Andrea Vance writes:

“I’m a Covid Healthcare Hero.”

Like the lapel pin, the insult was sharp. This tiny badge was about the final straw for a GP in a busy, urban practice.

“What am I supposed to do with those?” she asked of the parcel, sent from a local Primary Health Organisation. “Pay my nurses?”

She sent them back.

Lapel pins. Whose genius idea was that.

The strain on the system has knock-on effects. People who should have seen a doctor are spilling into already-crowded emergency departments (ED). Wait times have blown out. Patients are stuck in the ED, waiting for beds to be freed up on wards.Tragically, a 51-year-old woman died of a brain bleed after leaving Middlemore ED because of long waits.

Shorter ED waiting times save lives.

The health system is in meltdown. Call it a crisis, or don’t. It is collapsing around us.

Healthcare staff are at the end of their rope – undervalued and underpaid for years, the wave of strikes is a cry for help. Most are distressed because they know people will die because they can’t access treatment.

As the system buckles, there is incredulity that Health Minister Andrew Little is pushing ahead with a bureaucratic overhaul. Doctors are being asked to work – unpaid – on groups advising the ministry on how to bed in the new regime. No-one seems to know how it will work – the changes are yet another burden that the workforce cannot absorb.

Instead of prioritising a flow of overseas healthcare workers, or returning normal care to reasonable timeframes, his Ministry is pre-occupied with an administrative rejig.

It does seem the worst possible time to undertake what will be the largest restructuring of the health system in recent memory.

They have a nickname for the Health Minister: Dr Do-Little.

Quite fitting for a Minister who laments he doesn’t know why the $1.9 billion in mental health funding didn’t lead to any improved outcomes.

Luke Malpass writes:

A recession, which was unthinkable even a year ago, is now all but a certainty. It is a matter of not if, but when.

A bold call. Why? Malpass points to the following:

• Shortage of workers
• Shortages of supplies
• Entrenched inflation
• Lowest ever consumer confidence
• Massive decline in competitiveness
• Major cities becoming less liveable
• Rising interest rates

A nasty mix it is.

TVNZ reports:

New statistics have revealed the failure of KiwiBuild to increase home ownership rates for Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders.

Figures released to Q+A with Jack Tame under the Official Information Act show just 4.8% of KiwiBuild buyers who gave their ethnicity on their application forms are Māori, and 4.4% are Pasifika.

These figures are well below the ethnicity breakdown of the general population, which is 16.5% Māori, and 8% Pasifika.

This is no surprise. The same happened with their free tertiary fees policies which mainly benefited wealthy European families.

Basically this shows that around 60 Maori families have been helped by Kiwibuild, so this may have increased the Maori home ownership rate by 0.027%.

At the current rate of progress, the original target of 100,000 KiwiBuild homes will be reached around the year 2300.

Not 2100, not 2200 but 2300!!!

They promised 100,000 homes in ten years and they are on track to deliver it in 283 years!

How long is 283 years? Well the time from 1739 to today.

Can you imagine some politician in 1739 promising something, and then you find out they won’t complete it until 2022!

Kate McNamara writes:

The Productivity Commission delivered a new inquiry into immigration last month, at the same time that it is facing its own story of migration: an exodus. It involves a string of departures that have not yet been stemmed by an independent HR investigation and a slew of recommended remedies.

A distinct wave of resignations began in February last year, when two of the independent Crown entity’s principal advisers left. In subsequent months they were followed out the door by six more staffers, including two lynchpin managers, each of whom had been directing one of the commission’s two inquiries of the time. The eight departures in 2021 made up more than half the commission’s 15 employees (the head count as of January 1, 2021, including one part-timer).

Losing half your staff in a year is generally a sign of severe problems.

An HR review called late last year found problems at the commission including a troubled transition under the leadership of Ganesh Nana, who became chair on February 1, 2021. It also found an uneasy relationship between the new chair and many staff, especially senior ones. While efforts to improve staff retention are underway, at least four more employees have resigned from the commission in the first half of this year. Of the senior leadership team described in commission documents at this time last year, only one of the five remains.

