Multiple problems in the health sector are worsening while the Government’s flagship reforms grind into gear, sector leaders say.
The $11 billion overhaul of the district health boards is a long-term project, but a succession of leaders told the Herald they were worried that key measures were deteriorating and not enough urgency was being shown to address them. …
Fewer kids are being vaccinated, people are waiting longer for needed surgeries and waiting times in emergency departments have blown out.
Recruitment drives had led to about 32 more nurses, she said, but that was dwarfed by an estimated 4000 vacancies across the country.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Anecdotally we are hearing that there is about a 30 per cent reduction in planned care surgery across a number of different surgical specialties.”
So fewer operations also.
Under National, immunisation rates soared, ED waiting times fell and the number of elective procedures massively increased. Labour has managed the opposite.
The Mayor of Invercargill has done us all a great service by highlighting inconsistencies in the way society applies its values.
Nobby Clark took offensive words and phrases used by culture figures and strung them into a short speech in which he asked where the limits on cultural expression should be. He quoted the words and phrases exactly.
Inevitably he has been accused of racism and various other things. This is despite the fact that he was merely repeating stuff that was already out there.
I guess we should not have been surprised. Logic is not a strong point of contemporary society. The idea that if something said by Person A is offensive it is also offensive if said by Person B seems to be a radical concept these days.
The Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon predictably missed the point by pointing out the need to not normalise words which offend. The greater point of why Mr Clark needed to be patronised by that advice but not the original writers passed him by.
Interestingly, if I understood his interview with Michael Laws on the Platform correctly, Mr Clark did not approach this exercise as an advocate for the consistently-applied right to free speech but as an advocate for the consistently-applied restriction of offensive speech.
But that doesn’t matter. What he did was clearly show that claims about appropriateness, right and wrong and so on in regard to expressions of opinion or thought are today selective. They are rooted in who expresses them not in the intrinsic nature of the opinion. As such they are inherently unprincipled as I personally define that term.
This has been true for some time where we are looking at analogous situations with different fact settings. Commentators have been questioning for years why it’s ok to have Che Guevara on a tee shirt at a demonstration of the Left but not ok to have Himmler on a tee shirt at a demonstration of the Right; why the Right is inevitably called “the Far Right” but no one is ever called “Far Left”; why the Hammer and Sickle are fine but the Swastika not.
The great merit of Nobby’s exercise is that he has pointed out the inconsistency not with analogous situations with different fact settings but with the same words repeated verbatim. It is very hard to argue the inconsistency doesn’t exist when highlighted in this way.
Another aspect of a discussion of values and principles worth exploring is the difference between what words denote and what they connote. Connote means to suggest or imply something whereas denote means to explicitly indicate something.
Today we are obsessed with connotation. Rob Campbell did this in his criticisms of Luxon. Referring to Luxon’s words as a “dog-whistle” is itself a way of asking us to leapfrog Luxon’s words as stated and look at what Campbell considered they implied. To concentrate on what they connote rather than what they denote.
The offence industry thrives on this. It is one of the ways in which it distinguishes between those who are entitled to hold an opinion and those who aren’t.
It’s obvious that all such assessments beg the question. If you don’t like those of the Right then anything they say can be treated as a dog-whistle to some other base thought. In other words you need to assume the offensiveness of the speaker to prove the offensiveness of the opinion.
The all-time worst expression of this was Todd Mueller and his MAGA (make america great again) cap.
Here was a guy with an interest in American politics and whose bookshelf had on it both the cap and – if I recall correctly – a photo taken with Hillary Clinton. Apparently then a non-partisan interest. The wording on the cap on its face cannot be viewed as anything other than innocuous.
Yet the offence-takers and their supporters in the media took those words from the bookshelf, back to the USA, layered them with all manner of vileness, then returned them here and used them to question the motivations and values of Mr Mueller. Such a long bow drawn in bad-faith which assumed offensiveness to prove it.
