The Herald reports:

A poll conducted for the Herald by Dynata from May 25-29 asked 1000 respondents if they were more or less concerned about being the victim of a crime today than five years ago.

Sixty-seven per cent were more concerned, 28 per cent felt about the same and 5 per cent were less concerned. Concern in Auckland was higher than the national average.

Police data shows the number of victimisations has increased from 240,000 in 2017 to 353,000 last year and so far in 2023 looking to hit 380,000. The more useful stat is violent offending which went from 45,000 in 2017 to 71,000 last year and in 2023 is on track for around 77,000.

Survey respondents were asked which single measure, from a list of seven, was most important to improving their safety. The options included punitive measures – such as harsher prison sentences – as well as increasing wellbeing support services.

The most common answers were harsher prison sentences (34 per cent) and more police (27 per cent).

Labour and Greens recently changed the law so that repeat serious violent and sexual offenders would get shorter sentences and parole eligiblity.

A very perceptive column by Steven Joyce about university funding, as Victoria and Otago are looking as mass redundancies:

Take international revenue. According to published figures from the Tertiary Education Commission, fees paid to universities by international students dropped by 22 per cent from 2019 to 2021, a loss of $110 million in annual income across the sector. The 2022 figures haven’t been collated yet, but they are likely to include a further drop, especially given what is known as the pipeline effect. Each year the borders were closed, there were fewer international students returning.

The universities have not received any compensation for that revenue loss. It must have been galling to see all the money ladled out to the likes of bungee jumping operations in Queenstown while they were ignored.

A huge revenue loss due to Government decisions around Covid-19, and no compensation. Also as they are public entities they were not even eligible for the wage subsidies.

The Government’s only new funding for universities in its first term was the first year fees-free money, which from the university perspective only replaced one form of funding (student fees) with taxpayers’ money. 

A total waste of money. It mainly went to students from well off families, and didn’t increase tertiary participation at all. Rather than invest the hundreds of millions in properly funding universities, they spent it on buying votes from students.

In 2021, ministers increased tuition subsidies by a miserly 1.2 per cent against inflation that year of 5.9 per cent, while in 2022 it was a 2.75 per cent increase, well behind inflation of 7.2 per cent. In this year’s Budget, the Government tried to trumpet a 5 per cent increase in tuition subsidies, but that too is likely to be behind this year’s inflation figure, so in real terms university incomes per student have been going backwards for six years.

So the redundancies are not just because student numbers have fallen. It is because funding has been cut in real terms by Labour.

All this must be quite discombobulating for the Tertiary Education Union. They are the most loyal of the teacher unions to the Labour Party, and in return expect to be looked after. What they have been given by this Government amounts to a cold shoulder. They are left railing at university leaders for all the redundancy plans, and yet still can’t bring themselves to criticise their political soulmates as the root cause of the problem.

The PM and Finance Minister are both former VUWSA Presidents, yet it is their policies that have caused much of the problem.

There are also immediate skills problems for the country which are going begging for lack of funding and a lack of government ambition. The big problem in the health sector is a lack of health professionals and especially doctors, yet we refuse to invest any money to train more. We have just two medical schools while a proposal for a third is left to wither on the vine. Australia has 21 medical schools for a population just five times our size. If we were serious, we would be adding two medical schools, not just one.

NSW has seven medical schools for a population of 8 million. Queensland has four for our population., Western Australia has three with half our population.

You might think all this is a bit rich coming from someone who rails against the excesses of too much government spending. But it is also about what you choose to spend money on, and in this case you don’t have to look far to find pots of money being wasted.

In the tertiary sector alone, Chris Hipkins’ baby, the Te Pūkenga polytech merger, leads a charmed life, despite something like a 20 per cent decline in domestic enrolments over the last two years. $200m has been wasted on that merger so far, and another $220m was advanced in the Budget this year. To try to help Te Pūkenga look better, the Government has hiked up subsidy rates for its courses excessively, in sharp contrast to the universities.

Think if the hundreds of millions spent on the merger instead went to funding universities!

A guest post by PaulL.

I see this article in the Herald, in which Tory Whanau says that criticism of her not attending some meetings is “gendered”.

I saw a lot of criticism of Wayne Brown for not being available enough, not turning up to meetings, not being around during a cyclone and suggesting he might play tennis on a Saturday morning instead of work (sure, during a cyclone, but it was Saturday). I think that criticism was definitely coming from one side of the political spectrum, but it was also somewhat fair.

Tory says that she “thinks the focus on her attendance is undue, and largely because people don’t like what she represents as a young Māori woman in council.” And “[The criticism is] gendered. And I know that people are going to be uncomfortable with hearing that but let’s be real here.”

