Stuff reports:

Businessman and former Far North mayor Wayne Brown has confirmed he will contest the Auckland mayoralty in October’s election.

Brown said in a statement that the Auckland Council he would lead would stop wasting money on “dopey projects”.

The newest entrant to the contest to succeed the retiring Phil Goff, said he brought more than 40 years’ experience running small, medium, and large Auckland businesses.

Brown has homes in the Far North District as well as in Auckland, and is former chairman of Auckland District Health Board, Transpower, and Auckland lines company Vector.

Labour and Efeso Collins must be very happy. Collins is the only candidate on the left, while we now have three or four candidates competing for the centre-right vote – Viv Beck, Leo Molloy, Craig Lord and Wayne Brown. This will allow Collins to win on as little as 30% of the vote.

This isn’t a criticism of Brown. He looks well qualified. But the vote splitting will only help Labour.

The Herald reported:

A gun was pulled out during a fight between Ōtāhuhu students earlier this week and held to a young woman’s head.

Two girls in school uniform can be seen fighting, grabbing each other by the hair. As the pair continue to fight a group surrounding them can be heard yelling.

“Motherf***er” one person yells.

Later in the footage, a woman is seen holding what appears to be a gun.

She holds the gun up, pointing it at a person in a green jumper while screaming at her.

“You touch my sister again, touch her, touch her,” the woman with the gun yells.

She then walks over to the woman in the green jumper and presses the gun to her head.

Is this New Zealand today – school girls carrying guns and brandishing them in while fighting?

Have the Police made an arrest yet?

The BSA has done its regular survey of New Zealanders to see which words are considered unacceptable on air. Generally blaspehmous terms are being more acceptable and racial terms less so.

The n word (I am not spelling it out in full as Google Ads play up when you do) is most unacceptable at 65% followed by the c word at 57%. Down the other end only 23% said nutter was unacceptable.

Curia did a poll in March for the Taxpayers’ Union asking:

Turning to the cost of living, would you support a reduction in the tax levied on petrol to
combat rising petrol prices?

This was 85% done before the Government announced they were cutting petrol tax by 25 cents a litre.

The results were massive – 78% in favour and only 20% opposed.

The net support by party vote was:

• National +82%
• Labour +62%
• ACT +22%
• Greens -32%

It is a good reminder that there is a huge difference between Labour and Green voters. When Labour focuses on the 10% who are Green voters they forget about the 90% who are not, including most of their own voters.

Several media outlets have all run a story that says Christopher Luxon has ruled out ACT’s proposed referendum on co-governance.

The Herald reports:

National Party leader Christopher Luxon has, eventually, ruled out a referendum on co-governance.

But what did he actually say. The Spinoff reported:

During a later press conference at parliament, Luxon appeared to once again be avoiding the subject of a referendum. “I have concerns about co-governance as it moves from management of local natural resources into the delivery of public services but what I’d say to you is the bigger issue is the government needs to make the case as to what they’re doing in this space and where we’re going,” he told reporters.

He even said he wouldn’t be “getting into” discussion of a referendum. “I appreciate [Seymour]’s got a view about what we might want to do with his party and a referendum,” he said.

But after further pressure from reporters, Luxon seemed to relent: “I don’t see a need for a referendum at this point, if you’re asking me that question.”

Saying “I don’t see a need for a referendum” is not the same as saying “I will refuse to consider one, if raised in coalition negotiations”. Luxon has simply said National’s policy isn’t to hold a referendum.

It is very rare for any party leader to adamantly rule something out, because MMP means it is rare to have a majority government and in coalition negotiations you often agree to things that were not your own policy.

I’m not saying National would agree to ACT’s referendum. In fact it is silly to speculate until you get an election result because a result of say National 43%, ACT 7% is very different to say National 35% and ACT 15%.

The Herald did a Q+A with top editors and readers. This is a good thing and is to be commended. A lot of it was around impartiality and Government funding.

It is true that some people often see a media outlet as left leaning and others as right leaning. A poll Curia did in 202 found CR voters thought the Herald leaned left by a net 12% while CL voters thought the Herald leaned right by a net 38%.

With regards to the Government funding, I don’t think that this means the Herald (or others) won’t criticise the Government. However it does create an incentive for media organisations to be more favourable towards parties that will continue funding them, as opposed to those who won’t.

But the real issue, as I have blogged on previously, is the Treaty partnership obligations. A reader asked:

Una G: To get the fund you must “show a clear and obvious commitment or intent for commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including a commitment to te reo Māori.” Is that why so many media outlets are changing the name of our country and English named cities like Auckland? And secondly is that why you refuse to represent the concerns of many who are critical of the Government’s interpretation of the Treaty…?

