Radio NZ reports:

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has declined to express confidence in the chair of Te Whatu Ora/Health NZ Rob Campbell after he made “inappropriate” political comments online.

In a LinkedIn post over the week, Campbell – who also chairs the Environmental Protection Authority – lambasted the National Party’s Three Waters policy as a thinly disguised “dog whistle on co-governance”.

He went on to target National’s leader, writing: “Christopher Luxon might be able to rescue his party from stupidity on climate change but rescuing this from a well he has dug himself might be harder.”

Under the Public Service Commission’s code of conduct, directors of crown entities must act in a politically impartial manner.

Speaking at a media conference on Monday afternoon, Hipkins told reporters Campbell’s comments were “inappropriate” and “fell well outside” the code of conduct.

“Some of the public commentary that he has made steps well outside of the politically neutral stance that we would expect,” Hipkins said.

“Ministers responsible will be raising [that] with him.”

Asked directly whether he had confidence in Campbell, Hipkins said: “There’s a process [to work through]”.

Campbell seems to think he is special, and the rules don’t apply to him. It’s not only the original attack on Luxon (where he implied the Leader of the Opposition is racist) but he then defended his comments 100% and said he stood by them and had done nothing wrong.

And this is not the holder of some minor office, but the person basically in charge of the entire health system.

The Herald reports:

Former Whanganui MP Chester Borrows has died after he was diagnosed with cancer last year.

Borrows campaigned in two elections before winning the Whanganui seat, which includes South Taranaki, from Labour’s Jill Pettit in 2005.

He held the seat for four terms and was Minister for Courts and Deputy Speaker of the House in the Key Government before retiring in 2017. …

Key said today that he was sad to hear the news.

”Chester was a unique politician – Conviction to the core. He voiced his opinion and supported causes because he knew it was right even if not always popular with his caucus or the party faithful.

“He had the ability to have enduring relations with both sides of the House and will be someone that will be deeply mourned by all political parties.”

His former colleague Paula Bennett said Borrows was a good friend to many politicians.

“Chester was a family man through and through but also a really good friend to so many of us that were in Parliament with him.

“He loved most of all to fight for the marginalised and unfairness. He was good on the karaoke and a genuine good bloke.

“He married my husband and I on the beach in Piha and always stayed in touch and cared about us and our family.”

I’m incredibly saddened by this. 65 is far too young.

I regarded Chester as a mate. I have known him for 25 years. He stood for Parliament three times before being elected on his third go, – which used to be the norm. Too many MPs today expect tp win their seat straight off. Chester lost by 3,000 in 1999, closed it to 2,000 in 2002 despite it being a terrible year for National. He then won it by 2,000 in 2005 and his majority then went to 6,000 or so.

Chester was one of the most decent human beings I knew. That’s not just my opinion, but almost everyone who knew him.

I recall attending a Regional party meeting in the early 2000s with him and Chester arrived late. He apologised and explained he’d come across a car crash, and had helped get people to safety etc. As a young party apparatchik, I got excited by this and said that this will be a great media story – “Candidate helps saves lives of crash victims”. Chester replied that he didn’t even think of mentioning it to the media, and didn’t. In fact he said that his priority was calling 111, to which I retorted “Of course, but you could have called the Whanganui Chronicle second” 🙂

There are not many people I’ll spend six hours in a car driving to and from Whanganui for, but Chester was one of them. He asked me to speak at a party function there a few years ago, and I was happy to oblige.

He will be greatly missed by family, friends, many many colleagues and former constituents.

National over the weekend released their Three Waters policy. It is very similar to the policy endorsed by the Mayors of Christchurch and Auckland, 31 local Councils, the Taxpayers Union etc. It is not the status quo, as this graphic below shows.

It keeps the good stuff from the Government’s reforms (water quality regulators) but dumps the undemocratic stuff. It is highly likely to see Councils forming water companies that span more than one Council, but the Councils will decide amongst themselves what they should be, rather than have just four companies based on historic boundaries.

