The annual world competitiveness rankings are out, and New Zealand has fallen 11 places from 20th to 31st.
They note NZ had the steepest drops in economic performance and business efficiency along with domestic economy and labor market.
They explicitly cite:
In a global world, competitiveness is critical along with productivity. We’re failing.
NewstalkZB reports:
Asked what impact the legislation will actually have, Tibshraeny explains: “Fair pay agreements are a way of requiring employers and employees to agree on baseline conditions and pay.”
This is incorrect. It does not require employers and employees to agree. In fact the current law requires such an agreement but this law will allow a Govt appointee to set conditions and pay for an entire industry regardless of agreement.
Under the proposed rules, if a public interest test is met, or 10 per cent or at least 1000 workers in an industry or occupation decide to start a negotiation process with employers, negotiation needs to happen.
Minimum pay and working conditions will only be ratified if a majority of both employers and employees in a sector agree to them. All employers and employees get a vote.
This is not right. If a mere 10% of employees (or in a large industry of 100,000 it could be 1%) say they want an industry wide agreement, then there will be one imposed no matter what employers or employees vote on.
“Presumably, to get a majority on both sides, you will need the conditions to be reasonable,” Tibshraeny says.
No you don’t.
If there is a stalemate in the negotiations, the matter can be passed on to the Employment Relations Authority.
Not so much can, but will. If a proposed FPA is not agreed upon twice, then a union can unilaterally take it to the Employment Relations Authority. There will be compulsory arbitration which will bind every single employer – even if 99% voted against it.
The ERA will establish a panel of 3 people who will have the power to impose terms and conditions on an entire industry or profession – it could be every journalist in New Zealand or it could be every cafe worker – regardless of if they work for a owner operated cafe in Invercargill or Starbucks.
So who appoints the ERA? The Government of course. They are appointed for four year terms, so a Government can quickly appoint an entire slate of ERA members who will be far more likely to rule in favour of the unions (who partially fund the Labour Party).
The Government could have given the power to determine an FPA to the Employment Court. The Employment Court Judges must be lawyers with at least seven years experience and crucially they taken a judicial oath and are appointed for life. a Government can’t just not reappoint incumbent Judges to replace them with friendly faces.
So there is a reason the Government has given the FPA power to the ERA, not the Employment Court.
This legislation is even worse than the national awards of the 1970s. They still required agreement to be reached between employers and unions. This law does not. 1,000 union members can get terms and conditions imposed on 99,000 other workers through the compulsory arbitration clauses.
Nothing on Earth will stop the Government from passing this law, as the unions want this even more than compulsory unionism. But it won’t survive a change of Government, and nor should it.
UPDATE: My post shouldn’t be seen as implying the journalist quoted has not described the law correctly. Rather they have just not assumed that unions would always take a proposed FPA to the ERA if employers did not agree to it.
But personally I think it is almost unthinkable that a union would not do so. They wouldn’t go the the time and expense of drawing up a proposed FPA and just dropping it simply because employers didn’t agree to it. Why would they?
The Mail reports:
A BLACK trainee vicar was blocked from becoming a Church of England priest after a white bishop voiced concerns about his belief that Britain was not institutionally racist.
In the latest storm to hit the Church, Calvin Robinson, a TV presenter and political commentator, accused senior figures last night of torpedoing his planned ordination because of his conservative and anti-woke views.
So the black vicar was sacked because he did not think he was discriminated against due to his race!!!
Mr Robinson also claimed that the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Sarah Mullally, lectured him about racism in the church, insisting that ‘as a white woman I can tell you that the Church is institutionally racist’.
Heh.
Geoffrey Miller writes:
Jacinda Ardern’s decision to attend the upcoming North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit in Spain, but to skip the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) in Rwanda symbolises the changes she is making to New Zealand foreign policy.
Chogm starts today in Kigali, while the Nato summit will be held in Madrid next week.
However, Ardern is only attending the Nato summit. She is sending her foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, to attend the Commonwealth meeting in her place.
I’m delighted to see Ardern attending a NATO summit. There are many issues I disagree with the Government on, but the decision to clearly back NATO and Ukraine vs Russia is the right call.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the world. Sweden and Finland are joining NATO. Ukraine is joining the EU. Switzerland has abandoned neutrality. And China’s implicit backing of Russia has made people realise that China is far from benign.
