Inflation is at 7% and families are struggling with the extra cost of food, petrol and housing (and more). What many don’t realise is later this year Labour plans to legislate to cut people’s take home pay by up to $1,800 a year. It is their compulsory income insurance policy. This is how it will work:

• Funded by a massive $3.5 billion a year take hike on all employees and employers
• Employees will have an extra 1.39% tax which will reduce their take home pay by up to $1,820 a year or $35 a week.
• Employers will have an extra 1.39% tax on staff which will see them boost prices making inflation worse
• People who are made redundant etc will get paid by taxpayers up to $400 a day to remain unemployed for six months (and one month from the employer). If they get a new job, they will lose their insurance payments so they will be incentivised to remain unemployed for the full seven months.

So the net effect of this policy is:

• Inflation will increase
• Take home pays will decrease
• Unemployment will increase

This $3.5 billion annual tax increase will be the largest tax increase in over 30 years. The only way to stop it will be to change the Government.

An excellent advertisement that appeared in the Herald. We need to remind people that every single Labour and Green MP voted for a bill to end equality of suffrage in New Zealand.

A leaked draft US Supreme Court opinion shows that a majority of the Supreme Court are going to reverse the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision which found abortion to be a constitutional right.

I believe abortion should be a constitutional right, but that the way you get it to be a constitutional right is to stick it in the constitution!

I blogged back in January:

Like RBG, I like the outcome of Roe vs Wade. I’d vote (if in the US) for a constitutional amendment stating abortion is a right. But the fact I agree with the outcome, doesn’t mean I think the judgment is a good one, which should stand.

From a policy point of view I’d love it if the Supreme Court declared taxation greater than 10% of income is unconstitutional. It would be great. But it would be just as wrong for the Supreme Court to invent low taxation as a constitutional right. And imagine how outraged left wingers would be if the Supreme Court declared taxation over 10% illegal. Well that is how many on the right feel about Roe vs Wade.

I also commented:

It is a terrible decision. It is one of the worst decisions made by the Supreme Court where a majority of Justices just decided to invent a constitutional right, because that would align with their policy preferences.

One of the reasons abortion is such a divisive issue in the US, is because of resentment that the Supreme Court decided the issue for the entire country, rather than have it decided democratically through legislatures as we have done in New Zealand.

If the Supreme Court does reverse Roe vs Wade, then abortion law will be decided by state legislatures in the US, just as abortion law in New Zealand is decided by the House of Representatives.

The valedictory by Simon Bridges’ last night was one of the most substantive I’ve been to. The core of it was 14 pieces of advice for his 14 years in Parliament. I’m summarising them below, as they are so good:

1. New MPs: don’t breathe through your nose
2. New MPs: don’t let anything ruin your sleep
3. To more senior MPs, don’t be quite so poll and focus group driven – “Polls and focus groups don’t, or at least shouldn’t, tell you what to do. They should only ever be an aid, helping you to decide how to get to where you think is right.”
4. Have less small-target, short-term political tactics and more large long-term strategies
5. Independent thought and differences of opinion are actually good
6. This point about independent thinking also applies to the press. If every one of you has the same basic position on a complex matter, you are probably all engaged in group thinking, quite probably wrong.
7. The most important job of the media is to hold the powerful to account, and let me give you a clue: it’s the Government that has the power
8. Experts don’t know everything. Nothing in politics and government comes down to the science says this: there are always wider social, economic, and normative implications as well, which we have a duty to have an opinion and a side on.
9. To MPs on select committees: spend less time arguing where the comma goes in a report no one will read, please, and more time debating from your principles and values for your electorates and communities.
10. MPs in Parliament should be bold and without fear or favour as Clark, Cullen, Hide, Peters and Mallard have been. We over-sanitise this place at our and, more importantly, society’s peril.
11. Parliamentary reform to strengthen it against the executive is important. Select committees should not be rubber stamps for Government. The Speaker should be elected by secret ballot.
12. National is and must be a very broad church of urban, provincial and rural and of liberal, centrist, and conservative. We must be scrupulous to allow all these views through without too much control, let alone censorship, and seek to keep the balance, the peace, among all those values and interests without letting one dominate the other.
13. They say politics is Hollywood for ugly people but it’s far from all glamour and glitz, however, and I do think politics is getting harder.
14. This job done well is tough and not actually that well-remunerated for what it entails. So on MPs’ pay, let’s all remember that we need the highest quality people here—not just the very wealthy, for whom money doesn’t matter

Simon is a big loss to Parliament.

Newshub reports:

It asked: Do you think the Government should give New Zealanders a tax cut in the upcoming May Budget?

A clear majority – 68.7 percent – say yes, hand back over the cash, while only 23.7 percent said no. Even a majority of Labour voters – 54.2 percent – want a tax cut, with 35.7 percent saying no. 

That’s a huge majority, basically 3:1 in favour of tax cuts in the Budget. Even a majority of Labour voters want a tax cut.

But are they going to get a shock. Not only will Labour not give tax cuts in this Budget, they are delivering a tax hike on every employee and employer in New Zealand. The average family is going to have their take home pay cut by $100 a month, to fund Labour’s unemployment insurance so people made redundant will get up to $400 a day for seven months.

Stuff reports on how a teacher called Ngamihi Moses did the following:

• On a school camp instructed six misbehaving year eight students to get into a van
• Dropped them off 10 km from camp to an area unknown to them
• Told them to walk either 200 km back home to Whakatane or 10 km back to camp
• Drove off
• Kids split into two groups of three
• 20 minutes later the teacher picked up the kids walking back to camp
• Could not find the kids walking to Whakatane
• After midnight the other three kids were found
• The teacher then punished the kids who tried walking to Whakatane by stripping them to their underwear and made to stand outside in the cold until they apologised

For all that he merely gets to go on a course, and have mentoring for a year and have to tell future employers for just two years. Then it is all wiped.

A Curia poll for the Taxpayers’ Union has found 59% of NZers believe government funding of private media companies has undermined the independence of media with only 21% disagreeing.

The media will of course never report on this poll finding, but it should concern them. It doesn’t matter whether or not the media have compromised their independence by taking the $55 million, because the vast majority of NZers believe they have been compromised. Taking the money has been the largest own goal for media.

Note that this was not a partisan issue. A plurality of Labour and Green voters also agreed media independence has been compromised.

The $55 million PIJF (Public Interest Journalism Fund) is unpopular. Only 24% of New Zealanders support it. Time to scrap it.

The April 2022 Roy Morgan is out.

Party Vote

• Labour 33.5% (+1.5% from March)
• National 37.5% (-0.5%)
• Greens 10.5% (nc)
• ACT 10.0% (+1.0%)
• Maori 1.5% (-0.5%)
• NZ First 2.5% (-1.5%)
• TOP 2.0% (+0.5%)
• New Conservatives 0.5% (nc)

Seats

• Labour 43 (-22 from election)
• National 49 (+16)
• Greens 13 (+3)
• ACT 13 (+3)
• Maori 2 (nc)

Governments

• Labour/Green 56/120
• National/ACT 62/120

Direction

• Right 43.0% (+4.0%)
• Wrong 49.5% (-2.5%)

This is the fifth Roy Morgan poll in a row to show a change of Government if there was an election.

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.

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