Brown had called for a review of the council’s membership, which costs around $400,000 a year in membership and conference costs, and spoke disparagingly of its value.
LGNZ only really have themselves to blame with their disastrous decision to take money from the Government in return for not opposing the Three Waters reforms. They are meant to be the organisation that lobbies the Government on behalf of Councils, but instead they seemed to be lobbying the Councils on behalf of Government.
This would be like say the Council of Trade Unions taking a cheque from a National Government in return for not opposing the Employment Contracts Act. No one would be surprised in such a scenario that member unions would quit.
If LGNZ wants to regain the largest Council in NZ as a member, they need to do a mea culpa over their Three Waters agreement with the Government, and agree to never ever sell out their members again.
Stats NZ has just released the 2022 child poverty data, and the measure for material hardship (which measures actual hardship, not merely relative income). I have charted them below.
As you can see the evil Key/English Government over four years (data series starts in 2013) reduced child poverty by 56,200 children. Under the king Ardern Government which pledged it was their number one priority, the reduction over five years has been merely a further 20,700.
And sadly that will probably end up being reversed with the cost of living crisis when the next update is done.
80 per cent of Year 8 students being at or above the expected curriculum level for their age in reading, writing, maths, and science by 2030.
New Zealand students to the top 10 in the world in maths, reading and science, measured by the international PISA rankings, by 2033.
The how:
require all primary and intermediate schools to provide at least an hour of reading, an hour of writing and an hour of maths, on average, every day.
re-write the curriculum to clearly state what must be taught each year in reading, writing, maths and science to every year group.
require standardised robust assessment at least twice a year in reading, writing and maths from Year 3 to Year 8
detailed results will be reported to parents.
refocus initial teacher training so that all new teachers are themselves confident in the subjects they are teaching as a requirement for registration.
scrap teacher registration fees so that teachers don’t have to pay to teach.
This is an excellent and important policy. Far far too many kids are leaving school deficient in literacy and numeracy. It can doom them to a bleak future.
I was shocked to discover that schools are not already doing an hour a day on average on reading, writing and maths. Some schools are, but on average most are not.
I’m lucky that my oldest is at a school with an excellent focus on literacy and numeracy. In fact I was at a workshop for parents yesterday where we learnt about the Best Start Literacy Approach, and how both teachers and parents can use this to improve literacy. There are some great teachers and resources out there. But it will require good policies from the Government to support them.
Stats NZ has just published the sentencing data for 2022, which has allowed me to compare it to the Police data on recorded offending. It tells a massive story about a soft on crime approach that has seen violent offending soar, yet prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments fall.
Now comparing offending data to sentencing data is imperfect as people do not always get prosecuted or convicted in the same year as they’re offending. But the trends are so clear and over so many years, that it doesn’t change the conclusion that there is more violent crime, and less consequences for those offending.
Also note that the some numbers are for offences, and some for people. Some people commit multiple offences. But what is important is the change in each of them since 2017.
Note that the category Acts intended to cause injury excludes homicide type offences. But they are very few compared to overall violent acts.
Here’s how things have changed since 2017:
Violent offending has increased 42%
Prosecutions for violent offending has declined 13%
Convictions for violent offending has declined 18%
The number of people sent to prison for violent offending has declined 36%
This is what happens when the Government tells the entire justice sector they want to reduce the prison population by 30%. Instead of reducing crime (which is hard), they have reduced prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments.
So the Maori Party co-leader is against helping Ukraine defend itself from Russian invasion, and even worse portrays the Russian invaders as indigenous to Ukraine.
Waititi is so anti-West that he fails to understand that Kane Te Tai was in fact fighting for the indigenous people of Ukraine to keep their sovereignty.
(And – yes – I can hear you all yelling “oxymoron”.)
Dr Oliver Hartwich was on the Leighton Smith podcast last week. He offered very succinct critique of the state of NZ bureaucracies through the application of the theories around “public choice economics”.
I would hate to over-abbreviate Oliver but this sums up the theory.
“[P]ublic choice, like the economic model of rational behavior on which it rests, assumes that people are guided chiefly by their own self-interests and, more important, that the motivations of people in the political process are no different from those of people in the steak, housing, or car market. They are the same human beings, after all. As such, voters “vote their pocketbooks,” supporting candidates and ballot propositions they think will make them personally better off; bureaucrats strive to advance their own careers; and politicians seek election or reelection to office. Public choice, in other words, simply transfers the rational actor model of economic theory to the realm of politics. (https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html)
NCEA Level 3 economics and the first year of undergrad study tends to have three major components. Micro-economics (markets), macro-economics (employment, inflation, etc) and market-failure. Market failures – poverty, lack of housing, pollution, etc – are then seen as reasons for governments to intervene (as if they need a second invitation).
What is barely looked at is the standards of decision-making (process/cost-benefit) around government intervention, the effect of such interventions (e.g. the crowding out of private sector building through government projects), and then accountability for “intervention-failure” (e.g. Andrew Little – where did that $1.9 billion “investment” in mental health actually go and what was the ROI?)
