Newsroom reports:

A backlog in Covid-19 PCR testing which led to the country’s systems falling over should have been predicted and prevented by health officials, an independent review has concluded.

Poor communication, data limitations and a failure to learn from international experiences instead led to complacency and meant the country’s laboratories buckled under the strain of requests.

In March, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield admitted the ministry had overestimated the number of Covid-19 PCR tests the country’s laboratories could process as the virus took off in the community.

The revelation came as Kiwis waited upwards of a week for test results and health experts warned of laboratories reaching a crisis point, while months earlier one of the Government’s own groups had raised red flags.

You can forgive mistakes when they were not predictable. But when people had been warning about the problem for months and months, you are less inclined to forgive.

“While modelling was initiated in late January 2022, it appears that positivity rates were used to forecast demand only and were not used to forecast capacity or the point when pooling of samples is no longer viable,” the report says.

“Even then, the positivity rates used in the modelling are significantly understated and do not reflect the messaging from laboratories.”

With other countries having similarly faced difficulties with PCR testing in the face of Omicron, opportunities to learn from international experience were “substantial”.

“It is not apparent how these insights were incorporated into testing modelling, planning, or reporting.”

Saying “it is not apparent” is diplomatic speak for “They did not”

I did something I have never done before and ran a poll on what a sentence should be. It shows how totally out of touch some Judges are with the public.

I would normally never poll on a judicial sentence as there are so many factors to be considered in sentencing. But it was justified in this case as the Judge ignored the written statute and made a value judgement about what New  Zealanders would consider shocking to their conscience. By over-riding the Sentencing Act passed by Parliament, the Judge made his judgement fair game to test.

The background is in this Herald story. Zacquirin Tikena-Stuchbery had managed to chalk up three serious violent assaults in just three years. The Sentencing Act 2002 86D(2) states:

Despite any other enactment, if, on any occasion, an offender is convicted of 1 or more stage-3 offences other than murder, the High Court must sentence the offender to the maximum term of imprisonment prescribed for each offence.

86D(3) states:

When the court sentences the offender under subsection (2), the court must order that the offender serve the sentence without parole unless the court is satisfied that, given the circumstances of the offence and the offender, it would be manifestly unjust to make the order.

So this is the law of the land. This meant that the offender must be sentenced to 14 years in prison, with the Judge having discretion over whether to make it with or without parole eligibility if they thought no parole eligibility would be manifestly unjust.

But last year the Supreme Court found in the case of Daniel Fitzgerald that his seven year third strike sentence for indecent assault could be reduced, despite the statute law, if the punishment was so excessive that it would shock the conscience of properly informed New Zealanders. They based this on the Bill of Rights Act even though BORA explicitly is not meant to over-ride other laws.

Now the Fitzgerald case was a difficult one. His three strikes were burying his head in a woman’s buttocks, slapping buttocks and an unwanted kiss. There is a good argument to be made for removing indecent assault from the three strikes regime as what constitutes indecent assault can range massively. So one can understand (even if one disagrees) why the Supreme Court ruled the way they did in that case.

Anyway the Supreme Court made their decision. And the threshold is that the punishment would shock the conscience of properly informed New Zealanders. You could argue seven years for an unwanted kiss would do so.

But the case of Tikena-Stuchbery is nothing like this. All three of his strike offences were serious offending. The first was for multiple beatings of his partner. The second was for a violent beating and robbery of a man outside a bar. And the third, as reported was:

He was sentenced today for lashing out at the woman on November 27, 2020, after their home was burgled and he blamed her for not being home to prevent it. The following evening, she fell asleep as he played games on her phone and she woke up to what the judge described as a prolonged, “violent and brutal” beating prompted by jealousy over a text from another man who had commented on her looks.

“The complainant begged you to stop the assault and call for an ambulance,” Justice Davison said, noting that the defendant only agreed to medical attention if his victim promised to lie about the cause of the injuries.

“The attack was vicious and extremely violent,” the judge said, adding that the victim has since expressed forgiveness but that doesn’t mitigate the offending.

This seems like exactly the type of offender the law is designed for – three violent assaults in just three years. Yet the Judge refused to sentence him according to the statute for 14 years jail (he could have had parole eligibility in under five years) and declared that doing so would be so “disproportionately severe and crushing” as to shock the conscience of New Zealand.

