One News reports:
The issue of Māori co-governance is set to be a big talking point at the next election with ACT campaigning for a referendum on the issue.
Revealed exclusively to 1News, party leader David Seymour says it would be a bottom line if forming a Government with National.
“Over the last 40 years a combination of the Waitangi Tribunal, the courts, and successive Labour and National governments have quietly but progressively changed the definition of what the Treaty means,” Seymour said.
I certainly think that major constitutional changes such as the push for co-governance at the highest levels of government should be a matter decided by the public, not done by politicians with no mandate.
ACT proposes that the next government passes legislation defining the principles of the Treaty, then ask the people to vote on it becoming law.
The Treaty Principles Act would say:
1. All citizens of New Zealand have the same political rights and duties
2. All political authority comes from the people by democratic means, including universal suffrage, and regular and free elections with a secret ballot
3. New Zealand is a multi-ethnic liberal democracy where discrimination based on ethnicity is illegal.
The second one is key. Political authority does not come from the Treaty of Waitangi, or the US Declaration of Independence or other founding documents. They are important documents but political authority comes from the people via democratic means. This is what separates out democratic and free countries from other countries.
A nice little protest in Wellington that will annoy the Russian Embassy. But one step up is what some building owners did in Madrid:
They projected the colours of Ukraine onto the Russian Embassy. The local Ambassador is reportedly apoplectic with rage.
Bristol World reports:
Staff at the University of Bristol are being given guidance on neopronouns and emerging gender identities such as ‘catgender’.
The university’s ‘Using Pronouns at Work’ guide advises staff to include their own pronouns such as he/him or she/her when introducing themselves to students and other staff, helping others feel comfortable and ensuring the institution is a ‘welcoming and supportive’ place for all.
It also links to a website that says some people may use ‘emojiself pronouns’ or nya/n pronouns (’nyan’ is the Japanese word for meow) as they identify as ‘catgender’, a xenogender in which one strongly identifies with cats or other felines.
This will be invaluable in dealing with all the feline identifying students.
An OIA to MBIE has revealed that 11 NZ citizens entered NZ by way of transit. I blogged on how desperate families did this to get home – book a flight to Fiji, and simply don’t get back on the plane in Auckland.
The most interesting thing is that not a single one has been issued an infringement notice by the NZ Police. I recall the Government warning people they may be arrested and charged – but it was all scaremongering.
Jon Johansson writes:
Temporary relief at the pump shows how nimble government can be when sufficiently motivated. Same with border openings happening sooner and vaccine passes going too. Polling had nothing to do with fuelling Labour’s motivation, according to the Government.
Nevertheless, Labour’s poll reversal has it in good company for a government four-and-a-half years in. Only Sir ‘Teflon John’ Key bucked the trend, selling high to retire undefeated, with National never once behind in TVNZ polls while he was Prime Minister.
This got me wondering how Governments normally fare at this stage of the electoral cycle. So here’s the One News poll for all the MMP Governments at this stage:
So it is rare for the Government to lag at this stage. The only other time they did, was just after the Orewa speech which saw National climb 18%.
The PM announced:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta announced today that New Zealand will provide a further $5 million contribution of non-lethal military assistance to support Ukraine, and are making available a range of surplus defence equipment to share with Ukraine at their request.
Funding will be primarily directed to the NATO Trust Fund which provides much needed fuel, military rations, communications and military first aid kits to support Ukraine.
So we will be assisting Ukraine to the level of 10% of what the Government spent on wanting to do a cycle bridge in Auckland. It’s less than a quarter of what they are spending on a train service from Hamilton used by 30 people a day. And for a country of 44 million fighting off a vicious invasion.
Australia is giving A$96 million of military assistance. That is 20 times as much as New Zealand.
Stuff reports:
Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield says there isn’t a mental health crisis despite a new Government report finding ballooning specialists wait times for children and adolescents, and increased antidepressant and antipsychotic medication dispensing for young people.
All mental health services for children and adolescents are short at least a quarter of clinical roles, with the deficit as high as 40 per cent in Wellington, despite a huge $1.9 billion investment in mental health from the Labour Government as part of its wellbeing budget in 2019.