“Saturday night should I be in the office? Well no, that’s just silly. I’m entitled to a private life. I’m entitled to have a little fun with my mates and there are some people who take issue with that.”

She was also heckled at a resident’s association meeting. “…what it felt like to me is that like many other women, I was just being shouted down by a group of men.”

Is it perhaps possible that any mayor would face questions if their attendance is a bit short? Wayne Brown certainly did. And that there will be people who disagree with you and heckle? Certainly Wayne Brown gets that too.

I always find it interesting when the go to explanation is sexism or racism, when an alternative explanation is that pretty much everyone in politics will face people who disagree with them. It’s part of how politics works. I personally think people should be able to disagree without shouting others down. But the left are usually the worst offenders, so it’s a bit rich for her to be saying it’s rude, or claiming that it’s because of her gender or race.

The Jaz brothers have been convicted for sexual violations and indecent assaults on over 20 women. The case has been sickening as one reads about the shattered lives of victims, but also their total lack of remorse and how calculated their offending was where they boasted in private chat channels about drugging and raping women.

The maximum term for sexual violation or rape is 20 years. The courts never give out the maximum sentence, but surely in this case the circumstances dictate (at least for the brother with 15 convictions) a sentence close to the maximum – say 18 years or so, and a non parole period of at least two thirds of that?

The defence will argue that the rapes didn’t involve violence, which is what normally gets a more severe sentence. But they didn’t involve violence, because they drugged the victims to be semi-conscious so they couldn’t resist. I’m not sure you should get credit for that.

I note the Jaz brothers were born in Australia, and only moved to New Zealand as adults. If they never gained NZ citizenship, then we should deport them back to Australia after they get released from prison.

News.com.au reported:

Decorated war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith has lost his defamation case against Nine newspapers.

The 44-year-old did not front the Federal Court on Thursday as Justice Anthony Besanko found imputations put forward across six articles by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times were found to be substantially true. …

There was silence across the courtroom as Justice Besanko found the decorated veteran was a murderer and a war criminal in his conclusions.

He’s gone from a war hero and VC winner to having been found judicially to have murdered unarmed people. He now faces losing his medals and even criminal charges over his actions.

The hubris to launch a defamation claim against media, when you basically know that what they reported was truthful, has bitten him big time. He has taken unverified allegations and now had a Judge confirm them.

Matthew Hooton writes:

Until now, it has been assumed that for sheer, unadulterated incompetence, no Government could ever beat Jacinda Ardern’s ministry for KiwiBuild.

Full credit, then, to Chris Hipkins’ Beehive for proving everyone wrong. It turns out that the centrepiece of its election-year Budget – giving 2-year-olds 20 hours of free early-childhood education (ECE) – will more likely force centres to close.

Combined with the Government’s own ECE regulations, the new policy seems to require ECE workers to be paid below the minimum wage, something you’d have expected at least one minister to have been able to work out on a napkin.

Ultimately responsible is Education Minister Jan Tinetti, who also has her primary and secondary teachers on strike, her universities and polytechnics going broke, and who has become the first MP to be referred to Parliament’s privileges committee for contempt of Parliament since Winston Peters after 2008′s secret-donations scandal.

We should have an annual award, maybe called the Twyford award, and Tinetti would be a contender for the 2023 award.

Jonathan Ayling of the Free speech Union writes:

The Department of Internal Affairs’ public consultation documentproposes a new law establishing a “regulator” to oversee the modern content landscape. The Classifications Act will be gone, along with the Broadcasting Standards Authority and other industry groups.

While Parliament would establish the regulator, outlining its remit, it would be the regulator itself that decides how these powers are used.

A series of codes will be drafted to outline what content is acceptable and what content is prohibited. These codes will be written by industry, with the regulator ultimately approving them and having veto powers if they don’t go far enough.

What’s in scope? Pretty much everything. Media outlets (TV, print, radio) of course, but also some Substack accounts and personal blogs (if you’ve got a strong following). Heck, the Free Speech Union, with 80,000 supporters nationwide, would be regulated.

Kiwiblog would come under this new regime. I currently voluntarily subscribe to the NZ Media Council Code of Ethics, but that is my decision. This proposed regime would make it compulsory for Kiwiblog to regulated by a regulator.

The proposed structure of a regulator, with a code drafted away from Parliament and political accountability, is a censor’s greatest dream and will ultimately be weaponised to suppress unpopular or disliked perspectives and opinions.

Call this cynical, or call it a clear reading of history. Both are probably true.

