On my patreon page, I have written on the Sam Uffindell story which broke today. I explain what I would have done if I was on the pre-selection committee which vetted Uffindell.

I currently live in Cambridge and have had two occasions recently to drive to Auckland. What a dream the new expressway is (although there a few surfacing repairs to do).

Both occasions have taken me little over 70mins – sticking to the 110km speed limit of course – on a wide and safe road. You can then park where you want to park – clearly as close to the venue that you want to be at – and/or tiki tour in your own private vehicle – e.g. driving back on the beautiful coast road via Kawakawa Bay.

There is an alternative of course – as recommended by Michael Wood. I could have taken Te Huia. It would have taken a lot longer – please see below. I would have been highly limited as to the times I travelled. On both occasions the nearest station point was 30km from my destination.

“Te Huia runs return services from Frankton (Hamilton) to the Strand (Auckland) twice a day during the week, and once on Saturdays.

The service has an estimated running time of:

• 2 hours, 25 minutes from Frankton to the Strand (98 minutes to Papakura)
• 2 hours, 17 minutes from Rotokauri to the Strand (90 minutes to Papakura)
• 1 hour, 56 minutes from Raahui Pookeka | Huntly to the Strand (68 minutes to Papakura)

The total journey from Rotokauri to Britomart in Auckland will take an estimated 2 hours 35 mins (subject to the transfer time at Papakura or Puhinui if you are transferring trains).”

I do get that some people do not have private transport – but surely a daily bus would save plenty in and of itself. Even if you made it free to those in need.

Virtual signaling and not being prepared to acknowledge a screw up is so expensive … for the taxpayer.

The Herald reports:

The owner of an Auckland watch shop that was targeted in an attempted daylight smash and grab says the men who fought off the thieves are heroes.

A group of men, one armed with an axe, started “attacking” the window of About Time in Remuera around 4.20pm on Monday.

The owner of the store, Rebecca Alexander, said she was at home at the time of the incident but was on the phone to her husband who was at the store.

“I heard our office manager screaming, then I heard the breaking glass and I thought ‘oh dear we’ve been done again’,” she said.

Incredible footage of other store owners and locals who took on the offenders in an effort to thwart their escape has emerged.

“We had a couple of heroes, the man from the kebab shop happened to be cutting up carrots with quite a substantial machete-type knife – he rushed out and started attacking them or the car,” said Alexander.

Co-owner of Pro Consult Stuart Hobbs also ran down and picked up a sign to defend himself, he can be seen in the footage bailing the group up behind some stairs before following them to their car where he rammed them from the passenger side.

Good on them – they are heroes.

Another man can also be seen hitting the car.

“That was the only thing I could defend myself with because these three hoods were armed with hammers and axes, so I charged them and I think they got the fright of their life actually and they started to run and I just kept running after them,” said Hobbs.

“I think you know I’ve got the right to protect my community, I think I should do that and I think that if people can get together and not put up with this sort of thing, we’re going to be a better society for it.”

If the Government can’t protect you, then your community needs to. Absolutely.

The Herald reports:

Former Otago Polytechnic chief executive Phil Ker has called for an apology from Education Minister Chris Hipkins for turning the country’s polytechnic education system into “a national disgrace”.

It comes in the wake of last week’s apology from Te Pūkenga’s acting chief executive over its beleaguered financial situation and its delays in transitioning the country’s polytechnics into a single entity.

The Government said a combined $50 million deficit was unacceptable, so they merged them all into one centralised entity and the deficit has blown out to $100 million!

“Those hundreds of millions have just gone into structural stuff.

“Not a single dollar has been put into improving outcomes for learners, not a single dollar to strengthening the regional providers, and so the issues that we had before Hipkins started this misguided venture, are not only still there, they’re worse.”

Sounds like the health reforms!

The initial goal was to build a system that delivered more education to more people — particularly Māori, Pasifika and people with disabilities — and to do it better.

“I would challenge you to find a single, solitary, additional initiative in the last two years that has delivered more or better. It just hasn’t happened.