Ironically today the question of who precisely it is that renders an opinion or expression unacceptable ultimately becomes a function of tribal identity politics. I say “ironically” because identity politics is assumed to be about looking after the few in the face of the many. But we have in fact just displaced one “few” with another.
The key point about this for those of us who hold unpopular opinions is that it is virtually impossible to appeal to principle in getting our ideas into the public square. We can no longer argue that my view is analogous to that other view so why can’t I say it, or that my words are the same as those used by that other person so why are they not ok, and be confident of success.
Instead we need to understand the following propositions:
1. Society through its elites rejects any concept of even-handedness in the validity of views and their offensiveness, by which mirror-image utterances are treated the same.
2. Society through its elites rejects the logic by which the very same words and opinions are equally offensive (or not) irrespective of who expresses them.
3. Society through its elites assumes the nastiness of those whose opinions they reject in order to prove this is so.
3. The arbiters of acceptability and proxies for societal values are the high priests of the media, academia and public sector agencies who are invariably Left-leaning, and hostile to logic.
In my view Nobby did a great thing. He used majority values against those who hold them. I have long day-dreamed about a media channel or website that exactly replicated the one-dimensional rubbish we get fed as news reports but from the opposite perspective. I imagine it would be an enormously fun thing to do.
Newshub can reveal an ad campaign to recruit more health professionals from overseas cost more than half a million dollars and resulted in just three people being interviewed.
Doctors said it’s “really disappointing”, while nurses labelled the campaign “a failure”, with both sectors saying the money should have been spent elsewhere.
Repeat after me: There is no waste in Government spending.
Labour list MP Tāmati Coffey has announced he won’t stand for re-election.
Coffey first entered Parliament in 2017, winning the seat of Waiariki, which he lost in 2020.
He said he was retiring to spend more time with his newborn baby.
“After the birth of our second child, I’ve reprioritised where I want to put my energy and that’s into our two kids, Tūtānekai and Taitimu,” Coffey said in a statement.
This is no surprise. I’m sure family is part of the decision, but the reality is Coffey was the only Labour MP to lose their seat in 2020, and is so unpopular he failed to even get re-elected (came 9th) to a local trust board in Rotorua. And Labour are looking to have fewer List MPs, so it was very unlikely that Coffey would be re-elected even if he stood.
The Health Minister is in another political neutrality mess after Te Whatu Ora paid for a puff profile of her in a southern newsletter.
Dr Ayesha Verrall – who sacked the chair of Te Whatu Ora last week for not being politically neutral – has called the piece an “inappropriate use of public funding”.
The 10-paragraph profile of Dr Verrall featured in Te Whatu Ora Southern’s February newsletter and featured the headline: ‘New Health Minister reveals strong Southern Roots.’
It also appeared in the Otago Daily Times, The Star, Southland Express and other region publications.
The cost of the publications is $14,000 and it’s estimated to have reached more than 365,750 people. The cost of the profile didn’t incur an extra cost.
It called the minister a “southerner at heart” and said she was born in Invercargill and raised in Fiordland.
“She remembers her father trying to instill his love of the outdoors, and recalled crossing the Eglinton River, scrambling up Dore Pass and waking in freezing Department of Conservation huts to see the sun touch the mountain tops,” it read.
This is Labour Party advertising, and has nothing to do with the health system. What does it say about the culture in the new Health NZ, that they thought this was appropriate?
“The first I learned of this matter is through a Written Parliamentary Question”.
But her office knew because Te Whatu Ora Southern sought its approval.
That approval “was mistakenly given by a former staff member, who did not seek my approval,” Dr Verrall said.
The Minister’s Office speaks on behalf of the Minister. One of her staff approved it. Again what does this suggest about the culture, where this was even proposed, let alone approved?
I did the census online, and was really impressed with it. Our papers were a bit late arriving, but I got a household code within 60 seconds by text.
The census took me barely 30 minutes to do my household form, myself and my two sons. What really impressed me was how they had linked in other databases.
