Peter Bassett writes:

On 27 May 2021, Wellington City Council’s Long-Term Plan Committee faced a clear fork in the road.

Officers presented councillors with water investment options, including one — Water Option 3 — that contained a $391 million wastewater renewals programme. It was not vague. It was explicit. It was designed to reduce sewage pollution, starting with the central city and south-coast catchments now making headlines.

At the same meeting, officers recommended Cycleways Option 3, a staged programme set out in the consultation document presented to councillors. 

Councillors were not choosing between water and nothing. They were choosing priority. 

What happened next is the hinge moment of Wellington’s current disgrace. 

An amendment was moved by then-councillor Tamatha Paul, seconded by Jill Day (now Labour Party President), to adopt Cycleways Option 4, expanding the programme to $226 million over ten years, compared with $120 million under Option 3, as set out in that consultation document. 

That amendment passed. 

Accelerated wastewater renewal did not.

So let’s be very clear on this. They were given an option to spend $391 million on improving wastewater and $120 million on cycleways. The now Green MP and now Labour Party President moves to spend instead $226 million on cycleways and not to accelerate the wastewater renewal.

The Wellington press gallery now demands accountability, inquiries and transparency — yet appears to have collectively forgotten the meeting where the decisive trade-off was made.

Columns thunder about “decades of under-investment”, a phrase that has the great advantage of removing responsibility from the true enablers. Contractors are blamed. Systems are blamed. Governments are blamed.

What is not mentioned is the moment when councillors explicitly chose more cycleways over fixing basic infrastructure.

Every Labour and Green Councillor voted for cycleways over wastewater. Great job.

Radio NZ reports:

More than 45,000 people have signed a petition demanding equal treatment of visitors from New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours.

At the moment they must apply for a visitor visa, provide proof of funds for the duration of their stay and could be asked to get an x-ray or doctor’s check to show they’re in “good health”.

But the petition wants visitors from six Pacific nations to be treated the same as travellers from 60 other countries – that it says are eligible for a cheaper more straight forward electronic authority to enter Aotearoa.

Visa free travel is given to countries that don’t have a significant prevalence of travellers overstaying. It isn;’t about their location, it is about whether people abuse visitors visas.

Here are the overstaying rates, which are the percentage of temporary visa arrivals who overstay:

1. Tonga 1.9%
2. Samoa 1.7%
3. Malaysia 0.3%
4. Fiji 0.3%

If 1 in 50 visitors are overstaying, then of course visitors from that country will face more stringent eligibility to visit. And this is based on there already being these current hurdles. Presumably if they were removed, the percentage overstaying would go from 1 in 50 to maybe 1 in 20 or more.

Until now, members’ bills only get debated in the House if they get drawn at random from the ballot.

However for a few years no Standing Order 288 allows for a member’s bill to be automatically out onto the order paper if 61 MPs who are not Ministers state in writing they support it. In practice this means it has support from both government and opposition MPs.

This has now happened. Stuff reports:

National and Labour party MPs have teamed up to fast-track lawmaking that will tighten regulations to stop modern slavery.

Labour MP Camilla Belich and National MP Greg Fleming have co-sponsored the Modern Slavery Bill. It would mean that large companies report on how they have identified or mitigated the risk of slavery being used in supply chains they are part of.

Great to see National and Labour MPs working together.

The Herald reports:

The number of disadvantaged students using the fees-free scheme for university in 2024 slumped to the lowest figure in the scheme’s short history. …

But only 1.3% of the fees-free students at university in 2024 came from EQI 7 schools. In actual numbers, this translated to 230 fees-free university students in 2024 from EQI 7 schools, while there were 775 students from EQI 6 schools. Both of these are the lowest numbers on record for the scheme’s six-year history.

So 230 of the most disadvantaged students were helped at a cost of over $100 million.

“It’s a tremendous way to spend a lot of money to no effect,” tertiary education consultant Roger Smyth, who used to work at the ministry, told the Herald.

“They seriously believed it would make a big difference to participation. 

“But the drivers of tertiary education participation occur in early childhood, the expectations built up in children’s minds through their schooling, through parenting, and so on, which keep getting reinforced year by year through the schooling system.”

