Labour and Greens have tried to make Three Waters about privatisation, but the voters are not dumb enough to fall for it.

The irony is that far from the right wanting to privatise Three Waters, it is Labour and the Greens who are doing so.

They are passing a law that gives nominal ownership of Three Waters to local councils, but actually places almost all the powers of ownership to these new regional bodies, which are 50% comprised of Iwi representatives.

Now Iwi are part of the private sector. Some like Ngai Tahu are major players in the private sector. So the Government is taking control of Three Waters away from being 100% controlled by the elected public sector, and giving the private sector 50% control of what were formerly public assets.

So what you have is a real confidence trick. A Government that is de facto privatising Three Waters assets, while passing a law saying privatisation is wrong.

The full results are here.

Party Vote

• National 38% (+1% from last poll)
• Labour 33% (-1%)
• ACT 11% (+2%)
• Greens 9% (nc)
• Maori Party 2% (+0.4%)
• NZ First 3.6% (+0.6%)
• TOP 1.7% (+0.4%)
• New Conservatives 0.6% (-0.4%)

11% (-2%) undecided.

Seats

• Labour 42 (-23 from election)
• National 49 (+16)
• ACT 15 (+5)
• Greens 11 (+1)
• Maori 3 (+1)

Government

• National/ACT 64/120
• Labour/Greens 53/120

Preferred PM (unprompted)

• Jacinda Ardern 29% (-1%)
• Christopher Luxon 23% (+2%)
• David Seymour 6% (+2%)
• Chloe Swarbrick 2% (+1%)
• Winston Peters 2% (nc)

Economic Outlook

• Better 18% (-18%)
• Worse 61% (+23%)
• Same 21% (-5%)

Thomas Coughlan writes at NZ Herald:

Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson would do well to heed the advice of Adrian Orr and cool his jets after this morning’s trainwreck interview on TVNZ’s Q+A with Jack Tame. …

He then decided to give Tame tips on how to conduct a good interview.

“You’re doing such a negative interview today – I’m very disappointed in you,” Jackson said.

Jackson, as the co-author of one of New Zealand’s worst ever broadcast interviews (a bizarre grilling of a friend of an alleged victim of the Roast Busters group), is in no position to be dispensing tips on tradecraft, but nevertheless felt himself qualified to do so.

“You’re hammering every part of this entity,” Jackson complained – and of course Tame was – that’s the whole point. Heaven forbid the new entity prohibits its employees from “hammering” it.

It is very clear that Willie sees the role of TVNZ as being to not challenge the Government. This makes the merger an even worse idea, as the motivating factor appears to be having a large Government controlled media entity dominating the reporting landscape.

The Herald reports:

Introducing an entrenchment provision into Three Waters legislation while the Government is operating under urgency is unconstitutional and undemocratic, the head of the New Zealand Law Society believes.

Law Society president Frazer Barton has penned a letter to Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta, criticising a new clause that was added to the Water Services Entities Bill, known as Three Waters legislation.

Undemocratic and unconstitutional seems to sum up the Government!

The JC reports:

In a guest appearance on conspiracy theorist Infowars online TV show, Kanye West praised Adolf Hitler during an interview with host Alex Jones. …

During the show on Thursday, which featured Mr Jones, Mr West, and Nick Fuentes, a holocaust-denying white supremacist, the host attempted to defend the hip-hop star, saying: “You’re not Hitler, you’re not a Nazi, so you don’t deserve to be demonised.”

Mr West instead pushed back, saying: “Well, I see good things about Hitler also.

“The Jews… I love everyone, and the Jewish people are not going to tell me, ‘You can love us and you can love what we are doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we are pushing with the pornography”, but this guy [Hitler] that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good and I am done with that.”

Mr West, who recently announced his intention to run for president in 2024, added: “I am done with the classifications. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”

Especially Hitler!!

And this is Donald’s good mate and dining companion. The upside is Ron DeSantis is looking a better and better prospect.

Following the outrageous comments, Mr Jones, in an attempt to distance his own views, said that he did not like Nazis or Hitler, to which Mr West replied, “I like Hitler.”

When Alex Jones starts trying to distance himself from you, you know a line has well and truly been crossed. And then West goes further and declares he actually likes Hitler.

“The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.”

Funny that.

The Herald reports:

The man today sentenced to three years in prison on New Zealand’s first-ever charges of sabotage was motivated by one purpose; causing as much disruption as he could in an effort to draw attention to his cause.

