Chris Hipkins taking over from Jacinda Ardern is the 8th time this has happened since WWII. The previous seven were:

1. 1957 – Holyoke from Holland 87 days before the election which they lost
2. 1972 – Marshall from Holyoake 306 days before the election which they lost
3. 1974 – Rowling from Kirk, 463 days before the election which they lost
4. 1989 – Palmer from Lange, 453 days before the election which they didn’t get to contest
5. 1990 – Moore from Palmer, 60 days before the election which they lost
6. 1998 – Shipley from Bolger, 733 days before the election which they lost
7. 2016 – English from Key, 319 days before the election which they lost

This is of course no guarantee that Hipkins will lose, but that the track record to date is not great.

An interesting interview with Bari Weiss and Benjamin Netanyahu, especially about his brother:

BW: I want to open this conversation on July 4, 1976. On that day nearly 50 years ago, Israel carried out a stunning mission at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. A week earlier, a few terrorists, four of them, had hijacked a flight of 248 passengers that were headed from Tel Aviv to Paris. They landed the plane in Entebbe and held the passengers hostage, separating the Israelis out from everyone else, while demanding the release of 53 Palestinian terrorists, many of whom were hardened murderers in Israeli prisons. Their terms were clear. If Israel refused, the hijackers promised to kill the Israeli passengers. 

After a week of planning, Israel’s most elite unit, Sayeret Matkal, carried out a mission to rescue those hostages. And miraculously, almost all of the hostages were rescued alive. The New York Times called it an operation with “no precedent in military history.” Israel lost one soldier in that operation, a 30-year-old unit commander named Yoni Netanyahu. Now, I grew up, like so many young Jews, learning the story of Yoni, reading books about him, his letters, and visiting his grave at Israel’s military cemetery. 

But Yoni was also your older brother. And it’s hard not to see this moment as your origin story. In your new autobiography, that is how you open the book and how you write about it—as a catalyst for the rest of your life and everything that would follow. So I wanted to ask you, how did this nightmarish day shape your view of Israel, of the fate of the Jewish people, and of the role that you wanted to play in both of those things? 

BN: Well, it’s changed my life and steered it to its present course. I had no intention of entering political life or even public life. 

In the course of that day, we heard a newscast which said that Israeli commandos had rescued the hostages and were making their way back to Israel. We were overjoyed. But something marred my joy, because the newscast said that one officer had been killed. I said, “what are they saying, officer?” They don’t say officer. They usually say one soldier was killed. I immediately picked up the atlas in my bookshelf and looked at the distance to Entebbe––you didn’t have Google in those days––so I computed it very quickly: 2,000 kilometers. Three or four Hercules planes, so 200 men. A quarter would be officers because they’d fight to get on such a mission. The odds were one to four. 

We had faced worse odds before because Yoni and I, and my younger brother Ido actually, had served in this tiny unit and we often had to be separated on missions. I always calculated the odds; one to four, so not too bad. Yet I couldn’t resist, so I called my brother, and I said, “Is Yoni back?” I didn’t even ask, did Yoni command that? There was no question about it. They would be our special elite unit, which is a kind of a Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and Green Berets merged together and distilled. He said, “no, he’s not yet back.” I called him a few hours later and asked, “is he back,” and he said, “no he’s not back, but I sense that something is wrong.” Then a few hours later he called me and I said to my wife, “that’s Ido calling to tell me that Yoni had been killed.” And that’s what Ido told me. There was this indescribable silence of agony on both sides of the line. 

The only thing I could think of at that point was that I didn’t want the news to reach my parents through the media. My father was teaching at Cornell University at that time, and I was in Boston, so I made my way through seven hours of indescribable anguish to Ithaca, New York. I walked up the path to my parents house. There was a big glazed window in the front of the house, and I could see my father marching back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back in his typical thoughtful ruminations. All of a sudden, he looked at me. He saw me and he said, with a look of surprise, “Bibi, what are you doing here?” Then he saw my face and he understood immediately. He let out a cry like a wounded animal, and then I heard my mother scream. That was actually worse than hearing about Yoni’s death; it was like a second death. 

