Stuff reports:

Give children “the vote when they’re seven, and the world will be a whole lot better”, says lecturer, child counsellor and neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis.

Speaking to Simon Bridges on the latest episode of Stuff’s long-form interview podcast Generally Famous, Wallis explained why he thinks the younger generation should have a say in choosing our next PM.

All the reasons people say an 8-year-old can’t vote “are the same reasons they gave for why you couldn’t give black people the vote, or women”, Wallis says.

People remain black all their lives and remain women all their lives. You don’t remain seven years old all your life. It is an inane argument.

Dear Kiwiblog Folk

After the release of all of the new Equity Index (EQI) numbers yesterday I did a, long/late night process to match those numbers to: 

– L3 Achievement

– UE Achievement

– Retention to 17yo

– Progress to Degree Level Study

… for every high school in NZ.

The final sheets in the dataset have trend line diagrams which strongly indicate that the 37 Variables used to develop the data set by no means explain what is happening in many schools (for good and bad). 

It would be interesting to know if being male  was a variable given how far NZ boys are behind girls. 

The good aspect for teacher practice/school aspiration is the schools that are clearly beating their EQI “expectations”). Examples are:

– Baradene College

– Iona College

– St Peter’s Epsom

– Columba College 

– Marist College

– Nga Tawa

– St Paul’s Ponsonby

– Al Madina

– Hato Paora

– Manukura

– Christchurch GHS

– St Catherine’s Kilbirnie

– Roxburgh Area School

– TKKM o Hoani Waititi

– Swelwyn College

– Zayed School for Girls

– Liston College

– Auckland Grammar Girls School

– McAuley College

Seems like a good group to learn from!

This is a very valuable data set for overall programme evaluation and goal setting/planning. All data is for LEAVERS – the most important category.

If you would like a copy of this data-set please let me know.

It is highly informative and I would be very happy to discuss aspects.

Regards

Alwyn Poole
[email protected]

Stuff reports:

Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins has apologised in the House to former finance minister Sir Bill English for dragging his family into an exchange over government contracts awarded to the husband of Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta.

Hipkins on Wednesday afternoon interjected during Question Time with an apparent reference to English’s brothers being provided government appointments. This came after ACT leader David Seymour questioned the Government on the contracts awarded to Mahuta’s family.

“Let’s talk about Bill English’s family, shall we?” Hipkins said, suggesting English’s family members were treated differently because they were “white”.

Labour love to play the race card to defend themselves. But this has backfired on them, because the facts are so bad.

What Hipkins was referring to was the appointment of Mervyn English to a fixed term role in the Ministry of Health in 2011, to set up a Health Sector Forum.

Mervyn was a career public servant. He had spent six years as a general manager at the Electricity Commission before the Health role. After that role, he held senior roles in the State Services Commission and DOC.

His brother, Bill, was not a Minister of Health.

Labour did actually question the appointment at the time, with Grant Robertson asking questions in Parliament.

The Minister Tony Ryall immediately asked the SSC to investigate, and they found everything was done properly.

Now compare this to the Mahuta contracts:

• None of the Ormsbys seem to have had a background in the public sector and only gained contracts once Mahuta was a Minister
• They were given consulting contracts, not an employment contract
• Three of the four contracts were in portfolios that Mahuta was a Minister
• Internal reviews to date have found proper processes were not followed
• The Government has spent months resisting an inquiry

So Labour playing the race card and trying to smear the English family over the Mahuta saga is very disappointing.

The Free Speech Union has surveyed local candidates on whether they would try and ban events where they disagree with the speakers from council facilities. Use this guide to find out who not to vote for.

The Herald reports:

Public service commissioner Peter Hughes is looking into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.

National Party spokesman for Public Services Simeon Brown first requested the commission investigate the matter in August, as details of a series of government contracts related to two companies owned by or related to Gannin Ormsby continued to emerge.

Ormsby is Mahuta’s husband.

This is a good thing.

