The full results are here.
Party Vote
Government
Preferred PM (unprompted)
AP reports:
Many voters in heavily Democratic Los Angeles are seething over rising crime and homelessness and that could prompt the city to take a turn to the political right for the first time in decades.
Sounds a bit like Auckland!
One of the leading candidates for mayor is Rick Caruso, a pro-business billionaire Republican-turned-Democrat who sits on the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and is promising to expand spending on police, not defund them.
He is a Democrat, but one of the few moderate or sane ones.
But these are fraught times in Los Angeles, with more than 40,000 people living in trash-strewn homeless encampments and rusty RVs, distress over brazen smash-and-grab robberies and home invasions while inflation and taxes are gouging wallets — gas in a region built on car travel has cracked $6 a gallon. Rents and home prices have soared.
Again sounds like Auckland!
Andrea Vance writes:
How did Covid-19 get in? Was elimination the right strategy? Did we go too far, or not far enough? In protecting the vulnerable, did we condemn others to a future of ill-health, poor mental health, poverty and misery?
As important as the economy, is surely the health system. Why could it not cope? Even after two years, and high rates of vaccination, how is it that we cannot rely on it?
There are judgements to be made. Even before the pandemic, the cracks were evident: staff shortages, dilapidated facilities, treatment delays, and poor cancer survival rates.
Governments allowed our most vital service to be run down. It failed us – so how do we rebuild it? And how can we ensure our essential workforce is no longer undervalued?
Were there mistakes in policymaking – from mask wearing to modelling? Why was the vaccine roll-out so slow – and who should be held to account? And should Rapid Antigen Tests – or RATs – have been prohibited? What really happened with the provision of PPE to healthline workers? …
here are legitimate questions about our preparedness for Omicron. Why were services like rubbish collection allowed to grind to a halt? Did officials not anticipate there would be huge demand for passports as international travel resumed? And could LINZ not have predicted and prepared for staff shortages, instead leaving newly built homes standing empty in a housing crisis?
Should officials, and retailers, have better anticipated that our delicate supply chains would come under extreme stress?
Did we fritter away our rights and freedoms too easily? And did our checks and balances hold up – did the Opposition hold ministers to account? Was the media too compliant – did we question enough, or challenge too much?
Public inquiries are a part of the machinery of government.
We’ve had Royal Commissions investigate the Pike River disaster, the Canterbury earthquakes, the March 15 terror attack, and abuse in state care.
It seems logical that we hold the highest form of official inquiry into an event that saw the death of more than 1000 New Zealanders.
It should be unthinkable that a pandemic which has killed over 1,000 New Zealanders, has cost over $50 billion and led to unparalleled restrictions on freedoms is not the subject of a Royal Commission of Inquiry.
Stuff reports:
Shazly Rasheed has become the second councillor to quit in a term, citing a lack of faith in the Hutt City Council’s leadership.
Rasheed handed in her resignation to council chief executive Jo Miller on Friday morning, severing herself from the role effective immediately. Her letter to the council boss raised concerns that councillors were not free to express their views without fear of punishment.
“I have never worked in such an unhealthy environment. What I have seen is undemocratic and bullying.”
In June last year, councillor and former deputy mayor David Bassett resigned because he felt the council’s leadership was stifling his ability to carry out his duties.
Rasheed said elected officials were divided into two groups, “people who ask questions and people who say ‘yes’ to everything”.
The split had created a toxic environment among councillors, with little to no communication between the two camps.
Councillors who raised concerns about proposed policies and governance issues were liable to find themselves being punished, or ignored when requesting information, she said.
“It’s been almost impossible to perform my governance duties. I’m not going to be bullied and treated like a second-class councillor any more.
“We need to be able to answer questions from the public and to inform our own decisions.”
The tone set by Miller and mayor Campbell Barry was bad for democracy, she said.
The Hutt Council sounds a terrible place to be. They are not meeting statutory consenting targets and Councillors who ask questions are bullied off the Council. Hutt residents deserve better.
Food Ticker reports:
In an in-store demonstrations update on 20 May seen by the Ticker, supermarket chain Countdown advised industry stakeholders, including sales agencies with demonstration divisions, that it has had to pull the plug on in-store activations such as tastings.
