Just when you think their contempt for the public can’t get larger, they try and sneak this through Parliament. They expanded the scope of the mandatory water statements by Iwi and hapu from the existing three waters to include coastal and geothermal water also.

This is a huge policy issue in its own right – something that should be carefully considered with much consultation. And they tried to sneak it into the committee stages of the bill.

And when they get caught out, they lie, and try to blame it on Federated Farmers.

95BFM reports:

A University of Auckland PhD student, Sophia* has come forward with allegations about a University employee reportedly providing the Iranian regime with intelligence about Iranians in New Zealand who are protesting.

The employee, who is also a PhD student, has a record of openly supporting the actions of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and reporting protestors- and they’re not alone. 

The employee is among other students who Sophia says have been reporting individuals speaking openly in opposition to the regime, and attending protests. Sophia told Jessica Hopkins on The Wire that the University promised complainants they would investigate the matter, but no information has been released about the situation. 

She believes “the University should share the results of this investigation, (and) stop providing shelter for these individuals,” saying the reporting of protestors was “abusing democratic values in New Zealand”.

If this is correct, this is outrageous. You can’t have a university staffer reporting students to the Iranian Government for peaceful protests in NZ. This could lead to harm against their families back home.

Auckland University needs to clarify what exactly has happened, and what they have done in response.

I have a Christian faith. I came to that decision in my late teens/early twenties. I was not brought up with those beliefs. I read heavily and asked all manner of people all sorts of questions. I was anti-, sceptical, insulting at times … and eventually convinced.

It is a faith based on one person who, should you choose to read the gospels, was far from politically correct. His freedom of speech, and that of many of his followers, came at great cost.

I was/am heavily influenced by the work of C.S. Lewis – a person who also came to faith after many highly antagonistic comments and entrenched atheism. I believe he would have stood very strongly for full freedom of speech around religion.

Christian faith is highly misunderstood. I by no means claim to be a perfect – or even good – person. No Christian should. I have a long way to go to be the human I ought to be.

Neither should any Christian Church claim to be perfect in any way. I am reminded of an old friend who – when someone posed the challenge that the Church is full of hypocrites – responded; “Yes and there is room for one more.”  

It is a faith based on grace but, at best, also on openness, transparency and challenge.

Bringing religion under the Human Rights Act and Hate Speech Laws is high problematic. According to the Spinoff:

“Currently, under the Human Rights Act 1993 it is illegal to publish or distribute threatening, abusive, or insulting words likely to “excite hostility against” or “bring into contempt” any group on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins.”

Those grounds will now be extended, in both the civil and criminal provisions, to cover religious belief.”

According to Newsroom:

“In order to have breached the law, a person has to have published, broadcast or said in public words which are “threatening, abusive, or insulting” that are “likely to excite hostility or ill-will against, or bring into contempt or ridicule” any group of people based on their skin colour, race, ethnicity or national origin while intending to do so.”

• The Life of Brian?
• Cartoons?
• Public ridicule of Christian leaders?
• For the older ones – Dave Allen jokes?
• The words of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, or the writings of Douglas Adams (my second favourite author).
• My friend Bryan’s Bruce’s book Jesus: The Cold Case?

Kiri Allan might have easily dismissed such concerns is this, somewhat bizarre interview but I, for one, felt far from reassured upon looking at the proposed text.

I was talking to a good friend recently and faith came up and he said: “I have no idea why you believe that pie in the sky crap.” I defend his right to say that to me both privately and publicly – even if I feel a bit ridiculed.

Steve Hughes is relevant.

Kiri Allan – please stay away from Free Speech and Religion.

Christian people and Churches please stand to keep this government intrusion out of the lives of Kiwis.

There has been a long-term decline in the proportion of adults who smoke, but one can see that in the last three years it has really accelerated. There is no doubt this is due to smokers transferring to vaping.

Vaping is not harmless, but it is massively less harmful than smoking. Thank to vaping, we may achieve the goal of getting the smoking prevalence rate to under 5% by 2025.

This chart shows the proportion of the population who are classified as hazardous drinkers. The wowser brigade would have you believe that hazardous drinking is increasing and dramatic law changes are needed. But the official data shows its is somewhere between steady and slightly declining.

Audrey Young has written an excellent summary of the recent memorial service to Sir Wira Gardiner, which I attended.