“I think it’s a national disgrace.”

He said colleagues still working in the system felt Te Pūkenga was trying to drive a compliance model, obsessed with rules, standardisation and people obeying the rules.

Command and control!

Christopher Luxon announced a significant policy yesterday in his conference speech:

There are 50,000 more people on the jobseeker benefit than when Labour took office. And for those aged under 25 it has gone from 23,000 to 34,000. Also of concern is the number who have been on the benefit for greater than 12 months is up 84%

So National’s announced a policy to get young people off welfare and into work. Key elements are:

• Community providers contracted to provide 18–24-year-old Jobseekers with a dedicated Job Coach to help get them into work
• Funding linked to keeping young people off welfare.
• Jobseekers will get a proper assessment of their barriers to finding work, and an individual job plan to address them.
• Those who fail to follow their plan will face sanctions, such as money management or benefit reductions
• long-term under 25 Jobseekers who get into work and stay off benefit for 12 months will recieve a $1,000 bonus.

This is a home run for me. It hits all the key elements of good policy:

• A well defined problem
• A partnership between government and community
• Funding tied to actual results or outcomes
• Resourcing to solve the problem
• A mixture of both carrot and stick

The policy is costed at around $120 million over four years, with 20,000 young people to be assisted. I am very happy to pay $6,000 per person to get them away from being a long-term welfare recipient. If it works for even 20% of them, it will be a great (social) investment.

There is absolutely no good reason welfare numbers should have increased so much, as official unemployment levels are so low. Having a work capable 18 year old spent a decade on welfare is not kind – it is cruel.

The Free Speech Union reported:

The craziness of woke censorship seems to break new records every week, as their fight to control others’ speech grows. But I don’t think we’ve ever taken on a case this mad.

A member of the Free Speech Union reached out last week saying that they were worried about their job security after an incident at work when they were challenged for misgendering a patient… the peculiar thing about this case was that the client was already deceased.

While doing their work as a mortician, they referred to a client (who biologically was a certain sex) by that gender. The mortician was promptly told that while the individual had been living, they had identified as a different gender and that it was offensive and ‘harmful’ to not respect their wishes.

How would the mortician even know? You can generally tell a body’s biological sex by looking at a cadaver, but how would you know their gender identity?

Matthew Lesh in the UK Telegraph writes:

Jacinda Ardern oozes self-satisfaction, whether swanning about at Davos or lecturing the world on climate change and the importance of “wellbeing”. At first this young PM became the darling of the progressive world – many admired the feminist credentials, sensitive handling of the Christchurch mosque attack and zero-Covid strategy.

But the carefully constructed façade is wearing thin. No amount of positive global press coverage can disguise the lacklustre economic situation in New Zealand, the growing list of broken promises and mounting unpopularity at home. Ardern is on track to lose the next election, with the latest opinion polls indicating a 10 percentage point drop over the last six months. The centre-right National Party, reinvigorated under Christopher Luxon, and the libertarian ACT Party, are both wooing voters.

This has been a dramatic fall from grace. Ardern’s Covid strategy was widely celebrated. Taking advantage of the island nation’s isolation, she introduced short lockdowns and border closures, and managed, at least initially, to eliminate the virus. In October 2020, she won a historic majority in the general election. But things began turning sour within months. The failure to vaccinate left the country isolated for much longer than elsewhere. By mid-2021, as the rest of the world was reopening, New Zealand embraced harsh lockdowns yet again. The borders will not fully reopen until the end of this month. Until recently, even many citizens were not allowed back into the country, a policy which tore families apart and left Kiwis destitute overseas. In one shocking case, a New Zealand journalist was forced to turn to the Taliban for sanctuary to deliver her baby after struggling to get home. For all that pain, the Covid reckoning has now arrived. An upsurge in cases has led to one of the highest daily death rates in the world and the reintroduction of restrictions, including a mask mandate and isolation requirements. It’s a gloomy turn of events for a country that is still unprepared to live with the virus.