My address was confirmed from the NZ Post database (this is fairly common now)
My employer name was confirmed from presumably an IRD list
Ben’s school name was confirmed
Sam’s ECE name was confirmed
What it meant for all of these is that rather than have to type in full details for each, you just type the first few characters and it finds the entry you want. Makes it more user-friendly and also improves data quality.
The Government is concerned that hostile foreign powers, likely our top trading partner China, might seek to use trade as a weapon against New Zealand by blocking our exports – leaving billions of dollars of trade in jeopardy.
The threat runs deeper than just trade, with officials making sure that supply chains and communications cannot be weaponised against New Zealand in a wider diplomatic, economic or security spat.
The Government, in particular Trade Minister Damien O’Connor, has been working to bolster resilience to “economic coercion” – when a country tries to use trade as weapon to achieve diplomatic or security goals.
China has a record of using trade as a weapon either in an overt or covert sense.
It blocked lobster and wine exports from Australia, apparently in retaliation to the government’s harder line on Chinese interference.
I’m very pleased the Government is looking into this area. I think we are incredibly exposed to trade coercion where we may feel unable to stand up to China, because they could wreck our economy.
It has become clear that not all authoritarian countries become less authoritarian just because we trade with them. In fact the opposite may occur, where they think that if other countries are dependent on their trade, they won’t stand up to them. We saw this with Russia and Germany and may face this ourselves.
Former intelligence and defence policy analyst Paul Buchanan warned New Zealand was more vulnerable than Australia to China weaponising trade.
He noted that when using economic coercion with Australia, China only blocked things like wine and lobster.
“They did not go after strategic minerals which they depend on. They need Australian minerals to continue their growth to great power status,” he said.
Buchanan said New Zealand had no equivalent of iron ore that would be safe from being blocked. Most of New Zealand’s exports are “creature comforts for their rising middle class” which can be sourced from other countries.
I’m not actually that worried about our exports. If China blocked some exports, that would be a loss of revenue for the country. But as we saw with Covid-19, the economy can withstand a drop in income. The Government borrows to cushion the blow, while exporters find other markets.
The area I worry about is imports. If China stops imports to NZ, then multiple supply chains come crashing down. Think widespread shortages for everything.
What would be useful work for the Government to do is identify industries of critical importance, and work with industry to set targets that no more of x% of that industry comes from a single country. That way we don’t end up with entire industries that can be closed down by trade coercion.
I understand Australia is already someway down this path, so we could work with them on increasing our reselience.
National and a nursing union boss are questioning the accuracy of official health figures about emergency department (ED) wait times, saying they cannot be real – and could lead to vital funding being misdirected.
A regional breakdown of monthly ED wait times shows many areas last year lagged well behind the historic target of 95 percent of people being seen within six hours.
This was consistent throughout 2022, before Northland, Southern and Taranaki EDs reported near-perfect figures in November and December.
National’s health spokesperson Shane Reti says he has never seen a figure like Northland’s – 99.7 percent – and believed it was a mistake.
The official Government data says Northland went from 76% to 99% in just one month.
According to the data, the West Coast normally has between 680 and 1000 people attend an ED each month – except for May, when only 92 supposedly showed up, ballooning to more than 8000 in both November and December.
So obviously incorrect, but still published by the Government as official data, All those hundreds of comms staff, and none of them check the data!
In Northland, between January and October, EDs saw between 4500 and 5000 patients – then in November and December, that apparently dropped to 361 and 318 respectively.
Counties Manukau, Southern and Waitemata also saw enormous drops in recorded attendance in the last two months of 2022, while Wairarapa’s figures increased nearly 10-fold.
Note that this incorrect data all happened after they abolished the DHBs.
So the Minister went out there and used patently incorrect data, which got picked up by local media. And this Government lectures us on misinformation!
Te Whatu Ora national medical director Pete Watson said the figures were “as accurate as we’ve got them at the moment”, but “clearly [are] not accurate”.
I thought accuracy was binary.
Rather than improving, as Verrall said suggested was happening in Northland, Watson said nationwide, the situation was deteriorating.
