It is fascinating to see so many of the Twitter left celebrating that they managed to physically prevent someone from speaking at Albert Park. They are so convinced of their moral superiority that they can’t imagine that the precedent may one day have them at the receiving end.
But imagine how they would react to a scenario like this.
A controversial anti-semitic speaker is coming to NZ, hosted by a controversial pro-Hamas group in NZ. They label themselves as being merely pro-Palestinian but their opponents claim they are anti-semitic and their rhetoric and even their presence in NZ is a literal danger for Jewish people.
They turn up to Albert Park to be met with 3,000 Jews and their supporters who drown them out, demolish barriers keeping them back, yell abuse and even throw liquid over them. The speaker doesn’t get to speak to their few hundred supporters who wanted to hear what they were going to say, and flees in a police car for their own safety.
If this was the scenario, would this be seen as a great victory for tolerance?
Have we totally lost our marbles? An American grand jury is apparently about to criminally indict, for the first time in history, a former president of the United States. This is a weighty and meaningful act. It couldn’t have more gravity. And so the charge will be … falsely accounting for hush money paid to a porn star?
One of the marks of personal maturity is a sense of proportion. A healthy democracy has a gracious sense of the rightness and wrongness of things, and is alive to symbols and signs. Is this, perhaps, the wrong indictment to bring?
On and in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump encouraged and unleashed an assault on our Constitution. Before that he appears to have waged a concerted and thuggish effort to overturn a democratic outcome in the state of Georgia.
For these things he deserves it all — the indictment, the handcuffs, the mug shot, the hauling into court, the bail hearing. Georgia and Jan. 6 are big and serious events, worthy of the strictest legal approach and subject to all legal remedies. These events are being investigated, the former through a state grand jury, the latter through a federal special counsel.
You say, but those cases aren’t ready! Then wait. Allow a serious process to play out seriously.
Charging him in the Stormy Daniels case is below us — not below him, but us. The subject matter is below us. The nature of the charges is below us. The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky low-life things. The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right and also in the way all “close Trump advisers” past and present are half-mad: money-addled, fame-addled, power-addled, screwball in their thinking.
I very much agree with Noonan on this.
Indicting Trump over how a payment was classified seven years ago in relation to him hooking up with a porn star 17 years ago is ridiculous. It looks petty and will backfire if the DA proceeds.
Many many legal commentators, left-leaning, have said the case is shaky.
There are, as Noonan says, much more important and stronger cases. Obstruction of justice charges over his denying he held top secret classified comments could see his in real trouble. The fact the Judge has said his attorney has to testify, is an indication that there is strong proof that he lied to his own attorneys.
Indicting Trump over obstruction of justice will harm Trump. Indicting him over Stormy Daniels will help him.
On Saturday 18 March, in Melbourne, a group of mostly women gathered outside Victoria’s Parliament. Lead by a petite blonde Brit the “Let Women Speak” rally was supposed to be an opportunity for women to share the personal impact of gender self-identification (ie. males being able to identify as women based purely on their say-so) and male violence.
The black clad invaders then performed Nazi salutes on the steps of Parliament and unfurled a sign. At which point a group of women, many of whom had gathered to talk about the impact of male violence on their lives were *checks notes* roundly condemned for not acting violently toward masked men. And on social media and in the press the two were then conflated into one evil entity.
What has followed in the last week can only be called a damning indictment on the legacy media in both Australia and New Zealand. Leaving what they sneeringly call “alternative” media to be the only platform where actual facts and balance can be gleaned.
Oh, and by the way, that includes the Australian Jewish Association who had members at the event and who has issued a statement criticizing both the policing and stating “it is shameful that some politicians and media are now trying to smear this women’s movement with the false accusation of involvement with Nazis.” But never mind them. After all, what would Jews know about Nazis.
So, first of all, congratulations, if you happen to have any concern, any at all, about male bodies that self-identify as women in women’s spaces, services, or sports then according to the legacy media you can now take your pick of being “Nazi-adjacent”, an “extreme right-wing bigot” or “hate-fuelled”. Yes, that includes Angie Jones, the woman who organized the Melbourne rally and who is left leaning, has a history supporting gay rights, and Jewish.
The idea, the very notion, that women might want to gather together IN PUBLIC and talk about the outrageous notion that sometimes, just sometimes, some women want spaces away from male bodies, regardless of how those bodies identify, unleashed what kind only be described as a tidal wave of self-righteous performative coverage from people who self-identify as journalists. Here’s a sample of egregious examples:
I watched the unedited video multiple times on Twitter trying to get a screen grab of this horrific gesture of white supremacy that needed to be blurred out and it was so fleeting, so fast, that I couldn’t despite multiple attempts. Because Posie Parker/Ms Keen, as it turns out, is a massive gesturer and flings her hands around a lot while talking. And the truth is that Newshub know that if they hadn’t blurred it everyone watching would have seen it for the flying jump into defamation that it is. But never mind because the internet has very kindly found us another woman doing this despicable gesture.