The email from Countdown’s demonstration team cited feedback from WorkSafe as the reason for ending the promotional activity, which had returned under the Covid-19 Protection Framework’s orange traffic light setting.
“Back in April, a communication to all demonstration companies and suppliers was sent advising, when New Zealand shifted to the new traffic light system that Countdown would accept demonstrations in both the orange and green traffic light systems,” Countdown said in the email.
“Over the past couple of months, we have all enjoyed the theatre that demonstrations have provided in our stores for our customers, and we thank you for that.
“Unfortunately, WorkSafe has been in contact with our business and they have asked us to cease all food and drink demonstrations happening in our stores. This means that these demonstrations will cease from Monday 23 May.
“The reason they provided was – it has been legislated by the government that all supermarket customers, staff and external parties, are to wear marks when working/shopping within the supermarket to help prevent transmission of Covid-19.
“It has been brought to their attention that food and drink demonstrations are now operating in Countdown supermarkets and have advised that it is inappropriate to ask customers to remove their mask to sample food and drink within the supermarket environment.”
This is just ridiculous. You can go into a crowded bar and don’t need to wear a mask, but can’t take your mask off for 10 seconds in a supermarket to sample some food.
One News reports:
KidsCan was founded by Chapman in 2005, at the time providing services to over 40 schools that were struggling with children in poverty.
In 2022, it’s estimated they will assist 1000.
During his tour of the charity’s Auckland centre, Luxon asked Chapman if the levels of child poverty had changed in New Zealand during that 18-year period.
“To be frank,” Chapman responded, “poverty is the worst it’s [ever] been for families.”
So a group that works with children in poverty says child poverty is the worst it has ever been.
Wasn’t there some MP who said that the reason she entered politics was to end child poverty? I can’t recall her name, but what a shame she isn’t holding some sort of role where she could make a difference.
A guest post by Cr Chris Milne:
How Council’s use accounting standards to over-charge residents and ramp up rates well above inflation.
This article is written from the perspective of a past chair of Hutt City Council’s finance & audit committee and the architect of the council’s previously very successful strategy to keep rates rises to a maximum of inflation. With the flick of an accounting switch, all that good work is being undone. HHHHere’s the story.
In many council’s across New Zealand ratepayers are being hit by rapidly rising rates with no apparent improvement in services, and even services going backwards. Many councils have now adopted the financial sleight of hand, described below, to extract vast amounts of excess cash from ratepayers.
Why are Council rates rising stratospherically? If you listen to the Council PR machine it’s all about “getting back to basics”. While investment in infrastructure is growing, that’s not the primary driver of higher rates. The real culprit is a 2020 change in the way Hutt City Council calculates its compliance with the Local Government Act’s section 100 requirement for a ‘balanced budget’, specifically the way the calculation is used to set rates.
Official information requests to councils across New Zealand have found that more and more councils are making this change.
At Hutt City Council the previous treatment of depreciation in relation to rate setting supported low rates increases, and had the international credit rating company, Standard & Poor’s, commending Council on its strong financial management. The previous treatment always passed the official Audit New Zealand audit with flying colours.
But Audit NZ, which audits most councils, is missing in action on the balanced budget calculation. Providing a formula is applied and explained they are happy to sign it off, even when the impact could be a difference of $1,000 per household in annual rates between councils adopting different approaches. They will even sign off, without demur, a change in calculation methodology from year to year, with massive impact on the rates calculation.
Audit New Zealand is agnostic about how Council’s use accounting standards to justify rates increases. It appears that overtaxing ratepayers which is no concern to them. They focus on compliance with accounting standards and ability to repay debt. Confused? You and many.
Let’s use an actual example. From borrowings, Hutt City Council built a new administration building for $26m. Assume a building life of 50 years. Depreciation is charged at 1/50th of the “depreciated replacement cost”. So, in the first year, the depreciation is 1/50th of $26m. Revaluations of replacement costs occur every three years. Over time, construction cost increases raise the depreciation cost basis from $26m to $30m to $40m and so on.
Over 50 years what cost ratepayers $26m will be depreciated by $57m, fully funded by rates (cash from ratepayers) to ensure a ‘balanced budget’ under the new formula. To put it another way, ratepayers will be overcharged by $31m (or 220%) over what they borrowed to fund the construction of the building. This isn’t a ‘balanced budget’ – it’s highway robbery.