Hundreds of people packed St Paul’s Cathedral in Wellington to hear tributes to Sir Wira Gardiner, including from Sir Bill English, Hone Harawira and Gardiner’s widow, Hekia Parata.

I can’t imagine there is anyone else in New Zealand who would have both Hone Harawira and Bill English speaking at their memorial service. I reflected that it summed up Wira’s amazing ability to work constructively with everyone to serve the country.

His last prominent public role was as chief executive of Oranga Tamariki, a job that Public Service Commissioner Peter Hughes described as one of the toughest in the country and which he had agreed to do at the age of 77 as a service to his country.

Most people would be happily retired at 77, but Wira took on the job through a sense of responsibility to his mokapuna.

Those who came to honour him included former Prime Minister Jim Bolger, former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, Willie Apiata VC, Supreme Court Judge Joe Williams, Labour Ministers Kelvin Davis and Willie Jackson, National leader Christopher Luxon, former National Party president Michelle Boag, former solider and public servant Leith Comer, former broadcaster Derek Fox, spy chief Rebecca Kitteridge, and GCSB chief Andrew Hampton who worked for Gardiner as a junior public servant in Te Puni Kokiri.

Hone Harawira said Gardiner had been an exceptional man who had been confident in his ability to front anyone – tribal leaders, gangsters, politicians, whanau, activists and treat them all with the sincerity and dignity.

I don’t think anyone phased Wira.

Gardiner served in Vietnam and retired from the Army with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. The NZ Army band played at the service and the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment Colour was taken to the front of the cathedral by members of the 1st Battalion.

The military aspect of the service was superb. Wira’s military service shaped him into the man he was.

Stuff reports:

Lesley Elliott’s husband of 50 years has paid tribute to the domestic violence campaigner, who has died following an “incredibly difficult” battle with Parkinson’s disease and dementia.

The 76-year-old, who was the mother of Sophie Elliot, died at Ross Home in Dunedin on Sunday.

Following the brutal murder of Sophie by her former boyfriend Clayton Weatherston in 2008, Lesley set up the Sophie Elliott Foundation and toured New Zealand teaching young people about safe and healthy relationships and the warning signs of abuse.

She had the most horrific thing possible happen to her family, but rather than let it crush her, she spent her remaining years helping other families escape bad situations.

Lesley Elliott co-authored a best-selling book about her daughter’s death, Sophie’s Legacy, with Bill O’Brien. At least eight women credited it as being the catalyst for them leaving their violent partners.

May Lesley rest in Araboth with Sophie, while in due course Weatherston move permanently to Gehinom.

Radio NZ reports:

A victim’s advocate is describing sentencing discounts for offenders as a courtroom “lolly scramble” that lets survivors down and offenders off the hook. …

National was now considering changing the sentencing process to limit the discounts people could get.

This might look like making some discounts like ‘youth’ or ‘remorse’ one-offs and establishing a hard discount cap to restrict how much sentences can shrink.

This could include factors like youth or remorse being unavailable for reoffenders and hard caps on how much a sentence can shrink.

“There are good arguments for discounts … but where it becomes difficult is if you get multiple discounts, one on top of the other, and the outcome being so far removed from the original, then we know we have an issue,” Goldsmith said.

You absolutely need discounts (and add-ons for aggravating factors) to have fair and reasonable sentences. A first time 18 year old offender should get a lesser sentence than a 45 year old repeat offender, for example. Someone who is genuinely remorseful should get a lighter sentence than someone who is not. Someone who pleads guilty straight away should get a lesser sentence than someone who doesn’t.

But Goldsmith is right that the cumulative effect of the discounts can end up with ridiculously light sentences such as home detention for raping multiple girls.

I also suspect that some Judges reverse engineer their discounts. They know if they get the sentence to under two years they can sentence them to home detention rather than prison. So they ensure that the discounts add up to enough to get it down to 18 – 21 months or so.

So we need discounts but I like the idea that there is some limit to how often you can get a discount for youth and remorse. If you keep bashing people up, you are obviously not very remorseful.

So a limit of say three sentencing decisions where an offender can get a discount for remorse or youth could work well.

I also like the idea of an overall cap on the discount an offender can get. Perhaps two caps – one for pleading guilty of up to 25% (which is the status quo) and one of up to 20% for all other factors. That means the discounts would never reduce the unadjusted sentence by more than 45%.