A key element of the policy is that revenue from water charges must be ring fenced to fund water infrastructure. This will allow proper funding of infrastructure.

What I want deal with is the propaganda claim that rejecting the Government’s model will cost every ratepayer $7,000 more. It is a farcical claim, for two major reasons.

The first is that it is based on a 30 year projection of costs of future infrastructure. No 30 year projection of costs is every robust enough to survive reality. It is slightly better than throwing darts at a dartboard, but even five year infrastructure projects often have cost variations of 50% to 100%. For the Government to say they know exactly what it will cost under their plan, and under another plan for 30 years is just trying to scare people.

The second and more salient point is that almost inevitably the Government’s model will see households pay far far more, because the decision makers are isolated from those who have to pay the bills. Labour’s model will have the companies not fully accountable to either Parliament, central Government or local Councils. Now consider decision making under this model.

Future infrastructure costs will be the result of hundreds of decisions by these water companies – what types of pipes to build, and where. How to treat the sewerage, and where to have outlets etc.

Now consider a scenario where a decision has to be made on a new sewerage plant. Let’s say Option 1 will filter out 99.9% of bacteria and have it pump out to sea 250 metres out, and Option 2 will filter out 99.95% of bacteria and have it pump out 750 metres. Option 1 costs say $200 million or $2,000 a household and Option 2 costs $900 million or $9,000 a household.

Now if a water company is under the control of Councils who are accountable to ratepayers, they will probably say the quadrupling of cost will not match the marginal increase in benefits of Option 2, and go for Option 1.

But under Labour’s model, it is almost inevitable that every single time the water company will choose the most expensive gold plated option, because they can’t be sacked for imposing huge costs of ratepayers.

Democratic accountability is why we now have elected Government, not Kings.

Jimmy Carter is 98, and in hospice care meaning he will die quite soon. Almost every decent person can only admire the work he has done as a former President, and his work ethic where he was still active into his late 90s.

He was not a successful President. I was just starting to follow US politics in 1980 when Reagan got elected and thought the US chose well. Most historians rank Carter in the third quartile, so a poor President, but not one of the truly terrible ones.

But as a former President, he has worked tirelessly for good causes. Not holding international talkfests, but actually getting out there and making a difference.

His Carter Centre has helped eradicate diseases and provided election observers for many decades. He has been a major figure in Habitat for Humanity which has built 35 million houses. Carter himself has led work projects constricting over 4,000 houses – and doing this well into his 90s.

He is a man of deep faith who has been teaching Sunday School at his local church since the 1980s. He even carried on teaching while battling cancer.

He is a great example of someone you can profoundly disagree with politically, but still respect immensely.

One News reports:

Tairāwhiti Area Commander Sam Aberahama firmly pushed back on claims that crime was spiking in the area. …

He said the police “social media team are actively working to have disinformation removed”.

Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people, while the term “misinformation” is used to describe false information that is spread regardless of a specific intent to mislead.

When asked who was spreading the disinformation, Aberahama said it was possible that the false information was being spread by out-of-towners.

This is not good. The Police Commander is accusing people of spreading disinformation, which is information they actually know to be untrue. This is the sort of thing that Russia is normally blamed for. Are they saying Russia is behind these disinformation claims of crime and looting?

It was in response to Government Minister Michael Wood, who said a “culture of hysteria” was building while police responded to the cyclone.

So claims of looting are disinformation and hysteria, spread by out-of-towners.

Meanwhile the Herald reports:

As “lowlifes” continue to take advantage of those impacted by the deadly devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle – including looting shops and evacuated homes – Wairoa mayor Craig Little has called on the culprits to be “jailed for life”. …

He said he was aware of several reports of incidents in his district, including break-ins.

“It is just lowlife stuff; how could you do that to people who have lost everything?” Little told the Herald.