Access to money was only a “small component” of what drives participation, Smyth said, but fees-free made no difference to students in terms of cash in the hand.

“All the scheme paid was your fees, but you could borrow anyway, so nobody was better off, in cash terms. 

“It made a difference in debt terms, which meant that six, seven, eight years down the track, you paid your loan off a year or so earlier – at the very point when you didn’t need it so much.”

This is key. This hugely expensive scheme doesn’t even affects students when they are relatively cash poor and studying because they get loans. All it does is mean that when they are say in their 30s and on high incomes, they stop repaying their loans a bit earlier.

The ministry recommended axing the policy altogether; it costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year for essentially no beneficial change, though applying it to the final year of study will at least cost less than the first-year scheme.

Changing it from first to final year fees free is in the coalition agreement with NZ First so can’t be changed this year. But I hope National goes into the election pledging to discontinue it if reelected.

That money would be far far far better spent on early childhood education than subsidising wealthy graduates.

Richard Shaw is a Professor in Politics at Massey University. He writes:

I’m part of an international project hoping to survey former political (ministerial) advisers from 14 different countries (mostly European, but also NZ, Canada and Australia). I’ve written about ministerial advisers in NZ for years, but now a bunch of us are trying to kick off a large-n study comparing/contrasting advisers’ roles, relationships and policy contributions across countries. 

The survey will take around 15 mins to complete, and all respondents’ data will be anonymised. The project is taking place within the European Union’s personal data protection framework, and we’ve secured ethical approval from the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.

If you were a ministerial adviser on an events based contractor between 2014 – 2024 and are happy to participate in this project, please e-mail Richard at [email protected] and he will forward you a link to the survey.

Recently a number of news outlets including the Herald and Newstalk ZB published articles about the IDF’s desecration of ANZAC graves in Gaza. Headlines included for example “New Zealand World War 1 graves among those bulldozed at Gaza cemetery”: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/new-zealand-world-war-i-graves-among-those-bulldozed-at-gaza-cemetery/3BU24SYRSNFSHGPWOBP2PT7PP4/ and “Graves of 20 NZ soldiers killed in WW1 and WW2 bulldozed by IDF at Gaza cemetery”: https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/new-zealand-world-war-i-graves-among-those-bulldozed-at-gaza-cemetery/ There was similar reporting in overseas publications like The Guardian.

Although the truth was reported in the body of the articles, the headlines had people contacting me on social media asking for comment and expressing their outrage at the IDF’s actions. To me this shows how disingenuous the relevant media outlets are. Headlines frame a story. In fact, not everyone reads more than the headline.

The truth is that (a) there were underground terror tunnels beneath the cemetery which the IDF needed to destroy and (b) the cemetery itself was an active combat zone above ground. In response, for the safety of its own troops, the IDF destroyed the cemetery. But that doesn’t lend itself to biased clickbait headlines.

It is despicable that Hamas turned a veteran cemetery into a military target, and that should be the real story. Hamas has no respect whatsoever for deceased New Zealanders or Australians, just as it has no respect for living New Zealanders and Australians. It would gladly kill every single one of us for not sharing their beliefs just as it murdered Israeli civilians en masse on October 7 2023.

The ABC reports:

United States President Donald Trump has shared a video on Truth Social showing Alex Pretti in a confrontation with federal immigration agents 11 days before the intensive care nurse was fatally shot during a separate encounter with Border Patrol agents.

The footage shows Mr Pretti was forcefully taken to the ground by federal immigration agents after kicking out the tail-light of their vehicle during a Minneapolis protest on January 13.

The video posted to Mr Trump’s Truth Social account includes overlay of Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking about Mr Pretti.

“Alex carried patience, compassion and calm as a steady light within him,” Warren can be heard saying in the video, which shows Mr Pretti kicking the car.

In one of the original videos, published by the Minnesota Star Tribune and later obtained by the Associated Press, Pretti is seen shouting an expletive at the federal officers and struggling with them.

I want to explain here the difference between legal responsibility and common sense.