These codes will apply to all platforms, whether or not they sign up – gone are voluntary opinions.

And remember, the speech and content that will be regulated is all legal.

Illegal contact is already dealt with and is illegal. This regime is about regulating legal speech.

This is about “harmful” ideas that make individuals “feel unsafe”. This is about silencing certain perspectives, views or beliefs.

Secondly, why do we think this will work, and what will the unintended consequences be?

While the intention to address “safety” and online “harm” is arguably laudable, the cure is worse than the disease. This is an inelegant solution to the “lawful but awful” category of speech, which is best addressed through counter-speech.

I assume the FSU will set up a submission tool which will make it easy for people to submit on these proposals. When they do, I will encourage readers to take the time to submit.

The Waikato Times reports:

A 5-year-old boy was cornered in the toilets of his Waikato school by two older pupils who allegedly pinned him down, beat him and sexually assaulted him.

The shocked parents of the young victim have now pulled him out of the school because – to their further astonishment – the two alleged perpetrators of the abuse have not been expelled or even suspended.

The couple say they believe the school’s principal is not taking their son’s situation seriously because the parents of the alleged abusers are involved in the school community.

The poor poor kid. And here is what the school has done:

• “working through a sensitive matter involving young children”.
• met with ministry staff to develop a safety plan for their son and other pupils attending the school
• planned “to make some significant changes to the way we manage the way our toilets are used.
• “We are confident that our school is a safe space for all students,”
• We have also liaised with the families
• “We requested and received additional funding for this from the Ministry of Education.”
• The school’s staff and board had booked a workshop with Child Matters “to further review our child protection policy to ensure it is as strong as possible” and had brought forward a “Keeping Ourselves Safe” child abuse prevention programme initially scheduled for later in the year.

So they have had lots of meetings, have reviewed policies, have gained more money from the Ministry etc etc etc. But what they haven’t done is take any actual action in terms of consequences for those who allegedly sexually assaulted a five year old.

Radio NZ reports:

Eight months before the Loafers Lodge fire, the building regulator told Wellington City Council it was doing six-to-10 times too few safety checks on buildings, and to do more.

The regulator MBIE told it that riskier buildings, such as boarding houses, were even more in need of the better on-site checks.

Overall, the council was running at under 4 percent of buildings audited a year, when it should be at 20-33 percent.

“This number is well below what we would expect for an effective auditing regime,” MBIE said last September in a 2022 assessment it gave the council.

It also was doing too little enforcement when it found faults, the ministry found.

The council released the MBIE assessment on Tuesday in response to RNZ questions for over a week.

At the same time, it admitted last auditing Loafers in 2018 – when it found blockages at fire exits and smokestop doors wedged open, and a non-compliant card-access system – and 2012.

Think if the Council focused more on core functions such as building safety, water infrastructure and the like and less on recognising Palestine and painting rainbow crossings!

I have no issue with politicians changing parties, on a matter of principle. Most famously Winston Churchill is thought to have said “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” in reference to leaving the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 and then back to the Conservatives in 1924.

Few would doubt Tariana Turia left Labour on a matter of principle. The recent defection of Meka Whaitiri to the Māori Party seemed to be more about not getting back into Cabinet than any matter of principle.

The Herald reports:

Former National MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar will stand for Act in the coming election and will contest the Pakuranga electorate in Auckland where she lives.

Parmar, who spent two terms in Parliament with National, has made the move after she was unsuccessful in securing the candidacy for Upper Harbour, Maungakiekie or Mt Roskill – with National.

To swap to another party just weeks or months after you have three times tried to be selected for National, doesn’t suggest it is an issue of principle.

The Platform has applied for their producer, Ben Espiner, to be an accredited member of the Press Gallery. The Gallery recently changed their rules as seen below:

This is an interesting new criteria. First of all you can’t join the BSA. You are either covered or not covered by it. The Platform is not as they do not transmit to people who use a “broadcasting receiving apparatus” – they are solely available through the Internet.

So for non-broadcasters, the criteria now is you must be a member of the Media Council to become a member of the press gallery. Kiwiblog is a member of the Media Council so this should mean any application from me will be approved!

But have a look at the current members of the press gallery. As far as I can tell none of these organisations are covered by the BSA or the Media Council, so I presume they all lose accreditation:

• AFP
• AP
• AAP
• Bloomberg
• The Guardian
• Interest.co.nz
• Listener
• NZ Newswire
• Reuters
• Synapsis
• Xinhua

If this new rule wasn’t just designed to keep The Platform out, then it should be applied to existing members. They say it only applies to domestic media, but why? Are they saying that if The Platform was owned by an Australian, it would qualify?