This is a great example of Labour’s legacy – huge increases in funding, yet worse outcomes.
Some Ministers think that all you have to do to fix something is agree to spend money. The reality is that fixing complex problems requires a Minister to drive changes in their agencies.
Tony Ryall in Health showed how you can improve things. Rather than try to do 100 things poorly, he set around six health targets which would make a difference – reduced ED waiting times, quicker cancer treatments, more vaccinations etc.
This Government has shown that you can spend almost $2 billion on a problem, and have things get worse. They have managed the same in housing and education also.
The Herald reports:
Act will declare $850,000 of donations on Monday from some of the wealthiest New Zealanders, including a $100,000 donation from billionaire Graeme Hart, who tops the rich list.
Act leader David Seymour says the donations are part of a drive by the Act party which has raised almost $1 million. The remaining roughly $150,000 has come from smaller donations, which do not have to have their donors declared.
Alongside Hart, the big donors are Rod Drury, Craig Turner, Graham Edwards, Dame Jenny Gibbs, Murray Chandler, and John Harman, who donated $100,000 each.
Stephen Jennings, Grant Baker, and Mike Thorburn donated $50,000 each.
Seymour said the donations were from people who were not “particularly political”, and he did not know conclusively whether any of the names on the list were Act party members.
He said the donors were “worried about two things: the state of democracy, the rushed legislation and the uncertainty it creates; and the policy direction which they see as being anti-aspirational and I think the reason they have connected that with Act is they want to see meaningful change in New Zealand”.
That is a huge amount of money to collect from one donation drive. To me that indicates two things:
So great to see people willing to donate to parties they support, and that under our good electoral laws their donations are disclosed promptly.
The Herald reports:
A New Zealand-born father of five with a criminal history spanning 23 years in Australia has failed in a last-ditch bid to remain there.
The man, who was sent to Australia to live with an aunt after being physically abused as a teen, pleaded with authorities to let him stay in the same country as his children.
He said he wanted to be a father to his kids and be there for them when they needed him.
“I always said I would never disown my kids like my dad did with me.”
On the face of it, this is very laudable. Kids do much better if they grow up with both parents.
The man was sent to Australia when he was 15 after suffering physical abuse from his father and stepfather. He has never been back to New Zealand.
His criminal offending began when he was 18 and has continued almost yearly since.
While characterised by property and dishonesty-related crimes, numerous traffic offences and breaches of court-imposed orders, his list of previous offences also includes some that resulted in extended prison terms.
He was jailed for two years and seven months in 2006 for a grievous bodily harm charge, in which he fractured a man’s eye socket.
In 2008, he received a three-year prison term for his part in a phony robbery set up to steal about $40,000 from his employer.
He was warned by immigration officials in 2010 that his visa was in jeopardy but continued to offend regardless.
So his entire adult life has been crime, and he was warned explicitly 12 years ago he might be deported if he continued. He had kids then, so if he really wanted to be in their lives he could have stopped.
In 2015 and 2020, he was subject to domestic violence orders after incidents involving his current partner – the mother of his three youngest children, some of whom were present as he issued derogatory taunts, damaged and destroyed property.
If his partner took out domestic violence protection orders against him, then it is quite possible his kids are safer without him around.
It was accepted the man had a parental role in the lives of his three youngest children, but the Tribunal was concerned about how genuine the man’s evidence about his children was.
He made similar claims about his older children to the Department of Home Affairs in 2010 but he now had little if any contact with them.
Not entirely surprising.
It would be interesting to do such a poll here. I am sure we would also over-estimate, but surely not so badly.
If you groups responses together, then Americans think:
Oliver Hartwich writes:
Another concern is food prices. Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of maize and wheat. It is unclear whether there will be a large harvest this year, and no major shipping lines service Black Sea ports.
The price of wheat has skyrocketed as a result. In January, it was about US$7.50. Now it is US$13. It is a catastrophe in many poorer countries where households spend most of their budgets on food. It could trigger famines.