It is that call by the Judge that the sentence set in statute would shock the conscience of New Zealand I wanted to test. If say 75% or even 50% of NZers said such a sentence would be wrong, then maybe you could say the Judge was right. So here is the question I asked in our June poll of 1,200 New Zealanders:

For this question I’m going to read out details of a recent criminal case. At the end of it I’d like you to tell me which sentence you think would be most appropriate, out of three options. Zach is 22 years old. When he was 18 he beat his partner up and received his first conviction for violent offending. A year later he beat up and robbed a man outside a bar and received his second conviction for violent offending. A year after that he beat up his partner in a lengthy assault described as prolonged, extremely violent, brutal and vicious. The rationale was because another man had  commented on her looks. This got him a third conviction in three years for violent offending. Which of the following three sentences do you think would be most appropriate? 14 years with no parole, 14 years with parole eligibility after five years or Five years with parole eligibility after two and a half years

The results of the poll are:

* 14 years no parole: 43%
* 14 years with parole eligibility in five years: 38%
* Five years, parole eligibility in  2.5 years 10%
* Unsure 9%

So 81% of New Zealanders said they thought the sentence set out in the statute would be appropriate. Only a miniscule 10% thought the sentence the Judge substituted was appropriate.

This is not about selecting sentences by opinion poll. This is about testing the assertion made by the Judge in his decision to ignore the statute passed by Parliament on the grounds that the mandated sentence would shock the conscience of New Zealanders. It is clear that the Judge is massively out of touch on this issue. You could quibble over wording and background of the offender etc, but there is no way you can say that the assertion that the mandated sentence would shock the conscience of New Zealanders is correct when eight times as many think that sentence is the appropriate one.

I hope that Crown Law sees it job as to uphold the law as passed by Parliament and appeal this decision. Otherwise we are on very dangerous territory. 

 Incidentally the support for the statutorily mandated sentence over the one the Judge substituted was in all demographics. The breakdowns are:

• Women 81%
• Men 80%
• Under 40s 79%
• 40 to 59  80%
• 60+ 83%
• National voters 86%
• Labour voters 76%
• Maori Party voters 79%
• ACT voters 88%
• Green voters 81%

Agreement that a 14 year sentence with parole would be appropriate for this offending  has massive agreement in every demographic. The assertion by the Judge such a punishment would shock our conscience is hopelessly wrong. There is not a single demographic that would agree.

The latest food price index shows a 0.7% increase in food prices for the month. Food now costs 8.9% more than at the last election and fruit and veges cost 16% more.

The Herald reports:

A doctor with a criminal history poured alcohol over his wife, ripped open her shirt to prod her torso with a fork while calling her fat, and threatened to shoot police as the incident unfolded.

But the general practitioner, whose name and identifying details are permanently suppressed, is still allowed to practice, a medical authority has ruled.

Incredible.

The 111 call-taker overheard the doctor threatening to shoot police and to kill his wife.

When officers arrived outside the couple’s property during the 2020 assault, they could see through a window the doctor had his hands around the woman’s neck.

She was left bruised and scratched, and “emotionally and mentally broken”.

Who would want to see such a person as their doctor?

He has three previous convictions for driving with excess blood alcohol (EBA), for which he was sentenced to three months’ community detention and disqualified from driving indefinitely on the third.

To have three actual convictions would mean he has probably driven drunk several hundred times. I suspect he is an alcoholic.

How the tribunal thinks an alcoholic wife beater should be treating patients is beyond me.

Quite a lot of changes announced today for a minor reshuffle. Key points are:

• Trevor Mallard and Kris Faafoi leaving Parliament
• Daniel Rosewarne and Soraya Peke-Mason will become new Labour List MPs
• Peke-Mason will become the 60th female MP, making Parliament 50/50 in terms of gender for the first time
• Adrian Rurawhe will replace Trevor Mallard as Speaker and presumably Jenny Salesa will move from Assistant to Deputy Speaker. A Labour MP will become one of the two Assistant Speakers
• Priyanca Radhakrishnan moves into Cabinet
• Kieran McAnulty becomes a Minister outside Cabinet
• Duncan Webb becomes Chief Whip
• Radhakrishnan picks up Associate Workplace Relations
• McAnulty gets Emergency Management, Racing, Deputy Leader of the House, Associate Transport and Associate Local Government
• Hipkins gains Police from Williams and loses Covid-19 to Verrall, and delegates more in Education to Tinetti.
• Verrall gets Covid-19 and Research/Science
• Wood gets Immigration
• Willie Jackson gets Broadcasting
• Kiri Allan gets Justice

On my Patreon, I have analysed the merits of the changes.

Jon Johansson writes:

But making Luxon seem out of touch and a policy-free zone isn’t effective when Luxon is talking about the cost of living every day and when every political journo knows detailed policy isn’t announced midway through an election cycle. So, it seems like an ineffectual, scattergun attack.