The Herald reports on the case of Alwyn O’Connor who is about to get struck off for using an imprisoned client’s bank account as his own “personal credit facility”.

What amazes me is that the Law Society deemed him fit and proper to practice law in the first place, considering his record before 2014 when he was deemed fit and proper. This includes:

• Four dishonesty charges In 2000
• Nine dishonesty charges in 2005 with the judge describing him as a “conman” who seemed indifferent to consequences.
• Three charges of assaulting his partner’s three-year-old son in 2006
• Two charges of indecent assault in 2006 which were eventually overturned on appeal but where he admitted inserting a pen into the same boy’s anus and a drawing pin into the head of his penis.
• Had been bankrupted twice

Now I’m all for second chances and rehabilitation. But how could the Law Society in 2014 have decided someone who did all of the above was a fit person to be a lawyer?

The Herald reports:

Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere has some political korero for his ex-talkback co-host and Labour Māori campaign strategist Willie Jackson – concede some of the Māori seats and go hard for the party vote. …

Jackson said Tamihere was taking a cold hard clinical view, which he understands but was one step too far at this stage.

“The Māori electorates have history of blood, sweat, years and tears involved that I have to balance against what JT is saying and that’s not easily given away,” Jackson said.

“I get what John is saying but it is not a deal we can do at the moment.”

The key words here, bolded by me, is that Labour are only ruling this out at this stage. If they remain behind in the polls, they could well do a dirty deal to deliberately generate a disproportional Parliament where they get fewer votes but stay in Government.

Let’s say the election result is:

• National 37.0%, 48 seats
• Labour 34.5%, 44 seats
• ACT 11.0% 14 seats
• Greens 9.0%, 12 seats
• Māori Party 1.5%, 2 seats

The CR has 48% and the CL 45% and this gives the CR 62/120 and the CL 58/120.

But what happens is Labour throws the seven Maori seats to the Māori Party. They get seven seats, with an overhang of five seats, So then we have Labour/Green/Māori Party with 63/125 and National/ACT with 62/125. So they stay in Government despite getting 3% less party vote.

Willie saying not yet, is code for “We’ll do it if we get desperate”.

Tinetti (or her office … of whom she is supposed to be in charge) are clearly in some trouble re delaying the release of Term 3 2022 school data. Clearly still out to lunch – when she released the Term 4 2022 data she announced :improvement” as it had blipped slightly about 50% of students fully attending – which is actually due to many schools marking students on exam leave as being present – whether they were attending before that or not.

It should also be noted for T4 2022 approx. five hundred schools didn’t submit data. It is not actually compulsory for them to do so – -for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Of the 1,985 schools that did submit 249 nine reported less than 30% fully attending. Tinetti deserves the sack for sheer incompetence.

[email protected]

Newshub reports:

Labour MP Arena Williams claims she was never trying to suggest her father was forced to choose between heating and medicine with a tweet that’s caused a furore online and been fact-checked by Twitter.

National MP Judith Collins is labelling the tweet “very dishonest” and is “surprised” Williams hasn’t apologised and deleted it.  …

The tweet was fact-checked through Twitter’s community notes programme. It added the extra context that the $5 co-payment is only paid on 20 items per year, so there’s a maximum annual charge of $100. That would mean Williams’ father would only have to pay the $50 for two months.

But Williams, who earns more than $163,000 per year, was also questioned online over why she was suggesting her father had to choose between heating and medicine, especially given that it’s emerged her father lives with her. …

It’s now emerged that Williams lives with her father, and Collins is calling it a “very dishonest tweet”.

“I thought it was very misleading. I thought very disappointing bringing her dad into the debate like that,” she said on Tuesday.

She’s “surprised” Williams hasn’t deleted the tweet or apologised for it.

Collins received criticism for her initial response. Asked on Tuesday if she had been vindicated, Collins said: “I think that’s the thing with the truth, it always comes out.”

This was very bad judgment. When you and your partner are on $400,000+ a year and your father is living with you., you don’t tweet implying that he has to choose between heating his room and paying $100 a year in prescription fees.

The Blue Review writes at Patreon:

The media bites onto its preferred narratives with the determination of a Staffordshire bull terrier. Such seems to be the case with Simon Wilson’s story about Christopher Luxon’s public meeting at the Birkenhead Bowling Club.

The story being sold? That supporters of the National Party are solely preoccupied with issues of race.

