NZ’s worst landlord strikes once again. The Herald reports:

A state house tenant has been awarded $5000 after having to live next to a neighbour from hell who had rowdy parties, was abusive and urinated on the fence.

The Auckland tenant took Kāinga Ora to the Tenancy Tribunal after lodging more than 130 complaints against the neighbour in three years.

The renter claimed Kāinga Ora was not taking reasonable steps to stop the neighbour from interfering with their peace and comfort.

The tenant had lived in their Kāinga Ora home and had been a resident at the property since 1998. But, in 2019, a new neighbour moved in.

The neighbour, who was also a tenant of Kāinga Ora, would host loud parties, urinate on the tenant’s fence and let their dog defecate on the neighbouring property’s lawn.

They also had people living in their garage who would shout abusive language and intimidate the neighbours.

So they had 21 years of peacefully living there and then the policy changed to no evictions, and they got a new neighbour from hell. They filed 130 complaints, and what did Kainga Ora do?

A spokesperson for Kāinga Ora responded, saying they had visited the neighbour, serving them with breach notices in 2019 and 2022.

Wow, two breach notices three years apart.

Yi said Kāinga Ora should have served notices to the neighbour.

He recognised the extensive breach of quiet enjoyment and ordered Kāinga Ora to pay $5000 in compensation to the tenant.

Kāinga Ora offered to relocate the complainant, but they declined.

So Kainga Ora’s response wasn’t to evict the neighbour making all the trouble, but to move out the law abiding tenants who had lived there for 21 years!

A guest post by Cr Chris Milne:

A great mystery of 2022 is how it came to be that the Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt Mayors formed polar opposite views on Three Waters.

Three public opinion polls in the two cities have revealed strong resident opposition to the Labour Government’s centralisation of water management, including 50% iwi control through co-governance.

So how is it that, despite public opposition in both cities, Mayor Wayne Guppy of Upper Hutt is opposed but Mayor Campbell Barry is not?

The answer is pretty straight-forward. In 2019 Cr Campbell Barry campaigned for the Hutt City mayoralty under a Labour ticket. What the public were never told is that the Labour Party exacts a high price from candidates who use their trademark.

It will surprise most people to learn that the Labour Party requires that candidates using the Labour logo sign a pledge to support and implement Labour policy irrespective of the views of local residents. Further, all Labour candidates in a local body election pledge to block vote on issues of Labour policy.

The rewards for this abdication of local loyalty are political career opportunities and campaign assistance – databases, email systems, door knocking volunteers, billboard teams and social media support. One recent bauble was Mayor Barry’s appointment to the Labour Government’s Three Waters review taskforce, a body that reported back very recently with, you guessed it, no substantial changes to the policy opposed by the majority of Lower Hutt’s residents.

The Labour Party Constitution in force during the 2019 council elections contains Rule 95 (linked below):

R95: Any person accepting nomination as a Party candidate shall sign a pledge ….R95(e): I will faithfully observe the Constitution and Policy of the Party and the policy of the party for the [Lower Hutt] district.

R95(f): If elected, I will vote … in accordance with the decisions [of the Labour ticket members].

And the following rule dictates that Labour candidates will support each other no matter what:R95(c): I will wholeheartedly support the duly selected candidates of the Party in the [Lower Hutt] district.

And do note that the first Objective (R3) of the Labour Party is “to elect [candidates] for the purpose of giving effect to Party policy and principles”. Rule 152 says that “The Policy Platform is binding on … all Labour Party members elected to public office who describe their affiliation as “Labour” or “Labour Party” on the ballot.

Labour candidates are subject to a Disciplinary Process with multiple possible sanctions if they breach their pledge [R309]:

Rule 313: Disciplinary action shall be applied for and ruled upon on the grounds of:

(a): contravention of the Principles, Rules and Policies of the Party as contained in the current Constitution and policy documents of the Party, including under (c) – being automatically suspended for two years for publicly campaigning against another Labour candidate.

Notes:1) Link to the 2013 Labour Party Constitution: https://drive.google.com/…/18H2WIoLC9s2yNUnVfUW…/view…2)

Link to the 2020 Constitution (the relevant provisions are virtually unchanged – see Rule 12.4.1). This will apply to the 2022 Council elections. https://drive.google.com/…/1dWdUexV6fwd8rb3eMWo…/view…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities(the first sentence of the book)

DPF: Another key aspect of this constitutional requirement for Labour Mayors and Councillors to follow the dictates of the Labour Party over their local communities is that it is future binding, not just backwards binding. Even if Labour doesn’t have a policy on something at the time of the local body elections, any future policy becomes retrospectively binding on Labour Mayors and Councillors from the moment it is adopted.