Agencies appear to have bent over backwards to shovel work to Ormsby and co. Most contractors have to go through a burdensome tender process where you spend a couple of days filling in an RFP and then a panel considers all the RFPs against known criteria and recommend a contract. But in all of these cases Ormsby was contracted with no tender and sometimes without even a written contract.

One News reports:

The percentage of domestic university students who are men has reached an all-time low of 39%, and it is worrying universities.

This will not be new to readers of Kiwiblog. I blogged in 2018 that men are:

• 11% less likely to get NCEA Level 1
• 7% less likely to get NCEA Level 2
• 14% less likely to get NCEA Level 3
• 25% more likely to leave school with no qualifications
• Twice as likely to be a high (special) needs student
• 27% less likely to get UE
• Three times more likely to be stood down, suspended
• 5 times more likely to be excluded or expelled
• 42% less likely to be in tertiary education
• 36% less likely to obtain a diploma
• 37% less likely to obtain a bachelors degree
• 25% less likely to get Honours
• 37% less likely to get Masters
• 26% less likely to get a PhD

If women were 42% less likely to be in tertiary education, we would have stories every week demanding the Government take action to reduce the inequality. But when it is boys failing at school and not gaining UE, there seems to be no urgency towards turning this around.

Supporters of New Zealand remaining a constitutional monarchy, say that the status quo is fine. That unless you can point to a problem, why change.

I don’t think the status quo works well, from a constitutional point of view. It doesn’t work well, because it gives the PM far too much power.

In New Zealand the effective head of state is the Governor-General. The perform both the ceremonial roles, but also the constitutional roles such as appointing a Prime Minister who has confidence of the House, approving an election etc. And while it is rare for the GG to have to use discretion, it is not unheard of. The most famous case being Sir John Kerr in Australia. But they have been used twice at state level in Australia. In Canada two PMs have had GGs refuse requests leading them to resign. And in NZ we almost had the GG intervene in 1984 when Muldoon refused to act on the advice of the incoming PM.

In 1993 the GG appointed a committee of four people to advise her on who to appoint PM, as there was a hung Parliament. If Peter Tapsell had not become Speaker, she would have acted on the advise of this ad hoc committee,

So it is naive to think we will never have a situation where the GG has to use their reserve powers. And that is the problem with the status quo.

Who effectively appoints the GG? It isn’t Parliament. It isn’t even Cabinet. It is the PM, in his or her sole discretion. And the PM effectively has the power to sack the GG immediately. If Whitlam had realsed what Sir John Kerr was planning to do, and had got in first and advised the Queen to sack Kerr, she would have been obliged to do so.

It is somewhat mickey mouse to have the Head of Government unilaterally appoint (and be able to sack) the effective Head of State – whose job may require them to act independently if there is a question around the confidence of the House.

The King (weird to write that) can not intervene in a dispute between the GG and the PM. If asked to, he must back the incumbent PM by convention. If a GG refused a call by a PM to have an early election (as they have lost the confidence of the House), the PM could get the GG sacked and replaced within 24 hours.

So the status quo is somewhat broken. I want a system where the effective head of state can’t be sacked at whim by the Prime Minister of the day. I want a system where Muldoon can’t appoint a former National PM as GG and Geoffrey Palmer can’t appoint a Labour Party Mayor as GG.

That system is simple. You have Parliament appoint the Head of State by a 75% super-majority. This will mean that you’ll never get a politician again. The only people acceptable to a 75% super-majority of Parliament will be those who have distinguished themselves in areas outside politics.

The Herald reports:

A third government agency is reviewing the process by which it engaged a consultancy wholly owned by Gannin Ormsby, the husband of Government minister Nanaia Mahuta.

The news follows the admission that, contrary to its policy, the agency followed no formal conflict of interest process in procuring the work.

All of the contracts were non-contestable. They were not part of an open process.