In the week of the Shiva—the mourning period—I had lost my sense of taste. I didn’t know if I could live. I didn’t know how I would live, and I thought that my life in many ways had ended as I knew it. And it did. But in the course of the Shiva, facing inconsolable grief, two things happened. The first was that people started giving us letters that Yoni had written to them over the years, and we could see that his story came to life through these letters. The first one was written when he was a homesick, 17-year-old Israeli teenager in the United States and the last one was written literally days before his fall in Entebbe. We immediately set about to put these letters into a book, which has endured for 45 years.

Yoni was a remarkable person. He didn’t have to die to become a legend. He was a legend in his lifetime. For those who knew him and those who served under his command, he was a poet warrior who didn’t want to be a warrior. He really thought of his life, and ultimately his death, as a service to the nation, to protect the one and only Jewish state because history wouldn’t give us another chance. 

How did I extricate myself from this? I said that two things had gotten me out of this impossible abyss. The other one was that Yoni never believed that he was just fighting terrorism militarily. He thought it was a civilizational battle between barbarians and the forces of freedom and human rights. I thought that we had to mobilize the free world to adopt a different attitude towards terrorists, a different moral attitude to puncture their various lies—that they were fighting for human rights while they were trampling them and blowing up babies––to fight against the terrorist states that stood behind them, because international terrorism without terrorist states is basically impotent. 

Until I read this interview, I didn’t know about his brother. I think it explains a lot about his zeal.

Jerry Coyne blogs a letter from a NZ science teacher about the new science curriculum. Take the time to read the full post, but here is some of what will be taught in science:

• That mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science
• That science is a Western knowledge system
• The study of Maori gods and “their powers.
• The tale of Maui and Aoraki
• The concept of mauri, that inanimate objects have a life force

The latter three would be fine in a social studies class, but not in a science class.

A post by PaulL, regular commenter and sometime poster.

I see a lot of noise about the attacks on our outgoing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and whether they contributed to or were the cause of her resigning. Despite the Prime Minister explicitly saying that’s not the reason, we have many journalists deciding to ignore her statements and declare it to be the reason.

I’ve been mulling on the nature and volume of online abuse. I suspect that overall our Prime Minister has found the job very hard over the past few years (and legitimately so – a pandemic is a difficult time, and the whole government worked very very hard). It surely is harder if, after all that work, you see your popularity sliding, and you go from a position where most appearances involved congratulations to one where you cannot pre-announce where you’ll be for fear of noisy protests. The online abuse I’d expect is part of that overall picture, even if not a standalone reason.

The question I’m considering today is whether the online abuse that the Prime Minister has suffered is unique, is misogynistic, and is worse than others have suffered in the past. I’ll note that I’m not sure it necessarily matters whether it’s worse – all abuse is bad, although it is also to some extent part of the territory of politics. I’m not sure calculating degrees of abuse is useful other than in some abstract sense.

The Daily Mail reports:

A Politico reporter who called Pope Benedict XVI a ‘homophobic pedophile protector and Hitler Youth alumnus’ after he died last month appears to have been fired, according to his LinkedIn profile and personal website.

Eric Geller, who wrote about cybersecurity for Politico for more than six years, caused controversy after sharing a news story about late Pope’s death on Twitter with an offensive caption on December 31, hours after his passing was announced.

‘Homophobic pedophile protector and Hitler Youth alumnus dead at 95,’ Geller said in full, in a since-deleted tweet.

The tweet showed that Geller is a dick. Abusing someone who has just died is crass. Insulting the former head of a religion with 1.3 billion adherents who has just died is moronic. And slandering him by insinuating he chose to join Hitler Youth (he was forced to) shows huge prejudice.

But none of the above stops him from reporting on cybersecurity. The response to his tweet should have been more tweets. Not his employer sacking him.