Professor Robert MacCulloch writes:

Look at the document below which I found in the government’s files – its says that inflation in NZ is to be held at 1 to 3 percent over the medium term and is signed off and “agreed by” the Finance Minister and Reserve Bank Governor:

That would be Grant Robertson and Adrian Orr.

Yet on Budget Day yesterday, Treasury released its inflation forecasts which are HIGHER than 3% for 2022, HIGHER than 3% for 2023 and HIGHER THAN 3% for 2024. It was also over 3% this past year, 2001. Yes this inflation is not temporary, it is not “transitory”. New Zealand will NOT be achieving its agreed inflation target, not even remotely, over the “medium term”. My question is: since when can a Finance Minister and a Reserve Bank Governor put their signatures to an “agreed” course of action, then willfully ignore it? In monetary economics, we call it a loss of credibility.

This is a key point, that media should focus on more. The Government is projecting inflation will be higher than the top of the allowable band for at least four years.

The inflation rates are:

• 2021: 3.3%
• 2022: 6.7%
• 2023: 5.2%
• 2024: 3.6%

Over four years that is a cumulative inflation rate of 20.1%.

Yet no one is resigning.

In 2019 the BOP Regional Council decided to spend ratepayer money on providing free buses 24/7 to school-age children. It was a stupid idea economically and it seems an even worse idea socially.

The Herald reports:

Free student bus fares have been cut back in a bid to tackle escalating violence and anti-social behaviour on Tauranga bus routes – but installing cages for drivers was rejected.

A bus company boss told a summit today that abuse of drivers in Tauranga is the worst he has seen and a top cop said parents were too disengaged or busy working to supervise young troublemakers. …

Bus drivers have reported being racially abused and threatened – prompting a partial boycott of three stops – alongside recent reports of street brawls, vandalism, public underage drinking and assaults on passerbys.

Youths have arrested for allegedly carrying weapons at the Willow St interchange. Another has been charged with wounding with intent to cause grevious bodily harm after allegedly attacking a worker near a major Farm St stop, seriously injuring his eye.

The regional council added extra security to the city’s bus stops on Monday, adding $200,000 to the annual cost of $660,000. Waka Kotahi contributes 51 per cent.

So both taxpayers and ratepayers have been funding this unfortunate experiment.

Tauranga’s fare-free buses were part of the problem. Groups of youths used the library computers to organise fights at other stops then rode the bus there, she said.

“The free fares have been good for other young ones going home but there are more making bad use of those free fares than those taking good advantage of them.”

So we’re funding fight clubs for students!

NZ Bus chief operating officer Jay Zmijewski told the council that in his 22 years of driving and working in the bus industry in New Zealand and Australia, he had not seen such regular levels of abuse and violence directed at drivers and buses.

Zmijewski said bus routes had often had to be cancelled because the driver was still traumatised from an incident days before. There was a risk some would quit.

“I still recall the effects of anti-social behaviour when I was a bus driver. It makes you sick to the stomach.”

Vandalism was happening daily with seats being cut and burned, window laminates melted and graffiti “inside and out”.

A sad unforeseen consequence of generosity with other people’s money

Politicians and others are refusing to answer the question of what is the definition of a woman. A reader asked the Minister for Women and her reply was:

The Minister for Women and the Ministry for Women represents the interests and supports the rights of all women, including transgender and transsexual women, and recognises the rights of all people to self-identify.

At least they replied. But I would have thought the better answer would be along the lines of.

The definition depends on whether you mean sex or gender. If you mean sex then the definition of a woman is an adult female with two X chromosomes. If you mean gender then it is an adult who identifies as female.

So much of the problem with the trans debate is people treat sex and gender as the same thing. One can recognise someone ‘s gender identity without denying biological sex differences.

The Herald reports:

Rotorua mayor Steve Chadwick was “unlawful” when she decided a discussion on Rotorua’s controversial Māori wards bill would be held confidentially, two public law experts believe.

Chadwick not only tried to end one person one vote in Rotorua, but tries do do it behind closed doors.

Public law expert and lawyer Graeme Edgeler told Local Democracy Reporting, in his opinion, there were several issues with the proceedings in Thursday’s council meeting.

He said Chadwick should have put to a vote whether to add the urgent item to the agenda and to have the discussion in confidential.