The government sector is now HUGE in NZ – using IMF measures at present the ratio of government expenditure to GDP is 42.21%. This is general (central and local) government expenditure and acquisitions (https://www.statista.com/statistics/436523/ratio-of-government-expenditure-to-gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-new-zealand/).
In terms of just central government expenditure the trends go up almost as fast our our performance in education and health (among all other things) goes down (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/New-Zealand/Government_size/)
General government spending as a percent of GDP (NZ)
General government spending as a percentage of GDP over time (NZ).
So if you add in incompetence, and the public sector employment merry-go-round to Public Choice theory it is easy to see just how radical our overhaul needs to be for the provision of truly high quality services. I am fully aware in education that when schools are going well it is despite the Ministry – not because of it.
Who will have the courage to change this? Politicians need to hear again and again (especially the under-qualified Minister of Finance) that when they say: “We are investing in Health …. “. That it is not their money – it is yours – and, as such they need to show a high quality decision making process and genuine returns and not ongoing “intervention failure”.
Tasmania’s government plans to introduce laws to ban the Nazi salute, after outrage following an anti-transgender rights rally in Melbourne
About 30 men dressed in black performed the salute at the rally on Saturday outside Victoria’s parliament where UK anti-transgender activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull spoke.
It prompted the Victorian government to move to ban the salute, although the state’s attorney-general admitted it would take “some work” to get proposed laws right.
The Tasmanian Liberal government today announced it would also introduce legislation to ban the salute.
I don’t think the Government should ban Nazi salutes, just as I don’t think they should ban gang patches. Ironically most Nazi salutes in NZ are done by gang members.
Freedom of expression includes the freedom to be odious. There should be consequences for odious behaviour, but they should not be criminal unless they rise to the level of actual threats etc.
I detest nazi salutes. I also detest people burning the NZ flag. But neither should be a crime.
Whangārei MP Dr Emily Henderson will retire from Parliament at the election, after three years as an MP.
Henderson was the first Labour MP to win the Whangārei seat in 45 years, winning by less than 500 votes at the 2020 election, which had Labour claim a historic majority.
Henderson on Friday afternoon said it was a “privilege and a joy” to represent the electorate.
“However I’ve realised my real calling is to return to my work in court reform as my way of contributing to change for the most vulnerable in our community,” she said, in a statement.
No Electorate MP retires after one term voluntarily. This is more a reality check that Henderson thinks she will almost certainly lose the seat back to Dr Shane Reti, and will not get a winnable list place.
This post is by PaulL, a regular commenter and occasional poster.
Many times in the discussion of the functions of government, and the line between public and private, the discussion of roads comes up. I’ve always believed that roads are a great example of a public good that should be (in the main) provided by the government/taxpayer. There are many externalities and benefits, and it’s hard to exclude those who don’t pay.
Obviously toll roads are the exception, but they are really only possible where a) there’s an alternative route, and b) you can limit access to the road.
So this article about how many roads in Sweden are funded was very interesting.
This is a really interesting model. When I look at many rural roads that receive relatively little maintenance, I can see the logic of letting those who live on the road own and maintain it. Presumably they can maintain a lot more cheaply than the local council would, and the local council not having to maintain those roads would result in lower rates. Or, to put it another way, the money that rural people might have spent on rates that are syphoned off to fund other roads, or used inefficiently by council, can instead be spent directly on maintaining their road, to the standard they’re willing to pay for.
The costs of upkeep are divided among members of the association. PRAs that do not accept government subsidies can prohibit traffic at their discretion. Those that receive subsidies must allow all vehicles to travel on their roads. Regardless of whether they receive funding, however, the associations may not ban horses, bicycles, and pedestrians from using the roads.
I wonder how many other things I’ve always considered to be public goods also have really interesting private models around the world.
The row over academic freedom at Te Pūkenga – the country’s largest tertiary provider – has rumbled on after it emerged staff have been issued with a list of words they should and should not use. …
Under the guidelines, the words “student” and “trainee” are discouraged, the “preferred terms” being “ākonga” (student) or “learners”. …
Another guide section refers to teaching staff as “learning facilitators”.
They’re running at $100 million deficit yet they have time to produce idiocy such as this.
I previously blogged how violent crime across the board is up. Now not all acts of violence are equal. Some may leave minor bruising and some may almost kill you, such as a stabbing.
The most serious category is “Serious Assault resulting in injury”. Let’s look at those.
Back in the good old days there were only 10,000 of these most serious assaults. Last year there were over 23,000.
The rate of serious assaults causing injury has increased 108% from 2.2 to 4.6 in just five years.
A woman who falsely claimed she was raped and trafficked by an Asian grooming gang has been sentenced in the UK to eight and a half years in jail.
Eleanor Williams, 22, said on Facebook in May 2020 – in a post shared more than 100,000 times – that she had been beaten, abused and trafficked by south Asian men.
She mad it all up.
The May 2020 Facebook post had included photos of Williams covered in serious bruises, with a black eye and a partially severed finger.
A forensic pathologist concluded the injuries were self-inflicted, using a hammer Williams had bought a few days earlier.
Williams published the 2020 Facebook post while on bail, having already been charged with seven counts of perverting justice, police said.