“Last week at Chris Luxon’s mtg in Birkenhead, MOST questions were on one theme: ‘What’s he going to do about Maori’?“ (emphasis Wilson’s)

“[Luxon] fielded about an hour of questions. Nearly all of them were about race.“ (emphasis ours)

“I have notes of 11 questions, 6 of them complaints that Māori get special treatment they don’t deserve.” (emphasis ours)

So Wilson reported that somewhere between most and nearly all of the questions were about race.

However the Blue Review obtained an audio recording of the meeting, and the actual situation is:

Did the treaty and related issues come up? Yes, they did. It would be a lie to say otherwise. There was a question about Te Reo taking precedence over English and another person touched on bilingual road signs in the course of an unrelated question. The work of the Waitangi Tribunal was the subject of two questions.

But to suggest that these few questions characterise the overarching sentiment of the audience is an exaggeration. To the point of being a profound misrepresentation. Wilson’s “6 of 11” looks more 3 or 4 of 15 at worst, less than halfway to “most” and a million miles from “nearly all”.

So 20% to 25% of the questions were on Maori issues and this got reported as nearly all.

And again we wonder why trust in media is so low.

Newshub reports:

Parliament’s powerful Privileges Committee will consider whether the time it took for Education Minister Jan Tinetti to correct an inaccurate statement in the House amounts to contempt.

On February 22, Tinetti was asked during Question Time to categorically state she played no part in the delay of the release of school attendance information. She said she already had and it was a decision for the Ministry of Education for when to release the data.

But Newshub revealed this month that Tinetti’s office instructed officials to delay the release of the information so it could be timed with a truancy announcement by the Government. The minister told Newshub she wasn’t aware at the time that her office was holding up the data.

The Minister is either totally incompetent or a liar. Only an entirely incompetent Minister could have her office staff instructing the Ministry to delay by two months a regular release of data, without her knowledge.

If her staff really had done this without her knowledge, I would expect she would have sacked them. Has she?

Speaker Adrian Rurawhe on Tuesday said Tinetti received a letter from him on May 1 telling her the answer needed to be correct, and she did so the next day.

However, that correction came long after Tinetti learnt her office was involved. She found that out after Question Time on February 22.

She claims she didn’t know her answer needed to be correct until the Speaker’s letter, but Rurawhe said it should have been done as soon as possible. 

So even if you give her the benefit of the doubt, that she is incompetent and clueless about her own office, she still knew the truth for two and a half months, and never corrected her untruthful answer to Parliament.

“While mistakes are sometimes made, which can result in the House receiving an answer containing a misleading statement, it is vitally important that as soon as this is discovered, the minister returns to the House to correct the answer at the earliest opportunity.”

He said it was for the Privileges Committee to determine whether the “delay in correcting an inaccurate statement in this instance amounts to contempt”. 

“I rule that a question of privilege does arrive from the time taken to correct a misleading statement to the House. The question therefore stands referred to the Privileges Committee.”

It is rare for a Minister to be referred for an incorrect answer, but this was an egregious breach, so the Speaker has made a good call.

The Privileges Committee has eight members – Labour 4, National 2, ACT 1 and Greens 1. It will be very interesting to see what they conclude.

The Herald reports:

Transport Minister Michael Wood said the first public draft of the Government’s next three-year transport budget would likely be published “approximately in the next month”.

Treasury warned at the Budget that rising costs in the transport sector, and a large loan granted to Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, may force the Government to hike fuel taxes as early July 1 next year. Such a hike would need to be signalled in the forthcoming budget.

When asked whether such a hike was on the table, Wood said he did not want to get ahead of Cabinet consideration of the budget, known formally as the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport, or GPS.

It is almost inevitable they will hike petrol tax because they no longer use it to primarily fund roads, but has become a cash cow for scores of transport projects that don’t benefit motorists.

In September 2017 the Government collected 93 cents in tax off every litre or petrol. After 1 July this year it will be approximately 137 cents in tax per litre – so the 44c extra per litre adds around $22 more per 50 litre fill.

1 News reports:

A new police chase policy has been introduced, acknowledging that more offenders have been fleeing and a smaller proportion of those fleeing offenders have been arrested in recent years.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said the changes are a “re-balancing”.

He said the changes “add the potential” for officers to pursue when an offender flees and there’s a “high risk of ongoing serious harm”.

“It does acknowledge that in the preceding period we’ve had an increase in the number of fleeing driver events and a decrease in the proportion of those being apprehended,” Coster added. “[The new framework] is likely to see police pursuing more.

“We recognise there has been a public demand for a stronger focus on apprehensions.

It’s good the Police are listening and have changed their policy. Hopefully we may see less ram raids if those responsible realise they might actually be pursued now.