Nate Cohn at the NY Times reports:

Overall, his preferred primary candidates underperformed other G.O.P. candidates by about five percentage points.

This is a very good analysis. The Republican’s actually won the actual overall vote for the House by close to 5% it seems. But they barely scraped in with a majority as in the competitive districts the Trump endorsees under-performed – in fact they went backwards from 2020.

This analysis didn’t include the Senate but there six of the seven competitive seats were lost by Trump nominees.

Hopefully for 2024 they will select better candidates.

The article by Anne Salmond on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and ‘Race’ is well worth a read. It is 23 pages long but makes a very strong argument that the Court of Appeal got it wrong by starting us on the path that the Treaty is a partnership between races.

Michael Bassett writes:

Have you noticed recently how many shops have signs wanting staff? How many tradesmen are hard to hire because they can’t find enough skilled workers? How many hospitals are bursting at the seams because they lack sufficient nurses and doctors? How many buses and trains aren’t running because there aren’t enough drivers? And how slow the government is to open up the borders to skilled migrants who could help? …

Why then are our shortages currently so dramatic? I’m convinced that the borders are deliberately being kept closed because Jacinda Ardern’s so-called Labour government believes it can force employers to lift wages for workers by maintaining a super-tight labour market. Some of this is the belief of a few mad scientists like Immigration Minister Michael Wood who seems convinced that pushing wages up for low-skilled jobs will benefit our society in general, and not accelerate inflation.

Our hospitals have a staffing crisis, and the Government maintains it hostility to making it easy for skilled migrants to reside in NZ.

Neither Jacinda, nor Carmel Sepuloni seems to care a fig about the consequences of the mad scientists in their ranks who keep the borders closed but then refuse to restore meaningful incentives to find jobs. The rest of us suffer because services that society needs – plumbers, electricians, builders and odd-job people – can’t be found for love nor money.

It is happening everywhere. Takes two months to get an electrician in. No doctors appointments available for three weeks. The first appointment for the panel beater is in three months time. This must be what like in the USSR was like!

Liam Hehir writes:

Age is not an immutable characteristic. Treating children differently to adults is not the same as treating people differently based on race or sex. And 18 years is the generally agreed-upon age at which a child becomes an adult.

For most New Zealanders, the idea of 16 and 17-year-olds voting defies common sense. Large majorities of people surveyed reject the idea. Letting kids vote is less popular than letting prisoners vote.

Liam is right. Three separate polls have found NZers massively opposed – Colmar Brunton had just 13% in favour and 85% against.

Of course, there is increasingly little room for common sense in New Zealand’s appellate courts. Not, at least, when the opportunity for the promotion of liberal opinion is concerned. Our justices are no longer so shy of broad political questions that touch upon subjects not usually reducible to legal reasoning.

In the case of the Three Strikes Law, the Supreme Court decided it can over-ride the statute, despite there being no legislative authority for them to do so.

Liam proposes four reforms:

• Repealing the recent amendment to the law requiring the elected branch of the government to respond a judicial finding of legislation being inconsistent with the Bill of Rights.
• Add a new section to the Bill of Rights specifically stating that the courts have no jurisdiction to make decisions involving inherently political questions, particularly those where voters and representatives can be reasonably expected to resolve those matters.
• Add a new section to the Interpretation Act 1999 providing that no international treaty, agreement or other instrument will have any bearing on the interpretation of New Zealand except to the extent it is incorporated into legislation.
• Add a further provision that that legislation should be interpreted based on the understanding of their meaning at the time they were enacted.
• Perhaps most controversially, amend the Constitution Act 1986 so that a judge’s flagrant unwilingness to carry out the will of Parliament provides grounds for removal from office.

I disagree on his first point, but like the other four points, especially the last one.

Guess what proportion of prisoners are enrolled in literacy programmes? 25%? 15%? 10%? 5%?

The answer is 1.2%.

And now guess what proportion are enrolled in numeracy programmes?

0.8%

Isn’t this Government meant to be about rehabilitation?

Shouldn’t a priority be getting prisoners able to read, write and count so they may one day be able to have the option of a job, rather than welfare or crime?

A guest post by Simon Lusk:

Next year’s election has the potential to be extremely good for National electorate campaigns across the country. At the 2020 election Labour beat National in the Party Vote by nearly 25%. In 2023 the Party Vote gap will not be anywhere near 25%, and there is a reasonable chance National will lead Labour.

