I’ve seen a lot of people on the left demanding that NZ implement petrol rationing immediately, to prepare for when the supply to NZ of petrol and diesel reduces. They are trying to portray the Government as not doing enough, so presumably they can claim that when rationing does occur, it could have been avoided by acting earlier.

They are wrong, because they overlook a vital fact – our in country storage capacity. It is estimated our in country capacity is around 28 days worth of petrol. We currently have 27.9 days according to MBIE.

What would happen if we reduced petrol consumption now by 20% for 10 days. Would that give us two extra days of fuel? No. Because we can’t store 30 days of fuel. Only 28. So what would happen is our petrol companies would actually have to cancel a tanker coming to NZ, as there would not be enough storage for them to offload. And once you start cancelling tankers, you may find it hard to get them coming as regularly as before.

You might think, how about we pay the tankers to just stay berthed in NZ. That could increase our capacity to say 35 or 40 days. Well first of all this will reduce global supply as there would be fewer tankers available to ship the petrol. And imagine what would happen if other countries started doing this also. Supply would really take a dive.

The reality is that while we still have tankers coming regularly to NZ to refuel our supplies, any demand reduction measures won’t make a significant difference. You might want to do it for cost saving purposes, but using 20% less now, won’t mean we have 20% more in the future. It will just mean less fuel comes to NZ.

Now once we start to experience a drop off in supply (which sadly is very possible, even probable), then yes conservation measures will be needed, and will even be vital. But fortunately we are not there yet.

Now you could argue we need more storage capacity in NZ, and I would agree. Obviously this is not something trivial to do, but any increase in storage capacity would obviously increase our resilience. So capacity, not supply, is the issue for now.

Catherine Cooke was diagnosed in 2024 with the aggressive triple negative breast cancer. She was also in a legal dispute with a lawyer over a large legal bill.

One of the lawyers in the law firm sent her a charming e-mail which said:

“We are sorry to hear you have such an aggressive cancer… all we can say is it is extremely important we all make good decisions so that we do not bring unnecessary stress or karma on ourselves.”

That lovely gentleman is a Labour Party candidate in the Papaetoetoe Local Board byelection.

Radio NZ reports:

A plan to fast-track a controversial West Coast hydro scheme has been given an initial go-ahead.

The West Coast lines company, Westpower, has applied to fast-track its controversial plans to build a run-of-river hydro scheme on the Waitaha River, and in its draft decision the fast-track expert panel has given it approval.

Westpower Limited wants to build the $100 million Waitaha Hydro Project on conservation land between Hokitika and Franz Josef Glacier.

The plan is to build a weir to divert water through a tunnel to generate 23 megawatts of hydroelectric power, enough to power the equivalent of about 12,000 homes, according to Westpower.

Excellent. I would much rather have more hydro power than import coal from Indonesia.

Federated Mountain Clubs (FMC) however said the proposal risked destroying a unique environment. President Megan Dimozantos said it was bad news for recreational users and the conservation estate.

Has there been any renewable energy project in NZ that hasn’t attracted opposition from environmental and conservation groups? They are in favour of renewable electricity in principle, but always seem to oppose it in practice.

The Taxpayers’ Union announced the finalists and winners for the 2026 Jonesie Awards for wasteful spending. A lifetime achievement award went to Chippie for:

Chris Hipkins won the Lifetime Achievement Award for his once-in-a-generation waste of $35 billion of Covid Response and Recovery Fund spending burned on non-Covid initiatives. That is $17,157 for every New Zealand household, shovelled from the taxpayer onto non-Covid projects during an international crisis.”

The central govt nominees were:

1. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (Going for growth): The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet recorded 27 attempts by staff to access “adult entertainment websites” on government devices, up from 24 in the previous year.

2. Te Pāti Māori Co-Leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi:

3. Minister Brooke van Velden ($150,000 cone hotline): Workplace Relations Minister Brooke van Velden allocated $150,000 to establish a public hotline for road cone complaints – a hotline that wasn’t even a hotline! The submission tool received just over 1,000 complaints before closing early, equating to roughly $140 per complaint.

4. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Mystery iPhone robber): Between 2022 and 2025, 258 iPhones and 22 iPads (an average of two per week over the period) were reported missing from MBIE, at a cost of $137,000. Have they not heard of Find My iPhone?