The video of Alex Pretti swearing at ICE officers a week earlier, and damaging their car doesn’t change the reality that his shooting by ICE agents was an unlawful killing, and quite possibly a criminal killing.

However it is fair to form a judgment about how wise Mr Pretti’s behaviour has been. Let me use an analogy.

If you get beaten to a pulp by Black Power, then Black Power is to blame. You are the victim.

However if you wore a big red bandana (the colour of the Mongrel Mob) to a party at Black Power gang hq and got assaulted that would be a pretty stupid thing to do. You are still the victim, and they are still responsible, but a bad outcome was somewhat predictable.

Likewise if you walked past a group of Black Power members in a red shirt, and said “Black Power are a bunch of pussies, and oh yeah I slept with your mum last weekend” that would be an even stupider thing to do. Again you are still the victim, and they are the criminals, but some common sense would tell you this was going to end badly.

Now I am now comparing ICE to Black Power. But I am making the point that there is a difference between peacefully protesting ICE actions, and doing the following:

• Yelling abuse at ICE officers saying “F*** you! Get the f*** out of here!” 
• Spitting into a vehicle driven by ICE officers
• Attacking their vehicle, and doing so while armed.

The more you do stuff like that, the more likely it it that things will end badly.

The India – NZ FTA allows 1,667 three-year temporary employment entry (TEE) visas per annum (capped at a maximum of 5,000 at any point in time).

However 1,466 of those visas are for skilled occupations already on the green list. We already issue 28,000 or so of these a year, including 4,500 a year to Indian nationals. So those 1,466 a year will be zero increase on what we are already doing. It is a floor, but a floor at one third of the level we are already at.

So that leaves 200 a year to ‘iconic’ Indian occupations. The maximum at any time would be 600. Even if they do successfully bring in family, again the maximum number of “extra” people in NZ would be around 2,000 in a country of 5 million.

On an annual basis you are taking maybe 650 more incoming migrants a year on top of the 136,000 we already have. That is a 0.5% increase.

Radio NZ reports:

An average of around 70 million litres of untreated wastewater has been pouring into the capital’s South Coast since Wednesday morning.

That is a huge amount of wastewater, but also need to put into context that it is equal to a 41 by 41 by 41 metre cube. In terms of the volume of ocean by our coastline, it is enough to make it unsafe to go into, but shouldn’t leave permanent damage.

Wellington’s mayor Andrew Little told Morning Report there must be an independent inquiry into what happened, which he’s labelled a “catastrophic failure” and an “environmental disaster”.

“This is a sewage plant processing the sewage for a big city, and it has completely failed, it just completely stopped,” he said.

“Plants like this should not suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that we’ve seen.”

Sometimes the totally totally unexpected can happen. But in any major plants like that you expect there to be regular and thorough checks of all critical equipment. So it will be very interesting to find out exactly what went wrong, and how preventable was it.

Radio NZ reports:

A Green MP wants tohorā/whales to be recognised as legal persons.

In New Zealand, laws have been passed to grant legal personhood to natural features, allowing them to be represented in court and have rights similar to those of individuals.

Teanau Tuiono has lodged a member’s bill, the Tohorā Oranga Bill, which would give whales inherent rights, including the right to freedom of movement, a healthy environment, and the ability to thrive alongside humanity.

Why not give them the vote also?

And why stop at whales? How dare they say whales deserve legal personhood but not snails.

Chris Bishop’s speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Today we remember the death of over six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and the death of millions of Poles, Russians, Roma, the disabled, political opponents, and homosexuals by the despotic Nazi regime.

We remember who they were. Scientists. Authors. Lawyers. Doctors. Teachers. Artists. Mothers. Fathers. Sons. Daughters. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Brothers. Sisters.

My great grand-father Marcus Feuer was a Polish leather merchant. He was taken by train to the Majdanek or Lublin concentration camp (prisoner number 90) and died there along with around 80,000 others.

My great grand-mother Gisela Feuer (nee Spira) was the daughter of a Czech trodler. She had three children with Marcus. She was taken by train to the Majdanek or Lublin concentration camp (prisoner number 93) and died there along with around 80,000 others.