As the facts change, so should stances. It is very pleasing that Labour has realised there is no sitting on the fence with these conflicts. An independent foreign policy is not the same as a neutral one. Independent means we independently decide who we think is right and wrong. It doesn’t mean we don’t back democratic countries who are threatened and invaded by authoritarian countries.
Ardern’s invitation to attend the Madrid summit will also be something of a reward for aligning New Zealand’s foreign policy more closely with Nato – and the West generally – over the past few months.
After all, Ardern has overhauled New Zealand’s foreign policy by introducing sanctions against Russia and sending military equipment and weapons to Ukraine – and by making a symbolic contribution of New Zealand troops to Europe to assist with the war effort.
Ardern is probably the most pro-NATO Labour PM since Peter Fraser. Not because her views have changed, but because the world has changed. Again we should all fully support her Government’s work in this area.
It does make me wonder if one day, there will be an impetus for New Zealand to join NATO. At present it doesn’t really make sense, but if China turns into the Russia of the Pacific, then it may. Time will tell.
A guest post by Mark Keating:
The current political and public debate about tax policy is being dressed up as a need to achieve “equity” by ensuring the rich pay their fair share.
The Prime Minister stated boldly that “parts of New Zealand’s tax system are unfair” – although she refused to be drawn on what changes or new taxes Labour would like to introduce to address that alleged unfairness.
The Minister of Revenue started the whole debate last month by proposing is to enact a Tax Principles Act setting out the foundations of our tax system. In doing so he argued that more financial information about high wealth individuals must be gathered by IRD to ensure the tax system is working fairly.
The Greens picked up that ball and ran with it. Its Revenue spokesman stated:
“Our tax system is unfair and it needs urgent attention.”
“The most straightforward solution is to introduce a capital gains tax or a wealth tax on individuals’ net wealth over $1 million – not including mortgages and other debt. This would only apply to the wealthiest six percent of New Zealanders,” she said.
So it seems the political Left are doubling down on the traditional “eat the rich” approach to taxation and want to soak them even more to ensure the tax system reflects their version of “fairness”.
But what’s missing from the present debate is the facts about how much tax is already paid the wealthiest Kiwis. I have waited in vain for some journalist to drop this other shoe … but apparently such facts would only get in the way of the prevailing narrative that the rich are currently undertaxed and should pay more.
Yet such hard date is not hard to find if you want to. For example, Treasury helpfully publish statistics on Who pays income tax… and how much? (treasury.govt.nz)
Those figures record that in 2020 (the last year for which figures are available) the top 5% of income earners (some 196,000 individuals – the very people that the Greens are targeting) paid a total of $11.31billion in income tax (out of total income tax of $36.85billion paid by the 3.85million individual taxpayers).
So the top 5% already pay 31% of all tax paid by individual taxpayers. By contrast, the bottom 74% of income earners (2.84m individuals) pay only $10.95billion, which represents only 29.7% of all tax paid by individuals.
This means the top 5% are already paying more tax than the bottom three-quarters of taxpayers combined.
And those statistics were gathered by Treasury before last year’s increase in the top personal tax rate on income from 33% up to 39%. Presumably the statistics for the 2022 year will be even more skewed against the top 2% of taxpayers earning over $180,000, who already pay $8.6billion or 24% of the total tax paid by all individual taxpayers.
None of this sounds very fair – but presumably not in the way Miss Adern or Mr Parker mean.
Likewise, a common allegation is that “the rich” should pay even more but instead hide their wealth in companies and trusts, which pay a lower rate of tax (28% and 33% respectively).
But that myth is exploded by statistics kept and published by IRD on the tax payments by the very wealthiest New Zealanders. Just in March this year IRD released a Discussion Document floating novel proposals to impose new taxes on the wealthy (Dividend integrity and personal services income attribution – a Government discussion document (March 2022) (ird.govt.nz)
That Document included the following details regarding the tax affairs of the very wealthiest 350 Kiwis, who already have an entire unit of IRD dedicated to monitoring their full compliance with all tax obligations. It explained:
Inland Revenue analysed existing data it holds on 350 high wealth individuals (individuals and families with more than $50 million in net assets) and found that they used or controlled 8,468 companies and 1,867 trusts. For 2018, these 350 individuals paid $26 million in tax, while their companies and trusts paid $639 million and $102 million respectively.