5. Tertiary Education Commission (Fees Free skydiving courses): More than $1.2 million in Fees Free funding has been used to subsidise skydiving courses for students. The Government’s Fees Free programme contributes $12,000 per student, leaving trainee skydivers to fork out just $1,500 – $7.50 per jump.

The TPM co-leaders took out that category.

And in local government:

1. Wellington City Council ($2.3 million disco loos): Wellington City Council spent $2.3 million on a public toilet block under former Mayor Tory Whanau, including $147,000 on decorative lighting.

2. Selwyn District Council (Child governance): Selwyn District Council included children’s feedback in its long-term planning consultation on housing, rates and infrastructure. The Council later admitted it did not separate children’s submissions from adult submissions before they were reviewed by councillors.

3. Auckland Council ($118 million consultant spend): Auckland Council spent $118 million on consultants in the first two full financial years of Mayor Wayne Brown’s term. The spending comes as the Super City faces a record rates hike, with the mayoral office alone spending $2.5 million on consultants over two years, compared with $4,110 across four years under former Mayor Phil Goff.

4. Mahé Drysdale ($470k coffees): Tauranga City Council spent over $470,000 on coffee machines and beans for staff, a decision occurring under a term that included a 36 percent rates increase, the highest-paid councillors in the country, and a $92 million council headquarters project.

5. Christchurch City Council (243 flights during climate emergency): Local councils spent $1.3 million on international flights over five years. Christchurch City Council spent more than $211,000 on 243 international flights – the most flights recorded by any council that had declared a climate emergency

I thought it should have gone to WCC, but hard to meat Mahe Drysdale and almost $500k on coffee!

The latest performance data for Orange Tamariki show useful improvement, which should be welcomed. Key measures are:

• Percentage of children in care who have been visited by their social worker at least once in the last eight weeks – 97% vs target of 95%
• Percentage of critical or very urgent reports of concern, addressed within operational timeframes – 85% vs target of 95%
• A six year target of reducing children and young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour by 18% has already been met with an 19% reduction
• Proportion of complaints audited that were handled in a way that fully met Oranga Tamariki standards – target is a 25% increase from 48% to 60% – already at 62%

I think it is so important governments set performance targets that can be measured, and they are held to account for. The previous government was allergic to them.

This is a guest post by a former Ministry of Health staffer:

The NZ Herald has revealed that a Cabinet paper in Chris Hipkins’ name included CV-TAG’s December 2021 advice warning against mandating two vaccine doses for under-18s – advice Hipkins and his colleagues told the Royal Commission they never received. That revelation is damning. But it barely scratches the surface.

The public debate has fixated on whether the December advice reached Ministers. That is the wrong question. The documentary record shows that CV-TAG’s concerns about vaccinating children were communicated months earlier, in August 2021, and that those concerns were comprehensive, specific, and unambiguous.

CV-TAG’s August 4 memo stated plainly that children aged 12 to 15 should be eligible to be vaccinated if they were at high risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19. It recommended explicitly against routine vaccination of that age group, noting that children faced low risk of severe disease or death and that, given New Zealand’s low prevalence of infection at the time, the risk of exposure was minimal. The group flagged that it would revisit the question once more data emerged on the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in adolescents, particularly the incidence and outcomes of myocarditis cases following the Pfizer vaccine.

CV-TAG’s own minutes confirm this advice was relayed to Director-General Sir Ashley Bloomfield  and “Vaccine Ministers” – at that time Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Ayesha Verrall. There is no dispute about this being recorded.

Yet in October 2021, Cabinet decided to include 12 to 15-year-olds in the vaccine mandate framework, requiring two doses for them to be considered fully vaccinated. No further advice from CV-TAG was sought before that decision. The group’s earlier caution about routine vaccination was, by all appearances, simply set aside.

The claim by Hipkins and Verrall that they were unaware of CV-TAG’s position is not credible. Sir Ashley, Dr Caroline McElnay and Dr Ian Town were in frequent, direct contact with Ministers about the vaccine rollout throughout this period. The proposition that all three independently failed to mention the substance of CV-TAG’s advice – that New Zealand’s foremost vaccine experts had recommended against routine vaccination of this age group – defies belief. But even if we accept that improbable scenario, it raises an equally troubling question: how could Ministers decide to mandate a vaccine for children without first requesting and reviewing the expert advice? That is not governance. It is recklessness.