“We’re not improving, so the system is under real pressure and we know that and that’s across the system, and we’re focusing on what we can do to address that.”
The nationwide figure showed a six-hour response performance trending downwards over the course of 2022, from 78.8 percent in January to between 71 and 72 percent from August onwards.
This fiasco really undermines confidence in Government statistics. I have a suggestion.
Stats NZ is highly respected. Why not have them put in charge of producing statistics for the health system, as it is obvious Health NZ is not able to do so accurately?
A Florida bill that would require bloggers who write about the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, to register with the state proved a step too far even for the godfather of far-right Republicanism, the former US House speaker Newt Gingrich.
“The idea that bloggers criticising a politician should register with the government is insane,” Gingrich wrote on Twitter.
“It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Floridawho introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.”
The bill was introduced by Jason Brodeur. It states: “If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register” with the appropriate state office.
The bill defines “elected state officer” as “the governor, the lieutenant governor, a cabinet officer, or any member of the legislature”. As penalty for failure to comply, it posits fines of up to $2,500.
It is a terrible bill. In theory it only applies to bloggers who are paid to blog, but that in itself is no reason to make people register with the government.
In spite of the name, degrowth advocates do not suggest the carte blanche reduction of economic activity. They propose the downscaling of parts of the economy that do little to contribute to human wellbeing while causing enormous harm to the environment. Examples of such sectors are industrialised meat and dairy production, fast fashion, advertising, cars and SUVs, and aviation.
Don’t you love it. Someone who claims that food and transport contribute little to human wellbeing.
Degrowth advocates argue that whether we like it or not, we will get to a point (and it may be sooner than we realise) when current growth rates are no longer viable, and our existing economic system will collapse.
They have been arguing this since at least the 1970s, and have been wrong for all that time.
This would be a more rational and efficient economy because it would be centred on producing goods and services that we actually need, not ones that we are persuaded we need through all-pervasive advertising.
This is the classic hard left attitude. We the enlightened few know what is good for you. You, the teeming masses, are so stupid and inferior that you don’t know what you actually need, so we will decide for you.
Degrowth proponents acknowledge that the downscaling of significant parts of the economy will mean less paid work for those working in ‘sunset’ industries, and propose policies such as a universal basic income, publicly funded retraining schemes and a four-day week to address this.
The report I released last week (please email [email protected] for a copy) contained 13 recommendations – some of which I talked about at the NZ Economics Forum at Waikato University.
My Proposals (with respect to many sources)
A Crown Agency for “Parenting” to provide information to make New Zealand the very best parenting country on the planet.Including “Project 5.75”: Ubiquitous education and support for pregnant women/partners re care for their child in-utero. Huge information/support programmes to counter FASD and other harms – before they occur. Massive parents as first (and most important) leaners and teachers programme age 0 – 5. Including health, reading, numeracy, movement, music, languages. See David Eagleman: The Brain e.g. “If developing brains are not given the proper. “expected” environment – one in which a child is nurtured and looked after – the brain will struggle to develop normally. … Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally …. The brain can often recover, to varying degrees, once the children are removed to a safe and loving environment. The younger a child is removed, the better his recovery.”
Language in the home is absolutely key. Many, many words and conversations and words that are positive!
Information and encouragement for parents to remain fully invested in the education of their children throughout the schooling year.
2. Split the collective contract in two and super-fund/incentivise teaching in Decile 1 – 4 schools. Super-fund the decile 1-4 schools from Year 1 – 13. Provide Principals in those schools with a Business Manager to take care of resourcing, contracts, etc – allowing them to fully focus on academics. Trust these Principals with significant incentive payments to attract and keep great teachers. Limit class size to 15. Help the families – provide uniform, stationery and IT and don’t ask for donations. Make every year urgent in these schools but also have a 19 year plan so that by the end of that these young people, who will go on to parent the next generation have education levels, that don’t offer up an excuse for our school system. The secondary teacher shortage is qualitative as well as quantitative. To attract great degree graduates and second career people they must be paid to train as it is no longer tenable to have them without a year of income in a high employment economy and with so many international opportunities.