This is the key aspect. The Government has a political view of the Treaty as being about partnership. This is highly contested. However media organisations must follow this view, in order to get access to the $55 million. And the Herald’s answer skirts this:

We were well on this path before the $55 million fund was devised – but it has certainly helped us – for example – in finding and funding 25 wonderful new cadets who might not otherwise have followed the traditional tertiary education path that’s normally required to be a journalist. Regardless, the fund in no way dictates or guides the topics we or the cadets cover. And of course we accept opinions and report views from very many people, representing diverse schools of thought and experience.

Yes they were on this path where they agree with the Government, prior to the fund. But that is not the issue. The issue is any media organisation that disagrees with the Government’s view that the Treaty is a partnership is ineligible for funding.

Alex Psirides writes:

A bed is a piece of furniture, incapable of providing any form of care, never mind intensively. To do so it needs a specialist intensive care nurse standing next to it 24 hours a day. This requires five to six intensive care nurses per bed as, inconveniently, they also want to sleep, have families, and not live in a hospital.

Caring intensively also requires equipment, drugs, doctors, a large array of allied health professionals (physiotherapists, pharmacists, radiographers etc) cleaners and administration staff. It costs around NZ$1.5m (£750,000) a year to keep one intensive care bed open, with the availability of intensive care nurses being the rate-limiting step.

So what has happened?

But two years have passed since Covid began and we do not have a single additional operational ICU bed.

We are very lucky that Omicron is so much less severe than delta. Otherwise ICU capacity would have been swamped.

Karl du Fresne writes:

I spent a couple of hours wandering the streets of downtown Wellington this week. What a dismal experience.

Actually, it was worse than dismal. It was profoundly depressing. The city where I spent most of my working life looks as if it has lost the will to live. …

Lambton Quay on Tuesday was like a ghost town, Willis St only marginally better. Cuba Street, which once had an appealing raffishness, now looks just plain grotty. The CBD as a whole looks and feels tired and moribund.

Everywhere you look, businesses are closed or empty – a state of affairs documented in last Saturday’s Dominion Post. Beggars are ubiquitous, sometimes obtrusively so, and Cuba Mall is owned by derelicts.

This isn’t just about covid. Wellington is no longer a safe city in the central city.

All of this brings us to the matter of the city’s leadership, or lack thereof. From 1992 till 2010, Wellington had a succession of mayors – Fran Wilde, Mark Blumsky and Kerry Prendergast – who were energetic, capable and ambitious for their city. That was the Absolutely Positively era.

The rot set in under Celia Wade-Brown and since then, things have gone from bad to worse. Wellington in 2022 is cursed with the worst possible combination: a weak, ineffectual mayor and a council of fractious activists, several of whom treat their office as a licence to pursue ideological agendas.

There is no doubt we need change at the Council, big change. It is not a bad thing that different parts of the city elect Councillors with different views. But what is bad, is when you get Councillors who can’t compromise or work with people they don’t always agree with. And the Council needs leadership which can unite.

What the people of Wellington must do is elect a mayor and council who reflect the priorities and aspirations of the city at large rather than those of a vociferous minority.

That won’t be easy, because Wellington is home to New Zealand’s greatest concentration of woke zealots. They are well organised, ferociously committed and have the support of a broadly sympathetic media, many of whose journalists are of a similar ideological persuasion.

The Left has made an early start. Tory Whanau declared herself a candidate for the mayoralty in November and has been energetically promoting herself at every opportunity. Whanau has no local government experience, but the fact that she’s a former chief of staff for the Green Party provides a clear pointer to the type of mayor she would be. It will also ensure the support of the impressionable young and the idealistic New Left from the inner suburbs.

She certainly doesn’t lack self-assurance, judging by a lavish photo spread in Capital magazine (what was that I said about sympathetic media?). But Whanau as mayor would be a disaster – a guarantee that the city would continue on its present wayward course, albeit even faster.

The Council is already proposing a 16% increase in rates. Whanau as Mayor would probably see that grow to 25% or more.

A reader writes in regarding the call for free public transport:

I am so totally in favour of this.

I’m just not sure that the bus drivers will work for free, the diesel companies will provide free diesel, the road user charges will be free.

Of course, if we mean “every other taxpayer should pay for some select people who have access to public transport and ability to use public transport to get a further discount beyond the massive subsidy they already get”, then that’s quite a different discussion.  I’m not sure I’m in favour of that.

Exactly.

Peter Davis writes to Newsroom:

Second, there will be a drastic reduction in accountability and transparency. For some reason that still puzzles me, the incoming Labour government more or less got rid of the public reporting of health sector performance metrics. I have always felt that was the saving grace of public-sector organisations –transparency, efficiency, and accountability. We should have a dashboard now as a public and viewable facility, and it should be extended to primary care as we will be losing the stats provided by PHOs.