By November, CV-TAG was raising the alarm more explicitly, expressing concern that the mandate required under-18s to have two doses to be considered fully vaccinated. By December 9, the group was effectively pleading for one dose to be sufficient. That December advice – the one the Royal Commission found was never formally delivered – was not a bolt from the blue. It was the culmination of six months of increasingly urgent concern that Ministers either ignored or were never told about. Neither explanation is acceptable.

Sir Ashley Bloomfield bears particular responsibility. As Director-General of Health, his duty was to the public, not to the political imperatives of Ministers. If CV-TAG advised against routine vaccination of children – and the record shows it did – Bloomfield was obligated to ensure that advice reached Cabinet with the weight it deserved. He should have fronted it personally. He should have ensured the public understood the basis on which decisions about their children were being made. Instead, the advice appears to have been absorbed into a system that was more concerned with maintaining the narrative that the vaccine was universally safe than with ensuring informed consent for parents making decisions about their children’s health. Bloomfield’s refusal to answer questions about this matter now only deepens the concern that he served Ministers’ interests ahead of the public’s.

The CV-TAG members themselves must also answer for their silence. When Cabinet included children in the mandate against their explicit advice, where was the public dissent? Where was the letter to the Minister insisting the record be corrected? Their December recommendations for the 5 to 11 age group – which explicitly stated that mandates, vaccine certificates and vaccine targets must not be used for that younger cohort – suggest they understood the consequences of their earlier advice being ignored. The forcefulness of that language reads as an attempt to prevent a repeat. But for the 12 to 15-year-olds, the damage was already done.

More than 300,000 children received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine under this framework. At least one child – a healthy, active 13-year-old boy – died of myocarditis ten days after his second dose. The coroner ruled that the cause of his myocarditis could not be satisfactorily determined, noting that viruses found in his heart tissue could have been responsible but that the vaccine could not be excluded. That finding is technically accurate, but the pathologist noted that had the boy not died ten days after vaccination, the cause of death would have been confidently attributed to viral myocarditis. The system, it seems, could not bring itself to make a definitive finding against the vaccine, even when the alternative explanation required the timing to be dismissed as coincidence.

An unknown number of other children may have suffered subclinical heart damage that will only manifest in the years ahead. What is certain is this: had parents known that the country’s expert vaccine advisory group had recommended against routine vaccination of their children and had not endorsed the two-dose mandate, many would have made a different choice. That information was withheld from them.

The Royal Commission had the opportunity to interrogate this chain of events and chose not to. It did not compel Bloomfield to explain why safety advice was withheld from the public. It did not probe why Ministers proceeded to mandate vaccination for children without current expert endorsement. It accepted at face value the claim that December advice was not delivered, without examining the far more significant August advice that is recorded as having been.

This is not a matter of partisan point-scoring. The question of how a government came to mandate a medical intervention for children against the advice of its own expert group, and how the public was denied the information needed to make informed decisions, is one that transcends politics. It goes to the heart of whether New Zealand’s public health institutions can be trusted to prioritise safety over expedience.

A formal inquiry is now required; one with the power to compel testimony from Bloomfield, Dr Ian Town, CV-TAG members, Hipkins and Verrall. New Zealanders need to understand how Cabinet came to include children in the vaccine mandate against expert safety advice, why that advice was never made public, and what institutional failures allowed it to happen.

The purpose of such an inquiry is not retribution. It is to ensure that the next time a government faces a decision about mandating a medical intervention for children, the expert advice is heard, the public is informed, and the safety of our young people is treated as non-negotiable. New Zealand’s children deserved better. Their parents deserved the truth. It is not too late to demand both.