I was in Australia a few weeks ago. I wore a mask to check in to my hotel. After a few minutes I noticed that I was the only person in the hotel wearing a mask. I took it off. For the next two days I’d say mask wearing was around 1%.

The loss of people has contributed to an acute skills shortage, with the health system struggling to handle the influx of Covid cases and other ailments. School children are frequently being sent home due to a lack of teachers. Inflation has reached 7.3 per cent, a 32-year high, driven by rising food, fuel and rent prices that make life more difficult.

Meanwhile, a surge in violent crime in hollowed-out cities, including gang activities, shootings and “ram-raids,” in which thieves drive cars into shop fronts to steal merchandise, have made the public fearful. This has, at least in part, been driven by troubled children and teenagers, who fell off the radar when Covid-19 shut schools and haven’t been seen in class for two years. The broader economic situation has combined with a sense that Ardern has over-promised and under-delivered. In 2017, Ardern’s flagship promise was to build 100,000 affordable homes within ten years – just 1,366 have been built. The same week that Ardern was featured on the front cover of British Vogue, in the edition guest edited by Meghan Markle, her government abandoned the housebuilding commitment. Since then, the government has spent over NZ$1 billion on emergency housing grants, including buying up motel rooms.

A long list of failures.

From a speech by Professor Rata to the ACT conference:

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’?

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.

Most societies demand total loyalty.

Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.

Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination.

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it.

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

It is a nice way to think about things – democracies are about partial loyalty.

Retribalism has attackedthe three pillars of democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring in language, education, and the media.

Retribalist ideology and language

Ideologies control not just speech but thought itself. The most successful have a manifesto, a ‘sacred text’ or covenant[10]. Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, the sacred texts of religions, the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – these are used to symbolise a spiritual, ‘beyond this world’ authority,  disguising the real-life ambitions of those controlling the ideology. 

Since the 1980s the Treaty of Waitangi has been developed as such a manifesto – using two highly effective tactics.

I call the first the transubstantiation tactic.

Here the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text. This mystical transubstantiation takes the treaty into the realm of the spiritual from where it acquires a doctrinal authority – one to be interpreted for we common folk by a new priesthood – treatyist intellectuals.

Once the treaty’s unchallengable spiritual authority is established the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose.

What about retribalist ideology and education?

Our  education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason. 

I have described how this ability creates the disposition of partial loyalty that is required to be a citizen. Reasoning provides the rationalism to counter the irrationalism of total loyalty.  By undermining the secular academic curriculum – that which creates the reasoning mind – we are destroying the partially loyal individual. Our fate – to be left with those capable only of mindless total loyalty.

Dissent will not be tolerated!

Politics arises from civil society – from the various conflicting interests of people. That political-civil interaction is what democracy looks like.  But, and this is the crux of my argument,  no interest group  has the right of governance unless the people agree. Elections are that act of agreement – always temporary with the winner always on trial. 

New Zealanders, both Maori and non-Maori, have not been asked to agree to tribalist governance.  If we had been asked would we have agreed?

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both.  If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.

For our country to remain a liberal democracy, we need to know what democracy is, its true value, and what we must do to restore it.

The agenda is clear – we saw it with the Rotorua bill, with the ECan bill and more.

A guest post from PaulL, a regular commentor:

We’re a bit over 2 years into our COVID journey.  It’s timely to question what our future is.  Our government, our media and our commentariat seem to be looking weeks or months at best into the future, focusing on alert levels, current COVID variants, whether we need another booster shot, who should be wearing masks and where.

It’s time we started discussing what the next 20 years are going to look like.

It feels to me that many are still in a mental model where we are going to eliminate COVID.  We just get enough boosters, or we wear masks often enough, or we develop immunity, and it’s going to go away.

It seems clear to me that COVID is not going to go away with any of our current interventions.  It is endemic, there will continue to be new variants, those new variants will continue to exhibit immune escape (whether your immunity comes from vaccination or prior infection).