He believed Chadwick was also incorrect when she told the meeting she did not need to put moving the discussion into confidential to a vote as she could rule it as chairwoman.

Mayors are not dictators. They have no power to unilaterally decide these things.

In the meeting Chadwick cited the reason for the discussion being held in secret as “to enable us all as council, together, to have a free and frank discussion in response to the Attorney-General’s request for information needed to develop policy work”.

Edgeler said, in his view, that was not a lawful reason to put a meeting into confidential as “free and frank discussion” was explicitly excluded under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.

“I don’t believe they [the council] lawfully excluded the public, I don’t believe they ever tried to lawfully exclude the public and the reason they gave to exclude the public isn’t a lawful one.”

Victoria University of Wellington public law expert Dr Dean Knight broadly agreed with Edgeler.

Luckily for Chadwick she is retiring so she can’t be voted out.

He said the standing order it pertained to was 9.13 – “discussion of a minor matter not on the agenda”.

I love how they regard ending equality of suffrage in their district as a minor matter!

Stuff reports:

At Leatherby’s sentencing on Wednesday, Judge Hikaka calculated a starting point of four years imprison – three years for the sexual connection charges, and one year for the four remaining charges.

Hikaka told the court how there was “alcohol involved in all of” the charges.

However, Leatherby had stopped drinking, was attending programmes for alcohol abuse, Hikaka said.

He had also been willing to attend a restorative justice conference, written a letter of remorse, and had a number of letters in support of him – including a “glowing reference” from his employer.

The Judge took those aspects into consideration, and also allowed a discount for early guilty pleas, which allowed Leatherby to be eligible for an electronically monitored sentence.

“It’s only available because of the positive steps you’ve taken,” Hikaka said.

The 20-year-old was convicted, sentenced to four months home detention with post-detention conditions

So he had sex with a 15 year old against her will and somehow his initial sentence of four years in prison gets knocked by by 92% to four months home detention.

The NY Post reports:

Guess it takes one to know one?

President Biden’s pick to lead his Department of Homeland Security’s Big Brother-like Disinformation Governance Board has her own history of posting disinformation online.

Nina Jankowicz, who was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, has repeatedly cast doubt on The Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

During a series of live tweets during the presidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump in October 2020, Jankowicz had referenced the laptop.

“Back on the ‘laptop from hell,’ apparently—Biden notes 50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op,” Jankowicz tweeted.

It wasn’t. It was a genuine story reported truthfully by the NY Post. Now there is no problem that some people were sceptical of it. The problem is social media companies censored the story and suspended people who posted about it and stopped people being able to link to the story.

Jankowicz, who has researched Russian disinformation tactics and online harassment, also previously praised Christopher Steele — the author of the since-discredited Trump-bashing dossier.

In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted about the former British spy’s appearance on the Infotagion podcast, writing: “Listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”

Steele’s fake dossier, which sparked the probe into whether former President Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with Russians during the 2016 election, was eventually debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

So the person in charge of combatting disinformation has a partisan track record of spreading it!

UPDATE: She has resigned from the role. Another Biden bumble.

It seems clear that the Coalition have lost their majority in the Australian House.

The only real uncertainty is whether Labor will gain a majority in their own right or need to do a deal with the left leaning so called teal independents.

We all know that many on the left love cancelling historical figures because views of 200 years ago are different today. George Washington, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson have all been targets, let alone Cecil Rhodes.

But here’s one that they have not yet targeted. Here is his record:

• “The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation”
• “his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger”
• “The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew”
• “The misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization”
• “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans did not know what to do with it?”

Who said all this? One Karl Marx.

Dame Anne Salmond has published a series of six articles at Newsroom on Te Tiriti and Democracy. They made some very salient points, which I will try and cover below.

In Part 1 she notes the problem with the Cooke decision in 1987:

 In the 1987 ‘Lands’ case, for example, the judges’ framing of the Treaty as “a partnership between races” (or between “Pakeha and Maori”, or “the Crown and the Maori race”), cannot be securely traced back to the text of Te Tiriti. …

Nor is there any talk of ‘races’ in Te Tiriti. Whakapapa is a relational framing of the world as a cosmic network, with a burst of energy that generates thought, memory and desire, aeons of nothingness and darkness, the winds of life and growth, followed by earth and sky, forests, crops, winds, the sea and rivers, and people. All human beings in Te Tiriti are spoken of as ‘tāngata’ (persons); and ‘tāngata maori’ is best translated as ordinary, everyday human beings.