3. Emphasise inputs:
Simplify the NZ curriculum (and dump the current “refresh”). Align it with the international highest standards.
Attendance, retention until at least 17yo, parental engagement. Make this data publicly available in real time. There is no possible justification for the attendance data to be voluntary and for the national statistics to take up to four months to be made available
Purpose, inspiration and role modelling is vital.
Teacher quality is hugely important. Emphasise it, incentivise it, talk about it always – not just as one person compared to another but in terms of each teacher becoming better by the day.
“Movement is medicine” physical fitness and activity is a huge part of human development and oxygen feeds the brain.
4. Be honest about results but also provide the value added/progression measures. It is not that difficult. We are about to publish a “league table” that covers metrics for every high school. It is not “name and shame”. It is to provide information to every tax-payer, parent, Principal, BoTs, teacher, etc – about the inputs and outcomes of every secondar school. On that basis they can make their decisions.
5. Rename UE. Too many Principals/teachers use it as an excuse when they state – “University does not suit our [BROWN] kids”. Keep the purpose of the qualification but elevate it as the true level of high-school graduation and extract the excuse aspect. Possible NCEA* would work.
Achievement gaps between rich and poor exist throughout the school system, but are widest at tertiary level. For example, at NCEA Level 2 there is a seven percentage point lag between the pass rates of low- and high-decile students, by the time pupils take University Entrance, that grows to 44 points. Similarly, while only 17 per cent of low-decile students go to university, 50 per cent of for high-decile students do.
The largest chasm, however, is in second-year university courses with limited numbers and high entry thresholds – degrees which also lead to the highest salaries.
Data sourced from six universities shows while 60 per cent of the almost 16,000 students accepted into professional law, medicine and engineering in the past five years came from the richest third of homes, just 6 per cent came from the poorest third.
If you only include decile one schools – the most disadvantaged – that figure drops to just 1 per cent.
For example, Victoria law school took just eight decile one students. Otago law took three. And of 2000 total entrants, Canterbury engineering took just a single decile one student in five years.
6. Have a superb Designated Character School policy/process (not Charter Schools) to allow for schools to develop that suit the non-cooker cutter kids. Make approval independent of the “network” and aside from Ministry officials. Lock in Registered Teacher, OIA, NZC requirements. Include high quality Virtual Schooling (e.g. Mt Hobson Academy Connected: MHA Connected (Nationwide) — Mt Hobson Middle School) for students who are geographically or temperamentally disengaged and hard to reach. It is a model that is already proving highly worth while.
7. Drain the swamp. The Ministry of Education has gone from 2,900 to 4,000 bureaucrats in the last three years. This has been inversely related to school achievement. We only have 420 high schools and many of those are only semi-relevant to the Ministry being Private, State Integrated or DCS. The Ministry must get out of the way of success. Find the right people to lead the Ministry, the current leaders are simply not competent, and fully repurpose it towards actually serving the sector effectively and with accountability.
8. Deal quickly and effectively with the Union demands after the next election. They offer nothing helpful to the dialogue so throw them a bone and walk on.
9. Have input and achievement goals for every high school (approx. 410 – negotiated for improvement every year and fully available to the communities and nation.
10. Mimic Success. Work out the schools in each EQI range that is excelling and make them “lighthouse schools”. Manukura, St Paul’s Ponsonby, McAuley High School, etc.
11. Encourage public discourse from all of our school Principals. I was told by a Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Education that their main priority was to “protect the Minister”. That is abject nonsense. There is so much IP and experience help by our 2,600 Principals. Encourage them to express their views. From Matthew Syed in his outstanding book Black Box Thinking:
“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.
We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.
Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died. We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and have to relearn them.”
12. Move away from the “stop kids falling through the cracks” mentality (recent Tinetti, Sio, Davis). If you don’t fall through the cracks you are still on the ground floor.
