Newshub has released their April Reid Research poll.

Party Vote

• Labour 38.2% (-6.1% from February)
• National 40.5% (+9.2%)
• Greens 8.4% (-1.2%)
• ACT 6.4% (-1.6%)
• NZ First 1.7% (-0.1%)
• Maori 2.5% (+0.5%)
• TOP 0.9%
• Conservative 0.7%

Seats

• Labour 48 (-17 from election)
• National 51 (+18)
• Greens 10 (nc)
• ACT 8 (-2)
• Maori 3 (+1)

Governments

• Labour/Green 58/120
• National/ACT 59/120
• Labour/Green/Maori 61/120

Preferred PM

• Jacinda Ardern 36.6% (-6.7%)
• David Seymour 5.1% (-2.9%)
• Christopher Luxon 23.9% (+6.1%)

Should Ardern stand again in 2023?

• Yes 50.2%
• No 41.4%
• Unsure 8.4%

Cost of Living

• Government has done enough to address cost of living crisis: yes 15.2%
• No 77%
• Unsure 7.8%

The Herald reports:

The Green Party has scrapped its male co-leader requirement and added one to ensure Māori representation.

The party convened over the weekend for a special meeting where its members voted to implement the changes to its constitution immediately.

The two co-leaders now need to constitute one woman, and one person of any gender (providing leadership pathways for non-binary and intersex). One co-leader also needs to be Māori.

So under this new rule, you would never have had Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald as co-leaders.

It also means that Chloe Swarbrick can’t replace Marama Davidson as a co-leader as Chloe is not Maori. She could replace James though.

Leach said politics had never provided a “level playing field” for Māori and Pasifika peoples, people of different genders, rainbow communities, and women.

Really?

21% of Parliament is Maori – much higher than their share of the adult population.

8% of Parliament is Pasifika – slightly higher than their 7% share of the adult population.

49% of Parliament is female, marginally below their 50.4% share of the adult population.

11% of Parliament is LGBT – much higher than their share of the adult population.

This is constitutionally repugnant. I am no fan of Winston, but there is no way the leader of a political party and former Deputy Prime Minister should be banned from the grounds and buildings of Parliament.

Whoever made this decision should rescind it asap.

Radio NZ reports:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pressing on with plans to build a giant $7.5 billion data centre in Auckland, after receiving clearance from the Overseas Investment Office.

The global giant said decision the was an “important milestone” and brings it a step closer to delivering world-class computing services to New Zealand.

“Our investment includes building data centres, buying regional goods and services, operating utilities and facilities, and supporting wages and salaries that contribute to the local economy,” AWS country manager Tiffany Bloomquist said.

The major investment would create 1000 direct and indirect jobs, Bloomquist said, claiming it would add about $10.8b to the local economy over the next 15 years.

The centres would provide cloud-based storage facilities of data, so it could be accessed more quickly by local organisations.

This is a huge huge investment that dwarfs pretty much any other investment in New Zealand. It is extremely exciting for both the economic impact but also the Internet impact.

An excellent speech by Karl du Fresne to a meeting at Vic Uni hosted by the Free Speech Union. Some extracts:

My old friend and former journalism colleague Barrie Saunders, who’s also a member of the union and is here tonight, sent me an email last week ahead of this talk.

Barrie has always written very concisely and his email consisted of just one line. “Karl”, he said, “did you ever think ten years ago you would be speaking about free speech?”

The answer, of course, is no. Ten years ago we smugly believed that all the big debates about freedom and democracy had been won and we could all relax. Ha! More fools us. …

We’ve become accustomed to hearing the words, “I support free speech, but ….” New Zealand is full of people in positions of power and influence who purport to defend free speech, but always with the addition of that loaded word “but”. You can’t say you support free speech and then, in the next breath, put limitations around it beyond the ones that are already clearly established in law and broadly accepted, such as those relating to defamation and incitement to hatred or violence,

We’ve been introduced to phrases unheard of a few years ago: cancel culture, speech wars, hate speech, gender wars, safe spaces, culture wars, trigger warnings, transphobia and no-platforming. We’ve acquired a whole new vocabulary.