While IRD still quibble that so much of their income is generated through companies and trusts so don’t pay the new 39% tax rate, it overlooks the simple maths that those richest 350 individuals and families already pay a combined $767million in taxes (an average of $2.2m each)!
Yet it appears from the current debate that even that fleecing is not enough for the Government and its political allies. That approach ignores the reality of our current tax system. To paraphrase the famous words of Sir Winston Churchill: Never has so much been paid to so many by so few.
Mark Keating is a Tax Barrister working in Auckland
The Platform reports:
We decided to look closer at the fund and exactly what those receiving funding had to agree to. The information is all available publicly and in plain sight. A copy of the standard funding agreement is available on the NZ On Air website. Upon reading the documentation we were struck by two significant things:
That is essentially how the Public Interest Journalism Fund is set up – like a loan. Not only do applicants have to thoroughly explain how they will adhere to the particular co-governance model of understanding the Treaty in order to get the funding in the first place, they have to agree that should they deviate from presenting this perspective NZ On Air can say that they have defaulted on the agreement and demand the funding be repaid.
So if a media organisation that got some of the $55 million from the Government started running an editorial line that the Treaty of Waitangi did not establish a co-governance partnership, then they could be forced to repay the money they got.
Radio NZ report:
The government is proposing to change the electoral law to allow Māori voters to switch electoral rolls at any time.
Currently, Māori are only allowed to switch between the general and Māori rolls once every five years, a rule which critics have called undemocratic.
Minister of Justice Kris Faafoi said a bill to change the option to any time would be introduced to Parliament.
Allowing a change at any time, up to and including polling day, would allow Māori to fully exercise their voting rights, Faafoi said.
But to pass, the bill will need the support of three quarters of Parliament, including the National Party.
National should oppose this. The media have almost without fail neglected to give any balance to coverage of this issue. Here are the facts:
Now you might argue what does it matter under MMP, as the party vote determines the Government. This is true, but electorates are still very important to parties. Parties place great store on winning them. They can get you parliamentary representation if you get less than 5%. They get you greater parliamentary resources. They give the electorate MPs greater ability to be reported in local media etc.
I can guarantee you that if this change goes through, parties of the left will campaign for Maori to transfer to the Maori roll for the boundary setting (to gain more Maori seats) by telling people they can transfer back to the general roll once boundaries are done. At the moment Maori voters know that if they enrol on the Maori roll, they have to vote in the Maori seats and wards. This proposed law change will allow people to enrol purely for boundary setting, then swap out.
It will also be used tactically. In seats like Southland, having people transfer from the Maori to General roll will have little impact on the election results as it is a safe seat with few Maori.
But in seats like Northland and East Coast which are 37% and 52% Maori a tactical voting campaign could absolutely change who wins the seat.
The current law is simple. If you choose to be on the general roll or Maori roll for the purpose of setting the boundaries, you must vote on that roll until the next time boundaries change. Labour and others want people to be able to enrol on a roll purely for the purposes of boundary setting, but then tactically swap to the other roll to vote.
National should resist this law change.
The result for Tauranga is:
Considering the Greens didn’t stand, it’s a bad result from Labour. The two CR candidates got 19% more than in 2020.
It’s a basic and well known law – you can’t campaign for votes on election day. So who in Labour decided this doesn’t apply to them for the Tauranga by-election?
So this is the Labour candidate (and Cabinet Minister) flagrantly breaking the law and campaigning for votes on election day. Now sure you expect members of the public or even some low level activists not to know the law, but this is the actual candidate herself.
Anyway the polls have now closed. The Electoral Commission hopes to have half the polling places reported by 9 pm and 95% of them by 1030 pm.
UPDATE: The last screenshot from a No Right Turn is not the blogger as I assumed, but someone else using that phrase.
The public results are here.
Party Vote
Seats
Country Direction
This is the first time the Taxpayers’ Union/Curia poll has shown the wrong direction at 50%.
The Herald reports:
More than two thirds of Auckland’s $58.9 million light rail spend has been on consultants, Newstalk ZB can reveal.
The Transport Minister’s office has defended the spend and a spokesman said projects of this scale required significant planning, investigation, and design before spades hit the ground.
But National’s transport spokesman Simeon Brown said the project was going nowhere.
“Labour promised to build light rail from Auckland’s CBD to Mt Roskill by 2021, but all they have delivered is millions of dollars worth of reports.”
Brown accused the Government of being all talk and no action on its promises, while Aucklanders were stuck in congestion.
