Stuff hands out its 2021 Political Awards:
This is an astonishing turnover of senior management for any entity, let alone the Reserve Bank. Monetary economics is a pretty specialised occupation. Previously you would have senior managers who might have been there for decades. And now we have a near total clean out in just three years.
If I was on the Reserve Bank Board, I would be asking hard questions about this.
Newshub reports:
Harawira said, however, “we’ve had to stand down about half of our people” from helping to provide that protection following the vetting process.
“That’s really killed us,” he told Morning Report on Wednesday.
This suggests that half the members of the self-appointed border patrol failed Police vetting. Isn’t that rather concerning?
“Our people, over the last 18-20 months, have included bus drivers, gang members, doctors, lawyers, mothers, teachers – all sorts of people. Now, all of a sudden at the last minute, it got dropped on us that everyone had to be vetted.”
I wonder what the relative proportions are of say doctors and gang members on these checkpoints?
Voting is now open for the 2021 Kiwiblog Awards.
The contest for National MP of the Year is between
The contest for Labour MP of the Year is between
The contest for Minor Party MP of the Year is between:
Finally for overall 2019 MP of the Year, it is between:
You can vote in the embedded survey below, or at this link.
Create your own user feedback surveyPaul Homewood writes:
Extinction Rebellion is no local grassroots NGO. Instead, it receives major financial support from American and UK millionaires. …
That would be referring to Rory Kennedy (daughter of former U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy) and Aileen Getty (a granddaughter of former U.S. oil businessman Jean Paul Getty), who started the Climate Emergency Fund which has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Extinction Rebellion. Getty’s foundation even touts its support for Extinction Rebellion. …
Not quite grassroots, is it?
Richard Hawkins writes to the Royal Society of NZ:
I have read Professor Jerry Coyne’s long, detailed and fair-minded critique of the ludicrous move to incorporate Maori “ways of knowing” into science curricula in New Zealand, and the frankly appalling failure of the Royal Society of New Zealand to stand up for science – which is, after all, what your Society exists to do.
The world is full of thousands of creation myths and other colourful legends, any of which might be taught alongside Maori myths. Why choose Maori myths? For no better reason than that Maoris arrived in New Zealand a few centuries before Europeans. That would be a good reason to teach Maori mythology in anthropology classes. Arguably there’s even better reason for Australian schools to teach the myths of their indigenous peoples, who arrived tens of thousands of years before Europeans. Or for British schools to teach Celtic myths. Or Anglo-Saxon myths. But no indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.
The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not “Western” science, not “European” science, not “White” science, not “Colonialist” science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what “tradition” they may have been brought up in. True science is evidence-based not tradition-based; it incorporates safeguards such as peer review, repeated experimental testing of hypotheses, double-blind trials, instruments to supplement and validate fallible senses etc. True science works: lands spacecraft on comets, develops vaccines against plagues, predicts eclipses to the nearest second, reconstructs the lives of extinct species such as the tragically destroyed Moas.
If New Zealand’s Royal Society won’t stand up for true science in your country who will? What else is the Society for? What else is the rationale for its existence?
Yours very sincerely
Richard Dawkins FRS
Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford
The part in bold needs to be repeated. Science is science. There is no such thing as European science or Western science. Just science.
The inquisition underway by the Royal Society of NZ is making them an international laughing stock. Even just on Twitter, millions have seen tweets from international heavyweights who can’t believe what is going on. These include Dawkins (2.5 m followers), Peterson (2.0 m), Young (0.2 m) and Pinker (0.7 m).
And the Dawkins tweet has been retweeted over 1,000 times so all the followers of those 1,000 people will have seen it.
Peter Burns writes:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.
It was a dark time in his homeland. Total war had engulfed the world, and a totalitarian regime was controlling the country. Bonhoeffer pondered how this came to be. He thought about the nature of evil, but came to the conclusion it was not evil itself that was the most dangerous enemy of the good. Rather, it was stupidity.