It’s a great point Barrie made. We all thought the free speech issue was done and dusted. Everyone from left to right was in favour of free speech. But this is no longer the case.

We’ve seen the emergence of a media monoculture in which all mainstream media outlets adopt uniform ideological positions that effectively shut out alternative opinions, even when those marginalised voices may represent mainstream opinion.

We’ve seen traditional ideological battle lines totally redrawn as people on the left and right of politics unite around the need to save freedom of speech from a new and powerful cohort of people who have co-opted the term “hate speech” as a pretext for banning any opinion that they dislike.

Even worse is when they claim the speech they don’t like makes them unsafe.

Now, speaking of the police, I want to refer briefly to the blogger Cameron Slater. It emerged late last year through an OIA request that Slater had been under police surveillance. A police intelligence analyst was concerned that Slater was publishing information that denigrated Labour party policies and individuals linked to them. Another officer expressed concern that Slater was “anti-government” and a senior sergeant suggested they should pay him a visit.

In other words there are people in the police who apparently think that anyone who criticises the government should be watched. This is how police states begin. Fortunately in this case, wiser senior officers stepped in before things got out of hand.

Of course Slater is a highly controversial figure and a lot of people dislike him, but it’s cases like this that test our real commitment to free speech. As the left-wing American activist and writer Noam Chomsky has said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” [For the record, I don’t despise Slater, though there have been many occasions when I’ve wondered about his judgment.]

Yep the Police wanted to visit Cameron because he was anti-Government!

Speaking of Chomsky, a striking aspect of the speech wars is that they cut right across the traditional battle lines between left and right. It’s a fact of history that suppression of free speech has far more often been used against the left than the right, which probably explains why veteran leftists such as Chris Trotter and Matt McCarten are supporters of the Free Speech Union. Martyn Bradbury is another on the left who advocates forcefully for freedom of expression; there’s no one more vigorous in his tormenting of the woke. 

I hate to say it, but Martyn does excellent work in this area.

A common factor in these instances is the belief that people have a right not to be offended and that this right takes precedence over the right to free speech. It’s as if the woke elements in society have developed an allergic reaction to the robust democracy that most of the people in this room grew up in, where vigorous debate was seen as an essential part of the contest of ideas that democracy depends on.

Instead of a contest of ideas, we have a contest of supression.

Now if I may go slightly off-topic, I’d like to talk about the New Zealand media. It’s only slightly off-topic because free speech goes hand in hand with a free press – but it’s now clear that proponents of free speech in New Zealand can no longer rely on the media for support. That was made obvious when NZME, owners of the New Zealand Herald, refused to accept a perfectly lawful advertisement from Speak Up for Women. That advertisement consisted simply of the dictionary definition of “woman” as an “adult human female”, followed by the kicker line “Say no to sex self-identification”. Wildly inflammatory stuff, clearly – too hot by far for the Herald.

I can claim to be something of an authority on freedom of the press if only for the reason that I’ve written two books about it. Back then the concern was with threats to media freedom from outside sources, principally the state. But ironically we’re now in a position where I believe the New Zealand media abuse their own freedom.

They have fatally compromised their independence and their credibility by signing up to a government scheme under which they accept millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and in return commit themselves to abide by a set of ideological principles laid down by that same government.

The part in bold is the important part. The media have all signed up to a particular political or ideological view of the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi, and their funding depends on it.

The mainstream media are characterised by ideological homogeneity, reflecting the views of a woke elite and relentlessly promoting the polarising agenda of identity politics.

A good summary.

I want to conclude by saying I’ve been a journalist for more than fifty years and I’ve never felt that freedom of expression in New Zealand was in greater danger than it is now. Robert Muldoon was a tyrant who tried to bully the media into submission, but eventually journalists and editors stood up to him. In the past few years, however, we’ve gone backwards. We now live in a climate of authoritarianism and denunciation that chokes off the vibrant debate that sustains democracy, and tragically the media are part of the problem.

Muldoon had nothing on Twitter!

