Andrea Vance writes:

So why then, when Labour are clinging to power by their fingertips, are Kelvin Davis and Willie Jackson so determinedly trashing that brand?

Last week, Davis was forced to apologise to Karen Chhour for a personal attack. The ACT MP had proposed the repeal of a requirement for Oranga Tamariki to operate in accordance with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Davis accused her of viewing the world through a “vanilla lens” and failing to understand te ao Māori. She has Ngāpuhi whakapapa and grew up in state care. His words cut deeply and later reduced the backbencher to tears. …

Davis’ response to Chhour carried echoes of Jackson’s recent attack on David Seymour. He called the ACT leader “a man who claimed he was Māori”. It’s a theme: Jackson has also accused Paula Bennett, Mike McRoberts and Miriama Kamo of betraying their Māori identity and highlighted Simon Bridges’ inadequate te reo. (He’s also told Dan Bidois to go back to Italy.)

A real pattern.

That Davis and Jackson were quick to temper betrays their character. But it also speaks to a wider problem within the Labour tribe – who prefer invective to rational debate.

This is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate. It is easier to suppress criticism by dismissing or marginalising the critics as ‘bad’ people (whether that be racist, over-privileged, transphobic, etc) rather than actually addressing the issues.

Ardern’s empathy and cool-headed compassion was not a construct – that is her nature. But it’s easy to be nice when you are winning. Now that the political landscape looks significantly less favourable, some of her MPs are becoming defensive. It is the wrong kind of anger to harness if they want to remain in Government.

I suspect we will see more of it as the polls worsen for them.

The Herald reports:

President Joe Biden sought out deceased Rep. Jackie Walorski on Wednesday during remarks at a hunger conference, saying “Where’s Jackie?” The White House press secretary later said the congresswoman had been “top of mind” for the president at the time.

Karine Jean-Pierre did not acknowledge that Biden had misspoken during his remarks at the White House conference on hunger, nutrition and health when he looked around the room for Walorski, the Indiana congresswoman who died in an August car crash.

Biden, in his remarks. praised bipartisan lawmakers who worked on addressing childhood hunger, including Rep. Jim McGovern, Sen. Mike Braun, Sen. Cory Booker and Walorski, who was seen as a leader on the issue before her death.

“Representative — Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think she wasn’t going to be here — to help make this a reality,” Biden said.

There is little doubt that Biden’s cognitive abilities are affected by his age. That doesn’t mean he has dementia, but it certainly is showing.

That is a shitload of money.

Most households have two people working. Say you Jane on on $120,000 and Jim on $70,000. Their household income will drop by $2,600 a year or over $50 a week.

The jobs tax will be the biggest drop in take home pay for families in over 30 years.

The only way to stop it will be to vote Labour out.

Enter your captions below. They should be funny, and must not be nasty.

Through the work that I do and the data-sets I process on NZ high-schools I do receive a lot of contacts on the issues in NZ education from families. My first point often is, that if you are asking, you are heading towards the right path for your child(ren) to be doing well because you are engaged. There is, of course, more to being a parent that supports and enhances a child’s education than that – but if you are indifferent things are not as likely to turn out well.

The NZ education system, through Boards of Trustees (BoTs), is designed to be lead by families. This is often de-emphasised as the Ministry of Education, or school senior leadership seem to hold all of the cards and keep them close to their chest. This coming week most newly elected BoTs will hold their first meetings.

It is the BoTs that are the employers of the Principal and staff. The BoTs can have a huge role in setting the direction of a school and in improving outcomes for students. The past three years, around the globe, have seen parents come back to the realisation that need to be much more pro-active for their children and challenge what is being taught, the quality of teaching and how their children are doing. There has been significant growth in home-schooling – even in New Zealand.

Most new Board members will be aware that there are significant challenges in our system. They might be aware of NZ’s rapid comparative decline in international measures of literacy and numeracy. They might be aware of the attendance problems in the NZ system (although the government seems very reluctant to release Term 2 figures). They might even feel that they have some understanding of how their school does through figures for NCEA that are release in February. Those figures are cohort figures – Year group by Year group for who remains. Some schools are losing 40% of their students before they turn 17 years old and that does not show up in cohort measures.