So Peter Davis (a former DHB member) points out the health reforms will reduce accountability and transparency and laments Labour scrapping the health targets and metrics. I agree with him we should have these as a dashboard.

Patrick Carroll writes:

Simply put, the primary reason housing prices are soaring is because the supply is being limited while the demand is growing.

With respect to supply, there are basically two ways to expand: up and out. On the one hand, cities can build taller, higher-density residences. On the other hand, they can build on new land at the outskirts of the city.

The problem is that both of these options are seriously unpopular. With respect to building up, many people are fiercely opposed to high-density developments in their local communities, and as a result, most municipalities have strict zoning laws that prevent or at least limit these kinds of initiatives.

If you suggest building out, however, you quickly encounter the wrath of environmentalists who are on a mission to mitigate urban sprawl, and the environmentalists have passed many land-use regulations, too.

And just doing one isn’t enough. You need to be able to build both up and out. But sadly many of those who support building up bitterly oppose building out.

Karl du Fresne writes:

As I said in a recent letter to the Times-Age, New Zealanders need to decide what type of government they want: one that serves all citizens equally, or one that recognises a minority racial group as having rights that trump those of the majority.

This doesn’t mean sweeping aside Maori rights. But it’s one thing to treat Maori fairly and respectfully, as is their due, and quite another to undermine the fundamental democratic principles from which all New Zealanders – Maori, Pakeha and everyone else – benefit.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that people of Maori descent enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. These include the right to stand for councils and to get elected, as many have done. That would provide the opportunity to be represented in the running of a legitimately constituted Three Waters governance structure. But the powerful iwi interests that influence the government (and in particular Labour’s Maori caucus, which is a power centre in its own right) want to bypass that process and enjoy a seat at the table as of right.

To put it another way, the Three Waters project, as it stands, involves replacing democracy with another form of government for which we don’t have a name.

Actually I think there is a name for it. If you make representation dependent on race and members of one race get 5.7 times the voting power of all the other races, there is indeed a name for it.

Newshub reports:

Despite thousands of state homes not meeting healthy homes standards, Newshub can reveal Kāinga Ora’s spent millions doing up its own offices.

While Housing Minister Megan Woods says that’s a good thing because it means the agency is growing, National doesn’t agree.

Kāinga Ora’s spent $24,354,759 of taxpayer money over the past four years on itself on office renovation.

They have around 2,300 staff so that is a spend of over $10,000 per staffer just on office renovations.

Easy when it is our money they are spending. I doubt may private sector companies would spend $10,000 per staff on office renovations.

While Kāinga Ora spends millions on itself, it admitted in its last annual report just 21 percent of its homes met the Healthy Homes Standards – meaning 54,000 homes failed.

“And yet housing officials are prioritising upgrades to its corporate offices,” Willis says.

And the Government wonders why things are getting worse despite them spending more money.

Oliver Hartwich writes:

The Cold War era is often associated with the arms race between East and West. While that military confrontation between the two blocs was a key element of the Cold War, it was not the defining one.

At its core, the Cold War was a philosophical divide: liberalism vs socialism, democracy vs totalitarianism, freedom vs oppression. …

Thus, Western countries reconfirmed their adherence to their set of liberal values through their common institutions. Meanwhile, despite political differences, there remained a common core of values spanning almost the entire domestic political spectrum.

In a way, it did not matter if the Republicans or the Democrats governed the US. Or whether the Social Democrats or the Christian Democrats led West Germany. Or whether the socialists or the conservatives ran France. Their countries’ basic adherence to the Western values set was never in question.

During the Cold War, the old West remained highly coordinated internationally, and it was relatively cohesive domestically.

But just as having a common enemy unites, so the lack of a common enemy can drive apart. And that was the story since the end of the Cold War.

This is spot on. We have focused too much on what divides us, rather than what unites us, having lost that common enemy.

That is the backdrop to Putin’s aggression on Ukraine. Putin had perceived the West as divided – because he had helped divide it where he could. And he saw a West that was so weak it barely demurred when Russia swallowed Crimea in 2014. A West that liked Russian money, needed Russian gas and was not prepared to stand up for its own values. A West that allowed Putin to get what he wanted.

Despite that, Putin seems to have miscalculated. Instead of humiliating the West once again, Putin’s war is – so far – achieving the opposite: it is reviving it.

This is thanks to the heroism of the Ukrainian people and their President, Volodymyr Zelensky.

A CNN commentary summed it up perfectly: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his courageous nation have already done more to transform the West’s policy toward Russia than 30 years of post-Cold War summits, policy resets and showdowns with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

The invasion of Ukraine may go down in world history as just as significant as 9/11.

The West, which after 1989 lost sight of its values, may have found them again. By confronting the external enemies of liberal democracy, it may regain its own liberal-democratic strengths.