RNZ report:

Journalism is now dominated by highly educated elites who crusade about racial matters in order to generate outrage while protecting their own economic interests, says a US writer.

Newsweek magazine deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon has a new book; Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.

Note Ungar-Sargon is from the left and a widely published journalist herself.

The problem media is not “hyper focused” on finding solutions to the remaining areas in which systemic racism still exists, she says.

“What they have done is redefined what counts as racism to encompass an ever growing, metastasizing set of behaviours and things that you can’t really solve.

“I mean, they’ve convinced themselves that America’s DNA is racist, which means that it can never be fixed, right? Because you can’t change your DNA.”

This is a cop out, Ungar-Sargon says.

“Sociologists in America have tracked a shift in white liberal public opinion, to where white liberals are now more extreme in their views on race, and what counts as racism, than black and Latino Americans.”

White liberals are presuming to know best, she says.

We see this in NZ also.

“White liberals have taken the lead and shifted the discourse from dealing with the actual problems that the black community will tell you they have, to dealing with a set of things that are really very ephemeral, very academic in nature, and actually perpetuate the economic interests of those white liberal elites.”

Ungar-Sargon, who is a Marxist, says the book is a battle cry on behalf of the working class.

“I feel that white liberal elites have gotten very rich, and they’ve abandoned the working class.”

Journalists used to be working class and they saw their job as being outside of power looking in but are now part of the system, she says.

“They’re part of the elites, they go to the same colleges as billionaires, their children go to the same schools as politicians, they are now within the elites writing for other elites, creating content for other elites.”

That would be an interesting thing to look at in New Zealand – how many journalists come from a working class background?

The book is full of data, she says, that might make for some uncomfortable reading by liberals – something she experienced herself a few years back.

“It was a Yale study that found that there was a difference between how white liberals and how white conservatives talk to black and Latino Americans.

“And the difference was white liberals dumbed down their vocabulary, when they meet a black person and white conservatives don’t do this.

“I read this in 2018 and I thought, this is an indictment of my entire worldview. Because I immediately recognised myself and everyone I knew in that, and that impulse to dumb down your speech that comes from that generous place of like, we must help these people.”

The bigotry of low expectations!

This morning Jacinda Ardern refused to rule out a wealth tax, which looks like Labour are gearing up for a massive broken promise.

Here is a video of Ardern in 2020:

Q: Would you resign rather than put in a wealth tax:
A: It’s not in play so there is no need for the hypothetical. It won’t happen.
Q: That is something that has been put in place before over raising the super age so would you resign before you put in a wealth tax
A: I won’t allow it to happen as Prime Minister

So Ardern did not rule out a wealth tax for one electoral cycle. She ruled it out while she is Prime Minister. So again if they now move to introduce one, this will be a massive broken promise that will feature on billboards up and down New Zealand.

Robby Soave at Reason writes:

The Washington Post has accused billionaire Elon Musk, who is set to acquire Twitter for $44 billion, of “targeting” the company’s employees for harassment.

In actuality, all Musk did was offer some entirely valid criticisms of a specific, high-level employee: Vijaya Gadde, a top executive at Twitter and someone Politico once described as “the most important Silicon Valley executive you’ve never heard of.” And if criticizing someone on Twitter is equivalent to harassing them, has The Washington Post not committed the exact same crime?

The Post‘s confused and contradictory reporting on this issue notes that Saagar Enjeti, co-host of the podcast Breaking Points, named Gadde as Twitter’s “top censorship advocate” for her integral role in the company’s decisions to suspend former President Donald Trump’s account, and more infamously, to prevent users from sharing The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden story.

Musk replied to Enjeti’s tweet with this comment: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

Not only is Musk absolutely correct that muzzling the Hunter Biden story was a bad decision: Twitter actually agrees that it was a bad decision. Former CEO Jack Dorsey has described that action as a “total mistake” and repeatedly apologized for it. He clearly regrets working to suppress the story.

There’s really no headline here. If there is a headline, it should probably be: Elon Musk Agrees With Twitter That Censoring the Hunter Biden Story Was Wrong.

Yet here’s how The Washington Post headlined this revelation: “Elon Musk boosts criticism of Twitter executives, prompting online attacks.”