So in 18 months they have lost 80% of their staff.

In addition, reports of divisions at board level have been underscored by the early and unexplained departure of commissioner Andrew Sweet in March, two months before his term was to end. Also leaving is commissioner Gail Pacheco, who did not seek reappointment for a second term. Pacheco has agreed to remain temporarily past the end of her term, which expires at the end of the month, in order not to leave the board without a quorum (Sweet’s departure reduced the board to three).

Half the board gone also. You don’t have to be a genius to work out where the problem is.

Of the staff who spoke to the Herald, many elaborated that they found Nana’s economic and analytical input to their work “light weight” and his manner detached and awkward. They said Rosenberg was distant, and he was repeatedly described as “ideological” and set in his thinking.

This is no surprise. Both men are hugely ideological and the area of productivity is a highly technical one.

Some staff felt the HR review did not adequately reflect the interviews they’d given, especially the strength of their emotions. “I cried through the whole interview,” one said. Another described being surprised and overwhelmed by the strength of reaction the interview gave rise to: “I just felt this surge of rage”.

Sounds like a terrible place to work if former staff cry or get angry talking about it.

Stuff reports:

The House sent US President Joe Biden the most wide-ranging gun violence bill Congress has passed in decades on Friday (local time), a measured compromise that at once illustrates progress on the long-intractable issue and the deep-seated partisan divide that persists.

The Democratic-led chamber approved the election-year legislation on a mostly party-line 234-193 vote, capping a spurt of action prompted by voters’ revulsion over last month’s mass shootings in New York and Texas. The night before, the Senate approved it by a bipartisan 65-33 margin, with 15 Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting a package that senators from both parties had crafted.

The bill would incrementally toughen requirements for young people to buy guns, deny firearms from more domestic abusers and help local authorities temporarily take weapons from people judged to be dangerous. Most of its US$13 billion cost would go to bolster mental health programmes and for schools, which have been targeted in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida and many other infamous massacres.

And while it omits the far tougher restrictions Democrats have long championed, it stands as the most impactful gun violence measure that Congress has approved since it enacted a now-expired assault weapons ban nearly 30 years ago.

The House vote was 220 Democrats and 14 Republicans in favour.

Pleased to see this pass. Taking a more cautious approach to teenagers buying firearms is very sensible.

Stuff reports:

Auckland and Wellington were top of the pops last year, rated the world’s second and fourth most liveable cities.

This year, they have dropped down the rankings like a stone – and Covid-19 is largely to blame.

The 2022 Global Liveability Index, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked cities around the world on factors including health care, crime rates, political stability, infrastructure and access to green space.

It ranked Auckland 34th out of 173, a considerable drop from second in 2021. …

Wellington also experienced a notable drop, falling to 50th from fourth in 2021. …

The city in first place this year is Vienna, Austria. In last place is Damascus, Syria.

Vienna is a beautiful city – my favourite city in Europe. Pleased to see we still rank higher than Damascus.

The top 11 are:

1. Vienna
2. Copenhagen
3. Zurich
4. Calgary
5. Vancouver
6. Geneva
7. Frankfurt
8. Toronto
9. Amsterdam
10. Osaka
11. Melbourne

I’ve been to most of those cities. Slightly surprised Frankfurt ranks so highly. I do love Vancouver.

The cities that have dropped the most are:

1. Wellington -46
2. Auckland -33
3. Adelaide -27
4. Perth -26
5. Houston -25
6. Reykjavik -25
7. Madrid -24
8. Taipei -20
9. Barcelona -19
10. Brisbane -17

The ratings are based on five criteria:

• Stability 25% (crime etc)
• Healthcare 20%
• Culture/Environment 25%
• Education 10%
• Infrastructure 20%

I suspect the rise in inner city crime in Auckland and Wellington will be a factor in the droppings.