Confused? Then here’s something everyone understands. Imagine you buy a house for $700k – $200k deposit plus $500k mortgage. Five years later your house valuation is $1m. Your mortgage is still $500k, less what you’ve paid off over five years.
But if you are the Council then under the new ‘balanced budget’ treatment of depreciation the increase in your house valuation gets added to your mortgage! You now have to pay back to the bank both what you originally borrowed and the valuation increase. In this example, your mortgage would increase from $500k to $800k, even though you only originally borrowed only $500k. Your repayments go up accordingly. Why should you pay $800k to the bank when you only borrowed $500k? Good question.
It gets worse. Take Naenae Pool. It’s budgeted to cost $68m. The government paid Council $27m as a Covid ‘shovel ready project’. So the cost to ratepayers is $41m. But the depreciation charged to ratepayers is based on $68m! Over the life of the pool ratepayers will be charged $149m in rates to fund depreciation – 360% more than the true $41m cost to Council. And this does not include the millions of dollars of operating deficits (entry fees don’t cover running costs) of the pool – subsidies – which are also paid out of rates.
It gets worse. Where central government subsidises capital projects by 50% – very common for roads and bridges – the eventual rates take is over 700% more than the original cost.
So where does all the extra cash go? Not into a fund ready to replace these assets when they reach the end of their lives. When the asset needs replacement the whole cycle starts again. Meanwhile, all the cash has been squandered on a myriad of pet projects, too many to list here.
One could argue that the real culprit here is poor expenditure control by Councils, but this ignores the practical reality of elected councillors, many of whom have no idea about accountating standards, working to a three year election timetable. Experience has shown there are few feasible ways of stopping Councils spending all the cash that comes into their possession. What could work is a change to the Local Government Act requiring Councils to be explicitly transparent about what cash they are collecting and for what, and how they are spending it. Hiding behind accounting standards where cash and non-cash accounting transactions are merged into one muddy puddle, opaque beyond any normal person’s to understand, facilitates Councils taking more and more cash via rates than can be justified to pay the bills.
If you want to delve into the mathematics of the above examples then it’s all in the link below. Note that there are multiple tabs with different examples.
DPF: I never realised that Councils depreciate on the replacement value of an asset, rather than the cost value.
I support depreciating an asset to spread the capital cost over the life of the asset. But to depreciate on the (always growing) replacement cost does mean a huge cash intake for Councils. This should stop.
Some readers might be interested in this podcast chat/interview between Jordan Williams and myself about the battle to stop the Rotorua bill that would have ended equality of suffrage in Rotorua.
Jenee Tibshraeny writes:
The Government is being accused of making a mockery of democracy in the way it’s working on creating an income insurance scheme.
The Government last week passed legislation under urgency, allowing the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) to work towards operationalising such a scheme, should it be established under subsequent legislation.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson allocated $4 million via the Budget towards ACC doing this work, and set aside a further $56.5m in “contingency” funding for 2023-2026.
Yep they did this under urgency.
The Government did so ahead of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) analysing and publishing submissions made as a part of a consultation process that took place between early February and late April.
The consultation raised the question of whether the scheme was even required, and whether it should be administered by ACC.
MBIE said a formal decision on whether the Government will proceed with it will be made in June or early July.
So they are consulting on if such a scheme is needed, while also passing laws and funding under urgency to implement such a scheme!
The director of Victoria University of Wellington’s Institute of Governance and Policy Studies, Simon Chapple, said the poor process was “mind-boggling”.
He fears the Government is jumping the gun, working on the assumption the public wants and needs an income insurance scheme, without having properly campaigned or consulted on it.
The proposed scheme would see a claimant paid up to 80 per cent of their income for up to seven months, in the event of a job loss due to redundancy or sickness.
If they were unemployed after this time, they’d go into the regular welfare system.
The scheme is estimated to cost $3.5 billion a year and would be compulsory. It would be funded by employees contributing 1.39 per cent of their wages/salaries to the scheme (up to a certain level). This contribution would be matched by their employer.
The cost is now projected to be $4.5 billion a year and polling has in fact shown a majority do not want to pay an extra tax so people can get $400 a day for being unemployed.