That cause was a catalogue of fanatical conspiracies surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic and the roll-out of vaccines.

His conviction in his beliefs saw him turn into an almost fulltime campaigner. He had hundreds of followers online, with his postings garnering significant traction within Aotearoa’s conspiracy and “doomsday prepper” circles.

We can now reveal, what many knew, that he tried to bring down part of the national electricity grid. Sabotage was the appropriate charge, as is a jail sentence.

If he had succeeded, he may have killed scores of people, and done tens of millions of damage to families and businesses.

According to one of Philip’s many books, his childhood was marred with abuse and fear. His father, a steel-fabricator he described as a “schizophrenic communist”, emotionally manipulated Philip and his brother David, he wrote, referring to them both exclusively as his “little swines”.

Sounds terrible.

In 1988, his brother David was tried after being alleged to have killed Kyung Eup Lee, a South Korean fisherman, at the Melbourne Railway Station. He was sprung after a letter he wrote saying he had “done in a Korean” was intercepted by New Zealand authorities.

Philip, still in London, flew to Melbourne weeks later to visit his brother.

He arrived to discover it had been alleged David also cooked the man’s body parts in a wok and displayed Lee’s severed penis in the station’s female bathrooms.

Not a healthy family.

In late November, he began to undertake his own attacks. While the details of those attacks remain subject to strict suppression orders, today those orders were relaxed slightly, allowing media to report it was Transpower infrastructure that had been targeted.

The only other facts that can now also be reported are that the offending caused $1.25 million in damage and one of the acts led to a fire.

A lot of people don’t like the Government’s response t Covid-19. But most of them don’t take the law into their onw hand, let alone decide to try and bring down the electricity grid.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern attended a Labour Party caucus meeting where a last-minute entrenchment clause in the Government’s controversial Three Waters legislation was discussed, despite her saying on Monday it was “not necessarily something I would be aware of”. …

Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta confirmed, through a spokesperson, the change to the bill was discussed with the Labour caucus – a meeting of all its MPs – in advance of the House sitting.

“We knew it was novel and may not pass the constitutional threshold, but it was still worthy of consideration,” Mahuta said, in an emailed response to questions.

This is Nanaia throwing Jacinda under the bus, after Ardern and Hipkins said they knew nothing about the amendment they voted for. Everyone assumed that the SOP by the Greens was tabled at the last minute, and Mahuta as the Minister in charge decided to have Labour vote for it, on the fly.

But the reality is that Mahuta took the Green SOP to the Labour caucus, and it was either explicitly approved, or there was no objection to it.

This makes it a huge credibility issue for the Prime Minister. I can only think of four explanations, to reconcile what she said, to what we now know.

She wasn’t listening in caucus

Maybe she was bored with Three Waters, and despite the fact she chairs Caucus, she wasn’t listening to Mahuta and didn’t think she had to pay attention to what was being said.

She didn’t understand

Maybe she simply didn’t understand what Mahuta was saying. She may have got confused.

She forgot

Maybe she forgot it was discussed at caucus, even thought it was just a week ago.

She lied

This is the fallback option, if none of the other three explanations are credible.

Bill Bennett writes:

One day shortly before Christmas, a Chorus contractor will connect a slender strand of glass fibre to a family home and power up the hardware needed to drive it.

When that line lights up and the data starts flowing, the 11-year Ultra Fast Fibre project will finally end.

From where we are in late 2022, the wisdom of building a nationwide fibre network looks obvious. That wasn’t the case when Sir John Key and Steven Joyce first planned the network in 2008 while preparing that year’s election manifesto. Critics saw it as a high-risk project.

The Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) programme they developed has been a success by any standard. The initial goal was to connect 75 per cent of the nation — in cities and towns — to the network over a nine-year build. As the network grew, and people saw the benefits of fast, reliable broadband demand soared well ahead of initial projections. It was so popular successive governments revisited the plans twice and funded the UFB2 and UFB2+ extensions.

At an event to mark the end of the project, Chorus CEO JB Rousselot noted that 87 per cent of New Zealanders will now be able to access the fibre cable passing their gate

I was one of those early advocates, and recall significant scepticism. Some people claimed there was no need, for speeds that fast, and others that VDSL would be just as good,

It was a hugely ambitious project, and delivered huge results for New Zealand. 87% of homes can now have fibre connections, Telecom got split into Spark and Chorus, and it was all done within budget. Steven Joyce and Amy Adams oversaw an incredibly competent and vital project, which stands in huge contrast to today’s Government that promised light rail to be completed by 2020, and now are saying they may approve a business case by 2025.

