
The Sciences are not only important for career opportunities, important for the economy, but also deeply interesting and invigorating when well taught. Young people who love science have also got more resources at their finger-tips than ever before. Parents are beginning to challenge schools and the Ministry in a range of areas. This is another one to be VERY vocal about.
Much can happen in the home too. For parents and grandparents out there two of the best books to buy for 10 year olds through to adults are:
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (fully illustrated version – not the kids version)
The Body by Bill Bryson (also illustrated)
Anyone reading them will fall in love with Science and also probably realise they learn more away from PPTA control-ville and that many of the best teachers of science subjects around the world can be accessed.
The current government is passively presiding over the collapse of tertiary and vocational education, the slow degradation of primary and secondary education, and most alarmingly of all: the decline in health services and quality. See: the brutal rolling cuts to Dunedin hospital https://t.co/izngAyQHkm
What Morgan has said is pretty clearly the truth – the decline of out education and health systems. What makes it a bit remarkable is that Morgan is a former Labour parliamentary staffer.
If this is what former Labour staffers are saying, what must mere former Labour voters be thinking?
Suspended transport minister Michael Wood has resigned as a Cabinet minister, after it was revealed his family trust held shares in Chorus, Spark, and the National Australia Bank that he did not declare.
Is there any former SOE that Wood wasn’t a shareholder in??
If you asked me a year ago the Minister least likely to have to resign because he or she had extensive shareholdings in corporates, it would have been Michael Wood.
How he could have sat there for two years in Cabinet meetings and either not revealing his shareholdings, or promising 12 times to sell them I don’t know. It is one of the stupidest ways I have seen a Minister lose their job.
It is sad on a human level. I knew Michael slightly before he became an MP. I disagree with him on many policies, but have no doubt he is well intentioned. To destroy your political career over something that could have been avoided with around two hours effort is sad.
Taxpayers to hand over $1 billion a year to fund local councils, on top of rates
Lower voting age to 16
Make STV compulsory for all Councils
Allow Councils to charge congestion charges, bed taxes, visitor levies and value-added taxes
Rejects equality of suffrage as a western-style ideal (in fact it is a universal human right)
Allow every Council to have direct Iwi/Hapu appointed members with equal voting rights to elected Crs
Go from three to four year term
It is depressing to see government body after government body dismiss equality of suffrage as a western concept.
In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed:
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
The UDRP was adopted with not a single dissenting vote in the UN General Assembly.
In 1966 we had the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which says:
To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors;
The ICCPR has 173 countries that are party to it.
If the Government wants to adopt this report, they should withdraw New Zealand from the UDRP and the ICCPR.
He told Breakfast this morning while he had indicated to Associate Minister of Justice Deborah Russell he would leave the job, he hasn’t formally resigned yet.
“I didn’t want to surprise the prime minister, so I sent him a note and said ‘look the Associate Minister of Justice is looking at dismissing me’.
“I have not formally written to the Associate Minster of Justice yet.
“The information leaked out of the prime minister’s office, hence the news headlines that the Race Relations Commissioner has resigned.”
So Hipkins office leaked out on Friday, in advance of him actually resigning.
Foon told Breakfast he’s “not an idiot” and plans to challenge the Government.
“I’ve never seen in any board policy, especially the human rights one, that there is no rules or policy to actually declare financial information, there’s nothing.
“I had all my shares that I had, I did not declare the financial quantum, there’s no rule. I actually volunteered it and to volunteer that I think I’m bloody honest.”
Foon admitted that he did not declare conflicts of interest at the time but it’s still important to challenge the Government for “fairness and justice”.
“I think it’s very important to actually challenge, challenge and be upfront and be brave on my behalf to actually challenge the decision of the minister.”
He said all he wants is a fair deal and if he’s going to be “thrown under the bus” everyone else should be too.
“Other MPs have not declared their interests and they are still there, you know, and so why am I being put under the bus for not declaring a perceived conflict of interest?
Foon is right that his conflict of interest lapse is far far less serious than Michael Wood’s. If what Foon did is a sackable offence, then how is Michael Wood still in Cabinet?
Today, the Free Speech Union has launched a campaign to oppose the Department of Internal Affairs’ (DIA) proposals to reform the New Zealand censorship regime and regulate social media. These proposals are effectively ‘Hate Speech’ laws for the internet, with inherently subjective terms such as ‘harm’ and ‘safety’ as difficult to objective define as ‘hate’, says Jonathan Ayling, Union Chief Executive.
“Frameworks of this kind do nothing to increase mature discourse or community interconnectedness. On the contrary, they breed suspicion and division. Silencing Kiwis online does not promote social cohesion or build trust.
“That’s why we’ve launched a site where Kiwis can have their say- www.freespeechsubmission.com will facilitate thousands to submit to DIA, calling on them to abandon these reforms. We have also launched a petition at www.savefreespeech.co.nz, calling on all political parties to refuse to adopt these proposals and commit to maintaining free speech online.
Most media attention has been on the Greens policy to tax any net assets you have over $2 million at 2.5%. You may think you’re safe as your net assets are less than that.
Not so.
If you have any assets in a trust, then those assets will be taxed at 1.5% from the very first dollar, and even worse it will be on gross assets, not net assets.
Let’s say you have a $1.2 million house with a $1 million mortgage, and it is in your family trust. You will pay 1.5% on $1.2 million every year, which is $18,000 a year on equity of $200,000.
This asset tax will not hit the very well off. Anyone with a trust is screwed.
The median level of assets for a household in the 2nd top quintile (so 20% of households) is $920,000 and in the top quintile is $2,256,000. So if any of those household have assets in a trust, they will be paying 1.5% a year on those assets – regardless of their liabilities.
So the two important things to remember is that the Green Party policy is that if you have any assets in a trust, they will tax you on them from the first dollar, and the tax will be on gross, not net, assets.
My No 1 pick is Tony Randle. I have known Tony since university but that is not why I am so excited he is standing. Tony is an expert on public transport. He is hugely pro public transport but even more hugely pro good analysis. Whenever NZTA or GWRC or LGWM puts out a business case for something, Tony gets hold of the detailed work sheets and literally picks up all their errors, their misguided assumptions etc. The ability of WCC to scrutinise transport projects would be hugely enhanced if Tony is a Councillor. If you want public transport decisions based on reality, not fantasy, then Tony is your person.
And boy was I right. We should all be very grateful that Tony got elected to Council because the Council was planning to lower the speed limits on almost every street in the city by 20 km/hr – 60 to 40 and 50 to 30. This would have increased travel times by 50% or more.
There are some streets that should have lower speed limits. I support 30 km/hr for Lambton Quay as it is teaming with pedestrians. But a blanket reduction over the city was always about ideology.
It’s back to the drawing board for the plan to reduce speed limits to 30kph across Wellington, after one of the city council’s own discovered a serious error in the council’s cost-benefit analysis.
The mistake – first spotted by councillor Tony Randle – meant the benefits of reducing the speed limit in terms of reducing crashes was overstated by more than $250 million. …
The mistake was “a small but significant error”, Randle said. He had experience as an analyst and discovered the error after he asked council staff for the spreadsheet of cost-benefit analysis.
Councillors should not have to put through scores of pages of spreadsheets to check they are accurate. They should be able to trust what is put to them. This is a major failing by WCC, and should have employment consequences for some. I don’t necessarily mean the analyst who made the mistake. We all make mistakes. But a well funded massive entity like WCC should have rigourous processes of checking, and auditing and peer review. The senior management team need to explain why this all failed.
the benefit cost ratio, which councillors were told was 7.7, should have actually been -1.8 🤯
This is an error of monumental proportions. They told Councillors that making this change would produce $7,700 of benefits for every $1,000 of costs, but the reality is that the costs will be almost double the benefits.
Remember, that if not for one Councillor picking this up, the majority of the Council probably would have happily voted to lower speed limits across the city by 20 km/hr.
Staff involved in this area should have been sceptical from the beginning at the claimed 7.7:1 BCR. Such a ratio almost never exists in the real world with transport projects. Anything with such a positive BCR would have been done years ago.
The suspicion is that as the ideological agenda from the top is that cars are bad and we must make it as unpleasant as possible for people to use them, that no one wanted to question a paper which told them what they wanted to hear.
I hope Councillors don’t just shrug their shoulders and say oh mistakes happen. They should be angry. They should be holding the Chief Executive and the SLT to account and demanding an independent audit of their processes.
Council chief planning officer Liam Hodgetts said the error was “very disappointing” in a benefit-cost ratio which was externally and independently peer-reviewed.
“I apologise for the error – this should not have happened.”
Was it also internally checked by anyone? And who was the external independent peer-reviewer? The company should be named. Will the Council stop using them? What was the brief to them?
A Hamilton mother says she doesn’t “want to be in my own home” following years of abuse from her neighbours, and now she is begging for a way out.
Katelyn Park’s neighbours are Kāinga Ora tenants and she claims they’ve verbally abused and her four children and threatened to burn her house down.
“They’ve threatened to burn my house down, they’ve threatened to beat me and my mum and they’ve threatened to kill my animals.”
But despite multiple complaints to Kāinga Ora, she says nothing is being done and the abuse continues.
These families are going through a form of state sanctioned child abuse. Kainga Ora is allowing its tenants to terrorise New Zealanders who just want a safe home to live in. They are the worst landlord in New Zealand, as no other landlord would be so unresponsive to the bad behaviour of some of its tenants.
The parliamentary advisor who helped MPs discover 32 unauthorised changes to the Three Waters reforms bills is calling for a wider review, saying it would be “potentially dangerous” to assume this is an isolated case.
The finance and expenditure select committee reported last week that Department of Internal Affairs’ officials went behind MPs’ backs to make changes to the Three Waters reforms that MPs didn’t agree with.
This is outrageous behaviour by DIA, and there should be employment consequences for those involved. This has had little publicity outside Newsroom.
It’s understood Internal Affairs has not apologised to the committee, or to the Speaker.
I believe what DIA did was arguably a breach of privilege. The Speaker should refer DIA to the Privileges Committee. That is how you will stop this happening again.
Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.
Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients – on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare. …
Some surgeons, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new scoring tool was medically indefensible. They said patients should be prioritised on how sick they were, how urgently they needed treatment, and how long they had been waiting for it – not on their ethnicity.
One of the surgeons said he was “disgusted” by the new ranking system.
“It’s ethically challenging to treat anyone based on race, it’s their medical condition that must establish the urgency of the treatment,” the surgeon said.
The surgeons are right. Surgical priority should be based on clinical need, now whether one of your great great grandparents was of a particular race.
There can be times when group characteristics (such as ethnicity) need to be taken into account because you don’t have individual data. But this is not the case with surgical waiting lists. They have full health information on each individual, and there is absolutely no need to introduce group characteristics into it.
An email by Te Whatu Ora business support manager Daniel Hayes in April said: “Hi team, Heads up. This is going to be the new criteria for outsourcing your patients going forward. Just putting this on your radar now so that you can begin to line up patients accordingly. Over 200 days for Māori and Pacific patients. Over 250 days for all other patients.”
So someone who is sicker and more likely to die if untreated may have to wait 50 days longer for surgery, because they had the wrong ancestors.
Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said when it came to prioritising healthcare, there were important reasons why ethnicity was a factor.
She pointed to the Government-commissioned, independent review of the health system in 2018, which found the system did not serve everyone well and produced unequal outcomes, particularly for vulnerable populations.
Using this logic, the Government could justify the following policies:
A tax rate of 30% for Maori and Pacific taxpayers and 33% for everyone else, on the basis of unequal income outcomes.
A school starting age of 5 for Maori and Pacific children and 7 for everyone else, on the basis of unequal educational outcomes.
If you have no values or principles, then you can justify any amount of discrimination on the basis of unequal outcomes.
It is manifestly wrong that someone with a greater clinical need for surgery should be made to wait longer than someone with a lesser clinical need, because of who their ancestors are.
If you want a reason to change the Government in October, this is it.
Don’t just accept this change to our health system. E-mail your local Government MP and tell them you do not support this. Turn up to public meetings and challenge them on this. Support organisations that will campaign against this.
National is promising to create tougher sentences for gang members, adding gang membership as an aggravating factor when handed down a sentence for an offence.
This is a good policy. Gangs are by their very nature criminal associations. Crime is not an accidental byproduct of a gang. It is how they get funded (that plus grants from Labour). Someone who joins a gang is making a choice to join organised crime. Not all criminals are in gangs, but almost every gang member is a criminal.
However, the Green Party and Labour both say National’s proposal is already happening and “really redundant”.
They are wrong. In National’s release, they noted:
Note to editor: National will explicitly add gang membership as an aggravating factor in the Sentencing Act 2002, so when a gang member commits a crime they are likely to receive a stronger sentence than they otherwise would have. While participation in an “organised criminal group”, may be considered an aggravating factor if there is a connection between the “organised crime” and the particular offence, National believes gang membership should always be an aggravating factor when a gang member commits a crime.
I read a lot of sentencing notes. It is relatively rare, from what I have seen, for gang membership at present to lead to a longer sentence.