I have found the response to October 7 almost unfathomable, both here in New Zealand and worldwide.

Rather than unequivocal condemnation of clear human rights violations, war crimes and mass brutality on an industrial scale, the response from many people has been the opposite.

 The Jewish people know all too well that there is always a “but”

 “October 7 was wrong, but…

 “It’s bad that over 250 hostages were ripped from their homes and taken to Hamas tunnels, but…

 “Rape and sexual violence is abhorrent, but…”

 “Believe all women” – but not Jewish women

So sadly true.

I think of my Jewish friends who feel unwelcome and unsafe in their own country, who have “Zionist” spat at them as if a belief in self-determination for the Jewish people is somehow immoral or illegal.

Any Jew who believes in a two state solution are by definition Zionists.

So, please, let’s drop the “From the River to the Sea” chants. The Jewish community has made it very clear what they think this chant means. Political leaders in New Zealand involving themselves with this should know better. Can we make the “lived experience” of Jews matter too please?

Likewise, “long live the Intifada” and “globalise the Intifada” are not just simple protest slogans. They mean violence and plenty of it.

When Jewish people hear these chants, what they hear is not a call for liberation, but a call for the denial of their basic humanity.

Saying that we should’t listen to how Jews perceive “From the Rover to the Sea” should be akin to saying we shouldn’t listen to how African Americans perceive the n-word.

The Herald reports:

A man believed to have suffered around 1000 instances of sexual abuse as a young boy was scared into silence by his abuser’s threats.

But 30 years on, after decades of pain, the man has faced his abuser and reclaimed his voice and his power.

“I want my voice to be heard,” he said last week at the sentencing of Randall Kevin Wilson, a former tattooist from Hikurangi.

Wilson, 49, was sent to prison when he appeared in the Whangārei District Courtfor sentencing on charges of sexual violation against two boys.

He has previously served a prison term for causing the death of a motorist in 2019, after he drove off without paying for $108 of petrol and crashed into her vehicle.

The historical sexual offending dates back to three decades ago and relates to two boys who were under the age of 10 at the time, with one being just 3 years old.

Who would have guessed Mr Wilson was such a bad man. If only there was some subtle sign that could have given people a hint.

Again, if only there was some sort of clue.

Juliet Moses writes at Quillette:

The furore surrounding the storied Adelaide Writers Festival, the longest-running and largest literary festival in Australia and one that receives significant taxpayer funding, has made international headlines. Our drama ostensibly begins when the Festival’s board disinvites Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian writer with Palestinian heritage. 

Its climax sees a cultural stampede of 180 writers escaping the inferno of ignominy engulfing the Festival, before its smouldering wreckage collapses. Well-known names elbowing their way through the flames include Zadie Smith, Trent Dalton, Roisín O’Donnell and perhaps most high-profile of all, New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, who was to be promoting her memoir A Different Kind of Power.   

So who is Randa Abdel-Fattah?

While Abdel-Fattah has been an activist for some time (in 2021 she spoke on a panel with Hamas’s “head of international relations”), she has earned notoriety since 7 October 2023. She has repeatedly glorified that day’s Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel, while simultaneously denying its mass sexual violence. The next day she changed her Facebook banner to a paraglider (of the sort that was utilised by Hamas in the attack on the Nova music festival, at which 378 mostly young partygoers were slaughtered); and has said the attack gave her a glimmer of hope. On the day itself she mocked terrified young people fleeing the Nova festival and wrote about “all the Zionists staying up tonight hammering out… coloniser cries victim op eds.” There is footage of her teaching young children chants of “intifada”—no doubt inspired by UNRWA schools’  pedagogy that it is never too early to indoctrinate children into eliminationist hatred. She explicitly hopes for the eradication of the “murderous Zionist colony” and that “every last Zionist” will “never know a second’s peace.”

So you can see why organisers may have felt that having her speak just a few weeks about Jews were slaughter at Bondi Beach was a bad idea. Someone who celebrates the slaughter of Jewish civilians in Israel is part of the problem, not the solution.