Chapple noted Labour didn’t campaign on introducing income insurance ahead of the 2020 election. It wasn’t even included in its full election manifesto. Rather, Labour (in a tax policy document linked to its manifesto) committed to “investigating” such a policy.
And now using urgency for it. The way to stop it will be in the ballot box in 2023.
Thefacts.nz have done this useful graph of net debt. It shows that the huge explosion isn’t just around Covid-19 but is set to continue next year.
Donald Trump endorsed primary challengers to the Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney-General of Georgia. These endorsements were not over policy. They were because the three office holders refused to break the law and steal the election for Trump. Trump wanted to show that anyone who defies him will lose their job, so that in 2024 Republican state office holders will try and steal the election for him.
But he failed big time. He definitely still has huge influence with his endorsements in open races, but his revenge in Georgia fall flat massively. Fox News has the results:
This is good news. No one should lose their job as punishment for not overthrowing an election result their party doesn’t like.
George Campbell reports:
The budget for Wellington’s Town Hall earthquake strengthening project has blown out by $37.1 million.
The opening of the building has been delayed until 2025. It has been labelled the most complex construction project in New Zealand at this time.
The significant cost escalation, from $145.3m to $182.4m, is one in a string of many.
Since the Town Hall was declared earthquake-prone and closed in 2013, the cost of the work has grown from $43m, to $60m, to $90m, and then to $112m in 2019.
This is insane. The cost to renovate the town hall is now over $2,500 per household. The Council were warned costs would keep escalating but they just carry on burning up ratepayers money. Wellington already has a superb music venue at the Michael Fowler Centre. A second venue is a nice to have, not a must to have. Pipes that don’t leak is a must to have.
They are spending $182 million on a building that a small fraction of the population will ever use or go into.
It probably won’t stop at $182 million. Based on history it will probably exceed $200 million.
Karl du Fresne responds to a Shelley who calls him a racist with an insightful piece:
Now, that word “racist”. I believe a racist is someone who thinks certain races are inherently superior to others and therefore entitled to rights not available to supposedly “inferior” races. That’s a meaning we can all agree on. But the moment you stretch the definition beyond that, the word can mean anything the user wants it to mean. In the contemporary New Zealand context, that means it can be applied to anyone who disagrees with you – for example, on issues such as 50-50 co-governance with iwi. But the people who throw the term “racist” around don’t realise that they have stripped the word of its potency. “Racist” should be the most offensive epithet imaginable, placing the accused person on a par with Adolf Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan. But the word is so overused as to have become meaningless, so Shelley’s wasting her breath there.
It has indeed become meaningless.
On a more personal level, there’s a lot about Maori culture that I respect and admire – for example, its emphasis on a communal rather than an individual ethos, from which I think we can all learn. I marvel (as the British army probably did in the 19th century) at the courage and resourcefulness of a warrior society defending its land against interlopers and I share the widely felt reverence for the generations of Maori soldiers who served with such distinction in our own armed forces. I am stirred by kapa haka and revere our many great Maori musicians. New Zealand’s bicultural heritage is a unique part of our national makeup that we should all be proud of (and I think most of us are. When the Springboks narrowly defeated a Maori side at Napier in 1921, a South African reporter was appalled that the predominantly Pakeha crowd cheered for “coloured men” playing against their fellow whites).
I would add to that and say I also appreciate the concepts from Te Ao Māori which are commonly used in early childhood education. I enjoy Ben talking about doing manaakitanga (kindness to others) and kaitaikitanga (stewardship).
On the down side, we should all be concerned at high rates of Maori imprisonment, illness, sub-standard housing and low educational attainment. These not only hurt Maori but diminish the country as a whole. Some activists talk as if such outcomes are the results of deliberate, structural racism that suits the interests of the dominant group, but I have yet to hear anyone explain how anyone, including the supposedly privileged class, benefits when such a significant segment of the population is struggling. It’s in everyone’s interests for Maori to do better; the question is how that might be achieved. Ostentatious virtue signalling, such as the use of te reo by broadcasters and journalists, won’t do it. Nor is it likely to be achieved by transferring power from democratic institutions to an unelected tribal elite that hasn’t historically shown much concern for urban Maori with no iwi affiliations.