This means that there are many winnable Labour held seats. The historical precedent is that it is possible to overturn a majority of 6500 votes in a single election. On this number alone there are 17 seats that National can win off Labour, with 17 new National electorate MPs coming into parliament in a wave that is bigger than the National intake in 2005.

This theory needed supporting with some hard data.so I asked David Farrar to poll Napier. This kind of poll is extremely useful in deciding what seats to invest time & money in, and the results suggest a very high chance that National will win Napier.

The poll is published here in its entirety so others who are trying to win seats from Labour can see what they get when the pay for an electorate poll from Curia. If you are running or campaigning in any seat with a majority of less than 8000 you should fundraise to get a poll as soon as Curia can undertake it.

DPF: Simon lives in the Hawke’s Bay so he was interested in polling in his local area to see what the mood was like. He did this in his own right.

It is very kind of him to recommend electorates poll early, but I would stress always talk to the National central campaign team first, to make sure anything you want to do is consistent with their plans.

Newsroom reports:

Leading anti-smoking campaigners say officials’ modelling wrongly suggested the Government’s plan would reduce smoking rates by 85 percent within five years

In a new review released early Monday morning, researchers from Action on Smoking and Health say the modelling underpinning the Government’s plan to mandate cigarettes be sold without nicotine is “significantly flawed”.

So this is ASH saying the Government is over hyping the impact of their proposed policy.

Modelling commissioned by the Ministry of Health and referenced in Cabinet documents and the bill’s Regulatory Impact Statement suggests the denicotinisation could be expected to reduce smoking rates by 85 percent within five years.

Youdan says this is based on a misreading of a clinical trial on the provision of nicotine-free cigarettes to people who wanted to quit smoking.

“The assumptions that they put into the model are massively overestimating the likely impact of that policy.”

The trial provided people motivated to quit with behavioural support. Some also received nicotine-free cigarettes, while a control group didn’t. Six months on, 28 percent of those in the control group said they hadn’t smoked in the past week, compared to 33 percent in the denicotinised group.

The Government’s modelling assumed that denicotinising all tobacco products in New Zealand would lead to a 33 percent quit rate each year and an eventual 85 percent reduction after five years, which Youdan says is erroneous for a number of reasons.

First, the nicotine-free impact in the clinical study was only 5 percent – the bulk of the quit rate came from the behavioural support provided to all participants.

This is a huge stuff up. Basically the impact of nicotine-free was to increase quit rates by 5%, not 33%. And they compounded the 33% figure to get the absolutely implausible figure of an 85% quit rate in five years.

The minister in charge of the Smokefree 2025 plan, Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall, said she hadn’t relied too much on the modelling in question when designing the policy and the findings wouldn’t have changed her decision-making at the time.

That is a farcical denial. Officials said hey Minister this will reduce the number of smokers by 85% in five years, and Verrall claims that was not a significant factor in approving the policy.

Given the findings of the review, ASH has asked the Government to have the modelling independently vetted and allow the most dependent smokers access to nicotine cigarettes in a controlled way.

Verrall said she would look at ASH’s review but suggested it probably wouldn’t change the Government’s direction.

“I always welcome scientific debate. I think, though, I am confident of the measures that we’ve got and I’m very pleased to be taking strong action to getting tobacco out of our community.”

This isn’t debate. The official advice was clearly wrong. And the so called strong action is in fact window dressing.

Good on ASH for putting the science first. If only the Government would follow the science.

One of the very good things happening in NZ society at present is that Kiwis are becoming more aware of the state of our Education system and the need to improve things.

Next year a part of each schools funding is through an Equity Index number. The is replacing the decile system. Each school is allocated a specific number that is an indicator of how many students they have with 37 “risk factors”. The higher the number that more “at risk” students a school has – and the more funding they receive.

This is important information for all schools, families, communities, etc.

Last week I complete a data process that compares all high schools in NZ to each other. It has Excel sheets showing:

1. School number listing to EQI.

2. EQI ranking from lowest to highest.

3. School size to EQI.

4. 2021 L3 for leavers ranked by school.

5. 2021 UE for Leavers ranked by school.

6. EQI divided into tenths (deciles).

7. UE Ranking with 10th.

8. UE ranking by tenth.

9. UE to EQI gaps.

10. UE rankings/EQI for State funded schools only.

11. State UE to EQI gaps.

12. 2020 Level 7 (degree) study ranked- with EQI.