Now you may make the case that on free speech grounds she should not have been disinvited (which I tend to agree with). You could argue that it is important to have a wide variety of views at such festivals. Well the problem there is Abdel-Fattah herself has tried to cancel numerous other people:

Abdel-Fattah has previously stated that “Zionists” should be made to feel culturally unsafe, and, fair dinkum, took part in the doxxing of 600 Jewish Australian academics and creatives on a Whatsapp group.  She campaigned to have Thomas Friedman, a Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist (and strident critic of Israel’s current government), removed from the Festival’s 2024 slate. (He says he was subsequently mysteriously cancelled over “timing.”) She also campaigned to have Deborah Conway, a renowned Jewish Australian singer-songwriter, deplatformed from a Perth festival, and led a boycott of a 2022 Sydney arts festival after it received $20,000 in funding from the Israeli embassy for presenting a dancework created by an Israeli choreographer. And she signed a petition to ban Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born ex-Muslim activist against Islamism, from touring Australia.   

So basically the view of the Adelaide Writers Festival now is that it is hideous to not invite a speaker who has celebrated the slaughter of Israeli civilians, but its is repugnant to have Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who are Jewish speak.

One of the critics of Abdel-Fattah participating has been South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas who said:

Mr Malinauskas at a press conference last week in which he asked reporters to imagine if a “far-right Zionist walked into a Sydney mosque and murdered 15 people”.

“Can you imagine that as premier of this state I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to Writers’ Week and speaking hateful rhetoric towards Islamic people?” he said.

“Of course I wouldn’t but the reverse has happened in this instance and I’m not going to support that either and I think that’s a reasonable position for me to have. It’s a view that I believe.”

Abdel-Fattah is now threatening the Premier with defamation. I sincerely hope she proceeds, as the court case would be wonderful.

Radio NZ reported:

Plans to showcase F-22 Raptor fighter jets at Warbirds Over Wānaka have drawn condemnation from a former Doctors Without Borders worker, who says the display legitimises US military force and weapons used to kill civilians.

The show is “Warbirds” and Radio NZ is reporting a story because one person complains that a show about warplanes include, umm a warplane!

Grant Kitto said a strike from a US Air Force gunship – also built by Lockheed Martin – killed his colleagues in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2015, at a Doctors Without Borders hospital.

It is very sad his colleagues were killed by mistake. But what has that got to do with the planes (which are not even the same type of plane). It was human error, not a plane error.

The Post reports:

The Wellington City Council’s latest budget blowout has been revealed ‒ a $56 million shortfall between what was budgeted and reality.

The second phase of the council’s social housing upgrade programme (Hup2) had plenty of known numbers: A $446m budget over a 10 year programme, 825 units across about 50 projects with 2308 beds being brought up to standard.

But during a councillor briefing it was revealed that one vital number was missing: The 15% GST bill, which the council could not recover. That equated to $56m in real terms.

If only any of the 1,800 staff at WCC had accountancy degrees, where you would be expected to know about GST.

The blowout comes after two blunder-induced rates errors, just months into a new triennium, as the new council deals with the fiscal fallout of last term’s $80m sludge plant blowout and a $147m blowout on fixing the Town Hall.

There is a difference between a cost blow-out and an error. This is the third error in as many months revealed by WCC. That is simply not good enough for a large organisation with so many staff. Of course people make errors, but you are meant to have systems for checking so that errors are discovered before final decisions are made.

Will any staff member be held responsible for these errors?

The Herald reports on Scott Watson:

A video of convicted murderer Scott Watson attacking another prisoner was played to the Parole Board as it met to decide if he should be released from jail after 27 years.

In the video, several inmates are seen socialising and playing cards at tables in a prison unit. 

Watson steps up behind another man and grabs him around the neck and upper torso from behind, pulling him off a bench.

As the man tries to get up, Watson pushes him back to the ground.

After the man manages to get to his feet, another prisoner steps forward and punches the victim in the face.

That’s a pretty good sign that Watson shouldn’t be released. Unprovoked violence.

And they also report on Clayton Weatherston:

The reports referred to his diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder – specifically characterised as “gross narcissism”.

They also mentioned “psychopathy” and categorised Weatherston as being a high risk of reoffending. 