Then Breakfast TV Thursday morning sees Matty McLean and Shaneel Lal on the fainting couch. While Matty’s eyebrows do some Laurel Hubbard worthy heavy lifting, Shaneel starts with the arson “attack” on the Rainbow Youth centre in Tauranga last year that proves that New Zealand is a cesspit of “queer hatred”. Never mind that the two men convicted had mental health challenges, intellectual disabilities, and developmental difficulties and at sentencing the judge made clear that the arson wasn’t motivated by malice towards the LBGT community, and that the choice of the building was incidental but you do you Shaneel.
Back to the beige fainting couch. Having been lobbed the Matty low ball of being asked if he is concerned about the safety of trans people turning up to protests Shaneel summons their non-binary bravery “this is the first time I have feared for my own safety… incredibly scared of being there.” Matty murmurs supportively in what appears to be a live audition for a role in Shortland Street should the breakfast TV gig not work out.
And they are not wrong. They have reason to be fearful because *checks notes* in Melbourne the three people arrested were all transgender activists, not that you’ll find anyone in the mainstream media fessing up to that. Meanwhile, good old Aotearoa Twitter, that beacon of reasoned and rational debate, there are transgender activists talking about packing bricks in their bags for the protest. If I was a police officer faced with the choice between a bunch of women wanting to talk about male violence and women’s spaces and protestors threatening to pack bricks I know which way I would be facing in Albert Park tomorrow.
As much as I’d love to stay with this touching moment between Matty and Shaneel on the beige couch, we need to move on to other members of the media who are refusing to be left behind in out competing each other in the witch hunt.
Today FM, that stunning and brave media organisation most notable for sending two of its presenters off for “re-education” for not reading the memo about affirming “pregnant people” and pronouns. They’re also known for well, nothing. Their ratings are in the toilet, their management is quitting all over the show, and the only people who listen to them are… I have no idea. It’s a mystery.
But we’re going to give Lloyd and Tova a shout out in their frantic pursuit for relevance because they at least did one of those time honoured traditions of objective and considered journalism in their respective thought pieces yesterday. And by that I mean they linked to each other’s opinions and their own coverage as proof that Posie Parker is a “hate-fuelled, anti-trans, neo-Nazi supported” bigot. Don’t you just love it when elite urban liberal journalists quote each other as proof that someone with opinions they don’t like is evil?
Oh and Lloyd announced that he was joining the protest. You do you, Lloyd. Be a good man and take some tissues for Shaneel. And maybe keep a wide berth of any of your pink or blue haired friends carrying a suspiciously looking heavy handbag.
Back to Tova, who must be desperately missing her television career right now because there’s no thrill of chasing people in a red beret when you’re on talkback radio. Once she’s done quoting Lloyd as proof that Posie Parker is evil, Tova just goes straight for disinformation claiming, Speaking of liberal democracies, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Victoria has expelled an MP from the party for attending one of these hateful rallies.
It’s not true. What did happen is that John Pesutto, the new Liberal Leader in Victoria in the job for all of three months after the Libs took an absolute caning in the state elections last year, stated that he intends to seek a vote on expelling Moira Deeming. Moira attended the rally where she read out a statement on behalf of a Muslim constituent whose religious beliefs require that she access sex segregated services and facilities in certain circumstances and so is being impacted by males claiming to be women entering those spaces.
His decision came after his staff performed a through and independent review by *sigh* looking up Posie Parker on Wikipedia and reading an entry that had been maliciously edited by transgender activists. Now, I would have thought that any male political leader might have thought twice about opining on where one of his female MPs may go and who she may talk to but that’s just me with my weird beliefs about women having agency and autonomy. Especially women elected by their constituents and speaking at an event on behalf of one of them. And a women Muslim of colour that that.
Whether or not Moira will be expelled is the matter or both enormous angst and a matter for next week. Pesutto is digging in, he may have the numbers because for some reason the Victorian Libs are more afraid of the extremists who think that male rapists should be in female prisons than they care about holding onto what is left of their own dwindling supporters. Maybe once he’s done Matty could invite him for a session on the couch and they can slap themselves on the back for putting a stop to those damn annoying women with opinions speaking.
Back to Tova and her disinformation. Tova is using a lie about Moira Deeming to demand Christopher Luxon “stand up” and ban his MPs from being in the vicinity of either Albert Park or Civic Square over the weekend in case they hear opinions her and Lloyd don’t like.
Luxon, who when asked anything remotely controversial tends to resort to a word salad, at least remembers that in theory his party has a literal value of “individual freedom and choice” so he dodges the question by saying no one has expressed an interest in going. But you can guarantee that behind the scenes he is contemplating putting GPS tracking and/or geo-fencing on the principled MPs who do actually believe in freedom of speech and association and hearing alternative viewpoints.
Someone should tell Luxon about that 67% of bigoted hate-fuelled New Zealanders who don’t support male bodies in women’s sport. Because bigots tend to vote. But I digress. Politicians are a whole other post. As are the rest of the media, I’m looking at you RNZ, Stuff, TVNZ and NZ Herald, I’ll get to you if DPF lets me do another column.
So here we are. It’s Friday.
We all know what the media want this weekend. Shame on them.
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?