Instead of a racialised, bilateral “partnership between races,” then, (or between “Pakeha and Maori”, or “the Crown and the Maori race” – a framing that lends itself to ‘Iwi vs. Kiwi’ interpretations), the relationships among the parties in Te Tiriti itself are multi-lateral and non-racial – as you’d expect in a whakapapa framing.

And then in Part 2 she notes:

In very recent times, Sir Robin Cooke’s rewriting of Te Tiriti as a binary ‘partnership between races’ has been interpreted as requiring a split in kāwanatanga, or governance at the national level. The division of populations into ‘races,’ however, is a colonial artefact that cuts across whakapapa and is scientifically obsolete. It is not a sound basis for constitutional arrangements in the 21st Century.

I agree.

In Part 3 she looks again at the problem of racial division:

After 250 years of shared history in Aotearoa New Zealand, the lineages of indigenous persons and incoming settlers from many different backgrounds have tangled in ways that defy separation into two distinct ‘races’. In whakapapa, with its kin-based relationships among earth and sky, the winds and the sea, plants and animals as well as people, this kind of complexity is handled with admirable simplicity.

As different kinds of incoming settlers marry and have children with those who are already living in Aotearoa, they enter the whakapapa, bringing their lineages with them. These include persons described as ‘African,’ ‘Asian,’ ‘Pacific Islanders’ or ‘Pākehā’ in contemporary census tabulations. Here, where racial categories do not exist, these tīpuna (ancestors) are all described as tāngata, persons with their own origins and ancestral heritages.

Individuals may identify with the kin group of either parent, and kin groups define themselves by reference to an apical ancestor. As time passes, non-indigenous incomers may even have whānau named after them – the Manuels, the Stirlings, the Jacksons, the O’Regans etc.

In the logic of whakapapa, ideas of weaving, or binding, or currents flowing together in a river abound. The notion that these interwoven, ever-changing kin networks can be split into two distinct, timeless ‘races’ – ‘Māori’ and ‘Pākehā’ – does not fit well with this relational framing. Nor does the idea of ‘race’ have scientific credibility, as pointed out above.

In Part 5 she looks at the Rotorua bill:

Frederick Maning, an early settler in the Hokianga who lived among Māori, agreed: ‘The natives are so self-possessed, opinionated, and republican, that the chiefs have at ordinary times but little control over them, except in very rare cases, where the chief happens to possess a singular vigour of character, or some other unusual advantage, to enable him to keep them under.’

Even in war, as the missionary Henry Williams noted, “it was their usual way for each party to go where they liked, that everyone was his own chief. Without any one to direct, not only does each tribe act distinct from the other, but each individual has the same liberty.”

The evidence suggests that democratic values cannot be regarded as a colonial imposition.

Democracy and democratic values do not belong to any one race or culture. They are universal human rights.

No New Zealander should be asked to accept that, by virtue of their birth, they are less worthy than any other. And the chances that if they are asked, they will agree, are vanishingly small, because to do so is to surrender their dignity as a person.

As it states in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’

No ifs, no buts, no exceptions.

Sadly thought 77 MPs voted against the UDHR and voted to end equality of suffrage.

Sent in by a health professional:

I was talking to a couple of overseas-trained theatre nurses the other day. Both had had to undergo a month-long course in “cultural safety/ Treaty implications etc” before they could get their  NZ nursing registration, all at a cool cost of over $11,000 each!  Followed by an exam on the topic.  Needless to say they never once got examined on their clinical nursing competence!!

We might get more nurses wanting to come and work here if we didn’t charge them $11,000 for cultural safety training!

A press release from the UK:

The UK’s first full-sized autonomous bus will take to the roads of Scotland for the first time this week as live testing begins for project CAVForth.

Stagecoach, in partnership with Fusion Processing, Alexander Dennis and Transport Scotland, will be carrying out on-road testing* of the autonomous bus over the next two weeks in preparation for the launch of the CAVForth pilot service in late summer. The Project CAVForth pilot, which is jointly funded by the UK Government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) will see five single-deck autonomous buses operating at SAE Level 4 over the Forth Road Bridge between Ferrytoll Park and Ride in Fife and the Edinburgh Park Train and Tram interchange. The buses are fitted with Fusion Processing’s ground-breaking sensor and control technology, CAVstar, that enables them to run on pre-selected roads without the safety driver having to intervene or take control. The buses will provide a service capable of carrying up to 36 passengers over the 14 miles across the bridge, with capacity for over 10,000 passengers a week.