An increase in fertiliser prices – another major export from this region – will exacerbate agricultural crises. The fertiliser price in Britain increased by almost 50% in the past week alone.
Metals and rare earths are also a concern. Nickel, for example: From US$18,400 per tonne in January to US$80,000 today. Best of luck to any industry needing such resources.
The war has business implications everywhere. Airlines must make huge detours to avoid restricted airspace. Car manufacturers are closing factories because some of their parts suppliers are based in Ukraine. McDonald’s lost 9 percent of its global revenue from leaving the Russian market.
This is before we get to the question of how central banks will respond. Will they fight the wave of massive inflation? Or will they support their struggling economies?
I didn’t realise the impact on wheat or nickel. Inflation may not peak for some time yet.
A reader asked me which Labour MPs would be out on the latest ONK poll. This poll would see Labour going from 65 to 47 seats, so losing 18 seats. If you assume no change in electorate seats then the List MPs who would be out (in order) are:
However it is likely Labour will lose some electorate seats also. Their smallest margins (to National) are:
All these seats have a majority of below 4,500. Nelson, Whanganui, Hamilton West and even West Coast-Tasman could come into play. But’s let’s assume those 12 seats go to National. Then Labour loses six List MPs and 12 electorate MPs, so those out would be:
Newsroom reports:
As of 9.05am on Tuesday morning, there were 152 staffed intensive care beds across New Zealand (excluding Christchurch). All but four of them were full.
That’s according to a snapshot obtained by Newsroom of the Critical Health Resource Information System (CHRIS), which updates ICU capacity twice a day with submissions from each of the country’s public hospitals. It’s also much, much lower than the estimates provided by the Ministry of Health, which told Newsroom on Monday there were 297 staffed ICU beds in the public health system.
That is not a minor discrepancy. The Ministry pf Health is citing a number twice as large as the hospitals.
The Free Beacon reports:
More than 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, intimidating attendees and causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building.
The March 10 panel, which was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. Both groups had taken the same side in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations. The purpose of the panel, a member of the Federalist Society said, was to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues.
“It was pretty much the most innocuous thing you could talk about,” he added.
That didn’t stop nearly 120 student protesters from crowding into the event.
The intolerance is depressing.
Newsroom has a story that is almost beyond belief:
His company, Ubiquitome, which is 20 percent owned by Otago Innovation, was launched in 2014. In the early months of the pandemic it received more than half a million dollars in development funding from MBIE’s Covid Innovation Accelerator fund and more than $2 million from a similar fund set up in the US to advance Covid-19 testing technology.
“We were primed and ready [with the testing technology], and the MBIE and US funding allowed us to get meaty Covid work going,” Pickering says.
“We developed a hand-held device and the app that supports it, and we are contract manufacturing it here in [the Auckland suburb of] Rosedale, with sales overseas and a growing group of organisations including Napier Port, Winston Pulp International, Endoscopy Auckland and Te Whānau O Waipareira using it to test for Covid variants.”
The lab-in-a-box Liberty 16 device can be deployed at a company, school, hospital, marae or even an apple orchard, Pickering says, and run up to 30 saliva PCR tests at a time. Results come back within 90 minutes and can be sent to a mobile phone through the Ubiquitome app. One unit and the associated lab materials costs around $10,000, although it’s cheaper if you buy more units.
The technology has ISO international quality certification, and US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval. Ubiquitome has a partnership with the Yale School of Public Health. It has the effectiveness of a PCR test, with the flexibility of a rapid antigen test, Pickering says.
And it’s not available for use in New Zealand – at least not officially.
“We went to the Ministry of Health in 2020 and said ‘The New Zealand Government funded this, it was extraordinarily prescient, and it’s ready and working for you.’ The feedback was along the lines of: ‘We don’t have time, we are too busy, we are focusing on the Covid response.”
So we have a NZ company with a mobile testing device that was part funded by MBIE, yet the Ministry of Health wouldn’t even look at it!
Barrie Saunders writes:
The Three Waters proposal driven by Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta is a totally unnecessary, very divisive battle with local government and the people of New Zealand.