The latest welfare stats show:

• 353,904 people of working age on a benefit
• This is 22% higher than in Dec 2017
• Those on a benefit for more than 12 months up 26% to 257,865
• Maori on welfare up 26%
• Pacific Peoples on welfare up 35%
• Numbers on job seeker who are work ready up 51%!
• Numbers on job seeker for more than 12 months up 49%
• Maori on job seeker up 41%
• Pacific Peoples on job seeker up 67%

What is most amazing about all this, is that almost without exception every single shop I go into to, had an ad up pleading for staff.

As expected, Chris Hipkins has become the presumptive Prime Minister. I’ll blog in more detail on him, but for now will share this analysis at Radio NZ by Brigitte Morton who reminds us he has often been an attack dog for Labour, and a different style will be needed as PM. She covers:

• In October 2021, Northland was sent in to an 11-day lockdown after three allegedly “sex workers” with possible gang connections crossed the Auckland border. Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins accused them of using “false information to travel across the border”. But it was later revealed through OIAs that Hipkins knew at the time that a blunder by officials had been the reason and the women were at no fault at all. He has never apologised or corrected the record, nor has he bothered to even correct the reports that these were gang-related sex workers.
• In the case of Charlotte Bellis, he was forced to apologise and correct the record. But only because the Kiwi journalist, then pregnant and stuck in Afghanistan took legal action. Hipkins, in his defence of the government’s MIQ system used Bellis’ personal information as a political weapon and made incorrect statements about her circumstances, including that she ignore consular assistance.
• Late last year, in defence of the Minister for Local Government Nanaia Mahuta and government contracts awarded to her husband, Hipkins dragged Bill English and his family in to the response. He later made an apology to Parliament withdrawing his comments.
• In 2017, in what was perhaps the most concerning case of questionable judgment, Hipkins used Parliament to dig up dirt for the Australian Labor Party. At the time, the Australian federal government was rocked by citizenship sagas. A number of MPs and senators were forced to resign after it was discovered they unconstitutionally held dual citizenships. Hipkins used parliamentary questions to get information on the status of then Australian deputy prime minister.

This is not entirely surprising as his first job in politics was three years as a senior advisor to Trevor Mallard!

Chris is a likeable nice guy, but he is also willing to play the man, not the ball, and I suspect we will see Labour get more aggressive in trying to smear Luxon.

A guest post by Daniel Barraclough:

On the afternoon of January 19^th, 2023, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would announce her resignation from the office of Prime Minister and bring` the hope and change era of the Labour Party to an end.

Of all the reactions shared, the one that struck me the most was from a friend on the far right of the political spectrum. Instead of glee or spite, which I had expected, he expressed a genuine sadness. 

Jacinda Ardern had ridden a wave of popular sentiment to power five years earlier, promising transformational change to New Zealand. She swore after her government was done no child would be hungry in school, or would be sleeping in a car, garage, or a decaying and mold ridden home at night. Ardern promised a return of those most Kiwi of values: fairness and equality. This would be the mark her government would leave on our nation.

My friend’s sadness wasn’t due to the anguish that Ardern expressed as she resigned, rather it was the sadness that someone who had promised so much to those who live without hope, had decided that this challenge was too hard and had given up.

Perhaps If you are fortunate enough, you may have the luxury of choosing to ignore the signs of New Zealand’s growing underclass, but that does not make it invisible. Occasionally you may witness homelessness or violence as you commute to work or school, or you see a story on the news and remark at the tragedy of it all. But unless you’ve grown up in a neighborhood where police sirens, helicopters and raging parties on a monday are the norm you will struggle to understand the environment that produces this phenomenon, and how it creates the statistics we don’t like to talk about in New Zealand.

Ardern clearly empathised with these issues, but I don’t think she ever truly grasped their gravity. When Ardern was 21, she spent a semester exploring the United States, nobly volunteered in a soup kitchen, and dreamed of ways to help the world. Meanwhile, I went to WINZ to ask for a food grant and lamented that due to my criminal convictions, I would likely never get to visit the United States or have a meaningful career. 

This may be anecdotal, but it is emblematic of the divide between those that are the human stories behind every tragic news headline, and those who have made it their job to solve them. It is why despite record spending across the public sector, irrespective of the covid response, things have failed to improve in any meaningful way.