NZ kids need aspiration, and they lead to have leaders! It is the best time ever to grow up and this should be the Da Vinci generation. They have to be led out of the fog of fear.
We need to respect and love intelligence as much as brawn. If the All Black coach loses a game or two the nation goes nuts. The Minister and Secretary of Education can oversee HUGE systemic failure and very few appear to give a big rat’s backside.
13. Provide high quality afterschool care in keeping with Harlem Children’s Zone who look after all children from 7am – to 7pm (when needed).
At the beginning of 2022 I helped establish a nationwide online school in keeping with these needed improvements. I am no longer involved but very proud of what they are achieving as detailed here:
You might think that’s the sort of initiative an anti-smoking charity could get behind – but the director of ASH (Action for Smokefree 2025), Ben Youdan, says this sort of restrictive move could do more harm than good.
It’s an insanely bad proposal.
They are saying that the product that is 19 times more harmful than vaping should be available on demand at retail stores and the product that is 5% as harmful should be only available by prescription.
It would be a public health disaster. It would also turn almost every paper towards the black market.
According to a recent Roy Morgan survey, no more than 12 per cent of vapers have a prescription for nicotine and only 2 per cent of purchases were from a pharmacy – the government’s preferred model. Legal access is complex, onerous, and costly. Perversely, it is far easier to buy deadly cigarettes. Vapers also do not see themselves as patients in need of medicines to stop smoking and have rejected the need to see a doctor.
Did the College of GPs look at the actual data in Australia, before coming up with their proposal?
Predictably, the prohibitionist model has created a thriving black market for illegal, unregulated vaping products that do not comply with Australian standards. Massive numbers of poor-quality devices are being imported from China and are widely sold by tobacconists, convenience stores, online, and on social media. There is no quality control for illegal products and the black market sells freely to children. Criminal organisations are becoming increasingly involved.
Amazing that people think prohibition works despite the thousands of times it has not.
The only way to eliminate an illicit market is to replace it with a legal and regulated market. Nicotine liquid should be an adult consumer product that is sold from licensed retail outlets such as vape shops, convenience stores, tobacconists, and general stores. There should be strict age verification and severe penalties and loss of licence for under-age sales, with strict enforcement.
A regulated legal market is preferable to the black market when it comes to products that only harm the user.
Former Wairarapa MP Georgina Beyer has died aged 65. I knew her a wee bit, but not that well.
I recall when she was elected Mayor of Carterton and then MP for Wairarapa. She wasn’t elected to either role because she was transgender, or in spite of being transgender. The vast majority of the good voters of the Wairarapa didn’t care. She was re-elected Mayor with 90% of the vote, because she had done a good job. I think this showed that very few Kiwis are prejudiced, and they judge people as individuals, not simply by their demographics.
I liked her sense of humour, and recall her once saying that whenever she had to debate Brian Tamaki on TV, she’d always make sure she’d pat him arm, just to make him tense up.
So DeSantis has the highest favourability and Pence the lowest. Trump has the highest unfavourability and Haley the lowest. In terms of net favourability DeSantis and Haley are positive and Trump and Pence are negative.
A long and excellent story from Lloyd Burr who details how Pharmac lied to media in order to try and give an exclusive to one media outlet.
Some extracts:
During the phone call, I was told we had it wrong, they weren’t funding Trikafta from April 1st 2023 and if we went ahead with the story, we’d be breaking the hearts of cystic fibrosis sufferers. They offered me an embargoed copy of it, which I declined because I didn’t want to be bound to an embargo on a story we already had.
I called Today FM’s Head of News Dallas Gurney who rang Rachel Smalley, and we all decided to run with our story. It was ‘100 percent watertight,” Smalley said.
Pharmac staff lied to Burr. He didn’t have it wrong. They were just trying to give an exclusive to another media outlet.
Despite Pharmac telling us we had it all wrong, its CEO Sarah Fitt emailed Mediaworks CEO Cam Wallace saying Smalley and I “knowingly broke a very sensitive embargo around a consultation on the funding of a new medicine for cystic fibrosis”.