For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless. …
Herd behavior is among the pre-eminent causes of stupidity. Numerous scientific studies have shown how individual humans can be swayed by the crowd to adopt positions which go against all logic. In a classic examination of human folly, psychologist Solomon Asch looked at how individual people respond to the majority group around them.
Do they conform to the group’s view? Or do they strike out on their own contrarian (but ultimately correct) path? The results were mind-boggling, but incredibly telling for showing how stupidity arises. In the course of the 12 experiments on conformity, around 75% of the participants conformed to the majority view at least once.
This means 3/4ths of the people doing the study were pushed to say an answer which was clearly wrong, just by peer pressure from the group around them. This type of a process is at the core of how stupidity allows evil to rise up.
This is why we should welcome contrarians. Why we should appreciate those who argue against groupthink.
When Leon Festinger studied a UFO cult back in the 1950’s, he came across a curious thing. The cult leader, Dorothy Martin, a housewife from Chicago, foresaw that the world was going to end on the 21st of December, 1954. Seeing that we are still here, it is evident the prophesy was BS. Yet, many people believed it and gathered on that fateful day in a non-descript house.
They sat there, waiting for doomsday. To their great astonishment, it never came. When the hour for the end of the world arrived, nothing happened. What amazed the researchers who infiltrated the group were the reactions of many of the members. Faced with this apparent negation of their beliefs, many of the faithful did not abandon them.
Instead, their belief in Dorothy Martin’s BS grew even stronger. Festinger and his fellow researchers called this the backfire effect. Journalist David McRaney has a great definition of it. “When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.”
Convictions win over evidence.
We are living in an insane society. On one hand, you have people believing Trump won the presidency, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, you have people ruminating on the eternal sin of “white people”, whoever they are. As an individual who tries to use reason and common sense, you often end up feeling isolated amid all the madness.
The world is depressing at the moment.
This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, that while insanity might be rare in individuals, it is generally the rule in groups, parties, nations, and epochs.
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Sadly often true.
Radio NZ reports:
The police have been actively gathering and analysing detailed information on rising rates of crime and violence at emergency housing, despite insisting for months they do not “specifically” collect such data.
There’s been a “campaign of denial”, says National, accusing the Government of taking a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to a growing crisis in New Zealand.
Two Cabinet ministers are also standing by public comments they’ve made, and in one case responses to parliamentary questions – now brought into serious question with a number of reports and inter-agency communications in the public domain.
It’s become clear that there is a link between rising violent crime and emergency housing. This is because the Government has mismanaged emergency housing, and just throws young vulnerable families in with gang members.
But it would be embarrasing to admit this, so for months the Government has denied there is any data on crimes at emergency housing, because if they admitted there was, it would have to be released.
RNZ has reported stories of people terrified of conditions in some accommodation amid commonplace instances of violence, criminal activity and gang intimidation – both residents, and those living and running businesses nearby. In September this year, there were about 4500 children living in emergency accommodation.
Despite a number of requests for information, the police have consistently refused to make any comment to RNZ, but now it’s emerged they hold reports covering emergency housing-related offences, the impact on the wider community and demands on police, dating back to July 2020.
So 18 months of data they have hidden from us.
It later states “police demand across the 19 emergency locations has significantly increased (140.3 per cent) from 2019/2020 to 2020/2021”.
“Offences at emergency accommodation locations have approximately doubled (+97 per cent) from 109 to 215” over the same timeframe.
Offences have victims – often other people at emergency housing. This is a monumental failure by the Government to keep people safe.
A reader writes in:
Just yesterday we discovered that when the traffic light situation comes into effect, young people won’t be able to sit their drivers license unless they have received both vaccinations. This means, for instance, an unvaccinated 15 year old will not be allowed to sit their Restricted driving test.
There will be many young people caught in this, who are still making their way through the vaccination programme. Already wait times to secure a test are up to three months, and rebooking will delay a lot of young people’s ability to progress through their licensing journey.
There are hundreds of teenagers booked to sit their tests over the coming weeks who won’t be able to do so. We spoke with Waka Kotahi yesterday, who hadn’t appeared to have thought this through yet.