The privileged class that makes up the majority our nations politicians, consultants and policy advisors do not have the experience or courage required to grasp the scale of problem they are tasked with solving. This is why for all of Ardern’s rhetoric of ‘transformation’ all that was offered were small changes, institutional reshuffles, and adjustments to already failed systems. Small policy changes will not address intergenerational welfare dependence and poverty. Nor will more ‘radical’ calls for a wealth tax lead to increased home ownership for a segment of society that has normalised prison and the corrections system as just another part of everyday life. Nor will adjusting the metrics used to measure poverty change the reality of a generation of children growing up in motels.

Much of what I’m saying is easy to dismiss as radical and pessimistic. However, we have spent a generation tweaking policy and launching information campaigns while continuing to watch society fall apart. All we are left with now is apathy or new and radical solutions, if we have any hope of tackling a growing social crisis that threatens to destroy our way of life.

The pension, universal health care, free education, social security, and even universal suffrage; all were considered deeply radical at the turn of the 20^th century yet are taken for granted as foundations of our society today. So too will the solutions for the problems of 21^st century appear.

Perhaps you disagree with my prescription, and you believe that overall things are fine and radical change is uncalled for and would frankly do more harm than good. Perhaps you are right, but many have said the same thing about climate change for decades, and we now stand at the precipice of too late to do anything about it. History is full of societies that closed their eyes as the world deteriorated around them. Change is risky, but change offers hope.

I know I do not put forward any solutions in this piece, but that is not my intention. The purpose of this piece is to warn you we cannot look to another bright-eyed politician who spent their O.E working prestigious jobs on the other side of the world to fix the problems that we have chosen to ignore for decades.

The next ‘Ardern’ that wishes to deliver transformational change must understand that which requires transformation. They must steel themselves to the fact the kindness and empathy will not fix the gordian knot that drives the stagnation and growth of our underclass. The solutions will be difficult, painful and will likely cost the political careers of those that dare to face it. 

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

Two young guys, hoodie dressed, walked out of a South Auckland supermarket each pushing a trolley heaped with wine, chips and cake.  They didn’t pay.  No one stopped them, including the overweight security man who was studiously looking the other way.  Apparently, the local cops know them but have “more important matters” to deal with including filling in numerous forms that are supposed to improve policing and safety.

How do I know?  A close family member works in that supermarket and witnessed the brazen theft.

Theft in supermarkets is common.  It has increased dramatically since someone decided that criminals would not be stopped if they had got passed the checkout and that police would not be notified.  Staff are not allowed to interfere at all.  Security can only intervene if culprits can be caught prior to checkout.  We are not talking about women with large coats nicking a few items in their inside pockets – it is loaded trolleys pushed out the door in full view.

It is one reason for higher grocery prices – we are subsidising petty crooks.  Retail theft amounted to $1.2 Billion last year.  That’s the recorded stuff only. Double it at least. Its over $800 a household and maybe well over a $1,000 if unrecorded crime is added in.  

If you buy weekly your grocery bill could be $25 to $30 higher just to keep the crooks happy.

Statistics are being manipulated to make it look like crime is down.  Listen to the Government and they will pull numbers showing theft crime is down, police numbers are up and there is nothing to worry about. Try telling that to a supermarket owner or the local corner dairy.

Gang numbers increased 50% between October 2017 and June 2021 to well over 8,000.  The tough end of gang land operates in hard drugs monopolising the trade and pulling serious profits.  The newbies run the car thefts, ram raids, shop thefts and nick stuff from supermarkets.

Police are now caught up in more and more welfare work, dealing with mental health issues, court time and endless paperwork.  Labour is quick to point out extra police on the beat but the workload is up over 60% and the numbers barely 10%.  More and more of the ‘low level’ crime is simply ignored because of a lack of resource.

Only about one third of recorded crime is solved and with a high level of crime not being recorded criminals are playing the odds knowing they have a high chance of never facing any consequences.  Further should they be in the small group of apprehended they know those consequences will be a minimal disruption and cost.  The old adage that crime does not pay is turned on its head.