Someone on the left made the point to me the other day that the belief that enriching tribal elites will benefit poor Maori families in South Auckland is the ultimate in neoliberal trickle down economics and that they are aghast so many on the left have signed up to it.
I think all New Zealanders should know more about the country’s pre-European history. There was another New Zealand (Aotearoa, if you prefer) that existed before the arrival of the Europeans; one that was still technically in the stone age but was strikingly advanced and sophisticated for all that. We know far too little about it – or indeed about how the first voyagers got here, which is a remarkable story in itself.
It is sad that the new history curriculum almost totally ignores our pre-European history.
Speaking of “Aotearoa”, let’s have a referendum. That’s more honest than having the name insinuated into the language at the behest of a cultural elite too arrogant to put it to the test knowing there’s a very good chance it would be defeated. What can be more fundamental to a country’s identity than the name by which it’s known? Those who resist the idea of a referendum, preferring to impose the name without any mandate, are subverting democracy. (For the record, and not for the first time, I’m okay with Aotearoa just as long as the majority endorse it.)
A referendum is a good idea.
In teaching New Zealand history, we need to be honest about the circumstances in which Maori lost so much of their land, and we need to acknowledge that they were often the victims of rampant settler greed. (Two instances I’m personally familiar with, because I’ve written about them, are Lakes Wairarapa and Horowhenua, both shamefully and deceitfully taken from their rightful owners and subsequently subjected to shocking environmental degradation.) But we also need to acknowledge that Maori were sometimes betrayed by tribal leaders who sold their land from under them. We also need to acknowledge that pre-European Maori society was violent and cruel. Territory was taken by conquest and no mercy was shown to the losers, who were slaughtered, enslaved and cannibalised. Rekohu (the Moriori name for the Chathams) comes to mind.
Many wrongs were done, by many people.
We can agree that white supremacy was common – in fact the norm – in an earlier time when Europeans believed implicitly in the superiority of a culture that dominated the world. Do white supremacists exist still? Probably, although I don’t know any personally and I don’t believe they’re anything more than a tiny, pathetic minority whose attitudes appal most New Zealanders. Of far more consequence are the millions of New Zealanders who happily work, play sport and engage socially (which includes having sex) with people of Maori descent, and have done so for generations. The terrible danger is that this history of mutual goodwill will be undermined and may even eventually unravel as a result of the wedge being driven between the two main racial groups by activists who insist we are inherently different and that our rights and interests are in competition.
It is sad to see this mutual goodwill being trampled by woke activists.
Where we run into trouble is where the Maori activist agenda collides with democracy. Democracy isn’t a white supremacist invention imposed to keep minority groups firmly under the heel of their oppressor. On the contrary, it’s a system whereby every citizen’s vote – Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika, Chinese, Indian, whatever – carries the same weight. I believe absolutely in democracy because ultimately, everyone benefits from it and everyone has a say. It is the basis of every free and fair society in the world, and those who undermine it need to think very carefully about what form of government might replace it. I can’t think of any that would appeal to me – certainly not one that grants special rights, privileges and entitlements on the basis of ancestry. We have a name for that: feudalism. We were smart enough to abandon it several centuries ago.
I agree – we must reject feudalism.
As the tweet points out, suddenly finding your car won’t work isn’t a minor inconvenience for some people – it can be a matter of life and death. And targeting a family based on a stereotype about their type of car is nasty vigilantism.
Stuff reports:
The incident comes after seven shootings on Auckland’s streets on Tuesday night, which police believed were carried out by the Killer Beez and Tribesmen gangs.
Unbelievable. It wasn’t long ago that a single shooting in a night would be newsworthy, and Auckland had seven in one evening.
The gangs obviously think they are beyond the law. This needs to stop. Sadly though the Government’s solution is to repeal the three strikes law for repeat serious violent and sexual offenders.
Stuff reports:
Police are “actively” looking for a child who reportedly stole eight vehicles in Dunedin overnight and remains on the run.
One has to admire the work ethic and productivity for a 12 year old to manage to steal eight vehicles in one night. Would be good though if they focused that on say study!
Five Thirty Eight and IPSOS did a poll of 2,000 Americans about the most important issues. The top five overall were:
But they differ by party. For Republicans:
And Democrats: