Stuff has compiled a list of 12 things National has pledged to scrap. They are:
Newshub reports:
Emergency doctors have drafted health targets of their own, and they want Minister Andrew Little to adopt them.
It comes as multiple deaths associated with ED wait times increase pressure on the Government.
We had a health target for ED waiting times – 95% seen and treated or transferred within six hours. And National got the number up from 70% to 94%. Now under Labour it is down to 76%.
Even worse in the Capital, where only 56% seen within six hours.
“If you don’t have a target in place, then there is no main aim. There is nothing you’re training your system towards to become a healthier system,” Australasian College of Emergency Medicine Deputy-Censor Dr Elspeth Frascatore told Newshub.
They’re called Hospital Access Targets.
They state for admissions, greater than or equal to 60 percent of patients should have a stay of no longer than four hours.
Eighty percent no longer than six hours and 90 percent no longer than eight hours.
And all patients should be through ED within 12 hours.
These sound reasonable and would be a huge improvement on the status quo. But the are still longer than what was previously achieved. I’d advocate:
The Labour Government scrapped National’s so-called “arbitrary” health targets back in 2017. It did introduce “indicators”, but ED wait times have still ballooned.
The Health Minister today rubbished suggestions the Government is opposed to health targets.
“We have measures in place for EDs who are required to achieve at a level of 95 percent. Either treating, discharging, admitting patients who go through ED within six hours,” Health Minister Andrew Little said.
But, in a puzzling twist, Little’s press secretary emailed Newshub research showing “targets don’t work”.
The Government relies on spin over substance. The Minister claims they support having health targets and his press secretary says they don’t work.
Labour has passed the so called Fair Pay Agreements Law. This isn’t a return to the 70s, but is even worse.
We now have a law that allows a government appointed body to set pay rates and conditions for an entire industry – even if not a single employer in that industry agrees with them.
Even under the bad old 70s law, employers had a choice – they could reject a bad agreement and face strikes.
Now there are no strikes, as the Government appointed Employment Relations Authority can impose pay rates and conditions on an entire industry – and employers can’t do anything about it.
When there is a change of Government, this law should be repealed within 24 hours.
This law is about forcing workers to fund unions, which is no surprise as 30% of Labour’s caucus are former union organisers. This is 100,000% greater share than in the overall population.
Stuff reports:
The second-in-charge of a high-profile Waikato gang which has burnished its public image with a proclaimed tough stance against meth has admitted importing and selling “commercial quantities” of the drug.
Mark Anthony Griffiths, 52, appeared in the High Court in Hamilton on Tuesday morning, where he pleaded guilty to charges of importing, possessing and supplying methamphetamine.
Griffiths also admitted possessing and supplying Gamma-Butyrolactone (GBL), commonly known as the “date rape” drug.
A spokesman for Waikato Mongrel Mob Kingdom has been quick to put some distance between Griffiths’s actions and the other members of the gang – saying they are still profoundly anti-meth and his actions do not represent them.
This is the 2ic, not some rando. The reality is that gangs are funded through drugs and criminal activity. Without that they would not be gangs, they would be clubs.
A gang can hire a PR person to claim day is night on their behalf, but actions speak louder than words.
Our Arctic Ocean reports:
In the first round of Brazil’s closely watched elections this month, the polls were off the mark. They significantly underestimated the support for the far-right incumbent, President Jair Bolsonaro, and other conservative candidates across the country.
Many on the right were furious, criticizing the pollsters as out of touch with the Brazilian electorate.
That response was expected. What happened next was not.
At the urging of Mr. Bolsonaro, some of Brazil’s leaders are now trying to make it a crime to incorrectly forecast an election.
Brazil’s House of Representatives has fast-tracked a bill that would criminalize publishing a poll that is later shown to fall outside its margin of error.
Obviously not a good law, to put it mildly.
Think if you extended it to economists and GDP projections?
Or public health officials and Covid projections?
The penalty for inaccurate polls should be reputational, not criminal!
The Herald reports:
Government minister Nanaia Mahuta put her young relative Waimirirangi Ormsby on a list of candidates for a paid appointment to the working group that produced the He Puapua report, documents released to the Herald under the provisions of the OIA indicate.
Mahuta recently suggested to the media that decision-making for the appointments was made by officials. It’s also controversial because the Cabinet Manual – which guides Government Ministers in matters of conflict of interest including the appearance of a conflict – recommends, though the language is not absolute, that where a minister has a conflict of interest and also has ministerial responsibility, mitigation should go farther than a simple declaration of interest.
Last month, Mahuta told reporters that questions about the appointment of Waimirirangi Ormsby should be directed to the department: “That’s a matter for Te Puni Kōkiri, there were a number of names that were put up in relation to, I think, the working group you’re referring to, and that was last term. Yeah, so there were a number of names with a number of requisite skills and a number of considerations but the point at which I saw that, by recollection, was at the point where a shortlist was made and those decisions were made by the department.”