Kāinga Ora said that no written work was supplied by Ka Awatea under the contract. Rather, Rama Ormsby “facilitated” 14 workshops and six hui with Auckland iwi.

And there was no written output from the huis?

The facilitation work began in August, 2020, however, a written contract was not signed until October, 2020, by which point fully half of the hui and workshops had already taken place.

Questioned about this timeline, Kāinga Ora’s Te Ariki Pihama, deputy chief executive of the agency’s Group Māori, said the agency had a verbal agreement with Ka Awatea to commence work in August.

So it was a verbal agreement!

The National Party’s Simeon Brown said he has twice written to the Public Service Commission and called for an investigation into the wider picture of government procurement, Gannin Ormsby, and other of his family members.

Both the National and Act parties say the “extraordinary pattern” of government contracts awarded of Minister Mahuta’s husband and other family members requires comprehensive investigation by either the Auditor General or the Public Service Commission.

Kāinga Ora, the Ministry for the Environment, and the Department of Conservation, all contracted work from Ormsby’s company, Ka Awatea Services, in October and November 2020. All of the contracts were awarded on a sole source basis, without competitive bids.

I should stress I have seen nothing to suggest that Nanaia Mahuta has acted inappropriately. The issue is more that public service agencies seem to be bending over backwards to give contracts to her relatives, without following any sort of robust process.

The other issue is that the outcomes or outputs from the contracts have been derisory.

Stuff reports:

A Victoria University of Wellington lecturer has retracted an emotionally charged email in which he claimed students had “lied” and “cheated” after many failed to watch his queer criminology lecture online.

Lecturer Ti Lamusse told his Criminology 316 students they had shown “profound academic dishonesty and demonstrated disrespect for your teaching staff and the people whose lives you could have learned about if you had bothered to do so”.

The line, “I am ashamed of you as a cohort of students,” was formatted in bold.

Lamusse said he was “in tears” after seeing fewer than a third of his students had watched the lecture on Monday, September 12, which took him “three weeks to prepare”. Lamusse told his students that if he had acted in the same way, he would be deeply ashamed of himself, and his whānau would be ashamed of him.

He broke down in tears because not all his students watched one of his lectures? My God.

“I also worry what it means to graduate with a degree in criminology, if you’re able to lie and cheat your way into passing. The thought of many of you using your degree to find work at the NZ Police, Ministry of Justice or Department of Corrections fills me with dread.

“If you don’t engage, in even a basic way, with your course content, I am deeply concerned for the social harm you may cause,” the criminological theory lecturer said.

He then called his entire class liars and cheaters and said that the thought of them finding jobs was dreadful and they are so bad, they will cause harm.

How does he still have a job? The answer is easy,

Lecturer Lamusse is a hard left activist (he has written on how to grow the “revolutionary left”). This gives him immunity from consequences. If he was not, and identified as being on the right and send such an e-mail to an entire class, he would be suspended on the spot and out within days.

“Ti also uploads 70-plus PowerPoint slides for each lecture, and then in the lectures recites the PowerPoint slides word-for-word. Because of this, many students, including me, do not feel the need to watch the lectures, as they can get the same information from reading the PowerPoint slides,” the complainant explained.

Translation: The students don’t listen to the lectures because they are as boring as fuck, as they just recite a series of slides.

A request to interview Lamusse on September 15 was refused by the university. However, in a statement, the university said it was “aware” of the email.

“The university does not condone the approach taken by this lecturer, which is not in keeping with our institution’s values of respect, responsibility, fairness, integrity, and empathy.

“Resolution processes are under way with this staff member and the students involved,” the statement said.

This will be a wet bus ticket.

Personally I don’t think he should lose his job for being a snowflake and having a meltdown at his students. People make mistakes. But the hypocrisy is what gets me. So many others have been forced out of jobs for far less, such as writing a letter defending science!

The Herald reports:

Transport Minister Michael Wood has rejected official advice to delay public consultation to give councils the power to ban cars on some roads until after October’s local body elections.