Why are we not having a discussion about exactly what the new normal is going to look like?  If you listen to Michael Baker I think the conclusion can only be that we’d expect most NZers to require a booster at least twice per year (forever?), and that we’ll be wearing masks in many settings forever, ideally including all children in schools.  Vaccine mandates and traffic lights will remain, and the government will continue to regulate and intervene in many different ways, in particular reserving the right to move back to lockdowns if a new more infectious variant emerges.

Even in that world, I think we’ll be stuck in a situation where new variants are arising about every 3 months, but vaccines take at least 9 months to develop.  So the latest vaccine will always be two variants behind, and that means that the vaccine doesn’t provide a lot of protection against the latest variant.  BA.5 studies aren’t out yet, but with the previous BA.2.12.1 variant the vaccines had a 40% reduction in protection in the double vaccinated + booster cohort (i.e. that regime was 92% effective against BA1, and 52-69% effective against BA.2.12.1 – where effective means it reduced your chance of hospitalisation).  There’s an expectation it would be significantly less effective still against BA.5.

So what now?  Are we as a population prepared to continue getting booster shots every 6 months, and wearing masks in many situations, in order to slightly slow the timing with which we catch COVID, and somewhat attenuate the severity of our symptoms when we do get COVID? 

Surely the only paths out to an actual normal world are:

1. We develop sufficient natural immunity and/or COVID evolves and weakens enough that COVID becomes just another variant of the flu or the common cold – we catch it a couple of times a year and it’s OK, OR
2. We develop a vaccine that is sufficient to eradicate COVID – a “universal vaccine” that targets a biological pathway that COVID cannot simply evolve away from
3. We develop a treatment for those with COVID that makes it much less likely that you die from it – i.e. we treat the symptoms better even if we can’t stop you getting it
4. People just stop wearing masks and stop getting boosters, and COVID recedes into the background despite it still being a substantial risk and a substantial killer

Path 4 seems to be the default, because it seems to be happening everywhere else in the world.  A few people are still very concerned about COVID and are shouting into the wilderness about masks and vaccines (Michael Baker seems to be in this category).  And most people just seem to be treating it like they treat the risk of dying in a car accident – they know it can happen, but it doesn’t stop them getting in their car.

I don’t see any discussion of this, yet surely this is one of the most important things our government can and should be planning for – how exactly our country will emerge from mandates, traffic lights and mask wearing to be some version of the country we used to be.  If for no other reason than a failure of leadership and a failure of explanation seems by default to be leading us to that same option 4 that every other country seems to be marching down – just more slowly than everywhere else in the world except China.  If that’s OK then let’s have that discussion and agree that it’s OK.

I’d like to see some clear statements about the forward road map – we expect the traffic light rules to go away by a certain date, here are the criteria under which we’re going to stop requiring mask wearing, these are the criteria under which we’re going to remove vaccine mandates.  Is this discussion going on somewhere that I don’t look, or is it as sadly lacking amongst our governing classes as I fear?

Readers will know that the defendants in the NZ First donations trial were found not guilty. I acknowledge that verdict and my comments here are not to suggest they should be guilty, but that the logic used by the Judge is really (to be blunt) terrible and the decision should either be appealed, or the law changed quickly. The key aspects are:

‘Party donation’ is not defined by the party’s benefit, but by the party’s receipt of the
actual gift.

This is a preposterous and strained interpretation. The Judge has decided that you ignore the intentions of the person donating the money, and instead a donation only counts as a party donation if the person they gave it to actually passed it on. The intent of the law is very clear as it creates a duty to pass the money on, but the law is toothless because it has been decided that if you don’t pass it on, then it automatically can’t be a party donation that has to be passed on.

The law has a specific offence about not passing on party donations, and the Judge has said if you don’t pass the donation on, then by the fact you didn’t pass it on it isn’t a party donation, so there is no offence!

A key clause is that a party donation is “that is made to a party, or to any person or body of persons on behalf of the party who are involved in the administration of the affairs of the party”.