Not sure if it’s of interest to you – but shows the issue with pushing legislation through with zero consultation…!
Maybe passing the laws under urgency within 48 hours, without consultation, was a rather bad idea.
Brendan O’Neill writes:
Is silence still violence? If it is, then a whole lot of people, from the Hollywood set to the virtue-signalling left, are guilty of some serious violence right now. Their silence on the Waukesha massacre, on the slaughter of six innocents by a man wielding his SUV as a deadly weapon, is deafening. More than that, it is sinister. Dancing grannies, an eight-year-old boy, people singing and cheering at a Christmas parade, all mown down. Six killed, 62 injured, in what police are treating as a suspected act of intentional homicide. That is, mass murder. And yet there’s been nothing from Hollywood stars who normally love to hold forth on terrible acts of violence. Influencers seem to have been struck dumb. There are no blacked-out squares on Instagram. The big woke corporations aren’t pumping out pained, concerned press releases. It’s just tumbleweed, everywhere.
Even worse, they are downplaying it.
Even the media coverage is radically different to the kind of reporting we see in the wake of other forms of violence. It is passive, treating the massacre almost as a natural disaster. Or as the evil handiwork of the SUV itself. ‘Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by [an] SUV’, said the Washington Post. Caused by an SUV. The agency of the suspect is diminished. The problem, it seems, is killer SUVs.
It’s almost a parody – SUVs don’t kill people, drivers kill people. The murders were not caused by an SUV, but by a person.
It falls to the police, and then the courts and a jury, to work out why Darrell Brooks did what he did, and whether this was, indeed, intentional homicide. But there are things we already know about Mr Brooks that make the silence of the woke elites even more curious, and shameful. We know he posted invective against white people on social media. He wrote about ‘knokkin white ppl TF out’. He shared commentary on the problem of ‘white privilege’. There seem to have been flashes of anti-Semitism in his thinking, too. He shared an image of Hitler and a meme saying the Jews in Israel are ‘false white Jews’. He appeared to be echoing the eccentric black-nationalist belief that African-Americans are the true descendants of Israelites. Shouldn’t this be more widely discussed – the fact that a man suspected of intentionally slaughtering six white people at a Christmas parade had posted anti-white comments online?
It would seem this should be at least worthy of discussion.
To see how perverse the woke set’s relative silence on Waukesha is, just do this simple thought experiment. Imagine if a white man drove a car into a crowd of mostly black Christmas revellers and killed six of them. Imagine if it was discovered that this white man had posted social-media comments saying we should knock black people the fuck out. Imagine if he had dabbled in white-nationalist thought experiments online. What do you think would be happening right now?
It would be the most famous story in the world, for months on end.
Auckland Council announced:
An ambitious $1 billion climate action package to reduce carbon emissions and deliver more buses, ferries, cycling and walking and urban tree canopy is the signature policy in Mayor Phil Goff’s proposal for Auckland Council’s Annual Budget 2022/23, released today, 1 December 2021.
It is proposed to be funded by a Climate Action Targeted Rate (CATR) that will raise around $574 million over 10 years, ringfenced for direct climate action in Tāmaki Makaurau.
This is a con, that has nothing to do with the climate. This is Phil Goff once again breaking his promise to keep rates rises down. Last term he broke it by bringing in a bed tax (now ruled illegal by the courts) and now he is trying for a climate tax.
None of his billion dollar spend with your money will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one kg. That is because under a trade and cap system such as NZ’s ETS, any reduction through these policies, will just allow other companies to purchase emissions for cheaper. What reduces emissions is the shrinking cap, not ratepayers being soaked for one billion dollars.
A guest post by Karl du Fresne:
Freedom of speech is a fundamental right in a liberal democracy – as important, even, as the right to vote, since people’s ability to cast an informed vote depends on them first being able to participate in free and open debate about political issues and ideas.