“They are just lowlifes that we don’t want [here], go somewhere else. It is just disgusting; it is just shocking.

“Don’t downplay it. If it is happening, get those guys locked up and put away forever. You never should ever get an advantage out of people’s downfall.”

I guess a local Mayor is also an out-of-towner spreading disinformation and hysteria.

This chart shows how much various countries have donated to Ukraine to help them survive and resist the Russian invasion. We are at the 2nd bottom.

Even if you adjust for population size, the amount of aid in millions of euros per million population is:

• Canada 108.7
• Australia 16.6
• Japan 8.3
• NZ 3.9

That is just comparing to countries not in Europe. Ireland, Norway, Finland and Denmark are all around our population and have respectively given between 17 to 60 times as much aid to Ukraine.

Surely we can at least match Australia per capita?

Prince Harry has been pretty hated in the UK for a couple of years now, but his recent book has achieved the near impossible – he is now more disliked in the US than Prince Andrew!

Newsweek has the latest data.

• Princess Kate +32% (+6% from Jan)
• Prince William +28% (+7%)
• King Charles +11% (+3%)
• Queen Camilla 0% (+2%)
• Prince Andrew -2% (+2%)
• Prince Harry -10% (-7%)
• Meghan Markle -17% (-4%)

So he published a book attacking all his family, and in the US they have all got more popular, and he has got less popular, even falling below his uncle who was accused of statutory rape.

Can’t wait for his next book!

The Herald reports:

A man with a history of violence told his ex-partner who was pregnant with their child he was going to cut the baby out of her and stomp on her stomach.

He also threatened to cut up his ex-partner’s grandmother with a machete. …

The court heard this is Stott’s sixth conviction for breaching a protection order and he has previous convictions for family violence, including male assaults female and threatening to kill.

Judge O’Driscoll said this was serious offending aggravated by his past history of violence against family members.

“You inflicted violence on a vulnerable pregnant woman … It’s clear the victims were scared and terrified as a result of your actions,” he told Stott. …

He gave Stott discounts for guilty pleas and participation in a restorative justice meeting with one of the victims, arriving at a sentence of one year and 11 months imprisonment.

I hope I am wrong, but it seems sadly inevitable this guy is going to end up killing a women, or at least trying to. But he will be out unless than two years.

Protection orders need to have teeth. They are almost entirely ineffective. How about a three strikes type regime for breaching protection orders. Something like:

Strike 1 – Automatic arrest and 48 hours in jail before appearing before a Judge
Strike 2 – Automatic electronic monitoring for 12 months, so that Police get notified if he enters a house he is banned from entering
Strike 3 – Automatic prison sentence

The Guardian reports:

Upwards of 100,000 people gathered outside the Knesset in Jerusalem on Monday in protest against an initial plenum vote on bills that would give politicians control over appointments to Israel’s supreme court, and limit its ability to overturn laws. Protesters blocked major roads across the country, and prevented some politicians from leaving their homes. …

Also among the proposals is a bill that would allow a simple parliamentary majority to override almost all supreme court rulings – a move that would give politicians unprecedented power in a country with no formal constitution or second legislative chamber that can perform other democratic checks and balances. The changes would probably help Netanyahu avoid prosecution in his ongoing corruption trial, in which he denies all charges.

The situation described above is meant to sound terrible, but it is in fact the situation in New Zealand. It is called parliamentary sovereignty.

I’m not against having judicial sovereignty (like in the US) so long as it comes from a written constitution which the people can change. But the worst of all worlds is where the judiciary simply decides they are in charge, and neither the people nor Parliament can over-ride them.

The Spinoff reports:

Hence former Labour campaign manager Shane Te Pou, ex-Green MP Nandor Tanzcos, ex-Auckland Pride director Max Tweedie, and current Labour MPs Deborah Russell and Anna Lorck all being among those who admired the [Hooton] speech. 