A guest post by a reader:

Large numbers of well meaning people have been campaigning against Three Waters since it was announced. Unfortunately the government has done nothing to change its approach. This is not surprising. There have been no direct electoral consequences for any politician. Noise & PR campaigns can be ignored. Losing your job cannot. A far more direct approach is needed, where those holding elected positions see that they are likely to lose their positions if they do not change their policy. A direct, personal consequence sharpens the minds of politicians in a way that public meetings and protests do not. The general election is not until late next year, so Labour politicians are largely immune to the current campaigns against Three Waters.

The two opportunities to stop Three Waters through elections in 2022 are the local government elections in the spring, and the LGNZ conference at the end of July. Councillors in favour of Three Waters need to understand that they have to persuade their constituents if they want to get reelected. Campaigns against three waters supporters at the council elections are likely to have an impact. The more immediate opportunity for the Local Government sector to show their disgust at Three Waters is for a council to move a motion of no confidence in the President of Local Government New Zealand, Stuart Crosby. Crosby sold out Local Government New Zealand by accepting money to work with the government on Three Waters, when as many as half of LGNZs member councils oppose it.

A vote of No Confidence in Crosby will show there are genuine consequences for supporting Three Waters, and that politicians will be held to account for imposing unpopular policies without the consent of their voters. Failure to deal with LGNZ selling out its constituent councils on Three Waters will embolden Labour to push for the second phase. Once councils lose their water assets they will have much less to do, so Labour will likely push through amalgamations, and impose co governance on amalgamated councils. LGNZ members  need to seize the initiative away from the government and sack Stuart Crosby.

I have to say I was aghast when LGNZ (an organisation that has done much good work in the past) took money from central Government to promote Three Waters to Councils. The job of LGNZ is to represent Councils to the Government, not vice-versa. It was a monumentally bad decision.

Even if LGNZ thought that working with the Government to make a bad policy better was preferable to opposing it outright, they should have done that without signing a contract with the Government that required them to not oppose Three Waters. The loss of independence and integrity was massive.

So it will be interesting to see if Councils do hold anyone at LGNZ responsible.

Eric Crampton writes:

Just before 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, about a dozen New Zealand Transport Agency and Ministry of Transport officials received a weekend-ruining email. Subject: “Cabinet paper: Urgent.”

It provides a depressing insight into how policy gets made.

The agency that would have to administer a fuel tax and Road User Charge (RUC) holiday had less than a day’s notice that the change was coming.

Important detail had to be filled in after the policy was announced, which also may have prevented improvements that ran counter to what had already been announced.

The scheme was obviously fraught with complexity and potential for gaming.

I expected that the NZTA may have provided a few warnings about the messes that the Government would encounter, so I put in a request for any advice that NZTA provided in advance of the scheme’s announcement, and correspondence about it.

The very first email in that trail was an urgent email from an NZTA senior manager in Investment and Finance to a collection of NZTA and Ministry of Transport officials at 2.53pm Sunday, March 13. An urgent cabinet paper was due to the minister at 11am the next day.

Officials were told to calculate how much it would cost to reverse the increases in RUCs and Fuel Excise that had occurred since 2018, assuming normal use volumes. They had 20 hours, less any amount of time spent sleeping.

This shows you how panicked Labour were by their falling poll numbers. They were desperate to do something, anything, on the cost of living front so they gave officials 20 hours to work out a policy on cutting road user and fuel charges.

It would make Mickey Mouse look like Michael Bloomberg.

NZTA did an admirable job, under circumstances that should not be faced except under real emergency.

There was no emergency that required inventing policy on less than 24 hours’ notice to officials, forcing them to work past 11pm on a Sunday night.

There was only a political emergency caused by Labour’s drop in the polls, resulting in a ruined weekend for officials, extensive and imperfect backfilling of details afterwards, and theft from the Covid fund to cover road costs.  