The briefing document of May 28, 2019, prepared for Mahuta, stated: “We ask that you consider the range of potential appointees, and select a total of five individuals, who you wish to put forward for appointment. When you have selected the individuals you wish to appoint, the next stage of the process is for us to confirm their availability and willingness to be appointed.”
So Mahuta claimed the official decide, but the OIA documents reveal Mahuta in fact decided.
Last week, Mahuta declined to answer questions about the discrepancy between her comments and the briefing.
A spokesperson said “there’s nothing further to add to previous comments to [the] NZ Herald on this question.”
What can they say? You caught us out!
The Herald reports:
Just 2 per cent of decile 1 students passed the writing component of new standards that from 2024 will be required for NCEA assessments. …
And only 10% meet the numeracy target and 24% the reading target.
You want to close the gaps in society in terms of income, life expectancy etc etc – you need to change this.
This post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and occasional contributor. It is the tenth post in a series on the financial incentives to work and the impacts of our tax and transfer system on household formation, and the third post on the “what could we do” subsection. The index to all posts in the series can be found here.
If we can’t afford a full UBI, can we perhaps afford something else universal? From the earlier analysis we know the effective marginal tax rates are worst for those with children, because we have a number of targeted programmes that help those with children. Could we make the child-centred bits of the tax and transfer system universal?
Continue reading »NBC News reports:
Less than three weeks before Election Day, voter interest has reached an all-time high for a midterm election, with a majority of registered voters saying this election is “more important” to them than past midterms.
What’s more, 80% of Democrats and Republicans believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.
I hope New Zealand never ends up like this.
I am passionate about politics. I think generally policies of the centre-right are much better for New Zealand. But we must never regard those we disagree with on policy grounds as enemies who threaten the country. The vast majority of people in politics have good intentions.
We need to argue for our corner, advocate strongly and contest elections. But we must accept the results of elections, and not portray Governments we don’t support as existential threats.
The Herald reports:
At least seven people are understood to be putting their names in the ring for National, while Labour seems to have lower interest to run in the byelection forced by the resignation of Gaurav Sharma after his expulsion from the Labour Party.
Those interested in the selection for National include business director Rachel Afeaki – Taumoepeau, health professional Dr Frances Hughes, former Mayor Andrew King, and the former Hamilton West MP Tim Macindoe, who lost the seat to Gaurav Sharma in 2020.
Tim Macindoe and Andrew King are well known. Who are the other two?
Hughes has a long career in nursing management and health and in 2020 was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for her Services to Nursing & Mental Health. She returned to New Zealand in 2019 after spending a few years in Queensland as chief nursing and midwifery officer and in Europe as chief executive of the International Council of Nursing. She is now the Group General Manager Clinical and Care services at Oceania Healthcare.
Hughes has an incredibly impressive resume. She has held very senior roles in the public and private sector in healthcare, including running the global nursing council. Her PhD thesis was on “Politics, Policy and Nursing” which sounds useful.
Afeaki-Taumoepeau, a New Zealand-born Tongan raised in South Auckland, is a business director and involved with charitable, church and NGO work. She was chair of the New Zealand Tonga Business Council and is involved in local Waikato business groups.
Also very impressive CV. She has worked in senior roles in the UK for BP and Sky, and has done a huge amount of governance work in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, Labour sources have pointed to Georgie Dansey as their potential candidate, although a few others are said to be weighing it up before nominations close also on Wednesday.
Dansey is currently the electorate chair for Labour’s Hamilton East electorate. She was 84th on the Labour list – the last placed MP – and – wrote a good-humoured piece in the Spinoff about it.
Dansey is a former teacher who has worked for the PPTA and PSA.
Stuff reports:
The Green Party wants the Government to impose more sanctions and restrictions on Iran to support and help protect “the brave Iranian activists who are fighting to bring meaningful change in their country”.
Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said the “women-led revolution in Iran is an historic struggle for women’s rights and democratic freedom”. …
ACT deputy Brooke van Velden questioned Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the House on Tuesday on her statements on Iran.
“We have been raising the issue around women’s rights in Iran, for instance, in the Human Rights Council in 2021,” Ardern said.
I LOL at this. Raising Iran’s behaviour at the Human Rights Council is akin to complaining about sexual harassment to Harvey Weinstein.
Ghahraman said New Zealand should introduce legislation similar to the specific sanctioning of Russia, as the country does not have an autonomous sanction regime, or designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation.
That’s a great idea from Golriz. Hopefully the Greens can draft a bill to that end.
The Herald reports:
The Government is pushing on with NCEA changes as planned despite critics calling for a pause as just a third of students in a pilot programme passed the new writing standard.
The Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) said the results showed more time was needed for students and teachers to adapt to the new standards before the rollout began at level 1 in 2024 progressing to level 3 by 2026.
The Government has set new literacy, numeracy, Te Reo Matatini (Māori language literacy), and pāngarau (Māori language numeracy) standards that will need to be taken alongside NCEA.
The standards are being introduced because a study found 40 per cent of students who got NCEA level 2 were not functionally literate or numerate.
Ahead of the nationwide rollout the Ministry of Education has conducted pilots last year and this year. A nationwide pilot will also take place in 2023.
More than 200 schools, kura, and tertiary providers took place in the first pilot this year online.
The results showed just 64 per cent passed the reading standard, 34 per cent writing and 56 per cent numeracy, Te Reo Matatini (Māori language literacy) at 24 per cent and Pāngarau (Māori language numeracy) at just 18 per cent.
They are terrible results. This is not about having kids get university entrance. This is about them being able to count, read and write after ten years of schooling.
We should not be accepting anything less than say 90% to 95% meeting basic literacy and numeracy standards.
The Herald reports:
Anger and emotions threatened to boil over as MPs debated and one even called for the minister’s resignation following the murder of a 5-year-old boy by his carer who’d been approved by the child protection agency Oranga Tamariki.
The debate was spurred by the Chief Ombudsman’s damning investigation that found Oranga Tamariki failed to take the “bare minimum” action for Malachi Subecz, who died last November following repeated abuse by his caregiver Michaela Barriball.
MPs from each party also raised issues of confidence in the agency and the minister responsible, Kelvin Davis, who took on the role in 2020 seeking to reform it after controversy around the uplifts and mistreatment of predominantly Māori children.
“Somebody must pay. Somebody must be accountable,” Te Paati Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, visibly emotional, said.
“Not an education facility. It starts at the Minister, Kelvin Davis.”
Some child abuse deaths are not preventable. The first time the family comes to attention of the authorities, is after the child has been killed.
This case was not one of them. An uncle and cousin did alert authorities. Oranga Tamariki did not act.
The childcare centre saw the bruises. They did not act. They have been deregistered so at least there is a consequence there.
But what consequence has there been for Oranga Tamariki?
National’s spokeswoman for children Louise Upston said there needed to be accountability.
“The accountability has to sit with the people in Oranga Tamariki that the concerns raised about this child’s wellbeing were raised with. That’s what accountability looks like.”
Rather than fewer children in state care, Upston said the right measure was fewer children being harmed.
Exactly.
In the justice area the Government has a policy to reduce the number of prisoners, rather than reduce the number of criminals.
In this area their policy is to reduce the number of children in stare care, rather than reduce the number of children being harmed.
Stuff reports:
Police officers are reporting a change in the pursuit policy prioritising safety over arrests may be leading to more police cars being rammed, with offenders believing it will force police to abandon the pursuits.
Figures reveal 105 police cars across New Zealand were rammed between January and August 16 this year. May was particularly bad with 27 cars rammed. The damage cost police nearly $200,000 in insurance claim payouts from May to August.
It’s understood the rammings include youths in stolen cars trying to evade police, officers rammed while performing routine traffic stops, as well as some incidents without any provocation. In one incident, a ute was signalled to stop in South Auckland, but the driver reversed at speed into the front of the police car.
The kids may be little thugs, but they’re smart little thugs. They know that the Police are no longer allowed (mostly) to chase them, so of course they will try and ram past police cars etc.
Ngai Tahu publishes:
This same sense of duty further explains why we – Michael Stevens, Te Maire Tau and Atholl Anderson along with Puamiria Parata-Goodall and Tā Tipene O’Regan – were compelled to respond to a problematic article that the Royal Society Te Apārangi published in June 2021.
Written by a senior academic at the University of Otago, Priscilla Wehi, and six co-authors, this article advanced several spurious claims. Chief amongst them was that Polynesian explorers, beginning with a navigator named Hui te Rangiora, journeyed from Rarotonga into Antarctic waters ‘and perhaps even the continent likely in the early seventh century.’ The authors’ evidence? Their own inferences drawn from 1890s English translations by Percy Smith of Rarotongan narratives recorded in the 1860s. As we noted, with characteristic restraint, the authors presented this “traditional” material without nuance, qualification or critique, and based extraordinary claims upon it without commensurable evidence. For example, how the extreme practical difficulties of sailing a Polynesian waka to and through subpolar westerlies might have been overcome.
Our view is that these Rarotongan traditions need to be critically evaluated, which is how we approached them. Having done so, we found the authors’ assertions debatable on key points of interpretation and plausibility. As Te Rangi Hīroa remarked nearly a century ago in 1926, ‘Sometimes we, or the Maori themselves, read into a tradition something that the original narrators of the tradition never attempted to convey.’