Accordingly, the Bill of Rights Act states that every New Zealander has the right to freedom of expression, “including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”. Even before the Bill of Rights Act made it explicit, free speech was a right that New Zealanders took for granted. They exercised it (and still do) every day in letters to the editor and on radio talkback shows.
Yet a perception has grown in recent years that New Zealanders’ right to speak freely and to hear all shades of political opinion, short of those that incite violence and hatred, is under sustained attack. Concern at the fragility of free speech rights led to the formation this year of the Free Speech Union, which has drawn support from across the political and ideological spectrum. The Free Speech Union’s supporters, for example, include veteran leftists Matt McCarten and Chris Trotter.
One celebrated case involved the Canadian “alt-right” (so-called) speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were barred from speaking at a council-owned Auckland venue in 2018. The excuse used for denying them a platform was that the event might be disrupted by protesters.
Activists quickly got the message that they could force the cancellation of speeches by people they didn’t like simply by threatening protest action – a tactic sometimes referred as the heckler’s veto.
This controversy is still being played out in the courts, where the crowd-funded Free Speech Union has gone all the way to the Supreme Court in a test case aimed at preventing public authorities from using the fear of disruption as an excuse to “de-platform” speakers.
In the meantime, other developments have reinforced the perception that freedom of expression in New Zealand is imperilled. The feminist group Speak Up For Women (SUFW), which advances the unremarkable view that only people born female can call themselves women, has been barred from holding meetings in public premises and had a prominent advertising billboard taken down in central Wellington.
SUFW’s struggle to get its message across in the face of determined opposition from transgender activists illustrates that the defence of free speech cuts across the usual ideological and political lines. People who identify with the radical left have found themselves on the same side as conservatives and libertarians.
In the latest outbreak of the speech wars, the action has shifted to a new and worrying arena. Seven respected university academics found themselves effectively blacklisted in July after they wrote a letter to The Listener challenging the notion that matauranga Maori – which can be defined as the traditional body of Maori knowledge – should be accorded the same status as science, as proposed by an NCEA working group preparing a new school curriculum.
In an unprecedented pile-on, more than 2000 fellow academics, urged on by professors Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles, signed a letter denouncing the Listener Seven and implying they condoned “scientific racism”. The response went well beyond legitimate disagreement. The sheer weight and vehemence of the denunciation sent an unmistakeable message to the academic community: express dissent at your peril.
More alarmingly still, two of the Listener Seven are now being investigated by the Royal Society – an organisation dedicated, ironically, to the advancement of science – and may be expelled.
What started as an academic debate has thus taken on the character of a heresy trial. Even more ironically, one of the professors under investigation, Garth Cooper, is a Maori who has earned international respect for his achievements in Maori health.
Once again, the Free Speech Union has stepped up by creating an academic freedom fund to help defend the two accused. If the complaint against them is upheld, union spokesman Dr David Cumin says, academics will inevitably feel less safe expressing honestly held views on contentious issues.
The bottom line here is that science and academia need people who challenge accepted wisdom, otherwise we would be stuck forever in the status quo. But in New Zealand in 2021, the price for deviating from approved orthodoxy is punishment and ostracism.
Karl Du Frasne is a freelance journalist and former newspaper editor. He is the author of The
Right to Know: News Media Freedom in New Zealand, and is a member of the Free Speech
Union.
Newshub reports:
An epidemiologist is questioning if New Zealand should ever go to the green COVID-19 traffic light setting, saying it may be too risky. …
Dr Jackson, from the University of Auckland, said New Zealand got its timing perfect – but told Morning Report people to remember “this is the worst public health crisis in 100 years”.
“I’m not sure we should ever go green,” he said.
“It’s all about safety.”
This is depressing stuff. They never ever want to allow us to have a normal life again. There is just a total lack of awareness of the costs (economic, social, mental) of these restrictions.
Using this logic, NZ should do the following:
After all, it’s all about safety.
Radio NZ reports:
The Government kept councils guessing for months about whether they would be forced into Three Waters reforms, having already agreed to pursue such a strategy, papers show.