It is a terrible way to run a country.

They say you get the Government you deserve, but I think we deserve better.

Kris Faafoi was one of those MPs who was liked across the House. He had friendships with National MPs and Labour MPs. I knew him when he was a journalist, a press secretary and as an MP. He believed in public service/

His valedictory is here. Some extracts:

Prime Minister, I have had one outstanding issue, though, since Pasifika in 2012. I know you remember. I said I’d donate $500 to your campaign if you got up and danced on stage with a group. I never thought you’d do it, and you did. Prime Minister, I know it’s been 10 years, but earlier this week I donated $500 to the Mt Albert Labour electorate committee (LEC). That’s the receipt. I thought about adjusting it for inflation, but—ha, ha!

Heh.

One of my favourite experiences in that broadcasting portfolio was a Friday afternoon visit to offices of New Zealand Media and Entertainment in Auckland. I was given a tour of the newsroom and then found myself in the Radio Hauraki office at happy hour. After obliging an offer of an ice-cold Wakachangi beer, I was invited into the studio and offered another ice-cold beer, which I must admit was going down very well after a busy week. They gave me a guitar to take part in an on-air competition which, unbeknown to me, was won by an old school friend in Christchurch. But my most vivid memory was of the immense unease of my broadcasting private sec, feeling like she was losing control of the situation and of her Minister. 

I could imagine!

Bettina Ardnt writes:

Analysis by the Australian Election Study (AES) of 2019 election results (pdf) confirmed an ever-widening gender gap, starting back in the 1990s, marked by dropping female support for the country’s centre-right Liberal Party.

By 2019, 45 percent of men and 35 percent of women voted Liberal, while the split for the Greens was nine percent men to 15 percent women.

The AES asked voters to rate themselves on a scale from left to right, where 0 is left and 10 is right. In 2019 the average position for men was 5.2, whereas for women, it was 4.8, a significant shift from the 1990s when there were minimum gender differences.

One of the key factors I identified back in 2017 for why the shift was occurring was leftist university education. “The hearts and minds being captured in our universities belong mainly to young women,” I wrote, pointing to fascinating research from the AES showing women emerge from university education notably more left-leaning than women without degrees. In contrast, male graduates were not very different from less-educated men in their political views.

I found this interesting as it is well known that women are more likely to vote centre-left than men, but I hadn’t considered whether the impact of education on this. I was interested enough to look up the data from the 2017 Election Survey in New Zealand, and it backs up this argument.

Men tended to vote National over Labour. The data shows:

• All men National +12%
• Men uni degree National +5%

For women:

• All women National +3%
• Women uni degree Labour +8%
• Women school qualification National +15%

So in 2017 a very large gap between how women with a university degree voted and those with only a school qualification.

Steven Joyce writes:

Then there is the great centralisation. Regional people have watched suspiciously as Wellington takes away their ability to run their local polytech or hospital on the grounds that Wellington knows better, with the unspoken corollary that locals aren’t up to it. Woe betide the first bureaucrat who centralises services away from New Plymouth or Whangārei in the name of efficiency.

Regional businesses fear national pay agreements making it harder to run a niche exporter from places like Gisborne and Invercargill – where such businesses are celebrated and all too thin on the ground. And regional people are sick of hearing about vanity projects in Auckland and Wellington with ridiculous price tags, like bike bridges and light rail.

Yep if there is one thing this Government stands for, it is centralising power in Wellington.

The people are resourceful, direct and get on with getting things done. They don’t stand on ceremony and everyone has to rub along. Regional people are sceptical of Wellington and decisions made there. It’s never hard to find someone ready to tell you about the “shiny-arses” in the capital and how divorced from reality they are.

Wellington is to New Zealand what Austin is to Texas. On almost every issue I poll on, the average response from Wellington is vastly different to everywhere else.