The focus has been on whether there should be co-governance with iwi leaders, and also, whether it adequately prevents privatisation, which I see as a red herring maybe designed to divert attention from the real issues.
The critical question is whether the failings of local government are such, that their Three Waters assets should be confiscated by the state, reformulated into four entities, and then handed back into a convoluted governance regime involving iwi and local government nominees.
Having looked at the papers behind the proposals I do not believe they meet the necessary threshold. Yes, there are problems, as Local Government NZ has recognised for many years, but they do not in my view justify central government overriding local government in this heavy-handed manner.
And the problems can be fixed by central government setting standards that must be met, but leaving it to local government as to how they achieve them.
Some of the boundaries defy the common-sense test. Gisborne to Nelson including Wellington is Entity C, which is not rational, particularly when it’s remembered that Horizons in Manawatu is actually split with Entity B. The logic of Entity C is to accommodate Ngai Tahu, which in the 19th century controlled the South Island outside of the Nelson area.
Yep the boundaries are not based on regional or local councils today, but on what were the tribal boundaries in the 1800s!
Newshub reports:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern still has confidence in COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins after he released personal information about journalist Charlotte Bellis despite official advice not to. …
Revelations on Thursday show foreign affairs officials sent details of Bellis’s consular assistance to the Foreign Minister under the ‘no surprises’ policy because there’d been “extensive media attention”.
This was then passed to Hipkins with a note saying all personal information was “not for public comment”.
“Let’s be very clear why he did that – he did that to attack her because he felt under attack by her,” National’s COVID-19 spokesperson Chris Bishop said.
The Prime Minister still has confidence in Hipkins.
“I do have confidence in our minister in the fact that he at all times was working to best ensure that in a really difficult environment that all those who needed to access MIQ were able to do so,” she said on Thursday.
Bellis’ lawyer Tudor Clee wants an apology from Hipkins.
“He owes an apology not just for breaching her privacy but ultimately the information wasn’t even true.”
So MFAT explicitly said the information was not for public comment, but Hipkins went and used it exactly for public comment.
Normally it would be ridiculous for a Prime Minister to claim that a curriculum change would be one of their most important legacies. But this is quite plausible, when you consider what they haven’t managed to do.
So a new history curriculum is probably their biggest achievement.
Stuff reports:
There has been no fluoride in Wellington’s water supply since February and fluoridation has been inconsistent for the last four years.
The water supply in Wellington, Upper Hutt, and Porirua has not been fluoridated for more than a month.
“Wellington Water made the decision to turn off the fluoride facilities in February because of health and safety issues, according to an email sent to mayor and councillors last night. …
A draft press release attached to the email stated the fluoride dosing at all water treatment plants has been inconsistent for the past four years.
Because of the inconsistent dosage, operators have lowered the dose of fluoride to avoid dangerously high levels of fluoride. This means dosage has often been below the effective range.
This doesn’t affect us as we are on a tank supply, but this is a huge fail. For four years fluoridation has been below the effective range, and they even turned it off without telling anyone.
UPDATE: It’s even worse. The Herald reports:
An independent inquiry has been launched after Wellington Water was found to have overseen low and inconsistent levels of fluoridation in the region’s water supply for four years.
Fresh revelations have also emerged tonight that Upper Hutt, Porirua and Wellington City have not been supplied with fluoridated water since last year without residents being told.
Wellington Water previously reported fluoride had been turned off last month, which was incorrect. …
The board has clarified fluoridation was stopped at the Te Marua water treatment plant in May 2021 and in November 2021 at the Gear Island plant.
They supply Upper Hutt, Porirua and Wellington City.
This is a failure of such monumental proportions that either the Chair or CEO (or both) must go.
Any competent commercial board would have governance policies that would require management to report significant risks to them. A failure to comply with a statutory requirement to fluoridate the water would be as big a risk as you can imagine.
If the board did not have a policy requiring them to be informed of such risks, then the board chair must resign.
If the board did have such a policy, then the CEO must resign for keeping this hidden from his board for many months.