Figures show that the Auckland area has 1530 crimes per 10,000 people- 667 more than surrounding areas – and it shows a massive increase over previous years.

Australia has three times the coppers on the streets per head of population than Auckland.  Maybe that is a factor in the major crime rate being only a third of ours per capita.

Those who say jail is not the answer and that more needs to be done to rehabilitate miscreants are losing both ways.  No jail and no rehab.  And so are we.  The anti-jail lobby is working well with lots of help from the bench.  Community service is a very sick joke with limited supervision, no penalties for “no shows” and guys just sleeping it off in the corner.  Ankle bracelets and home detention means more porno movies and Maccas delivered by courier.

The answer?  Education and heavy intervention taking control through mentoring and tough love.  That is another story for another time and, sadly, avoided like a plague.

A snap Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll on the Labour Leadership was done on Thursday and Friday. ,The full report is online here. 

There’s been a couple of other polls done in the last 24 hours on the Labour leadership, but with respect the others have asked sub-optimal questions. Just asking who you want to be the next leader is interesting, but not insightful.

We asked, for each of the candidates, whether their leadership would make people more or less likely to vote for Labour. And also broke that down by who they voted for last time. This is about establishing electability. This is what Labour MPs want to know.

The poll shows a huge variance in electability between the candidates . Amongst 2020 Labour voters, one candidate increases Labour’s appeal by a net +22% while `It is very clear that Chris Hipkins is the best choice for Labour. I was somewhat surprised by how negative sentiment is towards Michael Wood. Hipkins net impact on 2020 Labour voters is +22% while Wood is -14%.

Also of potential interest are views on what policies voters want the new PM to scrap. The short answer, is lots of them! This is a reminder that it wasn’t so much Jacinda Ardern who was unpopular, but her policies!

A great analysis of the problems of Labour’s compulsory unemployment insurance proposal by Michael Fletcher. Fletcher is no right winger but a VUW academic and former economist for the Federation of Labour.

He states:

The scheme is huge, costing an estimated $3.5 billion each year. Administration of the scheme alone is estimated at $500 million per annum. This bill is to be funded by a 1.39 percent tax increase on wages, matched by an equal levy on employers. As Inland Revenue has advised, most of the employer levy will eventually be passed on to workers via reduced wage increases, reducing strained family incomes by nearly 3 percent in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. 

A lot of people, including the self-employed, many migrants, and some precarious workers, will not be eligible. For those who are, the scheme sounds generous – anyone who loses their job because of redundancy or illness will qualify for 80 percent of their lost wages for up to six months. That in itself is a problem because it sets up a two-tier welfare system with higher rates – one might think of it as Koru club welfare for insurance recipients, compared to other beneficiaries in cattle class.

The key thing is that this scheme will take into account current support such as benefits and WFF, so the actual impact on lower income workers who lose their job is minor. Here’s the net increase in income for a single person who lose their job:

• minimum wage – $4,828
• median wage – $6,775
• high earner – $26,416

So a high earner will get five times as much as someone on the minimum wage and four times as much as someone on the median wage.

Now what is the person who loses their job is married and has two kids. Then the income boost is:

• minimum wage – $4,871
• median wage – $8,945
• high earner – $38,896

So here the high earning couple get seven times more than the minimum wage family and four times more than the median wage family.

So every worker will have a 3% drop in their take-home pay, for a scheme that will deliver high benefits to the highest income earners.

On my Patreon (sub needed, have to pay the bills), I analyse all seven potential candidates (as in not ruled out yet) for the Labour Leadership, and make the case for and against each of them.

My conclusion is Labour MPs should elect Chris Hipkins as Leader and Kiri Allan as Deputy Leader, as in that is who I would vote for if I was a Labour MP.

I have charted below favourability data for Jacinda Ardern ranging from the week she became Labour Leader to last week. They tell a very powerful story, that explains a lot. There are three charts – one showing her favourability, one showing her unfavourability and the final one showing the net favourability.