Basically it is a nonsense story.

But taken to its logical conclusion, isn’t Dwoskin’s article doing the same thing? After all, she is directing criticism—legitimate in her view, but criticism nonetheless—at Enjeti and Musk. She “mentioned” them, to use her own terminology. No doubt this will produce some angry denunciations; Musk is currently receiving both hearty praise and relentless demonization as a result of his Twitter purchase. If Musk is “targeting” Gadde for harassment, what is the best way to describe a Washington Post article that wrongly maligns him? Isn’t Dwoskin “targeting” Musk?

If Dwoskin and the Post reject that analogy, this is what they are saying: when the media industry holds people to account, it’s noble and justified; but when people outside media hold people to account, it’s an act of targeted harassment. The media then insist these acts of targeted harassment (as they define it) are newsworthy, and the cycle repeats itself.

I think that nails it.

The Age reports:

The anti-corruption commission’s interim findings – contained in a draft report of Operation Watts sighted by this masthead – reveal that Andrews is among senior Labor figures to have privately conceded that “significant cultural reform is required within the ALP” to rid the party of a culture that encouraged the misuse of public funds, nepotism and other wrongdoing.

IBAC interviewed 26 witnesses, including the premier, in private and seven witnesses in public hearings. It concluded in its draft report that cultural failings within Victorian Labor were systemic and had been condoned or even encouraged by party leaders for many years.

So an independent watchdog has found Victorian Labor is systemically corrupt. The value of independent watchdogs!

While IBAC found it could not definitely conclude that all Labor’s factions had engaged in the same wrongdoing as Somyurek’s Moderate Labor, the evidence it gathered made it “highly likely the misuse of publicly funded staff” and “employment of family members and factional allies for party or factional purposes and nepotism has occurred for a much longer period and is much more widespread [across Labor] than Moderate Labor”.

“The unethical cultures exposed in Operation Watts are not confined to the [Moderate Labor] faction. These unethical practices are embedded within the [Victorian Labor] branch and are systemic to all of the factions,” the report found.

They were all at it!

The investigation uncovered evidence that money raised at fundraising events attended by state and federal Labor MPs was siphoned off to pay for fake ALP memberships as part of the branch-stacking operation. IBAC also concludes that jobs in state and federal MPs’ offices in Victoria were handed to factional operatives or their relatives in the knowledge they would not be required to show up to work.

“Evidence found that many of these employees did not perform their public duties either because their role had been given to them as a sinecure or because they were performing factional tasks instead of their public duties. As such, constituents were deprived of the support and services that should have been available to them.”

There should be people in jail for this.

An article by Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic has been widely discussed and shared. I recommend taking the time to read it (it is long). It is called “WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID”.

The TLDR answer is social media. A couple of extracts:

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.

It’s true.

The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain.

Also true, and not just in the US!

Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on.

Again we see this in NZ. A near total focus on equality of outcome, not of rights or opportunities and anyone who disagrees is called a racist.

Jenny Nicholls writes:

When friends popped in to see my Uncle Geoff one Friday in late March, he seemed happier than he had been in months.

“Lucky you didn’t come tomorrow!” he said.

Geoff did not expect to be home on Saturday afternoon. Not in the usual sense, anyway.

“I’m doing a runner,” as he told me. “I’m off.”

Uncle Geoff had terminal cancer, and was, to his friends’ and family’s grief, eligible for “assisted dying services” after two attempts at chemo. His life, the family say, might have been saved by a colonoscopy. …

It had been just 19 days since the family’s first phone call to the Ministry of Health’s 0800 ‘Assisted Dying’ number. (Uncle Geoff joked to me that “they get a lot of tyre-kickers”.)

“Although, obviously, we would have liked Dad to live much longer, I thought the whole process was wonderful,” Ursula told me. “[The medical staff we spoke to] were amazing – so respectful and polite.”

Her father’s decision to use the service, she says, was not made because of problems with his palliative care, which the family was ‘mostly happy’ with. He hated being in hospital; and, having been fit and powerful all his life, he hated not being able to shower himself.