Which brings us back to Three Waters. It doesn’t take an Einstein to work out that running Hawke’s Bay’s water facilities from Wellington will likely make the needs of Napier and Hastings people secondary to the much publicised water woes of Wellingtonians.

And how much time do you think the good people of Auckland’s water services body will spend thinking about the water issues of Northland?

Somewhere between zero and very little.

Finally, there is the accountability issue. Few in the regions are under any illusion that the convoluted spaghetti of governance arrangements has been set up to suit Labour’s Māori caucus and pretty much no-one else.

Good luck working out who to call if your “water service entity” fails to fix a sewer pipe, or a stormwater drain causes a pothole in the road outside your gate. In past times you’d ring the mayor and get it fixed. Now you’ll be given an 0800 number and no way of voting the bastards out.

This is the key. These reforms will make it impossible for people who fund three waters (through compulsory rates) to vote out those in charge if they do a terrible job.

Bryce Wilkinson writes:

For more than three decades, the Swiss Institute for Management and Development (IMD) has compiled annual rankings of competitiveness for 63 of the world’s most important countries. It makes for sobering reading for New Zealanders.

Back in 2017, New Zealand ranked #16 – ahead of Australia at #21.

Five years on, New Zealand has fallen to #31, while Australia is now ranked #19.

A closer look reveals the factors behind New Zealand’s plummeting ranking.

Over the past few years, we have plunged in economic performance, falling from 22nd to 47th place. Government efficiency has also deteriorated markedly from 7th to 17th place.

That’s not a record for this government to feel proud of. And it gets worse.

Altogether, the IMD’s ranking comprises 25 subcategories. In eight of them, New Zealand finds itself in the bottom half of all countries. And these are the categories that really matter: domestic economy, international trade and investment, inflation, productivity and efficiency, attitudes and values, and technological infrastructure.

The IMD noted New Zealand going in the wrong direction on subsidies, inflation, tourism, brain drain, public finances, skilled labour, competent senior managers, and central bank policy.

It’s a depressingly long list.

Is there any plan beyond tax and spend?

Former Awarua MP Rex Austin has died aged 91. I met Rex a couple of times – he was an MP from 1975 to 1987 and I joined Southern Young Nationals in 1986. He was a devoted representative of Southland and a very hard working MP.

Austin was only the second Maori New Zealander to be elected to a general seat. The first, Sir James Carroll, was first MP for Eastern Maori and then for Waiapu and Gisborne from 1893 to 1919.

There is a good biography of him here.

It’s not just in NZ we get crazy spending. The Spectator Australia reports:

As soon as the New South Wales state government finishes putting the Aboriginal flag atop Sydney Harbour Bridge, they need to have another ‘Sorry Day’.

I don’t mean a day to say sorry to Aboriginals. I mean a day to say sorry to taxpayers who are being charged $25 million for the gesture.

It costs $300 to climb the iconic bridge. It costs $25 million to whack a flag on the top. Figure that one out.

When installed, the Aboriginal flag will be permanently flown alongside the Australian flag and the New South Wales flag. 

How afraid must the NSW Liberals be of losing the next election – due early next year – that they are prepared to throw so much money at Woke posturing?

Premier Dominic Perrottet yesterday said the $25m pole and flag was ‘a small price to pay for unity’.

If the Premier is seeking to unify taxpayers in seething anger against government profligacy, then he may be onto something.

I’m changed $16 in tolls to drive from my home in north-western Sydney to the airport. And I need a second mortgage to afford the fuel. So you’ll forgive me if the Liberals shelling out $25m on a flagpole feels a little excessive.

Imagine being a small business owner in Sydney – battling to pay rent, overheads, and staff in the hope that you’ll be left with some sort of profit at the end of the month. And then you turn on the news and discover the government is spending $25m on a flag.

That is an obscene amount of money. It is almost as much as this Government has wasted on the now scrapped Auckland Harbour Bridge cycleway.

Mr Perrottet told ABC news he was ‘not sure’ why the project cost so much.