Weatherston said he was “not convinced” by the diagnosis as it “overlooked” other positive and pro-social aspects of his personality. 

“I don’t subscribe to the severe narcissistic personality disorder opined by [one psychologist in particular],” he told the board.

This should ring huge flashing bells. A refusal to accept he has a problem.

He was asked directly to explain why he mutilated Elliott’s body after he had killed her by stabbing her 216 times.

“With Sophie, a lot of things were going on in the relationship … I was full of an uncontrollable rage,” he said.

What is important to recall is he didn’t do this in a flash of anger, say in the midst of an argument. He went around to her house the day before she was leaving Dunedin and took a knife with him so he could slaughter and mutilate her while her family tried to get into the room. His actions were not rage of the moment, but a psychological need to destroy here because she broke up with him.

“Reflecting some more, it was just an ‘f you’ about everything about her, and about that I’m ashamed. It was incredibly misguided.

Misguided? Everything about his testimony screams that he should not be released.

n his thousand hours of reading he had come across a book with a message that was helping him navigate his “post-offending” life.

“S*** happens, and we have to drop anchor and deal with it,” he mused.

Again this is so minimising. Shit didn’t happen to him. He slaughtered and brutalised a young woman because she broke up with him.

Sophie’s father Gil Elliott shared his submission with the Herald – saying he wanted the panel to understand “how awful Clayton Robert Weatherston is”.

“As a narcissist [he] is never likely to change his ways – is incapable, in fact, of changing his ways,” he said in the submission, which he penned on what should have been his daughter’s 40th birthday last year.

Listen to Gil.

Today we celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – a day which should be called Emancipation Day. For on the 6th of February 1840, slavery became illegal in New Zealand. The granting of British citizenship to Maori freed the slaves in law (the practice took a while longer to end)

Slavery was not a fringe part of New Zealand prior to 1840. To quote NZ Geographic:

In 1836, the missionary William Yate told a House of Commons select committee that about half of the Māori population in northern New Zealand were slaves, but that in the South Island it was more like one in 10. Samuel Hinds, who had never set foot in the country, told an 1838 select committee that by his estimate, 90 per cent of the population were enslaved.

We should celebrate 6 February 1840 as the day slavery was made illegal in New Zealand and tens of thousands of Maori slaves gained the rights of British citizens.

The proportion of the population who were slaves was very high in New Zealand. Even if you accept the lower estimate of around 50%, here is what other countries were at their max:

• Brazil 35%
• Roman Republic 15% to 30%
• United States 13%
• Spain under 10%
• Ottoman Empire 5% to 10%
• UK around 1% to 5%

So the Treaty of Waitangi was, as a proportion of the population, one of the greatest emancipations in history. We should celebrate and honour it.

Radio NZ reports:

2026 is a “Goldilocks” year for first-home buyers, with lower interest rates, lots of houses to choose from and banks willing to lend to people with small deposits, market commentators say.

Property data firm Cotality (formerly known as Corelogic) has released data showing first-home buyers have reached a new record market share, responsible for 28.4 percent of all real estate transactions in the December quarter of last year.

That’s great news. I want as many people owning a home as possible.

Just four years ago the Herald was reporting:

A combination of record house prices and the limited further potential for growth makes this year the worst for first-home buyers since 1957, new research by economics consultancy Infometrics has found.

Falling house prices and falling mortgage rates have made a real difference.

The NY Post reports:

More than 36,500 Iranians were allegedly killed during a brutal, two-day crackdown against anti-regime protesters, the deadliest in the history of the Islamic Republic, according to a new report. 

The latest estimates paint a horrific image of the violence that fell across Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 when Tehran’s security forces opened fire on thousands of civilians protesting the government’s rule and failure to fix the nation’s ailing economy.

Iranian security forces have stormed hospitals and arrested wounded protesters in response to the unrest — with even celebrities swept up in the crackdown, according to reports.

Despite downplaying the death toll in recent weeks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ own records allegedly acknowledge that more than 36,000 people were killed during the two-day crackdown, sources from the Supreme National Security Council told Iran International.

Such evil, and so many people silent about it.