“We all had some really great quality time,” Ursula said. “We knew when he was going, so we were able to say goodbye to him, and tell him that we loved him.”

Isn’t that a much more humane way for Geoff to die. The euthanasia law meant he had a choice, and could exercise it.

For those interested, in the four and a half months to 31 March there were:

• 206 applications started for assisted dying
• 66 assisted deaths
• 59 applications still in progress
• 40 deemed ineligible
• 30 died before the process was complete
• 11 withdrew

It is good to see some people are being deemed ineligible – that shows those involved are not just rubber stamping (not that I thought they would). Also good to see that some withdrew – this is an important feature – you can change your mind at any time.

74%

Curia was commissioned by the Free Speech Union to conduct a survey of academics at the eight NZ universities on how well academic freedom is working for them. Academic freedom is a legislative right in the Education and Training Act, and something all of society should be concerned with protecting.

The results are here.

A key table is this:

For an academic to score their level of academic freedom a 2.5 or lower, means they must feel severely restricted or unfree. I would have thought you might have 5% or so rating so lowly, but for some measure it was between 20% and 30%.

The proportion of respondents who rated their freedom as a 5 or lower out of 10 on each measure was:

1. Free to engaged in research of choice 21%
2. Free to criticize the Government 28%
3. Free to regulate subject matter 32%
4. Free to teach and assess 34%
5. Free to question and test received wisdom 45%
6. Free to raise differing perspectives 47%
7. Free to debate or discuss gender and sex issues 47%
8. Free to debate or discuss Treaty issues 50%

What is also of interest is a huge gap between those who think academic freedom is working well for them, and those who don’t. I commented:

It is clear the distribution is not a normal bell curve with most responses around the middle. For the freedom to question and test received wisdom you have 21% saying it is very low and 38% very high. Different academics perceive their level of academic freedom dramatically different from their peers.

If I was the Minister of Education I would want to know who so many academics do not feel they have academic freedom, despite the legislation.

Many readers may have heard about the Azov Battalion in Ukraine, which is often cited as proof of Putin’s claims that he wants to denazify Ukraine. Of course far right parties in Ukraine got less than 2% of the vote, and the President is Jewish, but the Azov Battalion is often cited.

Well this very good FAQ puts things into context. I learnt a lot from reading it.

An OIA finds that 105 staff have resigned from the Reserve Bank in the 15 months from Jan 21 to Mar 22. As they have around 400 staff that is a massive 25% turnover in 15 months. Almost, as if there is a problem!

a guest post by Milkenmild:

Kiwiblog readers may have noticed recently some advertising for this interesting book.

Party Hopper is the autobiography of Peter McCardle, MP for Heretaunga from 1990 to 1996 and a NZ First list MP from 1996 to 1999. His was a relatively brief, but turbulent parliamentary career. He alienated himself early from his National Party colleagues by voting against the 1991 benefits cuts. Re-winning his Heretaunga seat in 1993, despite the swing against National, did not help his prospects. He was enthusiastic about joining Mike Moore’s proposed centrist party, before finishing the parliamentary term as an independent and joining NZ First. He played a significant part in the infamously dragged out coalition negotiations in 1996, and was appointed Minister of Employment – the role he most coveted. When Jenny Shipley broke up the coalition in 1998, McCardle left NZ First to remain a minister, but retired from parliament at the 1999 election. Almost immediately, he began a second political career, first as an adviser to the Act parliamentary team until 2005, and then with National Party health spokesmen and ministers until 2017.

A party hopper indeed. Having an inside seat at many of the most dramatic political ructions of the past thirty years, McCardle has many interesting details to share. But that is not the heart of the book, which is dominated by three themes – family, faith and employment policy. The first two themes provide the foundation for McCardle’s political motivation.