The figures the new Trustees need are the figures for LEAVERS that are released in August and I do a full process on against a range of metrics that can be compared to every other high school in NZ. I have two data sets available – one against the decile system (still in place this year), and one against the newly released Equity Index numbers – that should have some correlation to achievement – that are being used for some aspects of funding from 2023.

If you – or anyone you know – has gone onto a high school BoT (or simply if you are interested) – please make contact. Please also keep in mind BoT meetings all have to be open to all parents and the public. You can make a difference.

[email protected]

The NZ Association of Economists polled members on the best response to climate change. The results show there is a massive consensus.

• Tightening the Emissions Trading Scheme’s cap on net emissions would be a less expensive way to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions than a collection of policies, such as fuel economy standards for imported vehicles, that target emissions already covered by the ETS. – 87% agree, 5% disagree for +82% agreement
• If other market failures unduly hinder adjusting to rising carbon prices, policies directly targeting those market failures may reduce the cost of mitigating emissions. – 81% agree, 2% disagree for +79% agreement
• Undesirable distributional consequences of rising carbon prices are better handled through a carbon dividend that rebates government ETS revenues to households as an annual lump-sum transfer (potentially with higher transfers to lower-income households) rather than through regulatory measures requiring targeted emission reductions in sectors less likely to affect poorer households or through measures like subsidies for electric vehicles. – 93% agree, 2% disagree for +91% agreement

This is what you would call settled science. The sad thing is the Government is doing the opposite and pursuing policies that will achieve less and cost more.

Radio NZ reports:

Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere is calling an investigation into his charities political donations racist.

The Charities Services is investigating Tamihere in relation to two donations made by National Urban Māori Authority and Te Whānau o Waipareira, of which Tamihere is also chief executive.

Tamihere said they disclosed everything in audited financial statements and that there was no cover up or attempt to be dishonest.

“It is a sad day for democracy in Aotearoa when Māori get demonised for being honest in publicly ensuring that every cent spent to advance the Te Pāti Māori, or Māori causes by Māori people is somehow deemed illegal or unworthy.” …

Tamihere said should the Charities Commission find against them, they would litigate this because he said they had a right to overtly and openly stand up in a free democracy.

You can be a charity or be a political party, but you can’t be both. This has nothing to do with race. It is about charities only being able to spend money on charitable purposes.

Stuff reports:

Michael Hill jewellery store in Albany mall was smashed with hammers on Friday night as people nearby ate dinner.

Eyewitnesses report a group of masked thieves smashing cabinets at the Michael Hill branch at the Westfield mall.

An eyewitness said they saw five police officers guarding the store after the incident, and they could see at least four display cabinets had been smashed.

Shocking that they will break in and burgle a place during daylight hours. They have no fear of being caught or of consequences it seems.

The Chief Ombudsman has found:

Mr Boshier says most agencies have set up media teams to respond to queries from journalists but these teams do not seem to apply the law.

“There appears to be a widespread misapprehension that many media information requests don’t fall under the OIA, and that applying the law is difficult and complicated. These perceptions are false.”

Mr Boshier discovered multiple examples of media teams within agencies breaching section 19 of the OIA.

This is a damning finding. If anyone should be experts in the OIA it should be the media teams. But instead the Chief Ombudsman has found they are the worst offenders.

“In fact, the processes adopted by the agencies have little or nothing to do with the law itself and I intend to consider this matter further.”

Good.

Mr Boshier says he found gaps in all 12 agencies in terms of their record keeping and Information Management systems, with several agencies breaching the Public Records Act.

Most open and transparent Government ever!

This data tells such a powerful story. There are four parts to it.