The UFB project is a good reminder of what Government can achieve when it works with the private sector, and when it is competent.

NewstalkZB reports:

Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr stated that New Zealand’s relatively strict border rules were a handbrake on his ability to rein in inflation.

Adrian Orr said that the border restrictions and subsequent immigration reset forced him to raise the mortgage rates higher than he otherwise would have gone for.

People should remember this as their mortgage rates head towards 8%.

Steven Joyce writes at NZ Herald:

The die is looking increasingly cast for this Government. In a range of crucial policy areas they have resolutely refused to change course in response to changed circumstances, despite people jumping up and down and telling them they are sailing on to the rocks. Now they are in the process of reaping the consequences of their intransigence. And at this late stage it seems there is precious little they can do about it.

The economy is a case in point. Grant Robertson’s refusal to alter his spending plans, his lack of interest in a more welcoming immigration policy to unstick the labour market, his failure to hold back his colleagues’ tsunami of increasing regulation, and his unwillingness to require discipline on government-mandated wage increases, have all contributed to a glum economic prognosis. He has sat on his hands blithely assuring everyone we are in good shape, and now can only watch as the Reserve Bank does what it must do to rein in runaway inflation.

Instead they have passed a law which will allow unions to demand industry wide national awards, so a small business in Invercargill has to pay the same as a multinational in Auckland.

I am disappointed, but not surprised, that the Media Council has not upheld my complaint about the bogus poll prominently pushed by the Dominion Post.

I respect the outcome, as a member myself of the Media Council.

The decision will be on their website.

Stuff reports a Media Council ruling:

In addressing Ms Hickson’s more general complaints that Stuff lacked balance on transgender issues, Stuff said it took the view that giving a voice to certain opinions on transgender issues amounted to giving a platform to prejudice and views that might cause harm. Stuff went on to say a similar issue arose in the reporting of climate change where it was not a requirement to include comments from climate change deniers for balance.

While the Media Council did not uphold the complaint under principle (1) it noted the debate about the treatment of gender dysphoria in children is slightly different from other transgender issues and it rejected Stuff’s argument it is analogous to climate change. In the case of climate change there is an overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion whereas on the issue of childhood gender dysphoria there appears to be a variety of genuinely held and differing opinions internationally. The Council hoped all media outlets would consider whether they are taking a balanced approach overall.

Quite extraordinary that Stuff has openly said we will not allow contrary views on the issue of treatment gender dysphoria in children, when you have had damning reports from overseas about treatment in the UK, including from a High Court judge.

The attendance data that Associate Minister of Education, Jan Tinetti, stated was the most important in terms of policy impact was the Term 2 data this year:

Full attendance is 90%.

Results for full attendance were:

Decile 1: 23%

Decile 2: 26%

Decile 3: 31%

Decile 4: 37%

Decile 5: 39%

Decile 6: 39%

Decile 7: 43%

Decile 8: 46%

Decile 9: 48%

Decile 10: 50%

All deciles were well down on previous years.

There were approximately 128,000 students “chronically” absent in that they missed 30% or more school days.
Going to school either matters or it doesn’t. Schools, teachers and the Ministry of Education says that it matters and data certainly supports that view. You would think then it would be all hands on deck to maximise students coming to school in these fractured times.
So – I have been somewhat stunned to hear from a range of families where schools have taken 12, or more teacher only days (TODs), this year. All children are marked present for these but it is, in effect, forced absenteeism. The TODs are also rarely coordinated so a working parent, with three children, could have had up to 36 days to revamp their lives for. I am hearing of working people who have used up all of their annual leave through the impact of TODs. Some schools retort that “they are not a baby-sitting service”. No one expects them to be – just that when schools are “open” and during term time that children should be able to go and be well taught.

Add to that the full-on round of paid union meetings at present …

Is it any wonder that so many children/families are seeing school as an option not an imperative?

