Stuff reports:

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.

Monday saw the following:

• Labour backtrack on its ECE announcement made only three weeks ago, with a significant change to the policy
• Labour announce its free public transport policy won’t be implemented on time
• Labour argues with Race Relations Commissioner as to whether he has been sacked or resigned
• Labour try to divert attention from race based surgical prioritisation by promising a review

Two major Budget policies changed within a month of the Budget has to be a new record.

Here is what Labour’s hand picked panel of the future of local government has recommended in its final report:

• 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.

One News reports:

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?

The FSU has announced:

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.

I blogged last September:

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.

Anyway Stuff tonight reports:

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.

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?

Newshub reports:

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.

Newsroom reports:

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.

The Herald reports:

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.

Stuff reports:

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.

The Puhoi to Warkworth highway has been opened by Chris Hipkins. This was funded by the previous National Government and Labour fought it every step of the way, labelling it a holiday highway. Northlanders have been hanging out for this, and I am sure they will remember these quotes:

• Labour’s Transport spokesperson Shane Jones is welcoming reports that that the so-called ‘holiday highway’ from Puhoi to Wellsford may be delayed
• Phil Twyford – “That the planned motorway now only runs from Auckland to the Omaha turn off in Warkworth it is clearer than ever that its purpose is to make it faster a faster trip for the Prime Minister to get to his holiday house.”
• Twyford again – “National is determined to spend $1.3 billion on the ill-fated Puhoi-Wellsford holiday highway when that money could fund the central government’s share of the City Rail Link.”

This is how much food prices have increased since 2017:

• All food 29%
• Fruit 38%
• Vegetables 41%
• Cheese 48%
• Eggs 106%

So by the election, food inflation since 2017 will probably have exceeded 30%.

The Maori Party released:

“The legacy of this Crown has been genocidal. King Charles is now the figurehead of the world’s largest, longest, and most politically supported terrorist organisation.

As a Republican, the rantings of Rawiri Waititi don’t overly concern me, but what is of interest is the double standard around inflammatory language.

If one was to describe Te Rauparaha as a genocidal torturing terrorist and rapist, would that be okay?

The headline:

National Party fails to land blows on Labour despite news of a recession

So they manage to take the fact that under Labour we have gone into recession, and turned it into a negative story for National.

The lead para:

Despite National calling news the economy went into recession a “big flashing red light” for all New Zealanders, the economic downturn has yet to develop into a full-on election battle.

That is a weird take as the economy and cost of living score around five times as many people saying it is the most important issue as anything else, and Chris Hipkins has ditched multiple policies to try and focus on the economy. Not sure how you conclude the economic downturn is not a massive election battle.

Stuff reports:

Meng Foon has resigned as Race Relations Commissioner for a conflict of interest involving $2 million of Government funding for housing, but says he made an “error of judgement” and that officials knew about the money. 

Foon, who has been in the role since August 2019, is the director of a company which received payments worth $2m during his term. He failed to adequately declare this, Associate Justice Minister Deborah Russell in a statement, despite being involved in a report on emergency housing.

Foon absolutely should have declared the conflict in the context of contributing to a report on emergency housing. It is standard practice that you both declare potential conflicts generally, but also specifically in regard to individual agenda items.

Having said that, I’m not sure the omission quite reaches the standard for removal of office. There was no pecuniary gain to be made, and the HRC has no decision making ability around housing – they are basically just an advocacy voice.

I suspect that if the Michael Wood situation had not recently arisen, he might have escaped with a reprimand. But having had Wood so badly manage his conflicts, they need to make an example of Foon.

Foon’s behaviour, while sub-standard, is still well above Wood. Foon did not file false declarations for multiple years and Foon did not hold onto shares for 2.5 years despite 12 reminders. So if Foon’s management of his conflicts means he must go, why is Michael Wood still a Minister?

Newshub reports:

Hundreds of criminals could have avoided jail time under a proposal from the Justice and Corrections departments.

The idea was to prioritise home detention instead of incarceration and address the overpopulation of Māori in prison – but it didn’t work out like that.

Tommy Doran’s come a long way from his teenage years committing petty crime to fund his meth addiction.

“As it does for a lot of people who meth gets their hooks into, it led to my incarceration,” he told Newshub.

He’s done his jail time and he’s now doing an honour’s degree in criminology. He said home detention isn’t a silver bullet.

“I don’t think the solution lies in just taking them out of prison and sticking them in their home where they probably did a lot of their using and offending.”

But that’s a solution a document – released under the Official Information Act – recommended to the Government.

It was to the Minister of Justice, proposing an increase in the use of home detention to safely reduce the prison population. Judges would prioritise home detention when a short prison sentence – anything under two years – would usually be imposed.

While it would reduce the prison population by around 600 beds after three years, and save $7 million annually

The Government is obsessed with reducing the prison population, regardless of the impact on the community.

The way to reduce the prison population is to reduce the level of criminal offending. It’s not that hard to comprehend. Have fewer people raping and bashing people, and fewer people go to prison.

Stuff reports:

New Zealand pledged to spend $375 million reducing greenhouse emissions and protecting communities in vulnerable countries. 

But according to official documents reviewed by Stuff, some of that cash promoted planet-heating dairy and meat farming. …

A Fiji project aiming to “create a sustainable domestic milk supply” received NZ$2.4m of climate finance over four years, according to official documents. Another project in Myanmar planned to “establish an inclusive, vibrant and sustainable dairy sector”.

Aid to Sri Lanka intended to grow the country’s dairy production.

So the official position of the Government is that dairy production in New Zealand is bad and needs to reduce, and that it will take the revenue from taxing emissions in New Zealand and spend them on increasing dairy production in other countries!

Countries can run modest current account deficits without a problem. But when the deficit triples in size, it becomes a worry.