Now the Judge had strong evidence that both defendants were very involved in the administration of the affairs of NZ First. But in another shocking conclusion he decided:

The payments determinedly were not made to EF or FG in those capacities

So he has said that you can be totally involved in the administration of a party, and you can solicit funds for that party but if you then fail to hand the funds over to the party and instead stick it in the bank account of a company you own that provides services to the party, then you were wearing a different hat at the time, so that is all okay.

The people not meant to have a duty to pass a donation on are people with basically no connection to the party. If you go up to a random Mrs Smith on a street and give her $5,000 and say I want this to go to the Greens, then the obligation doesn’t apply. But these two individuals were given the money because they were representing the party, and it is beyond me how the Judge can decide they were wearing a different hat at the time because the people giving the money were not told of these different hats.

It really is an appalling judgement. I have no issue with the defendants being found not guilty on the basis there could be reasonable doubt, but the decision by the Judge that a donation intended for a party is not a party donation if you fail to pass it on to them can not be allowed to stand. It must be appealed or over-ruled by Parliament.

Zoe Strimpel writes:

At a small dinner party earlier this year—months before Boris Johnson resigned and she threw her hat in the ring to become prime minister, coming closer than anyone predicted—Kemi Badenoch, the 42-year-old MP for the Essex market town of Saffron Walden, was absorbed in fixing the TV so that it played cheesy early 2000s tunes. It was confusing to have to make a TV play music, but that was the only music source that night, and she went with it until Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child and Nelly’s Hot in Here rang from the speakers.

That done, she sensed trouble in the kitchen, and went to help the host out with the overheating purple sprouting broccoli. She drank the good French wine with zest, and, over dinner, asked sharp questions about the government’s handling of Covid, and the best way for those in power to approach the trans debate. 

Her demeanor in private that night matched her public persona, which, very suddenly two weeks ago, became a matter of intense public fascination. 

Pundits have described Badenoch as a Tory Barack Obama, with headlines boosting her as Labour’s “worst nightmare” and the “antiwoke crusader” Britain needs. She comfortably deploys the kind of bold and direct speech about complicated ideas that seem impossible for other politicians. In other words, she speaks like a normal person. And like Obama, Badenoch is an outsider: born to Nigerian parents, raised in Lagos, she worked at McDonalds when she arrived as a teenager in the U.K. 

Badenoch has garnered a fierce and widespread following, feted, in one prominent commentator’s words, with having “saved the Tories.” Last week, she beat the popular former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, 56 to 34 in a Yougov poll of Tory Party members.

She’s now out of the race for prime minister; the choice is now between Sunak and Liz Truss. But that almost seems secondary to what Kemi Badenoch has accomplished: A woman who doesn’t even hold a cabinet position has become the unequivocal star of the Tory Party.

She has become a real star and I predict she will become a full Cabinet Secretary once there is a new Prime Minister.

This speech has been much viewed and complimented.

Badenoch has rightly made a name for herself as the candidate who is “antiwoke, loves Britain, and is not afraid to take on the ‘hateful’ Left,” as the Daily Telegraph put it, but her conservatism goes well beyond questions of culture. She voted for Brexit, she loathes over-regulation and the expanding state bequeathed by Covid, and she is wary of green policies “bankrupting” the economy. 

Her political sensibilities emerged from her experience of Africa—though in the opposite way that adherents of Black Lives Matter would want. “Growing up in a place like Nigeria means you appreciate what we have in the UK and in the West,” she told me on the phone on Wednesday, after she had dropped out of the race. “One of the things I find frustrating is the ethno-nationalism that you get in many countries like Nigeria: ‘Oh, we’re going to do things our way, we’re not going to do things the Western way.’ People start looking at things like free markets and capitalism as being Western things. And actually the whole world would be in a much better place if they adopted these systems, free markets in particular,” she said. “They are still the best way of lifting people out of poverty.”

Free markets have pulled hundreds of mullions out of poverty in India and China – hardly Western countries.

One News reports:

The newly-opened Countdown Metro store is located in the suburb of Herne Bay and cost $50 million to build.