Second, it’s illogical for Labour to hammer Luxon’s leadership when it was the PM who appointed him to chair her Business Advisory Council in 2018. Was her judgment wrong then, or now? And why?

Ardern had scores, maybe hundreds, of people she could have chosen to chair the Business Advisory Council. The fact she chose Luxon shows she rated his abilities.

Third, Labour risks turning more people off if it runs negative attacks on Luxon and National because it contradicts the transcendent value expressed by its leader: kindness. This goes directly to authenticity. Lose that and its sayonara.

And that has already been damaged by some of the decisions and rhetoric around Covid-19 response.

An imminent reshuffle offers a circuit-breaker of sorts although removing or shuffling warrants from poorly performing ministers will likely reinforce failures of delivery more than a deep bench.

It will probably be a minor reshuffle, when in fact she should be dumping several under-performing Ministers. She could replace them with Deborah Russell, Kieran McAnulty, Camilla Belich, Greg O’Connor and Arena Williams.

UPDATE: The reshuffle is being announced today. Unclear yet if she is just shuffling portfolios or actually changing Ministers.

Sad news that Richard Prosser has died in the UK. I liked Richard, even though I was the one who exposed his awful Wogistan article to the world. It had been out for several weeks before I blogged on it, which then got the media onto it.

But you can be critical of someone, and still not regard that issue as defining them. Richard would e-mail me potential blog articles from time to time, and I would often run them. I enjoyed his occasional e-mails.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends. Losing a loved one who “lost his battle with depression” is incredibly traumatic.

A Q+A Kantar poll of 500 in Tauranga has found:

• Sam Uffindell 45%
• Jan Tinetti 35%
• Cameron Luxton 7%

Interestingly 220 of their 500 respondents were polled face to face,

The poll is very different to the Newshub Reid Research poll that had Uffindell on 57% and Tinetti on 22%.

The actual result will be very interesting as Kantar says Uffindell is only 10% ahead while Reid Research says he is 35% ahead. Which will be closest? The difference between them is well outside the sampling margin of error.

Politico reports:

Clinton urges progressives to rebuild atrophied muscles of persuasion. “I think one of the ways you win elections is by talking straight with people and giving them permission to vote against you,” he explains in the most recent edition of his podcast. In other words, don’t hector and moralize, as though the merits of your position should be self-evident to any decent person. Assume a position of modesty that argues, “If you really disagree with this, then you will go out and take another choice, but here’s why I think it’s better for you.”

This is spot on. All too often now many on the left try to position anyone who disagrees with them as a bad person.

Blair urges progressives to rebuild atrophied muscles of self-discipline. For much of the left, Blair said on Clinton’s program, it’s not clear that their main goal is really to win power or wield it: “Its primary purpose is to make itself feel good about itself, right? To convince itself that it’s principled, right?

Yep its virtue signalling.

Of course many on the left now hate Blair, but the fact remains he is the only UK Labour Leader to win an election in the last 48 years.

One News reports:

The 1News Kantar Public Poll asked: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Trevor Mallard is handling his job as speaker?

Just 17% said they approved, while almost half disapproved. The rest didn’t know. …

The exact results were:

• 17% approve
• 48% disapprove
• Only 25% of Labour voters approved

To be fair to Trevor Mallard, I would divide his job into three areas.

In the area of standing orders reforms, making Parliament more accessible etc etc he has done (i think) an excellent job. He has also held Select Committee Chairs to account in a way not done before.

In the area of Chairing the House, his record is patchy. I liked some of the innovations he tried, but he can’t seem to get past his visceral dislike of certain MPs, and the result has been a loss of confidence from those MPs.

And in the area of responding to the parliamentary protest, his actions were foolish and counter-productive.

Christopher Luxon announced four policies for dealing with the increase in both gang numbers and gang violence, including near daily shootings in Auckland. They are:

1. Ban gang patches and insignia in public
2. Give Police power to issue dispersal notices to gang members and associates
3. Give Police power to issue Consorting Prohibition notices for up to three years
4. Give Police power to issues Firearms Prohibition Orders

I’m strongly support 2, 3 and 4. I don’t support 1 on freedom of expression grounds, but you don’t need that for the others to work.

Labour’s policy appears to be to continue to fund the very gangs that deal the drugs to also run drug rehabiliation courses!

A 0 would mean a policy achieved all its targets – there was no failure.

A 5 would signify a policy was massively off course, and unlikely to get close to meeting the targets or promise made.

A 10 would be Auckland Light Rail.

So where does this one get scored? They announced a special visa and predicted 20,000 would come to NZ on it. And only 12 have actually utilized it.

I rate this an 8.5 on the Kiwibuild scale.