Fitt also tells Vertex that Smalley has broken the embargo, even though she was never sent an embargoed copy in the first place.
So first they claim Burr and Smalley had it wrong, and then they claim they broke the embargo, which implies they had it right.
But the fact is embargoes only apply to those who receive an embargoed copy. Burr and Smalley heard about it through other sources, and for this act of journalism a government agency banned their employer, as if they were recreating the spirit of Muldoon.
Chris Hipkins has three times misled NZers on matters of high intensity. He did it with Charlotte Bellis, he did it with the women who went into Northland and he did it with reports of guns in the Hawke’s Bay.
Now he seems to be at it again. The Herald reports:
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says he admires the entrepreneurship of the Christchurch company which offered agriculture help to Ukraine but ultimately New Zealand had processes on how aid is delivered.
New documents released to the Heraldunder the Official Information Act show how a direct request from the Ukrainian Minister of Agriculture and Food, Mykola Solskyi, for high-speed and mobile grain stackers from MHM Automation was declined.
Hipkins told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking that to his understanding the Kiwi company had approached the Ukrainian Government who then accepted the offer for the grain stackers. The company then approached the New Zealand Government requesting funding.
So Hipkins says the company approached the Ukrainian Government, but the Herald two days ago reported:
New documents released to the Herald under the Official Information Act show how a direct request from the Ukrainian Minister of Agriculture and Food, Mykola Solskyi, for high-speed and mobile grain stackers was declined.
By May 16 last year, when Solskyi approached Christchurch-based MHM Automation, which builds huge, high-tech grain stacking machines that help in the storage and handling of bulk grain and wheat, Russia’s aggression had knocked out 15 million tonnes of the country’s grain storage capacity.
So is the Herald’s reporting correct, or is Hipkins correct?
Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall says Pharmac chair Steve Maharey has tendered his resignation over political columns he wrote while holding the senior public service role.
Dr Verrall says she has confidence in Maharey and “I haven’t seen anything that concerns me here” but she is seeking advice from the Public Service Commission.
Maharey is the chair of Pharmac, ACC and Education New Zealand.
The Government says the difference in Maharey’s case is that he has accepted an issue with his actions whereas Campbell stood by his comments.
“In terms of with Mr Campbell, he called the Leader of the Opposition stupid and he implied his policies were racist,” said Dr Verrall. “While he apologised to me, he then doubled down on those criticisms in the press. Mr Maharey has reached out and been contrite.”
I’m not sure there is a big difference between the cases.
Campbell said he was willing to agree to a protocol about what he could say in future. Also he apologised directly to Luxon.
Of course Campbell is not a former Labour Cabinet Minister.
If they refuse to accept Maharey’s resignation, after sacking Campbell, they could be open to judicial review?
A National Party candidate received a very cold welcome from climate strikers in Wellington, with booing and abuse hurled during the entirety of her speech on her party’s climate policies. …
There was a person with a loudspeaker continually calling out abusive names to Chatterton, people up the front yelling at her and a loud alarm going off while she spoke. …
You demand politicians speak to your rally, and when they do so you abuse and yell at them and try to drown them out, and you think this will convince people to lower the voting age so rude abusive children like yourselves can vote.
A Kāinga Ora tenant is “appalled” the Government agency is not meeting its target to ensure 15% of its new-build state homes meet full universal design standards.
Information provided under the Official Information Act (OIA) reveal that since implementing its Accessibility Policy in 2020, the Government agency has recorded delivering only 70 new homes that meet full universal design standards between July 2020 and December 2022.
The total number of Kāinga Ora state homes built in the same time frame is 4775, which means only 1.5% of new homes meet the required standards.
So they promised 15% and delivered 1.5%.
If there was a gold medal for under-achievement, this Govt would win it. They don’t miss their targets by 2% or 5% oe even 10% but by 90%. They’re currently sitting at 1.6% of their Kiwibuild target!