Working as an employment centre manager, he developed firm convictions that there needed to be a combined approach to welfare and employment, and a focus on the long-term unemployed. His ideas did not fit with departmental approaches. He tried his luck as a parliamentary candidate, and was a surprise winner in Heretaunga. His mission, almost zealotry, was to implement his employment ideas, and he pursued this irrespective of any conventional party loyalties

His ambitions were fulfilled with the creation of Winz in 1998, from a merger of the Employment service and the Department of Social Welfare, and McCardle busied himself with the creation of his cherished ‘one-stop shop’ and work-for-the-dole schemes. After  parliament, he found himself in demand as a parliamentary researcher and loyal aide to Act and National Party MPs.

The book is a good combination of personal life and behind-the-scenes political machinations. Those looking for much criticism or dirt will not find it here – McCardle comes across as too nice a guy to make enemies or seek revenge on any enemies in print. His Cathollic faith is the bedrock of his life, giving him comfort through life’s vicissitudes and an acceptance that things are meant to be – all part of God’s plan.

I found the best parts of the book to be the descriptions of his electorate campaigning and the endless negotiations that are political life. I could have wished for more about his experiences as a city councillor and DHB member, as illuminated by his time in politics at the national level.

Radio NZ reports:

Hamilton police found four children aged 7, 10, 11 and 12 holding stolen toys at the scene of a break-in at a shopping centre last night, with one of the children injuring themselves in an attempt to get away.

Hamilton City Area Commander Inspector Andrea McBeth said multiple alarms alerted police to the break-in at Chartwell at about 1am.

When officers arrived at the scene, they found the four children holding stolen toys and other goods.

McBeath said the 11-year-old ran off after seeing police, but was not chased by officers who stayed with the other three remaining youths.

But while fleeing, the boy fell about 8 metres to the ground, injuring his arm. He was soon found by police and taken to hospital in an ambulance.

So four kids were out at 1 am breaking into shops and robbing them. It is impossible this was done without the parents knowing about it, or just not caring. The parents should be charged.

Stuff reports:

Opposition parties say Labour is misusing its majority by keeping useful information away from the select committees.

MPs from across the House, including National, ACT and the Greens say backbench Labour MPs – who make up the majority of members at most select committees – are actively blocking parliamentarians from accessing information from officials.

The Greens are in Government so it is also a Government party saying it.

The issue of select committee gatekeeping surfaced most recently with the National Party’s justice, police and mental health spokespeople being denied access to the police commissioner and also for a briefing on the damning Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission report.

But Opposition MPs say this has been an ongoing issue, since Labour won a majority at the 2020 election.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon said there was a trend where Labour MPs would block briefings and inquiries about health, policing and housing.

“For a Government that purports to be transparent and open, it’s blocking us from doing our job – which is holding them to account but more importantly, doing the right thing by New Zealanders who are asking some questions,” he said.

Luxon said his MPs started keeping a record of every time Government MPs blocked their requests for briefings or meetings with officials, which he said was happening more than once a week.

National had recorded 19 instances so far.

This is why I support ACT’s policy to have the Opposition have a majority on select committees, so the Government can’t block select committees from even asking questions.

Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick​ said she tried at every meeting of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, for six months, to get a briefing from Treasury and the Reserve Bank on how the two organisations forecast house prices.

She had the support of ACT and National’s Nicola Willis, but Labour successfully blocked the request as it has a majority.

Swarbrick said it made no sense for MPs to be that concerned about discussions or releasing information.

The Labour backbench Ministers are blocking on behalf of the Minister, because they don’t want Parliament (and the public) to have the information.

The Rotorua bill ending equality of suffrage in New Zealand has been killed, or to save face – they are calling it paused.

They planned to ram it through Parliament in a few weeks. The Māori Affairs Committee only opened submissions for two weeks. They started scheduling oral submissions before the written submissions had even closed.

But what stopped them wasn’t the Attorney-General’s advice it breached the Bill of Rights Act (they knew it did and didn’t care) but the fact in just two weeks we got over 10,000 New Zealanders to do individual submissions against the bill – including 2,500 who asked to speak to their submission.

This meant the Māori Affairs Committee would have had to meet for eight hours a day, five days a week for five weeks to hear all the submissions against. It made it impossible for it to be passed by 1 June.

I did my oral submission on Friday last week and let me tell you it was very very clear the Labour and Māori Party MPs on the committee supported the bill and wanted it to past.