In the past five years the Government has spent $58.9 million on the Auckland light rail project and $41.5 million of that has been on consultants, as of early June.
If a consultant charges $1,000 a day then that is 41,500 days of consultants.
One News reports:
A patient who turned up to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital’s emergency department on Wednesday – then left because of long wait times – has now died.
New Zealand’s busiest hospital has launched an urgent investigation into the death of a patient who presented at ED and later died in intensive care.
National introduced a health target of 95% of ED patients being seen within six hours. Independent research has credited this with savings hundreds and hundreds of lives. Previously only 80% were seen within six hours.
This was basically achieved in 2017 with 94% seen within six hours. By 2019 (so pre covid) it had dropped to 84% after Labour dumped the target.
What is it now? Well the Government has made it almost impossible to know. You have to OIA every DHB individually. But Shane Reti did OIA Mid Central Health for May 2022, and they revealed that only 53% were being seen within six hours. And the same OIA reveals that the number of ED presentations hasn’t significantly increased.
So while we don’t know the factors leading to this individual dying, we do know having a target for ED waiting times saved hundreds of lives, and that since Labour scrapped the targets only half are being seen within six hours.
The Herald reports:
A prominent kaumātua is questioning the Māoridom guidance given to National Party leader Christopher Luxon following social media debate of a potential tikanga breach.
An image of Luxon sitting on a desk during a visit to Ormiston Junior College this week has been shared on social media, prompting a discussion as to whether it was in violation of tikanga.
The prominent kaumatua is an officer of the Maori Party.
As explained by kaumātua and Manurewa Marae board chairman Rangi McLean, sitting on a table – particularly one used for preparing and serving food – is in opposition to Māori tikanga, held for generations.
It’s a school not a marae, and it isn’t one used to prepare or serve food so the entire story is a beatup from start to finish.
Auckland North Shore councillor Richard Hills was among those who took a dim view of Luxon’s seating choice, saying it was “basic tikanga” that wasn’t hard to abide by.
Hills is of course a Labour Party Councillor.
The Conversation published:
Successive New Zealand governments have failed to develop a policy or strategy focused on men’s health, falling behind countries like Mongolia, Australia, Ireland, Iran, Malaysia, South Africa, Brazil and the state of Quebec.
The consequences of this failure for New Zealand men are dire, with research showing men falling behind women in terms of access to health care, diagnoses and overall life expectancy.
I blogged back in 2018 how men are:
You would think all of these inequalities would lead to the Government saying we should have a strategy to close the gap between men and women by improving outcomes for men. But, no.
Bernard Orsman reports:
The Auckland mayoral race is wide open after the first public poll shows virtually nothing separating the top four candidates.
The Ratepayers’ Alliance-Curia mayoral poll has Labour councillor Efeso Collins and restaurateur Leo Molloy each on 21.7 per cent, Heart of the City chief executive Viv Beck on 20.5 per cent and businessman Wayne Brown on 20.1 per cent.
Freelance media operator Craig Lord, who came third in the 2019 mayoral race, was four points behind the leading pack on 16 per cent.
It’s a four way statistical tie, and even the 5th place candidate is within the 95% confidence interval of the leading candidates.
This is both bad and good news for Efeso Collins. It is remarkable that despite Labour’s endorsement he is not polling higher. But the good news for him is that if the other four candidates remain in the race and there is no front-runner, then Collins could win with 25% to 30% of the vote. And Labour’s endorsement and campaign machine should get him there.
The poll is also good and bad news for the other candidates. The good news is they all have viable chance of winning. The bad news is as they all have a viable chance, none of them will pull out. There is no obvious front-runner for voters who want a change from the status quo to get behind.
The Herald reports:
The Australian Foreign Minister is to visit the Solomon Islands before New Zealand’s Nanaia Mahuta, despite her being on the job for just over three weeks.
Mahuta has been under pressure in recent months due to her relative lack of travel and engagement with Pacific island countries, particularly as China seeks to increase its presence and influence in the region.
Penny Wong became Australia’s foreign minister in the last week of May and immediately set off to visit several Pacific island countries.
Wong has done five overseas trips in three weeks. Nanaia has just done three in almost two years.
Stats NZ reports:
GDP fell 0.2 percent in the March 2022 quarter
So we’re now just one quarter off a recession, during a time of high inflation. So Labour has almost managed the rare feat of stagflation.