One more was Richard Hills. The Auckland Councillor shared it with his followers along with a fairly anodyne comment: “I’ve got to know @MatthewHootonNz over the past few months. He was very nice to me and has a great sense of humour. A good speech and one I would think would have a positive impact on many of the young men he was speaking to.” …

The response to Hills’ tweet was so vitriolic that he appears to have locked his account in response (he has not responded to a request for comment by The Spinoff’s deadline). “Good bloke-ism”, “The whole speech was smug”, “absolutely abhorrent”, “a state school should not be offering a free speaking spot to a person like Hooton” typified the responses to Hills’ tweet. It escalated from there, and by the day’s end, “Matthew Hooton” was no longer trending – but “Richard Hills” was.

Twitter is a cesspit of mainly left leaning haters. Richard Hills merely complemented Hooton’s speech, and the mob turned on him, forcing him to lock his account.

This idea of hating everyone on the other side of you politically seems to be imported from the US. This is ironic as those who piled into Hills probably hate the US, yet they seem to copy the worst political behaviour from the US.

Stuff reports:

An Anglican priest has resigned from his position after having an affair with a woman he officiated a marriage for a few months earlier.

Reverend Pitotori (Peter) Naera, from the Far North, told an Anglican Church tribunal he “didn’t know it was against the rules”.

A tribunal decision from October 2022, stated Naera indicated he wouldn’t be willing to undertake counselling or training on issues relating to the affair, as he intended to resign.

The tribunal noted the affair was not a “one-off” incident and the woman he was having an affair with had been married to her husband less than six months.

I only did Sunday School to my teens and even I know that Anglican priests are not meant to have sex outside marriage, let alone bonk the parishoner you married a few months ago.

The notion that an Archdeacon had no idea this was against the rules is hilarious.

The Herald reports:

Glyn David Ackroyd appeared before Judge Dugald Matheson in the Whanganui District Court on February 14 charged with driving while disqualified.

Ackroyd, who first appeared in court on the charge in December 2022, pleaded guilty to the offending and was subsequently convicted and discharged by Matheson.

This seems to add to the idea of impunity for offenders.

Ackroyd was disqualified from driving for 13 months after he not only sped through an intersection and slammed into a car, seriously injuring two men, but fled the scene, left behind an injured passenger, tried to blame them for the crash, and didn’t check on the victims in the car he hit. One of the victims has spinal fractures and a broken jaw.

Two months after he gets disqualified from driving, he is caught driving again, and the Judge gives him a free pass by way of a discharge.

Think how the victims feel.

The latest net favourability ratings in a US poll:

• Ron DeSantis +2%
• Nikki Haley -2%
• Joe Biden -16%
• Mike Pence -19%
• Donald Trump -20%

DeSantis/Haley 2024 sounds good to me!

I suspect a lot of people in Whangarei are regretting how they voted in 2020.

Adam Pearse writes:

But what came in the days following the cyclone cannot be justified.

Some of the aforementioned communities saw no support for days. Looking around at their homes and livelihoods reduced to nothing, they thought help was surely on its way.

As reserves of fuel, food and water ran dangerously low, they thought a supply drop by chopper or truck must be imminent.

Without power to pump their water, they thought portaloos and medical kits were en route, as any cuts risked becoming septic while they waded through the sludge that filled their living rooms.

Unfortunately, it seems the demand nearer to town was too great.

It’s something rural communities are aware of and freely recognise – resources necessary to survive days of isolation aren’t usually common the closer you get to the city centre.

The cyclone first hit nine days ago, and we still have 2,000 or so people that can’t be contacted.

Farmers are paying thousands of dollars out of their own coffers to charter private helicopter flights to arrange evacuations of children or bring in supplies because publicly contracted operations are too busy with rescues.

Looting, becoming common in town, is spreading into rural areas, putting already traumatised residents further on edge.

Puketapu was among the first of these areas to install roadblocks or checkpoints at access points into their village, and others appear to be following suit.