Three groups, including the Waitemata Local Board, made submissions against the liquor licence – but there were no objections from Auckland Council or health officials.

Communities Against Alcohol Harm secretary Grant Hewison told 1News that there were vulnerable communities that lived near Herne Bay, that would be affected by the new supermarket.

The Waitemata Local Board is dominated by Labour and Green activists who don’t think people can be trusted to buy a bottle of wine from their local supermarket.

And the notion that anywhere near Hearne Bay has vulnerable communities (code for poor and hence deemed unable to decide things for themselves) is laughable. They are bounded by Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.

This chart shows the national surgical waiting list since 2017. National actually set targets for elective surgery and the result was not just record numbers of elective operations, but a national waiting list of just 1,421 at the end of 2017. It is now around 2000% higher.

And no it isn’t just Covid-19. By the end of 2019 it had already gone up 360%.

Once again this shows that Labour is entirely focused on inputs such as spending, and is failing totally at improving actual outcomes. We now have 20 times as many people waiting for a needed operation.

The latest benefit numbers show:

• 41% more NZers on jobseeker support than in Sep 2017
• 22% more NZers on sole parent support than in Sep 2017

That is over 60,000 more NZers on those benefits, despite unemployment officially being lower. Is it because there are basically no sanctions anymore if you don’t try and get a job?

The NZ Initiative have highlighted the results from a pilot test against proposed NCEA numeracy and literacy standards for students. Those meeting the standard were:

1. Reading 66.9%
2. Numeracy 65.3%
3. Writing 34.5%

Apart from this being terrible for the students, it also poses a problem:

However, there is a dilemma for the Ministry of Education. The new literacy and numeracy
would put in place a much-needed credential for these key skills. But should the Ministry go
ahead with them if doing so mean that two thirds of New Zealand students would leave
school without an NCEA certificate?

Their solution is:

1. Implement the literacy and numeracy standards, as planned in 2024, but not as corequisites for NCEA. Instead, they should contribute to a stand-alone literacy and
   numeracy certificate. Students who hold it will be credentialled as having sufficient
   literacy and numeracy for work and life.
2. Respecify the literacy and numeracy corequisite for NCEA. They should be at the
   highest level possible that will maintain an acceptable attainment rate for NCEA.
3. Urgently reform literacy and numeracy teaching at primary level. To avoid
   perpetuating the poor literacy and numeracy of young New Zealanders evinced in
   the TEC and Ministry reports cited here. A scientifically proven, structured approach
   to teaching must systematically be adopted.
4. Introduce and fund structured literacy and numeracy programmes for Years 7-10.
   These are needed for students who have come through primary school without
   having been taught these key skills effectively.
5. Stipulate a time at which the piloted standards will become corequisites for NCEA.
   It is important that a specific time is stipulated. Otherwise, the impetus to reform
   the way in which literacy and numeracy are taught in New Zealand schools may be
   lost. The task of remediating the problem created by decades of ineffective teaching
   is formidable. Given the size of the task, implementation in about 2027 may be
   appropriate.

The key is 3 and 4 – improving the literacy and numeracy of students.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has distanced herself from campaign material claiming “more than two million New Zealanders” received the cost of living payment on Monday, when in fact it was closer to 1.3m.

She can distance herself from it, but it is her party claiming it. They said it will go to over two million and it is barely half that.

It comes as the $116 payment – the first of three over three months – comes under criticism with potentially thousands of ineligible people receiving it.

700,000 fewer living Kiwis in NZ are getting it, but thousands of Kiwis living overseas or dead are getting it!

IRD has also explained for similar reasons it cannot rule out the payment potentially going to accounts of deceased people.

It has. I was informed by a lawyer yesterday that IRD paid $116.67 into the trust account of a client who died in December 2020. It seems the Government is incapable of ever cross-referencing with the deaths register.

On Tuesday, a Labour campaign email asking for donations stated: “More than two million New Zealanders received $116 from the new Cost of Living Payment”.

Don’t you love it. They take money from taxpayers, and then give some of it back to some people, and claim that in return for doing so, you should donate money to Labour!