The Herald reports:

Finance Minister Grant Robertson padded Budget 2022 with $2.05 billion from the remnants of the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund contrary to his undertakings that the enormous pot of emergency money be limited to direct, pandemic-related spending and over the Treasury’s objections. …

Proactively released Treasury documents show the money was tipped directly into Budget 2022, against the Treasury’s advice, and uncounted in the Budget allowance and consequently obscured from New Zealanders as new spending. …

Former deputy chief economic adviser to the Treasury, Tony Burton, said the Government’s move was an “abuse of process” as it is laid out in the Public Finance Act and that it had effectively turned Covid-19 emergency funds into “an election slush fund that will force the Government after 2023 to either put up taxes, borrow or cut spending”.

This is terrible transparency from the Government, and is fiscally reckless.

They used the one-off Covid fund to fund non-Covid activities in the 2022 budget. That was bad enough, but what is worse is that they have made no allowance for future funding of them, so have created an unfunded liability.

Basically it is a poison pill for the next Government.

Graham Adams writes:

It takes a large dollop of brazenness — and perhaps desperation — to deny reality quite as readily as Jacinda Ardern was willing to do last Tuesday, but the Prime Minister did not resile from the task.

When Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper asked her why the three waters (fresh water, storm water and waste water) had suddenly become five waters (with the late addition of coastal and geothermal water) in the amended Water Services Entities Bill, Ardern flatly denied that was the case.

Denying observable facts is typical of very young children before they understand that bending the truth beyond breaking point is an art that requires at least a modicum of plausibility to avoid ending up deeply and shamefully embarrassed.

Ardern’s denial reminded me of a three-year-old niece who, when asked why her name had appeared on the wall of her bedroom written in red crayon, claimed a visiting friend had done it — even while she was clutching a red crayon in her own hand. Her young friend had yet to learn to write.

While this might be seen as an amusingly naive ploy in a child anxious to avoid the consequences of being caught red-handed, such behaviour is plainly alarming in an adult — and especially when that adult happens to be the Prime Minister.

Ardern told Soper — in a strained voice: “The reference [to coastal and geothermal water] in the legislation does not change the scope of Three Waters. It’s only about the drinking water, waste water and storm water.”
Soper: “It extends into coastal and geothermal, if you read the legislation, which I’ve done this morning.”

Ardern replied, with such stilted diction it sounded as if she was reading from a press statement: “I have read the legislation. It does not change its scope… However, I can see, based on your questions, that it has caused, potentially, some confusion. So we’ll ask the drafters whether there’s a way to make it much clearer…”

“So you’re going to have it changed, are you?” Soper asked.

Ardern: “No, [I’m] just going to ask the question whether or not it could be drafted with more clarity because it’s obviously created some confusion.”

In fact, the clause Soper was referring to is perfectly clear. Confusion has only arisen because the Prime Minister decided to argue black was white.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time ….

Jamie Mackay writes at NZ Herald:

Fieldays 2022, Covid-postponed until summer for the first time in its more than 50-year history, will be a real litmus test for the Government and its often-fraught relationship with rural New Zealand.

I witnessed first-hand at AgFest in Greymouth, the only other rural field days to have got off the ground in 2022, the frustration and negativity that greeted O’Connor. And that was in his own home patch! But Damien, with his fiery Irish heritage, is nothing if not up for a scrap.

The reception Ardern gets, providing of course she’s there, will be interesting. Like Key, she’s a consummate performer in public. Regardless of your political leanings, there should always be respect for the office of Prime Minister. How much is shown at Mystery Creek will be intriguing.

I believe it is important to show respect to the office.

So I hope farmers show the same level of respect to the PM, as say the NZEI shows to a National Minister of Education when addressing an NZEI conference.

The Daily Mail reports:

Protesters calling for an end to the rule of President Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have clashed with police in violent scenes – as officers also assaulted a BBC journalist covering the demonstrations.

China is facing its largest anti-government protests since the Tiananmen Square massacre with protests erupting in at least seven cities over the country’s strict Covid rules – which many believe contributed to the deaths of ten people after a fire broke out in the city of Urumqi, capital of the western Xinjiang region.

The largest of the demonstrations has taken place in Shanghai – home to 26 million residents – with many also boldly demanding that President Xi resign.

China has a terrible problem.

Their Covid lockdowns are failing and generating huge hostility.

However their vaccine has been pretty rubbish compared to western ones, and if Covid spreads rapidily, their health system will collapse.

My pick is that they will persist with the lockdowns, but there will be more and more protests up until the point when they start mass killing of protesters.