Under Wood’s “Reshaping Streets” reforms, councils will have the power to “prohibit or restrict the use of motor vehicles, or one or more classes of motor vehicles, on the roadway”.

So they want to ban the vehicles that generally provide the funding for the roads!

Wood went ahead with public consultation on the proposals last month after the Department of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Transport advised him to wait until after the local body elections.

The Department of Internal Affairs said “it would be inappropriate to consult closely before an election” and the Ministry of Transport agreed, saying it would “overlap heavily with the pre-election period” with consultation finishing three weeks before the election. …

They really hate making it wasy for people to have their say.

• The Pike River Coal Mine tragedy in 2010 killed 29 people and had a fiscal cost of around $100 million. The National Government held a Royal Commission of Inquiry
• The second Canterbury earthquake in 2011 killed 185 people and had a fiscal cost of up to $30 billion. The National Government held a Royal Commission of Inquiry.
• The Havelock North water contamination in 2016 killed four people and had a minor fiscal cost. The National Government held a Government Inquiry.
• The Covid-19 pandemic has had between 2,000 and 3,000 deaths and has had a fiscal cost of over $60 billion. Labour refused to hold a Commission of Inquiry into the response.

Labour are being stupid by not holding a Commission of Inquiry. We need to learn from what has happened, not pretend it was perfect.

A terrible story at Stuff about 22 Christian Glass from Christchurch.

He crashed his car in Colorado and called the Police for help. He had ADHD and freaked out a but and wouldn’t leave the car when the Police arrived. After an hour they smashed his window, tasered him and then shot him five times.

He had a small knife (which he told the dispatcher about) but was no threat to anyone. He obviously needed a counsellor, but a bullet.

I am so glad I live in New Zealand where the sort of thing would be unimaginable. You have to work very hard to get the Police to shoot you in NZ – basically trying to kill them with a baseball bat.

The OCR was last above 4.75% (was 5.00%) in December 2008. The floating mortgage rate then was 8%.

The median house price is $800,000 so with a 20% deposit, a typical mortgage would be $640,000.

At a 4% mortgage rate, the monthly payments will be $3,055 and total interest would be $460,000.

At an 8% mortgage rate, the monthly payments would be $4,696 and total interest would be $1.05 million.

There is going to be a lot of pain next year.

My major submission is that Standing Orders should be amended so that it explicitly allows for any party or MP to do a minority report on a bill, including their own marked up version of the bill, and further that at second reading the member in charge of the bill can move for a particular version of the bill to be adoped by the House, even if not the majority report of the committee.

I support the proposition that ACT has advanced previously that select committee membership should be allocated on the basis of non-executive membership of the House. In practice this would mean that the Government would rarely have a majority on select committees.

If an opposition dominated (or tied) select committee makes changes to the bill not in accordance with the majority of the House, then these amendments can only be made the Committee of the House stage which is far from ideal.

By explicitly allowing select committes to publish minority reports and minority bill versions, and allowing the House at second reading to adopt them, this would mean a much more orderly approach than using the Committee of the House stage and would ensure work done by select committee members is worthwhile, even if not supported by the majority of the select committee.

That SO 249(1) be amended to read “Subject to paragraph (2), a select committee must, in its report, include differing views when one or more members indicate a wish to do so, including a marked up version of a bill that differs from the majority version.”

That SO 305 be amended to read

“1) The motion on the order of the day for the second reading of a bill is that the bill be now read a second time.

2) The member in charge of a bill may also move a motion that the amendments to the bill to be considered by the House is the version put forward by a specific member of the select committee”

That SO306(1) be amended to read

“If the member has moved that the amendments to be considered are not those from the majority of the committee, thenAt the conclusion of the debate on the second reading of a bill, the Speaker puts a question that the amendments either the committee by majority be agreed to. There is no amendment or further debate on the question.

Stuff reports:

A teen driver who killed two mothers is considered unremorseful and a “risk to the community” following the crash he could not be jailed for.