What is impressive about the number of submissions, is that this bill was almost totally ignored by the mainstream media until after the initial submission period closed.

It’s great we have won this one, but have no doubt they will try again. The Māori Party are very clear that they do support ending equality of suffrage in New Zealand. Labour don’t come out and say so, but the fact they discussed this bill at caucus, decided to support it, voted for it at first reading, spoke in favour of it, and supported it at select committee hearings makes it clear that what stopped them isn’t a belief the bill was wrong, but because too many people found out about it.

So this battle is won, but the war is just starting. The Herald reports:

Chadwick said she would write to the Māori affairs select committee clerk to seek the pause.

“Given the public interest in this process, I am making the decision public now.

“We have always said the bill is about the right way forward for Rotorua and have always been committed to working through the parliamentary process with central government.

So Chadwick states that ending equality of suffrage is the right way forward for Rotorua.

Rotorua MP Todd McClay said he viewed the bill as an “utter and absolute waste of time and money”.

“The council should not pause the bill, [it] should throw it in the rubbish bin as fast as [it] can.

“It is the most undemocratic piece of legislation that I have seen.”

He did not believe the bill had the support of Rotorua people and should be withdrawn from Parliament.

I think it is far to say that is no exaggeration. I can’t recall any other law in recent decades that sought to reduce the power of people to 39% of other people, purely based on their race.

Robert MacCulloch is a professor macroeconomics. He writes:

Let’s build the prosecution’s case. Exhibit A is that the defendants already admit it. At the last meeting of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), members confessed that “annual consumer price inflation is expected to peak around 7 per cent in the first half of 2022”.

Are the shocks hitting us short to medium term? No.

The bank says, “A broad range of indicators are highlighting … ongoing inflation pressures.”

Has the misconduct of monetary policy, which has been inciting the inflationary breach, ended? No. The bank says that the Official Cash Rate (OCR) “is stimulatory at its current level”.

Not only has NZ’s inflation target been ignored, but those responsible for achieving it are still pouring gasoline on the fire.

Yep inflation is three times what it should be, and the Reserve Bank still has a stimulatory setting for the official cash rate!

Exhibit B comes from Professor John Taylor, inventor of the “Taylor Rule”. That rule is a simple formula explaining how a Central Bank can quell an inflationary shock. It has proved a robust guideline when setting Official Cash Rates around the world.

The rule states that an increase in the OCR of more than one percentage point is required when inflation increases by one percentage point. The reason is to ensure that real interest rates go up to reduce borrowing.

Without a rise in real rates, debt-financed spending can continue to fuel inflation.

So what’s been going on in NZ? Annual inflation, measured at March 2021, was 1.5 per cent. Annual inflation at March 2022 was 6.9 per cent. In other words, inflation has risen by more than five percentage points this past year.

However, the RBNZ has only increased the OCR by a little over one percentage point over the same period, sending short-term real rates deeply negative.

The Taylor Rule is powerful evidence that there has been no intention, whatsoever, of our authorities to meet their obligation of keeping inflation on target.

This is important to note. The Reserve Bank has chosen to keep inflation high, despite being contractually obliged not to do so.

After keeping the cash rate so low for so long and embarking on a $53 billion Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, the bank is now in panic mode. It is panicking at the prospect of a full-on policy reversal that will highlight past mistakes and provoke widespread debt distress.

Those having trouble paying back their mortgages in the next few years can blame our RBNZ Governor and Finance Minister. They encouraged a borrowing binge to buy houses at wildly inflated prices, financed by dirt cheap credit, turning a blind eye to the breach of the target to which they mutually agreed and not learning the lessons of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

Printing cheap money comes with a cost.

The official defence is that other Central Banks are just as bad. That’s not true. Not one of them operates under the same laws as ours.

The US Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary have not broken any agreement. By comparison, our RBNZ Governor and Finance Minister have driven a truck through the single most important agreement underpinning our economic security since 1989.

I don’t understand how the Reserve Bank Governor hasn’t offered to resign. He basically has one job – keep inflation under 3%. It’s 6.9%.