1. In June 2009 when National had just come in, immunisation rates were shocking. 1 out of 5 2 year olds were not fully immunised. 1 in 4 Maori kids not immunised
2. National lifted overall rates to 92% to 94%, the Maori rate to 93% and the most deprived decile rate to 95%. The unvaccinated went from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 and for Maori from 1 in 4 to 1 in 14. Rates stayed fairly constant from 2011 to 2017.
3. After Labour dropped the health targets, the rates started to slip for Maori and the most deprived. Maori dropped to 88% and Decile 9/10 to 89%.
4. The last two and a half years have been a disaster with rates dropping to 67% for Maori and 73% for Decile 9/10. We’ve gone from 1 in 14 Maori kids unvaccinated to 1 in 3. We’ve gone from 1 in 20 Decile 9/10 kids unvaccinated to 1 in 4.

We need a Government that will make lifting the immunisation rates a priority.

Greenwald has 1.8 million followers on Twitter, has won multiple journalism awards and doesn’t like censorship. The video has been viewed by over 800,000 people, been retweeted over 5,000 times and has made Fox News.

It is amazing NZ media have almost ignored the extraordinary speech by the Prime Minister where she referred to the free and open Internet as a weapon of war, and the fact that some people online deny climate change as a reason for Governments to step in and regulate the Internet.

The NZ media often report breathlessly that the PM got some minor plaudit in a US newspaper, yet seem oblivious to the fact that millions of people reacting with horror to her UN speech.

The Herald reports:

Vodafone’s NZ chief executive has defended the company’s rebranding to One New Zealand amid criticism the new name has white supremacist connotations.

The telecommunications company ditched the red and white used by Vodafone globally in favour of an emerald or greenstone green.

However, it now shares a similar name to the One New Zealand Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “concerned about increasing privilege being given to one race of people over all other[s]” and has called the Waitangi Tribunal “an undemocratic and secretive institution”.

The telco’s chief executive officer Jason Paris took to social media to defend the company’s new name.

“One NZ stands for the best of NZ (diversity, inclusion, trust, innovation etc),” he tweeted.

Vodafone is uber-woke so it is hilarious that they chose a new brand name that was best known for being the exact opposite.

I thought Telecom’s rebranding to Spark was a good move (and worked well) but One New Zealand is just so blah.

The merger of TVNZ and Radio New Zealand will cost taxpayers $368 million according to the recent Budget.

The last annual reports for TVNZ and RNZ had their net worth at $298 million and $67 million respectively. Together they have a net worth of $366 million.

So taxpayers are going to be out of pocket by $368 million to merge together two companies worth $366 million. Isn’t it ludicrous? Especially as the merger is a solution looking for a problem.

GWRC are the ones who destroyed the great bus service we used to have in Wellington, so they are important. They have increased their rates 28% in three years. Some people worth rating highly:

Wellington constituency

Glenda Hughes, Simon Woolf, Leigh Catley, Daran Ponter

Kapiti

Penny Gaylor

Porirua

Chris Kirk-Burnnand, Roger Watkin

Lower Hutt

David Bassett, Ken Laban

Upper Hutt

Steve Taylor

In Parliament on Wednesday:

Karen Chhour: So does the Minister agree with John Tamihere when he says his charity and Oranga Tamariki are in a partnership and not a contract, and if Te Whānau o Waipareira is struck off the Charities Register, will the Minister guarantee that this partnership will end?

Hon KELVIN DAVIS: What the member needs to do is cross the bridge that is Te Tiriti o Waitangi from her pākehā world into the Māori world and understand exactly how the Māori world operates. It’s no good looking at the world from a vanilla lens.

Once again we have a Labour Maori MP denigrating another Maori MP and effectively stating they are not a real Maori because they don’t agree with them. They did it to Simon Bridges and now to Karen Chour.

From Karen’s maiden speech:

Life got so bad that, by the age of nine, I didn’t think I was going to survive to the age of 10. It was around this time that I ran away from home and cried out for help. …

I was bounced from pillar to post, and, by the time I was 14, I had moved schools seven times. I could not keep up, so I did what so many have done before, and I simply dropped out. I got a job and I saved what I could, and eventually I moved into a flat and became completely independent. I worked graveyard shifts at McDonalds while I tried to continue my education by day, doing a course. I drank a bit, I cried a lot, but I was doing OK.

 I, myself, have been on the receiving end of bullying for some of these very reasons. I was judged when I was younger, sometimes very openly, about just being another Māori dropout that would never get anywhere in life.