Hayden Manoah can now be named as the teenager who killed Charlene Phuong and her mother-in-law Kay Leota, 44, in a crash on State Highway 1 near Waihola, southwest of Dunedin, on October 23, 2021.

The 17-year-old was sentenced to six months’ community detention and two years’ intensive supervision by Judge Michael Turner at the Dunedin District Court on September 9.

He killed two innocent people, and got a wet bus ticket of six months community detention. It’s not even home detention, more just like a curfew. Why not full home detention?

While his Youth Court appearances could not be considered for last week’s sentencing, the judge noted the teen’s previous offending included drink-driving and dangerous driving.

He had also been caught driving 163kph past an unmarked police vehicle.

Manoah, who had a learner licence, had been released from Youth Court orders for only three days when the fatal crash happened.

And he is only 17!

The taxi driver who picked him up from the hospital said Manoah was “bragging about being involved in a crash”, the judge told the court.

In a later taxi ride, Manoah was “egging on a friend out of the car window”, who then began accelerating and weaving in and out of traffic.

No empathy. Possible sociopathy.

The whānau disputed that the teen was remorseful, describing him in court as uncaring and slouching in his chair during a family group conference.

Henderson said because of his age, it was likely a defence mechanism – he was too immature to process the emotions and gravity of what he had done.

The judge was unconvinced. He said a psychological assessment said the teen “demonstrated what is no more than self-pity”.

He is not going to change.

Danyl Mclauchlan writes:

Where IS all the money going? In the past few months the government has created a new anti-terror research centre, committed $300 million to replace the school decile rating system with an equity number, created a new ministry for disabled people, a new national health provider, a new health authority for Māori, a new ambassadorship for Pacific gender equality, a new supermarket watchdog. It’s hard at work creating a new mega-sized public media entity – estimated cost $350 million – and establishing four new regional wastewater entities at an estimated cost of $296 million (the total three waters reform is priced at about $2 billion). It has purchased Kiwibank for $2.1 billion. 

Some or all of these might turn out to be worthy enterprises but there’s a huge assumption in this government and on the left more broadly that they can only be Good Things – that questioning the rapid expansion of the administrative state can only be right-wing hate speech, part of a covert neoliberal plot to gut health, education, welfare. 

Aren’t we seeing an erosion in state capacity alongside all this centralisation and expansion? Aren’t outcomes in health, education and welfare trending down rather than up? What’s going on? You can’t have effective public services without bureaucracies, but it’s not clear that the torrents of money flowing into them are delivering more value to the public or to the marginalised communities some of them are named after. It’s almost as if the primary role of the administrative state is shifting from serving the people to the redistribution of wealth to the staffers, lawyers, PR companies, managers and consultancy firms that work in them, or for them. A billion dollars a year in public sector consultancy is an awful lot of money when you’re running out of teachers and nurses because you don’t pay them enough, and the fire trucks are breaking down.

The contractors and consultants have never had it better.

 In 2019 the government unveiled its Road to Zero campaign. This approach to road safety, funded at $3 billion over the next three years, “adopts a vision of a New Zealand where no one is killed or seriously injured in road crashes”, which it pretends it will realise by 2050, and which is accompanied by a $15 million advertising campaign (including the famous $30,000 in illuminated zero signs). The transport agency delivering the campaign, Waka Kotahi, has seen a dramatic increase in staff, especially comms staff. NewsHub reported it has “more than doubled its PR team since 2017 – when Labour took power – from 32 staffers to 88, 65 of whom are earning $100,000 or more.” It has more managers, more HR administrators, more accountants. It spent $25 million refitting its offices. But road deaths are trending up even though petrol is more expensive so commuter miles are down. RNZ reported that Waka Kotahi have only installed a fifth of the median barriers they were supposed to, and fewer than a fifth of the side barriers.

More median barriers, less PR!