This is an important question. It is one thing for a forecast done a year ago to be out. But the Reserve Bank just a few weeks ago was saying the economy would grow 0.7% for the quarter they were halfway through, and in fact it shrank 0.2%.
I may be wrong here, but would it helped if they focused more on economic capability, and less on te reo capability?
Now how does our economy shrinking by 0.2% compare with others?
Something amazing happened recently in US politics. Chesa Boudin was the DA for San Francisco. He was a “progressive reformer” and got elected in 2019 on a platform of making it easier for people to get bail, refusing to work with immigration authorities, generally going soft on law and order.
Since then San Francisco has become terrible. Homeless people are living on almost every street. Drugs are everywhere, stores are being robbed brazenly, organised crime is booming etc. It’s what happen when you go soft on crime. We can see it happening in NZ also.
In a recall election they sacked him 55% to 45%.
The key thing is this happened in San Francisco – arguably the most left wing city in the most left wing state in the US. Only 8.6% of people in San Francisco are Republicans. The last Republican elected Mayor was in 1960!
So for them to sack a progressive DA gives you some idea of how bad things are there.
A guest post by Paul Goldsmith, National’s Justice Spokesperson:
Labour’s Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, infamously said on Q&A last month that the nature of our democracy has changed. And he was being serious.
The current Labour Government appears to be reluctantly walking back its support for the undemocratic Rotorua District Council Bill, which would have swept away the principle of equal voting rights for all New Zealanders in the district.
They didn’t really have a choice after their own Attorney General pointed out that it is discriminatory and in breach of the Bill of Rights.
But Labour are pressing on with the equally undemocratic Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill.
Under this Bill, which has passed its second reading, the people of Canterbury would elect 14 councillors. Everyone gets a vote – Māori, Pakeha and everyone else. And then something extraordinary happens. Ngāi Tahu appoints two more councillors. No voting and no election.
This is not a Māori ward, allocated proportionately to the population – remember Māori Cantabrians have already had their vote like everyone else. It is an appointment by an independent entity – Ngāi Tahu. Something like the English aristocracy of old, or the Fijian Great Council of Chiefs.
Ministry of Justice advice to the Government on the Bill points out that this clearly discriminates against non-Māori. Yet extraordinarily, the Ministry also says in a couple of loose paragraphs that the Treaty justifies this change.
This is a dramatic and radical change to the way we choose our government in New Zealand. When did we, as a country, decide that the Treaty trumps democracy? We haven’t.
The idea of equal suffrage – equal voting rights, regardless of gender, class and ethnicity – has been a pillar of our democracy for decades. All New Zealanders should have an equal say in who governs them; an equal say in appointing the people that make the decisions that affects their lives.
Equally fundamental to our system is the ability to throw poor performers out at the next election – that is the bedrock accountability in our democracy. But not under this Bill. Ngai Tahu’s representatives could never be thrown out.
These concepts – equal voting rights and accountability at the ballot box – are basic to our democracy and precious. Sadly, they are becoming rarer in an increasingly authoritarian world.
Why this Labour Government thinks they can casually move away from these principles without discussion by supporting a Local Bill is beyond me. Where are the legal profession; the constitutional experts, the Human Rights Commission, the usual noisy crowd? The silence is deafening.
To those who say this is just a special acknowledgement of Ngāi Tahu in dealing with a council that has a lot to do with natural resources – I say, get real.
If passed, the argument will surely be extended to every other regional council, then unitary councils, then the rest.
If we as a country no longer think that equal voting rights apply at one level of government, pressure will build for change in national elections.
I can’t think of a more divisive agenda for any government to run.
We recognise the burden of history, but no past injustices are fixed by undermining something that makes this country the great place it is – preserving the pillars of our open democracy.
That’s my view.
And I would guess that most other people also have the expectation that living in a democracy, their voice is as acceptable and powerful as anyone else’s.
If Jacinda Ardern and her government Ministers no longer think that Kiwis should have equal voting rights, then they should make the case and ask New Zealanders whether they agree.
It would be a constitutional outrage to use a transitory parliamentary majority to set a precedent that changes the nature of our democracy so dramatically, without asking the people first.
Paul offered this as an opinion piece to both the Christchurch Press and the NZ Herald. Amazingly (but perhaps not surprisingly) they both declined. I guess the ending of equal voting in New Zealand is not seen as important enough by then to allow a debate!