Yet Kelvin claims she isn’t a real Maori, implying she grew up in some privileged Pakeha family!

By coincidence a near identical thing just happened in the UK. A UK Labour MP described Conservative Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as “superficially black”. This wasn’t even in Parliament but at a forum at a conference.

The UK Labour MP has been suspended from the Labour caucus for what she said. So the UK Labour Party is more ethical than the NZ Labour Party!

National made increasing immunisation rates a national health target and got the rate up to very close to 95%. Labour abolished the targets and look at what has happened since for two year olds:

• All 2 year olds: From 92.4% to 82.9%
• Maori from 90.4% to 67.1%
• Pacific from 95.2% to 81.3%
• Highly deprived areas (Decile 9/10) from 90.6% to 73.2%

This is a major failure which will see potentially horrible health outcomes for those kids not fully vaccinated.

What do you think would make more of a difference to Maori health outcomes – having a Maori Health Authority or having 90% of kids vaccinated instead of 67%?

The ODT reports:

A 91.75% majority vote to change Playcentre Aotearoa’s constitution has been overruled by some of the organisation’s roopu (governance bodies), Playcentre insiders have revealed.

A 91.75% majority vote to change Playcentre Aotearoa’s constitution has been overruled by some of the organisation’s roopu (governance bodies), Playcentre insiders have revealed.

One parent, who asked not to be named, said the nationwide vote on Saturday morning was designed to change the parent-led child care education organisation’s constitution to a “trust deed” so — among other issues —  more of the funding it received would go to local playcentres, rather than “98%” going to the administrative body, which operates a bulk-funding model.

In the vote, parents and employees at 366 of 400 playcentres voted yes in favour of change.

A massive 92% vote in favour. A huge mandate for change. But …

However, before any change could come into effect, a separate vote from  the organisation’s roopu needed to be considered.

The organisation’s six roopu are “governance bodies within Playcentre Aotearoa, consisting of whanau Maori, to give whanau Maori an equitable voice in Playcentre governance”, which require at least five of the six roopu to agree in order to achieve a consensus.

Four roopu voted in favour and two against, but  the two-thirds  majority was not enough to carry the change.

Welcome to co-governance! Two votes get to veto 366 votes.

This is the future the Government wants for Three Waters. One Iwi can veto and over-rule 22 South Island Councils.

How Grant Robertson can stand in Parliament and is unchallenged by the opposition when he claims New Zealand’s Covid response was world leading.

1. For total cases – we are now 49th – ahead of far more densely populated countries like Ireland and Hong Kong.

2. For cases per million we are now 46th – ahead of the UK, Ireland, Singapore, USA, Sweden, Finland – and many more.

3. Even in terms of deaths per million – mainly through the mild Omicron – we have made it up to 123rd place and are heading towards the world average. Australia has fewer deaths per million.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Has anyone asked why – when the MoH knew that the mRNAs did not prevent transmission by April 2021 – that they remained the key intervention. How many people got the “two shots for summer” and became over-confident? Then got sick and passed it on to vulnerable people.

Why don’t these questions get asked?

The full results are here.

Party Vote

• National 37% (nc from last poll)
• Labour 34% (+1%)
• ACT 9% (-2%)
• Greens 9% (nc)
• Maori Party 2% (nc)
• NZ First 3% (nc)
• TOP 1% (-1%)
• New Conservatives 1% (nc)
• Vision NZ 1% (nc)
• Social Credit 1% (nc)

13% (+2%) undecided.

Seats

• Labour 45 (-20 from election)
• National 49 (+16)
• ACT 12 (+2)
• Greens 12 (+2)
• Maori 2 (nc)

Government

• National/ACT 61/120
• Labour/Greens 57/120

Preferred PM (unprompted)

• Jacinda Ardern 30% (nc)
• Christopher Luxon 21% (-1%)
• David Seymour45% (-1%)
• Chloe Swarbrick 1% (nc)
• Winston Peters 2% (nc)
• Nicola Willis 1% (nc)
• James Shaw 1%

Preferred PM (prompted)

• Jacinda Ardern 47% (+1% from March)
• Christopher Luxon 41% (-4%)