These included making false rape claims against three young white men, one of whom, Oliver Gardner, had asked her for a light in the street.
So she is a serial fantasist who falsely claims attacks that never occurred.
Trengove, Gardner and Ramzan all said they tried to kill themselves as a result of being falsely accused.
Williams also gave police a list of 60 girls who she said had been pimped out by Ramzan’s gang. But when police knocked on the girls’ doors they were met with blank faces.
Ramzan received more than 500 death threats and had to leave Barrow for months, The Guardian reported.
Can you imagine that.
She destroyed multiple lives. It is good to see a decent sentence to reflect that.
Auckland Council and the Government are expected to split the higher cost between them.
The project was initially costed at $1 to $1.5 billion. It is now looking to cost at least $5.5 billion.
Now consider Labour’s light rail plans which are costed at $15 to $29 billion. Imagine if they actually proceed, what they might end up costing – $50 billion? $60 billion? $70 billion?
The Police have published their data for December 2022, so we can now look at crime rates over the last five years.
The number of violent offences was relatively static at 50,000 from 2015 to 2018, but in the last four years has increased to over 70,000. That is 20,000 more victims and almost 200 people a day being assaulted.
If you adjust for population growth, it is still a huge 33% increase in the rate of violent offending since 2017.
Harshesh Patel has a permanent injury from a hold-up, his wife can’t sleep and his son is scared to leave the house.
The Hamilton couple have now shut their Chartwell dairy’s doors after mental stress from countless robberies and violent confrontations – and a Claudelands dairy will follow suit this weekend.
“We just can’t take it,” Harshesh Patel said. “It’s too much for us.”
The River Rd Dairy and Lotto Shop had been robbed “lots of times” over the last few years, Patel said.
Dairy robberies used to be very rare. Now they are a near daily occurrence.
He said five years ago the teens would come in wearing masks and gloves to hide their identity and fingerprints. Now they didn’t bother.
“They just come and steal. There is no fear.”
Sometimes, he said, they were robbed by children as young as 10.
They know there will be almost no consequence for their offending due to their age, so they don’t have to even hid their face now.
“All over New Zealand it’s happening, and the Government is doing nothing about it.”
A proposed pumped hydro scheme in Central Otago is now estimated to come with a price tag of almost $16 billion – four times more than original projections.
And the National Party is promising to cancel it, should it win the upcoming election.
The Lake Onslow project is designed to serve as a giant battery to help protect against hydro electricity shortages and create more stability in the market. It normally functions like a hydro power station, but with water pumped back up when power is cheap so it can be used to generate electricity in dryer times instead of making up the shortage with fossil fuels.
Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods said on Thursday the government is moving ahead with the proposal. A detailed business case is expected by late next year.
“Until we address the dry year problem, we will continue to rely on burning expensive and polluting fossil fuels to produce our electricity. That’s bad for the climate and our power bills.”
The cost was originally estimated at about $4b – about a quarter of the new $15.7b figure.
Cost have blown out 300% yet the Government is still wanting to proceed!
This scheme would cost around $10,000 per household, just so one can be 100% renewable rather than 98% or 99% renewable. Madness.
However, some are refusing to, including Huntsbury residents Heather and Randal Law.
The couple received a bill for $45.09 after using an average of 1041 litres of water a day over 98 days.
Heather Law said she would “definitely not” pay the bill.
She said she would if it was averaged out across an entire year, rather than over a three-month period, and if the council refunded her when she used under the limit during the winter.
“I water the garden in the summer. I have a vegetable garden and a flower garden and I’m not going to stop watering it.”
1,000 litres a day is huge. They are basically refusing to pay $45 for 100,000 litres of water. They should try living off tank water where if you run short it costs you $250 for 30,000 litres.
Their argument about an annual average is silly. In winter there is plenty of water. It is during the hotter months that you need people to not use too much.
The pair operate a small Airbnb at their property and guests always comment on their “beautiful garden”, Randal Law said.
So they make presumably thousands of dollars a year from using their property commercially, and part of that is because of the beautiful garden that uses up so much water, and they won’t pay $45 for it. They want everyone else to pay.
I think water meters should be used everywhere. They are good economically and good for the environment.
The handling of Government data is again in question, with new police numbers showing there have been dozens more ram raids than initially reported.
It comes barely a week after Te Whatu Ora was forced to admit the publication of inaccurate Emergency Department figures. …
When Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was the Police Minister, his responses to written parliamentary questions (WPQs) said there were fewer ram raids than we now know occurred.
Take the peak last August, the Minister’s office reported 67 but data now shows 116.
For September, 60 ram raids are now 85 and in October, 26 were actually 76 ram raids – nearly three times as many.
This is becoming a bad habit, and does huge damage to confidence in the Government. In countries like China you of course can’t trust any data from the Government. But NZ has had top standards for data in the past. Society will not function well if you can’t trust Government data.
This is twice in a week that Government agencies have published manifestly incorrect data, which makes it appear things are better than they actually are.
Maybe Government chief executives should lose some of their pay for every time their agency publishes incorrect data. That would foster a culture of caution.