In the few weeks she was Leader of the Opposition, a very high 60% to 70% of New Zealanders had a favourable view of her (incidentally Bill English had comparable numbers – the 2017 election was a rarity in a choice between two very popular leaders).

As Prime Minister her first 15 months saw between 60% and 75% of New Zealanders having a favourable opinion of her. That is massively high, showing even those not voting Labour still liked her massively.

There was a decline in early 2019 to the high 50s but her masterclass handling of the Christchurch mosque massacre rightly saw her favourability go back up to 73%.

After that there was a sustained slide to around 55% at the end of 2019. Now 55% is not as good as 73% but still very good – anything over 50% is an election winning position. There was a small boost in 2019, which saw the White Island eruption tragedy.

Then Covid-19 struck and her favourability soared to an unprecedented 80%. Over the next six months it declined, but still remained massively high at around 65% going into the 2020 election, where she scored a majority Government.

There was a six month gap of polling so we pick up in mid 2021 where she is at 54% and she climbs to 60% in September. Then the big decline starts. Probably not a coincidence that Christopher Luxon became National Leader then, because that gave a more credible alternative. But that is only part of it, as people can like more than one leader.

Over the next six months she fell from around 60% to 50%. That was mainly, I believe, a reaction to continuing Covid-19 restrictions and also a feeling NZers were now overexposed to her. The protests at Parliament occurred late in that period.

Then over the last nine months her favourability fell from 50% top 40%. Any movement of more than 3% is usually significant. This probably reflects the cost of living pressures due to high inflation. Families were struggling, so you don’t think so favourably of the PM.

Also through all this has been what I call a delivery failure by the Government on almost all its major promises such as Kiwibuild, Auckland Light Rail etc. Jacinda was seen as well-meaning but ineffective in delivering. The three major crises of Christchurch, White Island and Covid-19 played to her considerable strengths and without them she may actually have hit 40% earlier than now. The decline in 2019 may have continued on.

This shows what proportion of New Zealanders have an unfavourable view of Jacinda Ardern. One can not have a favourable view but not necessarily have an unfavourable one. So it is significant as to how many people actually will say they don’t like someone, because if they don’t like you they probably can’t be persuaded to vote for your party.

For most of her first 18 months, fewer than 20% of New Zealanders disliked her. As National was polling in the 40s for much of that time, this means that most National voters didn’t dislike her (including me).

There was a slight increase to 22% in March 2019, and then again after Christchurch this declined to just 13%.

2019 then saw a pretty big increase in unfavourability on what was billed by Jacinda as the year of delivery. The slogan became a punching bag, for the lack of. Her unfavourables hit 27% in October 2019, dropped away over summer but back to 26% in early 2020.

The pandemic saw her unfavourables drop to a minuscule 8%. I doubt any democratic leader has ever had a lower number of unfavourables. The nation tuned into the daily 1 pm press conferences to be reassured by her.

Over 2020 the unfavourables rose to around 20%, but that is still massively historically low, especially during an election campaign.

Fast forward to mid 2021 and only a slight increase to 23%. But the latter part of 2021 saw growing resistance to the Covid-19 measures and for the first time in four years, criticism of Ardern was becoming widespread. Prior to then, if you were at a function, it would have been almost unsafe to say a bad word about her, but now anecdotally it was becoming common. Her unfavourables went to 33%.

2022 saw an undulating trend of growing unpopularity, culminating in 41% having an unfavorable view, this month. The cost of living is part of that, but also more and more people feeling the Government has not been transformational or even effective.

Now 41% unfavourability is five times the level she was at just two and a half years ago. But it is also not that high by world standards. Biden and Trump are usually around 55% unfavourable and Liz Truss managed 80%. So it is not that she was unpopular with the majority, but with a very large minority.

The net favourability is the one I refer to the most – the favourables less unfavourables. It combines the other two.

She spent the first two years at between +40% and +60% which is massive. John Key never got quite that high (but he sustained his much longer – when he retired after eight years he was at +19%).

Just prior to Christchurch she was at +37% and then hit +60%. From there the net rating fell to +30% in late 2019. Covid-19 saw it go from +30% (which is still a great rating) to +72% which is the sort of level George W Bush had after 9/11. In a disaster patriotism trumps politics.

By the 2020 election she was at +42%, much the same as in the 2017 election. A strong position after one term, and up against the third National leader in six months, hence a massive win.

By mid 2021 she was at +30%. This fell to +15% in late 2021 and then top a bit to +22% in early 2022.

2022 saw the net favourability decline to +4% mid year, rebound to +12% and then a gradual decline until she hit -1% in the Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll released today (taken 10 to 16 January).

So a brilliantly gifted communicator who was at +40% for many years, soared to +80% in early to mid 2020 and then a massive fall to -1% at the beginning of election year.

Comparisons can be made to both George W Bush and Winston Churchill. Bush remained popular for quite a few years after the 9/11 attacks, but he was also undone by a poor economy. Churchill saves the UK and the world from Hitler, but lost office because people don’t vote on gratitude for the past, but their hope for a better future.

Having failed to deliver so much in five years, it was proving harder and harder to excite people about what a third term for Jacinda Ardern would mean as almost every issue they got elected on in 2017 (housing, health, mental health, education) has got worse or is in a state of crisis. A third term for Janda would mean at best signing off a business case for Auckland Light Rail, when they had promised construction would be complete. It shouldn’t take nine years to develop a business case for a core promise.

I will write elsewhere on Jacinda’s legacy – the highs and low. This post is more about the data – charting her rise and fall with the public of New Zealand.

The Taxpayers’ Union Curia poll asks every month what NZers think of the significant party leaders. From time to time we also ask about other politicians. The data above is the results for ten senior Labour MPs (one nor retired). You can see in which month we asked about them.

The only Labour MP who had had a positive net favourability (just) is Chris Hopkins who was at +1% in July 22. Next closest is Andrew Little at -6% in December 2021. Note that this was before Labour started to tank in the polls so is probably lower today.

Megan Woods a year ago was at -13% and Grant Robertson just last month was -15%.

After that you have Kelvin Davis at -18%, Stuart Nash -29%, Nanaia Mahuta -31%, Willie Jackson -32%, Photo Williams -38% and Trevor Mallard 10 months ago at -54%.

This data suggests Chris Hopkins is the logical choice for Labour. But it isn’t quite as simple as that. Firstly the data is six months old, and also a new Prime Minister will have an opportunity to win more people over, whomever they are.

I analyse on my Patreon (sub needed) why Jacinda resigned as Prime Minister.

Jacinda Ardern has announced she will resign as Prime Minister next month.

The full thread is quite fascinating. To go from No 390 to No 1 is huge. More startling is the batting average which went from 15 to 124. Take that Don Bradman!

Christopher Luxon has announced some minor changes:

• Chris Bishop picks up Urban Development and RMA Reform, while Michael Woodhouse picks up Shadow Leader of the House.
• Louise Upston adds Family Violence Prevention to her portfolios.
• Judith Collins takes on the new roles of Foreign Direct Investment and Digitising Government.
• Todd Muller is confirmed as the Agriculture spokesperson, and also takes on the Climate Change portfolio.
• Todd McClay picks up the new Hunting and Fishing portfolio.
• Penny Simmonds takes on the new portfolio of Workforce Planning.
• New Hamilton West MP Tama Potaka picks up the Māori Development and Associate Housing portfolios, with a focus on social housing.

The Herald reports:

From April 1 to December 31, 2022, the total amount of fees received was over $105.1m.

The total amount of rebates paid out was over $203.3m over the same period.

It’s important to remember that the ute tax and electric car subsidy will not reduce our level of greenhouse gas emissions. Transport is in the ETS, so the scheme will merely reduce the cost of emissions permits in other sectors, as transport will consume fewer.

The scheme is meant to be self-funding, but it isn’t. So either taxpayers have to make up the difference, or they will have to double the level of the ute tax, to break even.

So the ute tax may double from up to $5,000 to be up to $10,000. All to subsidise new `Tesla owners!