If that is the outcome of this conflict, the West will be ready for the next geopolitical challenges to come. And President Xi will think twice about his ambitions in the South China Sea.

I hope this does give China pause, but we have to seriously consider how we become less reliant on China, so that if China does invade Taiwan, we can take action without being economically crippled.

A free trade zone between the US, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada would be a good start.

The West may also rethink its own domestic priorities again. It has taken a brutal and existential challenge to sort out what matters – and what doesn’t.

If that is the outcome, then at least out of Putin’s atrocity, out of his monstrous and barbaric war, may come something good. And that would be a comeback of a strong West, committed to its values. And with Ukraine as a free, liberal, democratic nation under the rule of law – just the kind of country the NATO Treaty talked about and that the EU should want to have as its member.

Putin’s war on Ukraine, and Zelensky’s heroism, force us all to take a stand. It leaves no room for neutrality, even if dressed up as an independent foreign policy.

When ever-neutral Switzerland joins the EU in their sanctions against Russia; when Finland and Sweden now think about joining NATO; when Singapore firmly puts itself behind the West; when pacificist Germany and Japan rearm themselves: As all of this is happening, times have fundamentally changed.

The only choice left for countries to make is which side they will be on.

There are 84 countries defined as “free” by Freedom House. We should be doing more with them and less with the others.

Stuff reports:

Drug use, violent behaviour, vandalism and other anti-social behaviour on a daily basis is “destroying our city”.

That’s what Rotorua Mayor Steve Chadwick told Social Development and Employment Minister Carmel Sepuloni about Rotorua’s emergency housing motels, in a letter obtained by Stuff via an Official Information Act request.

So a former Labour MP and Minister has said that the Government’s emergency housing programme is destroying Rotorua.

Good on her for telling the truth in her letters to the Government. If only she would say the same out loud.

This is beyond pathetic. To try and instigate a boycott of a company, because an individual involved with that company made a donation to a political party you disagree with. This sort of US-style cancel culture will destroy New Zealand politics.

First of all Xero itself has not donated to anyone. It is one of our most globally successful companies that have taken on the world and dominated. It has created jobs for thousands of New Zealanders and generated immense tax revenue for the Government. It also has been a godsend for many small businesses like myself. It has made running the company accounts so easy. To try any boycott an iconic New Zealand company because of a personal donation of one individual associated with it, is nasty. It is designed to intimidate people.

The smear that Drury’s donation to ACT is about white supremacy is malicious. First of all Drury himself is Maori (Ngai Tahu through his father) and the ACT leader is Maori (Ngapuhi through his mother). But even if they were not, it is ludicrous to smear people as white supremacists because they don’t agree with the Maori Party’s stated desire to change New Zealand from being a democracy.

But the attack on Drury is even more despicable considering his other donations. In December 2020, he donated $1 million to a local iwi’s charity to clean up Lake Hayes. Yep ten times what he donated to ACT.

Drury also personally funded a 5 year full boarding scholarship to Woodford House for Ngai Tahu families. That would be around $125,000 per student. And yet this is the guy the Maori Party smear as a white supremacist or supporting white supremacy. They should be ashamed.

Stuff reports:

Tauranga’s four commissioners have earned more than $1.1 million in the year they have been leading the council. …

Mahuta set remuneration at $1800 a day for the commission chair and $1500 for commissioners.

According to the council’s remuneration figures, Tolley was paid $358,200 for 200 days work between February 2021 and February 2022.

Selwood earned $261,000 for 174 days, Rolleston worked 174.5 days and was paid $261,750 and Wasley earned $275,250 for 183.5 days work.

Tauranga City Council democracy services manager Coral Hair says the reason for the difference in the days worked by the commissioners is because of their different duties and responsibilities.

These include appointments to regional joint committees, and they may also be asked to attend different events or meetings on the commission’s behalf, says Hair.

So if a Commissioner attends some function, then they get paid more money. Nice work.

Shouldn’t the Commissioners get salaries, instead of hourly or daily rates?

Stuff reports:

An Auckland man hid more than four million undeclared cigarettes in Gib board pallets. …

Customs investigations manager Cam Moore told Stuff this conviction is further evidence that it’s not just organised criminal groups who see large-scale tobacco smuggling and money laundering as a profitable crime.

Moore said the high retail prices for cigarette and tobacco products makes New Zealand a lucrative market.

Ng’s case is another example of large-scale tobacco smuggling.

Government policy has led to this huge black market. The tax increases have pushed the price up to a lvel where the black market is booming.

And sadly future Government policies look set to do the same. If you ban people from legally being able to purchase regulated and taxed tobacco, they will turn to the black market to buy unregulated and untaxed tobacco.