It is unimaginably tough for those in affected rural areas.

Given the latter point, it was perhaps telling Hipkins continued to insist to reporters that the Government was “throwing everything” at the cyclone response.

When Civil Defence controller Ian Macdonald, who was appearing with Hipkins, was asked if the region had enough helicopters, he casually said more would be nice, but he was confident there were enough.

That will provide little comfort for the likes of Puketitiri, which reportedly hadn’t had a supply drop as of Sunday, six days after the cyclone.

Six days with no supplies??

Stuff reports:

A Tongan national accidentally killed his partner with a single slap to the head while the pair were stuck in Auckland due to Covid-19 travel restrictions.

Umukisia Fiva​, 34, died in September 2020 after she was hit in the head at a party in Manurewa.

Penitiketo Uhatafe previously admitted a charge of manslaughter.

He was sentenced to five months’ home detention at the High Court at Auckland on Tuesday by Justice Anne Hinton. …

“I want to make it clear, that sentence is much lower than it would have been because of the seven months you have already spent in prison and the 22 months you have spent on restricted bail conditions.”

So he got seven months jail and five months home detention for killing his partner. Boy that will teach him.

The offending was:

• Fiva started videoing someone singing at the party, which angered Uhatafe.
• He told her if she did it again, he would slap or smack her and took the phone from her, the court heard.
• She picked the phone up, Uhatafe then stood up and hit Fiva once on the left side of her head with significant force.
• She slumped forward in her chair, unconscious, then collapsed onto the wooden deck.
• Uhatafe ran from the party to a nearby family member’s house
• Fiva died

So he killed her because she wouldn’t obey him. So sad.

This is a post by PaulL, regular commenter and sometime contributor.

The recent floods have highlighted (again) the problem of forestry slash. It seems only a couple of years ago that there was a washout on the Napier – Taupo highway because of a bridge blocked then blown out by forestry slash. There was talk in the media, then no action.

I see again talk on twitter about this being a problem, but mostly in the context of blaming forestry or blaming global warming. I haven’t seen proposed solutions.

This post proposes a two part potential solution.

Let’s start with the problem. We have lots of pine forests because govt policy encourages them in many situations as compared to alternative farming. Those forests need to be harvested to provide an income both to their owners, but also to the country as a whole. We’re ultimately an agricultural country, and our farmland needs to remain productive.

Harvesting trees means cutting them down. The logs that have commercial value are extracted, and there is a lot of residue – logs that were unsuitable, tops and tails, branches, stumps etc. This residue is typically left to rot where it is. The larger bits (logs and stumps) take a long time to rot. A major flood or rainfall event can drive this residue into a river, from where it can back up against bridge pilings and then cause a dam. That dam will either blow the bridge out from the weight of water behind it, or cause the river to jump out of it’s channel and go places we’d rather it wasn’t.

The slash is clearly a by product of the forestry operations, and it’s imposing a cost on the rest of society. It’s an externality from logging. The logging operations currently have no reason to do anything about slash. It’s hard to trace a problem (e.g. a bridge blowing out) to an individual forestry operation, and therefore hard to attribute liability. There’s no penalty for not managing slash, and it would cost money for the logging operation to do something.

Standard economic theory says that we need a way to internalise this externality. We need to make it cost money to fail to manage it, or we need to make it profitable to manage it.

My potential solution includes both those elements.

From Hansard:

David Seymour: Wouldn’t it be important to understand that his Government is taxing $118 billion off New Zealanders—$32 billion more per year than just four years ago?

Rt Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I welcome the opportunity to set out for the member that our Government is actually taking less tax out of the economy as a proportion of the economy than when we became the Government.

This could see the PM up before the Privileges Committee for misleading the House as it is clearly wrong. In 2017 taxation was 27.5% of GDP and now it is 30.2%.

The difference is not minor. GDP is around $400 billion a year so the difference is around $10 billion a year, or $7,000 per household.