A great article at Newsroom who interviewed the “oldest and most credible” witness against Peter Ellis. Some details:

• The senior detective told her parents “if they didn’t get their daughter to testify they would be as “perverted as Peter Ellis” and would be responsible for a “filthy bastard kiddie #@## going free”
• Of those seven children, five of their parents worked in the sexual abuse field.
• Some of the disclosures made by children from the creche included cakes and raisins being put up their bottoms, that Ellis killed people with axes, that he pushed children into a manhole with gorillas, smuggled them through dungeons, buried them in coffins, that children were made to kick each other in the genitals while adults stood around them in a circle playing guitars, and that Ellis’ mother had hung them in cages from the ceiling.
• There was no physical evidence and there were also no adult eyewitnesses

The Herald reports:

Auckland Transport (AT) has spent nearly $10 million and awarded contracts to dozens of companies on a controversial and little-used cycleway in Grey Lynn, which is even being criticised as inefficient by bike advocates. …

What’s more, a Herald survey over four days in March found just a handful of cyclists – between four and eight – used the cycleway over an hour in the morning peak.

Auckland ratepayers just getting fleeced again

Guyon Espiner has done a lengthy interview and article on Christopher Luxon, which is worth taking the time to read and watch.

MSN reports:

A man with a gun and a knife was detained by police early Wednesday morning near Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Maryland home after making threats against the Supreme Court justice, according to local and federal officials.

Authorities identified the man as Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., charging him with the attempted murder of a federal judge. The criminal complaint did not specifically name Kavanaugh. Efforts to immediately reach Roske’s family were unsuccessful. It is unclear whether he has an attorney. …

When Montgomery County Police Department officers were dispatched and arrested Roske without incident, he was still on the phone with 911, according to an affidavit. In his suitcase and backpack were a Glock 17 with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, a tactical knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crow bar, zip ties and duct tape, along with other gear.

After his arrest, according to the affidavit, Roske told police he was upset over the leaked draft of an opinion that would overturn the constitutional right to abortion and also over the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Tex.

This is a shocking development. The person who leaked the draft opinion bears some responsibility for this.

What is interesting (but not surprising) is how most US media are reporting this as a minor story. If a liberal Supreme Court Justice had been the subject of an assassination attempt by a right wing activist, the story would dominate the media for weeks and weeks.

Also the activist group that had published his home address on the Internet still turned up a few hours later for their daily harassment protest outside his home. How tone deaf is that? Someone has just turned up with a gun and knife to kill him and possibly his family, and you still hold your protest outside his house. Have these activists been condemned widely for this? Of course not.

The Herald reports:

A new attendance strategy is being launched by Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti this afternoon at Manurewa Intermediate School in South Auckland.

The strategy aims to see 70 per cent of school students at school regularly by 2024 and 75 per cent by 2026.

I thought this must be a typo. Surely not even this Government would say that the best they can do is aim for 70% of students attending school regularly by 2024. But, no that is what they are settling for.

In 2017 there were 37,904 students attending school less than 70% of the time. In 2021 this had increased to 67,687. That’s 30,000 extra kids basically not attending school.

And there are 300,000 kids not attending regularly (more than 90%).

In Term 2 of 2021 only 44% of Maori students were attending school regularly. Think what a huge difference it could make to outcomes for Maori later in life if that attendance rate was lifted to say 90%.

This is not just a problem of say 16 and 17 year olds not attending regularly. Only 69% of primary students attend regularly. 7% attend less than 70%. Their futures are probably pretty stuffed.

Stuff reports:

A Huntly Four Square owner who has been burgled three times in the last 90 days says New Zealand is a “third world country”.

Jas Sandhu is concerned that offenders are too brazen. He’s now living in constant fear for his family and staff.

He’s owned Fred’s Four Square since 2004, but he’s ready to give it up.

Can’t blame him.

Sandhu is frustrated that police didn’t attend the burglary until 9.30am after asking dispatch about 6am to get them to the scene straight away.

“I asked for one cop.We didn’t feel safe here, we just wanted someone to walk us through the shop to make sure no-one was inside. The person on the phone said if I wait for the cop I will be there all day.”

A ram raid on May 30 and another on March 6 had cost Sandhu over $70,000 in stock and damage, he estimates.

“This is the reason why these people have no fear, because they probably know cops aren’t coming.”

The two things that most deter criminals is the probability of being caught and the probability of serious punishment if caught.

He said in the 18 years he’s had the business it’s the worst crime he’s seen.

“I am feeling insecure at the moment.

“I have helped the local food bank with nearly $10,000 worth of food for the community. We support our community, so we aren’t just a business.”

He deserves better.