13. To L7 (degree)  study  by tenths (deciles).

14. To L7 (degree) study by EQI.

15. 2021 L3 to UE gap for every high school (ranked).

16. 2021 Retention until 17yo for every High School (ranked).

17. 2021 Progression to Degree study for every High School (ranked).

18. EQI & decile sector measures: attendance, transition to degree, UE for school leavers, 

19. Broad sector measures: UE for school leavers by governance type, UE for leavers by school type, UE for leavers by gender, UE for leavers by ethniicity.

20. Decile 1 vs Decile 10 retention to 17yo example.

21. Raw data for EQU vs L1, L2, L3 NCEA and UE.

22. NCEA Level 1 for leavers ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

23. NCEA Level 2 for leavers ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

24. NCEA Level 3 for leavers ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

25. UE for leavers ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

26. Retention to 17yo ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

27. Progression to degree level study ranked for every high school with nationwide scatter diagram against EQI.

28. School summary sheet for staff to complete.

For schools and profession use the cost in $300. For personal/family use free or a donation.

Alwyn Poole

[email protected]

Melissa Lee points out:

The Government’s planned media mega entity will need hundreds of millions a year in extra taxpayer funding due to the decision to destroy TVNZ’s commercial model, National’s Broadcasting and Media spokesperson Melissa Lee says.

“Documents obtained by the National Party reveal the combined media entity would require $6.3 billion in additional Crown funding over the next 30 years, or an average of $211 million a year.

The Government is really good at burning money on pet projects that no one wants and will make things worse.

An answer to a PQ from ACT MP Simon Court shows that NZTA found only 32% of NZers support lowering speed limits to improve road safety with 40% opposed.

The way to improve road safety is to stop stealing money from motorists on cycle bridges and the like and spent it on improving actual roads.

Labour seem determined to take us back to the 1970s with an 80 km/hr speed limit on open roads.

Here is the speed limit in other countries:

• 137 km/hr – US
• 130 km/hr – Netherlands, Serbia, France, Greece
• 120 km/hr – Canada, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, Israel
• 112 km/hr – UK

There are many more I could list at well above 100 km/hr let alone 80 km/hr. You can design roads that are safe at these speeds, as seen in those countries. So again the answer is spend more on roads.

A reader writes in:

In case you missed it, the National Ticketing system for public transport that was launched last month looks like it will have a high cost per ride. The Greater Auckland website covered it (https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/2022/10/26/a-new-national-ticketing-system/) and stated that it will cost “nearly $1.4 billion to build and operate over the next 15 years. That might sound like a lot, and I’m sure some people will say it should be just used to make fares free, but it’s worth noting that pre-COVID, total fares collected across New Zealand were about $340 million annually. That $1.4 billion would only cover a few years in that scenario.”

I then did some calculations. $1.4 billion divided by $340 million gives 4.1 years of fare revenue. If the system only has a 15 year life then 27.4% of fare revenue will be spent on the system. This looks very expensive and puts it in a similar league to the NZTA road tolling system which when I checked a few years ago absorbed about 30% of the money collected.

Put another way the NTS will cost 55 cents per boarding on 2018/9 MoT data (https://www.transport.govt.nz/statistics-and-insights/public-transport/sheet/boardings-all-modes) which had 168.4 million public transport boardings. The web page doesn’t define boardings, but I think it is each time someone boards a public transport vehicle as opposed to a trip which might consist of boarding a bus to get to a railway station and then boarding a train to get to the destination.

Public transport patronage in Auckland is still well below pre-COVID levels in 2019, although it has been climbing from 42% of January 19 levels in January this year to 63% when September this year is compared to September 19. (https://at.govt.nz/about-us/reports-publications/at-metro-patronage-report/)

I am a huge fan of having a national integrated ticketing system, but the price tag of $1.4 billion is eye staggeringly large. I understand the Auckland HOP system only cost $100 million or so.

Having 25% of the cost of a fare go simply on the ticket is insanely high.

As 99% of NZers have a smartphone, wouldn’t it be cheaper to just have a smartphone app that can work on all public transport?

Someone asked me which National MPs had the most followers on Twitter, so I checked it out.

So Judith Collins has by far the most followed by Chris Bishop and Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis. Nine MPs in total have over 5,000 followers.

I’ve got around 19,000 but I don’t have a constituents to look after 🙂