As he explained, different methods of speech and forms of expression have to be considered and one ‘must be careful of the overlying strata of popular exaggeration and modern interpretation that have been superimposed on the original narrative.’ According to Te Rangi Hīroa, such recent ideas lead to ‘erroneous explanations … that throw discredit on the truth of tradition.’ We cannot agree more.
In summary, we think the Hui te Rangiora narrative is more mythic or legendary as an origin story, than historical as a voyaging narrative. Taking our methodological cue from Te Rangi Hīroa, we did not find any reference to Hui te Rangiora sailing to Antarctica. The shortfalls that led to this situation might be of only passing interest to Ngāi Tahu whānui. However, three of the article’s seven authors were employed by Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu and their institutional affiliations are listed, in posterity, as such. Media coverage of the article described Te Rūnanga as co-leading the project from which the article stemmed. Ngāi Tahu whānui ought to be interested and concerned.
What was the nature and extent of the media coverage this article generated? It was, unfortunately, uncritical and celebratory. News outlets throughout New Zealand and around the world lauded the prowess of pre-modern Polynesian voyaging and the capacity of indigenous knowledge to survive colonial marginalisation and speak truth to patriarchal Western power on the dawn of the Anthropocene of its own making. A year later, the original article has been viewed nearly a whopping 19,000 times: a career-enhancing statistic by any measure.
How did the Royal Society respond to our request to publish a critical response to Wehi et al? To put it politely, utterly inconsistently with academic conventions, the principle of open debate, and the society’s stated aim of advancing and promoting the pursuit of knowledge. This attitude was unexpected, especially by Atholl and Tipene, a Fellow and Companion respectively of the Royal Society.
It was only our dogged determination that led to the eventual publication of our reply in September 2021. This has been viewed little more than 450 times, bringing to mind the quip of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that ‘A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’
So the Royal Society published and the media gushed over the original paper, yet almost zero coverage of this response.
The society has also attempted to ‘unlock the innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people’ and ‘blend’ mātauranga Māori and Western science, which are suspiciously treated as bounded. No matter how well-intentioned this all might be, were he alive today, Te Rangi Hīroa would likely have some difficulties with how institutional biculturalism and “cultural awareness” has unfolded within the Royal Society, and for that matter, New Zealand’s universities. In short, uncritical acceptance of Māori knowledge is arguably just as patronising as its earlier blanket rejection.
It is interesting that Ngai Tahu seem to have a higher regard for critical scholarship that the Royal Society of New Zealand.
The Herald reports:
The Government has abandoned plans to auction radio spectrum.
Instead, it will directly allocate the 5G-friendly to telcos for a 20-year term – on the proviso that they make commitments to better address mobile calling and broadband gaps in rural and small-town NZ.
The move means Communications Minister David Clark has gone for public good over a windfall for Crown coffers that could have run to hundreds of millions, based on previous spectrum auctions.
Clark says the arrangement means more people will get better mobile coverage more quickly, and in more places.
This is a terrible decision. It is crony capitalism and corporate welfare at its worse.
The bad outcomes are numerous:
In the meantime, Spark – which paid $149m for its 4G spectrum at the 2014 auction – said in an NZX filing that “in return” for it receiving an 80MHz allotment of 5G spectrum, it will commit an additional $24 million in funding to the Rural Connectivity Group between 2023 and 2025 (the RCG is a joint venture formed by Spark, Vodafone and 2degrees for the public-private Rural Broadband Initiative).
So Spark paid $150 million for its 4G spectrum and for the 5G spectrum it just has to contribute $24 million to rural broadband.
If this had been done by a National Government, Labour and the entire left would be howling loudly, alleging corruption and deals for corporate mates.
The PM could have chosen to have the Hamilton West by-election on 19 November. Instead she has gone for almost the last legally allowable date of 10 December, in the hope that by that time of year, no one will notice if they lose a seat they have a 6,500 majority in.
The key dates are:
A fascinating story by the CBC about the leading indigenous legal scholar in Canada. Basically it turns out that she has no Cree ancestry at all – her grandfather once worked in a Cree reservation, and somehow she has interpreted that as being Cree.
The story is very well researched with lots of interviews and documents scanned.
This is not a unique story in Canada:
Recently in this country, claims to Indigenous ancestry by a number of high-profile people in academia, the arts and other sectors have been questioned.
For example, a 2016 APTN story about author Joseph Boyden raised doubts about his claims to Indigenous ancestry. A 2020 CBC investigation raised similar concerns about filmmaker Michelle Latimer. In October 2021, CBC revealed that Carrie Bourassa, Canada’s leading Indigenous health scientist, appeared to be of entirely European ancestry.
Fortunately we don’t seem to have this issue in New Zealand.