‘I don’t know. But it does, apparently,’ he said. ‘Apparently, that’s the costing.’

Apparently, Dominic Perrettot is the least curious person in New South Wales. 

It’s amazing how blasé you can be when you’re spending other people’s money.

Is the pole made of gold? Is it being imported from Italy? Was it sculptured by Michelangelo?

It could be. You could buy 292 kgs of gold for A$25 million. If the flagpole was sold gold you could get a 10 cm by 10 cm flagpole which is 1.5 metres tall.

Radio NZ reported:

Data has revealed police caught 5000 drivers breaking their restricted licence by carrying passengers when they shouldn’t last year – and prosecuted just one of them.

So that’s a 0.02% prosecution rate!

An OIA response shows they issued written warnings to 10.

And a 0.2% warning rate

Restricted drivers tend to be young and inexperienced. They should not be driving at night or with passengers. They will do so, unless there are consequences for breaking the rules.

Stuff reports:

Bad news first-home buyers, it’s probably the worst time to buy a house since 1957.

How can this be? Labour promised in 2017 they would build 100,000 affordable houses for first time home buyers.

“Given the increase in house prices during 2020 and 2021 and the lift in mortgage rates since the middle of last year, average first-home buyers currently face initial mortgage payments equal to 49% of their income. This figure is the highest on record, surpassing the previous records of 1987 and 2007,” Kiernan said.

Will get worse as interest rates rise more.

Matthew Hooton writes:

For five months, Hipkins has allowed the public to believe that Bellis had twice been offered government assistance to return home from Afghanistan but had turned it down – implying she was some kind of drama queen making a political point, rather than a mum-to-be wanting to give birth in her hometown of Christchurch rather than Kabul.

It was a smear, and a lie.

If more were needed to reveal the Government as a mere focus-group-driven, PR charade, five years since the Prime Minister appointed herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction and declaring her Government would build 100,000 new homes, KidsCan founder Julie Chapman reports that “poverty is the worst it’s been for families”, mainly because of housing.

  The State of Child Health Report from Cure Kids, in partnership with the Paediatric Society, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Otago University’s Child and Youth Epidemiology Service, found that New Zealand’s rates of dental disease, respiratory conditions, skin infections, acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease are too high relative to other resource-rich countries. For dental disease and respiratory conditions, hospitalisation rates continue to worsen.

  According to the Government’s Children’s Commissioner, Frances Eivers, “On many measures, New Zealand is currently one of the worst places in the developed world to be a child.”   There comes a time when governments simply must be thrown out. It’s bad enough that the Ardern Government has proven incompetent at delivering any of the things it was elected to do. Its performance over Bellis shows it has now joined some of its most infamous predecessors in the slime.

There is a maximum of 568 days until they can be voted out.

Robert MacCulloch writes:

Former RBNZ Assistant Governor & Chief Economist, John McDermott, who was at the IMF, Yale-trained, Director of Motu & winner of the NZIER Economist Award, has slammed the RBNZ’s monetary policy, blaming it for the inflation mess we’re in. We already knew as much, but to have it confirmed by John is a big deal.

This is unusual and hence a big deal. Until the current Governor took over, it was incredibly rare for former Governors or senior staff to criticise the Reserve Bank’s decisions.

“We know that in the long run, excessive money-supply growth causes inflation and that the monetary base is under the control of the Reserve Bank. So why is the Reserve Bank allowing its monetary base to expand long after the emergency Covid settings are no longer needed?

…. It makes for sobering reading when you compare NZ’s monetary experience with that of Norway, a country with a similar population and an identical monetary policy regime … The assessment that emergency monetary settings were no longer needed seems to have been made early in Norway. By the end of 2020, its monetary base was back at a normal level. The result was that the Norges Bank kept inflation under better control than the RBNZ”.

At the end of March the inflation rate in Norway was 4.5% compared to 6.9% in New Zealand.