The Government has hired an extra 700 people just to administer this handout which has gone to half the people they claimed it would, and thousands who are overseas or dead. There is a way they could have avoided all this.

They could have dropped the bottom tax rate on income up to $14,000 by 3% for a year. It would have needed no extra staff for IRD and would have gone to every single New Zealander who earned income and paid tax in New Zealand.

But Labour hate cutting taxes, so instead they went for an inefficient handout that isn’t getting to half those they promised it would, and to people who are no longer living in New Zealand.

Lots of discussion around the state of play for education in NZ and the rolling disaster that is evident at 2021 school leavers data is becoming available.

More importantly we look at schools that are doing things well … it is possible.

The Herald reports:

A bill allowing Ngāi Tahu to appoint two voting councillors to the Canterbury Regional Council was passed tonight with fractious debate in Parliament about whether it will diminish or enhance democracy and whether other councils will follow suit.

This ends equality of suffrage in Canterbury. All residents get to vote for the elected Councillors but those residents who belong to Ngai Tahu get additional Councillors because of their ancestry.

Tirikatene described the bill, the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngai Tahu Representation) Amendment Bill was “about the evolution of our treaty partnership and representation of Māori, of iwi at the local government level”.

The next step will be all Councils to have 50% of their representatives appointed by Iwi.

National’s Paul Goldsmith said National would repeal the law if it became the Government because it did not uphold equal voting rights for all New Zealanders and did not provide electoral accountability. 

The most basic part of democracy is being able to vote those in power out. The Government seems allergic to this.

“It is our view on this side of the House that the Treaty of Waitangi does not trump democracy and the country has not decided that,” he said.

Sadly such a view should be uncontroversial, but it seems only one side of politics thinks so.

In response to growing criticism of the Reserve Bank allowing inflation to hit 7.3%, Grant Robertson labelled critics as having hindsight. Well that was a mistake, as it allowed the NZ Initiative to respond showing their many many criticisms over the last four years. They include:

• Mar 2018: Warned about price stability
• Aug 2019: Published a research note about the loss of Reserve Bank focus
• Oct 2019: Highlighted loss of economists at Reserve Bank
• Oct 2019: Criticized the decision to cut OCR 50 points instead of 25
• Apr 2020: Warned about funding deficit spending through the central bank
• May 2020: Warned against RBNZ monetarising govt debt
• Jun 2020: Warned against money printing
• May 2021: Warned the current path would end in inflation
• June 2021: Warned against using balance sheet to but climate bonds instead of reducing debt

Think how much better we would be off if the Government or the Reserve Bank had listened!

Professor Robert MacCulloch also notes:

Yes, the RBNZ was flagging future negative interest rates and Quantitative Easing even before the Coronavirus Pandemic. The NZ Initiative fully warned the Finance Minister of the implications. We had perfect foresight. There is not one grain of hindsight in the Wheeler-Wilkinson Report, contrary to the Minister’s assertion.

Basically it was smearing the critics for being right!

As for forecasting the rise in inflation, this blog commented in April 2021, “Our prediction is that the cost of living is on the way up in NZ and interest rates will be going up sooner rather than later”. In May 2021 we wrote, “Amusingly (if that’s the right word?) the RBNZ’s Monetary Policy Committee seems to be the only group in the country which doesn’t think prices are on the rise”. Why? Since in May 2021 the ANZ’s Business Outlook survey showed inflationary pressures were soaring. “Reported costs are through the roof”, said ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner”.

And these statements were made whilst the RBNZ was still printing money!

So Hindsight Economics, is it, eh Grant? No, that’s your style of economics. Folks like Wilkinson, Hartwich & Crampton at the NZ Initiative, former Governor Wheeler & me, we do Foresight Economics. We do so to try to prevent inflation & cost-of-living crises like the one you threw us into. We put in effort to help serve the public interest – my work for doing so is unpaid – and all you can do, Grant, is put us down for political purposes.

Again, think if they had listened!