I have no doubt this is the future. Autonomous electric vehicles (vans and buses) that will pick you up from your home and deliver you to your destination. Many households will be able to give up owning their own vehicles, as you can summon an autonomous vehicle by app within minutes.

Sadly the Government here is doing everything possible to stop this future. They are degrading roads and putting all the money into 19th century transport modes such as trains and trams which can only take you from one fixed point to another.

Stuff reports:

Inland Revenue’s total tax take is expected to rise from just over $104 billion in the year to June to more than $138b in the year to June 2026.

This is partially because of high inflation. Let’s say you have inflation of 5% a year or 20% over four years.

Let’s say you were on $70,000 today. You pay $14,020 tax. If your wages stay the same in real terms your tax paid increases by $4,620 or 33%. Your after tax income only increases by 17% so in real terms you have less money while the Government has more.

But it gets even better than that for the Government with GST. If prices go up 20%, then GST revenue goes up 20%.

But the tax haul doesn’t even stop there.

The Government is also expecting its first inflow of levies from its proposed Income Insurance Scheme with its levies on workers and employers bringing in $1.1b in the year to June 2025, jumping to $4.7b the following year when the scheme is expected to be in full swing.

This will be the largest take hike in decades – almost $5 billion of extra tax will be paid by employers and employees.

Every employee in New Zealand will be paying this extra tax, up to $1,800 a year, so unemployed people can get paid up to $400 a day not to look for jobs. This is what you will get if Labour get a third term.

The Taxpayers’ Union released:

Grant Robertson is the first Minister of Finance since Muldoon to fail to deliver a budget surplus during a time of economic boom, says the Taxpayers’ Union, commenting from today’s Budget 2022 Beehive lockup.

“With Government revenues booming, it is stunning that Grant Robertson has failed to deliver either tax relief or a surplus,” says Jordan Williams, the Executive Director of the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. 

“The spike to inflation has seen record revenue flooding into the Beehive due to workers paying higher income tax rates and more GST. But despite the inflation, the lowest unemployment since records began, the end of COVID lockdowns, and better than expected economic numbers, Grant Robertson has actually pushed back the return to surplus.” 

“It is stunning that, during a cost of living crisis, Grant Robertson has failed to give back any of his windfall gain to the workers who earned it.  His failure to deliver either income tax relief or a balanced budget beggars belief: while households tighten belts, Wellington balloons.”

“With Government revenues as strong as they are, the Finance Minister could have today announced both income tax relief and a surplus. Instead, he’s decided to feast on the revenue with a laundry list of spending commitments.” 

“The temporary $27-per week ‘cost of living’ payment is a cruel joke. Unlike genuine tax relief, it fails to improve productivity incentives. It’s just a three month handout, and an ineffective one at that. At current prices, it wouldn’t even buy two blocks of cheese!” 

“The only silver lining is pushing back by three months the hike to petrol taxes and Road User Charges. With inflation running at 6.9%, the hike to petrol taxes should have been squashed permanently”

The NY Times has basically told its reporters to stop using and relying on Twitter so much. This is a welcome development and it would be great if NZ media did the same here.

Here are some quotes from the NY Times Executive Editor:

• We can rely too much on Twitter as a reporting or feedback tool — which is especially harmful to our journalism when our feeds become echo chambers. We can be overly focused on how Twitter will react to our work, to the detriment of our mission and independence. 
• Maintaining a presence on Twitter and other social media is now purely optional for Times journalists. In fact, after speaking to dozens of you, it is clear to us that there are many reasons you might want to step away, and we’ll support anyone who decides to do so. If you do choose to stay on, we encourage you to meaningfully reduce how much time you’re spending on the platform, tweeting or scrolling, in relation to other parts of your job.
• We know that Twitter can be an important and useful reporting tool, especially for breaking news. You should use it as a source whenever appropriate, especially if Twitter plays a major role in your beat or the issues you’re covering. But it should rarely, if ever, be your primary reporting focus.

All good common sense. I despair when I see stories entirely based on the fact a couple of people on Twitter have criticised someone or something.

Got sent this fascinating chart from the Third Reich that shows how specific German laws were over working out your blood ancestry. It wasn’t about religion, but bloodline. If you had the right ancestors you had the privileges’ of citizenship, and if you didn’t you had less rights.

I am not considered Jewish as my mother wasn’t Jewish. But according to the Nazis I would be classified as a Jew as I would have been a child of mixed ancestry of the 1st grade. I would have needed permission from the Nazis to marry a non-Jew.

It’s a good reminder that rights of citizenship should not be dependent on your bloodline.