I have bolded the most compelling parts. The author has also provided the following links to source documents:

Source documents:

• h202116357_response.pdf

• Decision-to-use-the-Pfizer-mRNA-COVID-19-vaccine-for-children-aged-12-15.pdf
• Decision-to-use-the-Pfizer-mRNA-COVID-19-vaccine-for-children-aged-5-11-years.pdf
• COVID-19-A-Strategy-for-a-Highly-Vaccinated-New-Zealand.pdfV2.pdf
• implementation_of_covid-19_pfizer_paediatric_vaccine_for_children_aged_5_to_11_years_report_back.pdf
• There is also this OIA re CV-TAG and myocarditis more broadly: h202116974_response_0.pdf
• There was at least one teenager who died ten days after the second dose of the vaccine. Impossible to tell if death was from Covid vaccine or virus says coroner | RNZ

As the author has noted, this is a compelling and damning timeline. The experts explicitly recommended against routine vaccination of young New Zealanders, and the Government not only authorised it, but they even mandated it. And it can’t be excused as one missed memo, as there were multiple memos and reports that all warned on this.

A few years back two schools I was involved in managing took the Ministry of Education to formal mediation on six non-performance issues on their part.

While all of the outcomes remain confidential I can comment on one of the processes for their response.

At the end of the mediation day there was a point of dispute on how much funding the schools had received. We asked for one day to thoroughly check our figures. They asked for two weeks to do the same.

We supplied our part the next day. Two weeks later they rang. They would not tell us their outcome on the phone – instead insisting they come to Auckland to meet the next day.

The next day – mid-morning – three high level officials arrived at our office. They came in and sat down. Told us that we were correct but that the missing amount would not be made up. I closed the meeting three miinutes after it started. They ordered a new taxi and the three senior officials went back to the Auckland airport and home to Wellington.

It has stuck in my head since (and two of the three people are still in very senior roles). They booked flights the day before, flew in and out – plus no doubt a nice lunch – when a phone call or email would have done.

Is this type of spending of taxpayers’ money common?

[email protected]

Danyl McLauchlan has done a long article in The Listener (paywalled) on five political tribes, based on the 2023 NZ Election Study.

Bryce Edwards summarises it here.

This is a graphical summary of it. It is a fascinating analysis, and very useful gender breakdown also. I would be Establish Right and once would have been very high for institutional trust. I would still be above zero, but a lot lower than previously as so many institutions such as in the science and medicine realms have behaved so badly.

A couple of weeks ago a guy called Jake Lang (a right wing Internet troll) held a protest outside the NY Mayor’s residence called “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City”. There were a couple of dozen of his supporters and some 100 counter-protesters.

Two young men traveled from New Jersey with home-made IEDs and three them into the protesters. If they had not malfunctioned, they may have killed scores of people. They claimed allegiance to ISIS shouting “Allah Akhbar”.

How did the media report all this? Politico talked about the rise in Islamophobia. The Mayor condemned the protesters, and didn’t even mention the bomb throwers were not the protesters, but counter protesters.

CNN created a trove of memes as they made it sounds like a little adventure gone wrong.

ABC calls the guys who tried to murder scores activists.

National Review sums up other media responses:

NBC New York got an early start on what would quickly become an overwhelming trend, telling a curiously noncommittal story over the weekend: “Multiple arrests made after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Gracie Mansion, home of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, during anti-Islam rally and counterprotest.” The Daily News’ headline whimpered, “Protestors throw smoking improvised device, clash over Jake Lang pig roast at ‘anti-Islamification’ rally at Gracie Mansion.” The tone-setting New York Times itself wrestled with curiously tortured locutions: “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.”

What they all have in common is downplaying the seriousness of the terrorist attack, and doing their best to leave readers ignorant as to who is to blame.

The highlight of stupidity has to be Walter Masterton, a counter protester. One of the terrorist literally used his body for leverage to throw the IED which if it had worked would have killed him and most of the people there. And what does he say:

So he says that the terrorists who just tried to kill him are welcome in New York. He really is too stupid to be allowed to breed.

One good aspect covered on Twitter was the Police Chief who sprung into action. No back room bureaucrat this guy. People commented the photo looks like a shot from the credits of a TV show.

That is leading from the front.

Grace Tame was the 2021 Australian of the Year for her work as an advocate of survivors of sexual abuse.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, she is only an advocate for rape and sexual abuse victims if they are not Jewish.

News.com.au reports:

Child safety campaigner Grace Tame has come under fire for suggesting rapes and sexual assaults of Israeli women and girls during the October 7 terror attacks were “debunked propaganda”.

Far from being debunked propaganda, they have been substantiated by The Guardian, and by a senior UN official. Neither are entities friendly to Israel.

Also numerous hostages held by Hamas have spoken of sexual assaults and rapes they endured in captivity.

I guess Tame’s hatred of Israel outweighs her hatred of rape and sexual abuse.

At least the Democratic Party was more popular than Iran!

A guest post by Chris Scott:

 Every so often, New Zealand produces a piece of public policy that doesn’t really belong to the left or the right — it simply works. ACC is the classic example. When it arrived in the 1970s, it wasn’t universally adored, but it solved a real problem in a way both sides could live with. The left valued the universality and fairness; the right appreciated the end of endless litigation and the stability it brought to business. 

It was, in its own way, a kind of political magic pill: a rare moment where the country managed to design something that delivered outcomes both sides could accept, even if for different reasons. 

But those moments are rare. Not because politicians don’t want them, but because formulating a political magic pill is hard. It requires a system capable of producing outcomes that are more than just tolerable to both sides — outcomes that are genuinely better, cheaper, faster, and fairer all at once. That’s a tall order when the machinery you’re working with is creaking along on 1970s logic. 

Our public sector isn’t bloated because it’s generous. It’s bloated because it’s inefficient. Every agency has its own systems, its own databases, its own processes. The only way to keep that fragmented machine running has been to keep adding more people, more layers, more checks. We’ve ended up with a government that’s large because it’s slow, not because it’s ambitious. 

This is where AI enters the picture — not as a replacement for human judgement, but as a tool for finally upgrading the operating system the state runs on. Most of what clogs up government isn’t meaningful work; it’s friction. It’s re‑entering the same information into multiple systems. It’s reconciling mismatched data. It’s waiting for approvals that only exist because the underlying machinery can’t coordinate itself. 

Clear that friction, and the whole structure becomes lighter. Not because you’ve cut it back, but because it no longer needs to be so heavy. 

And once you start imagining a state that actually works properly, you realise something interesting: the old political trade‑offs begin to dissolve. Lower taxes versus better services. Faster decisions versus fairness. A leaner state versus a more capable one. These aren’t iron laws of politics; they’re symptoms of an outdated operating system. 

A modern, intelligent one gives you the ingredients to formulate a new magic pill — one that could deliver: 

● lower taxes 

● smarter, leaner regulation 

● better public services 

● a more adaptive education system 

Not because of ideology, but because the machinery finally supports the outcomes we’ve been arguing about for decades. 

Of course, the moment you say any of this, people worry about jobs. And fair enough — that fear sits under everything. But the future isn’t a mass firing. It’s a gradual shift. Most reductions happen through natural attrition, as they always have. And the work that remains becomes more human, not less. AI is good at the routine; it struggles with judgement, nuance, and the messy edge cases where real people live. 

The future of work looks more like shorter weeks, more flexibility, and jobs that focus on people rather than paperwork — supported by “pocket mentors” that help workers learn, plan, and navigate their careers. This isn’t something to fear. It’s something to prepare for. 

And preparation means getting specific. It’s easy to sketch broad ideas about a smarter state, but at some point you have to put a real proposal on the table. So here’s one worth considering. 

Right now, we use 13% of our renewable electricity to produce aluminium — a low‑margin commodity in a world where the highest‑value product is compute, and the intelligence that runs on top of it. If we’re serious about building a modern operating system for government, we should also be thinking about the infrastructure that supports it. 

Tiwai Point — with its enormous, steady supply of renewable power — is a natural candidate for a national‑scale data and compute hub. Not a government‑run monolith, but a public–private partnership with a hyperscaler like Microsoft, AWS or Google. They bring the capital and expertise; we bring the clean energy and the strategic intent. 

A project like that would: 

● turn low‑value electrons into high‑value compute 

● anchor a sovereign capability we currently lack 

● support the AI systems needed for a smarter state 

● and lay the groundwork for a new kind of economic engine 

This is what I mean by formulating a political magic pill. Not slogans, not wishful thinking — but structural changes that deliver outcomes both sides of politics have wanted for decades: lower taxes, smarter regulation, better services, and an economy built on high‑value capability rather than low‑margin commodities. 

And that’s really the point. ACC showed we can build systems that work across ideological lines. We did it once by accident. With the right tools, we might be able to do it deliberately. 

And if we do — well, that opens the door to a much bigger conversation about what New Zealand could become when intelligence, not aluminium, becomes our next great export. 

Jonathan Rosen writes:

Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdieto death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel.

It is hard to write that sentence without feeling it is a parody of the opening line of Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

The then Supreme Leader said:

“Even if Salman Rushdie becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell.”

This was for writing a book. What I didn’t realise was how it also covered anyone involved with the book:

• Japanese translator stabbed to death
• Norwegian publisher stabbed
• Turkish editor – attempted burning alive (37 others died)
• Belgium muslim leaders shot to death for saying there was freedom of expression for the book
• Rushdie stabbed in New Jersey

Rushdie has now of course outlived two Supreme Leaders.

Simeon Brown announced:

From 1 July, decision-making within Health New Zealand will shift closer to patients, communities, and hospitals, ensuring decisions are made in the right place at the right time so Kiwis get better access to care, Health Minister Simeon Brown says.

Health New Zealand regions and districts will receive delegated decision making over workforce decisions, budgets, and service delivery.

It is important to remember that the Heather Simpson review did not recommend trying to merge 20 DHBs together in 18 months into one body. She sensibly recommended reducing the number. The merger has basically been a disaster. It would be almost impossible to reverse it, but delegating more authority closer to patients is a good step.

It was almost beyond dispute that Willow-Jean Prime was the worst Labour Education Spokesperson in living memory. It is hard to think you can do worse than having your leader criticise the Government for a lack of consultation over NCEA, and then learn Willow-Jean personally ignored or declined three personal requests from the Minister to brief her.

This was reflected in the Mood of the Boardroom ranking last year, where CEOs rated Willow-Jean the least effectual Labour MP. That’s like not just being the stupidest person in the room, but like being the stupidest person in the meeting room of the Flat Earth Society.

Chris Hipkins did the inevitable and sacked her a couple of weeks ago.

So this week in Parliament was the chance for the new Education Spokesperson to shine – Ginny Anderson. Yes, the Ginny who called Mark Mitchell a paid killer.

Was she going to ask about NCEA? About attendance rates? About science or maths curriculums? About charter schools? No she chose to focus on a e-mail that linked to the wrong Youtube channel.

Audrey Young writes:

Ginny Andersen, who picked up education from Willow-Jean Prime, was turned into mincemeat in the House yesterday in a full-court press by Government MPs, mocking her over her first question as education spokeswoman. It was about Education Minister Erica Stanford having sent teachers a link to a video of her on a National Party website, which Stanford said was the result of human error, not a federal case, and corrected 15 minutes later.

Act leader David Seymour said this: “Has the minister considered engaging a private detective to get to the bottom of this weighty matter – who did it, who took it off the YouTube channel, and how do we make sure it never happens again?”

It takes a lot of effort to make people miss Willow-Jean, but Ginny managed it. She didn’t just ask one question about this, but followed up with six supplementary questions!!

Chris Bishop had some fun also, reminding people of Willow-Jean’s inability to even respond to e-mail invites.

The Herald reports:

Then-Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins received advice about the potential risks of a second Covid-19 vaccine dose for teenagers at a time when tens of thousands of them had yet to get a follow-up jab.

The Phase Two report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response said the advice was never delivered to ministers, but the Herald has unearthed a Cabinet paper, in Hipkins’ name, from March 2022 that includes the advice in question. 

It was from the Covid-19 Vaccine Technical Advisory Group (CV TAG), on December 9, 2021, and it covered the possibility of “unnecessary risk” of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) following a second dose of the Covid vaccine for under 18s. 

It recommended considering changing the requirements of existing vaccine mandates – for the 12-17 age group – from two vaccine doses to one. …

Labour’s response to pressure from the Government has leaned on the Royal Commission’s report, which said: “Ministers we interviewed could not recall receiving that advice, nor is there any evidence it was provided to them in the material we obtained from agencies.”

But Hipkins’ Cabinet paper indicates he knew of the advice, which was shared with Cabinet colleagues in a Cabinet Social Wellbeing Committee meeting (Hipkins is not listed in the minutes as being present at that March 2022 meeting).

This direct contradiction is very hard to reconcile. I can only think of three ways you can do so.

1. Hipkins didn’t read his Cabinet papers, and signed off on a paper without reading it, and the paper was inaccurate.
2. Hipkins forgot he had received the advice
3. Hipkins lied about receiving the advice

None of these possibilities reflect particularly well on Hipkins.

The Herald reports:

Labour leader Chris Hipkins isn’t providing an alternative plan of action to help struggling New Zealanders facing pain at the pump and the threat of rising prices elsewhere. 

Asked repeatedly what alternatives Labour could suggest, Hipkins said the onus to present ideas was on the current Government. 

He gave some principles, such as that any support should assist people on low, fixed income, and generally that Labour wanted to ensure a transition to renewable energy. 

The lack of detail of alternative ideas contrasted heavily with the Green Party’s offerings this morning. It wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon with a variety of policies to support New Zealanders. 

What’s worse – lots of stupid ideas, or no ideas at all?

David Harvey makes a salient point:

There is a particular kind of political cowardice that masquerades as wisdom. It speaks in the language of restraint, dresses itself in the garb of responsibility, and calls itself prudence. But strip away the euphemisms and what you are left with is a simple, damning truth: nothing. No ideas. No vision. No plan.

Chris Hipkins delivered a masterclass in this art form this week, and in doing so, he did New Zealand a genuine service — not the service he intended, but a revealing one. He showed, with uncomfortable clarity, exactly why Labour is unfit to govern this country.

Standing before the press gallery in the shadow of a genuine global crisis — weeks into the war in Iran, with New Zealand households facing real and escalating economic pressure — the Leader of the Opposition opened his mouth and produced precisely zero policy ideas.

Not one.

Instead, he did what the modern Left does best: he criticised, he gestured vaguely at incompetence, and then, when pressed for substance, he retreated behind a wall of excuses so flimsy it would embarrass a first-year politics student.

“The Government needs to come up with a plan,” Hipkins told the Herald when asked what should be done to help struggling households.

That’s it. That’s the contribution. That is the sum total of alternative thinking from a man who wants to be Prime Minister of New Zealand. …

What Hipkins offered this week was the opposite: an opposition that has decided the work is optional, that ideas are a liability, that the safest political ground is the empty ground of permanent critique.

He is, of course, correct that the Government is in the hot seat today. That is true. Voters rightly hold governments accountable for their performance in a crisis. But voters are also watching the alternative. They are forming judgements not just about whether the current government is adequate, but whether there is anything better waiting in the wings.

What they saw from Hipkins this week was a man standing in the wings, refusing to learn his lines, insisting that knowing the lines wasn’t really his job until opening night.

That is not leadership. It is not even competent opposition. It is the political equivalent of turning up to a job interview and declining to answer the questions on the grounds that you don’t actually work there yet.

All very astute points.

I was at a forum on Tuesday where the Reserve Bank Governor was asked about the role of fiscal policy in responding to the increase in prices caused by the Iran war. She said that any assistance should be timely, targeted and temporary.

I agree, and this is of course in great contrast to what the last Government did with the Covid-19 response where the spent a shocking $30 billion of Covid-19 response funds on stuff that had nothing to do with Covid-19.

So how does the announcement by Nicola Willis stack up to the three Ts.

Timely

The extra assistance will start on 7 April, just 14 days from the announcement.

Temporary

It is for a maximum of 12 months (so will not become a permanent entitlement) or until petrol drops below $3/litre for four consecutive weeks., Sensibly tied to the problem of families being hit by the cost off petrol at a historic artificial high.

Targeted

It is not a cash for everyone splash. There simply is not enough money available to cushion the shock for every household. So it is targeted towards low and middle income households that are working and have children. Very sensible because you don’t have a choice about getting your kids to school and getting to work. It will benefit 143,000 families – the majority earning under $80,000 a year

Even better Nicola Willis said this won’t be funded out of additional borrowing, but will come from the Budget operating allowance – so in other words through savings elsewhere or not proceeding with something else they would have funded.

If Labour had not blown spending out from 28% of GDP to 34% of GDP, leaving us with a permanent structural deficit, we would be better positioned to respond to the fuel crisis.

So I am very pleased to see a sensible approach to helping the families that most need support, but not adding to the debt that will have to be paid back by future generations.