Q+A released a Kantar poll of 500 Wellingtonians this morning on the Wellington Mayoral election. The results were:

1st preference

• Paul Eagle 28%
• Tory Whanau 26%
• Andy Foster 20%
• Ray Chung 13%
• Unsure 47%

STV prediction:

• Paul Eagle 51%
• Tory WHanau 49%

The Q+A poll is an actual scientific poll and the results stand in contrast to the bogus poll that the Dom Post was hyping up that had Whanau on 47%, Eagle on 17% and Foster on 15%.

A guest post by Rowena Edge, Spokeswoman, Saves Women’s Sport Australasia:

Alice Soper (Why sportswomen don’t need ‘saving’ from transgender athletes, 25 August) and Save Women’s Sport Australasia agree on many important things. That participation in sport is the beginning, not the apex for many athletes. And that women are fiercely competitive.

            We also agree that years of under investment in women’s sports, misguided policy, people learning on the job, decisions being made by people with no lived experience, sexual harassment and bullying, and pay disparities have roots in sociology. Or more specifically, sexism.

            Finally, Alice is absolutely right when she says that sportswomen are not damsels in distress in need of “saving”. I come from a sport mad family of high performing athletes. Within our whanau we have those who have represented New Zealand in multiple sports on the international stage and at Olympic level, as well as those who channel their competitive spirit into community level sport. Our sportswomen are strong, competitive, smart and dedicated.

            Their participation and success is only possible because of the existence of the female category. A category that allows them to participate in fair and meaningful competition against other women. And, when it comes to contact or combat sports, one that also protects them from the increased risk of harm that competing against a male-bodied athlete could result in.

            If it was not for the existence of, and the protection of, women’s sporting categories we would have no female medalists or even contenders on the international stage in any sport where strength, speed, or stamina matters. New Zealanders would have never heard the names of athletes like Alison Roe, Susan Devoy, Sophie Pascoe, and Lisa Carrington. As much as some people may wish to deny reality, biology and physiology matters because we play sports with our bodies, not our identities.

            Ms. Soper appears to be comfortable with the loss of meaningful and fair competition for women and increased risk of injury in some sports by the inclusion of male-bodied people, as is her right.

            However, many people do not share her views. Save Women’s Sports Australasia had heard from female athletes and the parents of girls across New Zealand who have been impacted by the inclusion of male transgender people in their sports category. They have included cricketers, cyclists, roller derby players, swimmers, netballers, runners, hockey players, weight lifters, and mountain bikers, among others. They have shared stories of how they have been injured and given up sports that they love. They have told how they have been ostracized by people they have previously considered to be friends, called bigots and transphobes, and dismissed by their sporting organisations when they raised concerns.

            This never happens, people like Alice Soper tells us. Except it does, and it is growing as more sports organizations fall into line with Sport New Zealand’s relentless insistence that the inclusion of male people who identify as women is more important than fairness to, and the safety of, female players.

These are the words of one woman who contacted us, “During one training, I was elbowed sharply in the stomach, knocking the wind from me, and on another occasion was held and shoved with such excessive force that I had a panic attack. All aspects of my physical and mental safety were ignored… I never felt comfortable again and subsequently felt that I had little choice but to leave the sport which I had loved for the previous eight years.”

As another example, right now in a community cycling club in New Zealand there is a male transgender cyclist who holds the award for both best female cyclist of the season as well as best overall cyclist. Why? Because this cyclist not only cleaned out the women’s field, posting times so fast that no female had a chance of competing for first place, but on some occasions even beat the fastest male competing in the men’s category.     

This is what kindness and inclusion now looks like. Female athletes being forced out of sports that they love and out of their rightful placings and recognition because including males in their category is considered to be a higher priority.

Sportswomen don’t need saving, but their category certainly does.

Note: the column was written as an opinion piece in response to another opinion piece by Alice Soper and published by the New Zealand Herald on 25 August that referred to the work of Save Women’s Sport Australasia. The New Zealand Herald declined to publish this response.