The National Party says it is clear Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta made the decision from the outset and consultation with the sector was just a box-ticking exercise.
RNZ has been asking for an interview since Tuesday but her office repeatedly said she was not available.
So the Government had already decided the reforms would be compulsory, not opt in. Yet it went through months of stringing local councils along, saying it hadn’t yet decided.
The Times of Israel reports:
Uncovered cables seem to confirm reports that Rome signed deal with Palestinian terror groups to ignore attacks against Jews, in exchange for them not hitting other Italian targets
This action by the then Italian Government is beyond shameful. They basically told terrorists you can blow up Italisn who are Jews so long as you leave the other Italians alone. And people wonder why many Jews only feel safe in a Jewish majority state.
Italian media on Friday published documents that appeared to confirm long-held accusations that Italy had agreed on a deal not to interfere with Palestinian terror attacks on Jewish targets and had failed to prevent a 1982 assault on a Rome synagogue in which a 2-year-old boy was killed.
The documents showed that Italian intelligence had clear information on the planned attack on the synagogue but did not stop it, and police even reduced security around the Rome house of worship.
An innocent two year old killed because he was Jewish.
On the Shemini Atzeret holiday in 1982, several unidentified gunmen threw hand grenades and fired submachine guns at worshipers leaving the synagogue, killing 2-year-old Stefano Tache and wounding 34 people, including his 4-year-old brother and parents.
According to the documents revealed Friday, Italian internal intelligence, then-known as Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica (SISDE), sent several warnings to the government that groups of Palestinian students “intended” to attack Jewish targets in Rome. At the top of the list of possible targets was the synagogue.
But despite the warnings, not only was security not increased, but on the day of the attack, the usual police vehicle that sat outside the synagogue on holidays, was absent, the documents showed.
That was not chance.
The year is almost over, so it is time for nominations for the annual Kiwiblog Awards. The nomination categories are:
Make your nominations in the comments (free free to say why) and then I’ll start a vote based on the most popular nominations.
The winners in 2020 were:
The median house price in November 2021 is $925,000. In October 2017 it was $530,000. That is a 75% increase in basically four years.
Chris Cillizza writes:
In an interview with Donald Trump earlier this week, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt said something truly breathtaking.”You know, Mr. President, you and I disagree about the election, but we agree on so much,” Hewitt told Trump, segueing into a conversation about China’s hypersonic missiles.Talk about an other-than-that-how-was-the-play-Mrs. Lincoln moment!
That Hewitt uttered that line without irony is a telling window into how conservatives have found ways to rationalize Trump and his fundamentally anti-democratic attempts to undermine the faith of the American public in the 2020 election results.
Here’s the reality: You can’t just sort of yada yada the election rejection embraced by Trump. Because in refusing to accept the result of the 2020 election and repeatedly (and falsely) alleging voter fraud, Trump is actively working against everything that makes America, well, America.
Hewitt’s attempt to dismiss his disagreement with Trump over the election then as just another policy disagreement is laughable. This isn’t Hewitt saying we should have stayed in Afghanistan and Trump saying we should have pulled American troops out. This is the former President of the United States refusing to accept the results of a national election.
This is the key point. Trump is such a sore loser he refuses to accept the results of any election, unless it is one in which he wins. That isn’t democracy. That is not something on which you say “We agree to disagree”.
And it would be semi-ok if it was only a token protest. But he is making it a litmus test for Republican candidates that they must agree with him that he won, or he will campaign against you.
Trump is working to make a belief that the 2020 election was stolen a central piece of the Republican Party platform. And, again, this isn’t like making abortion or trade a party platform. This is making a rejection of American democracy a major part of what it means to be a Republican.
It’s such a shame as the US needs a good Republican Party. Biden has moved so far to the left that he could well be a one term President if the next election is fought on issues such as the economy, education etc. But if Trump insists it be fought on a single issue – how he is no actually a loser, then Biden may once again be the lesser of two evils and win (again).
Stuff reports:
Auckland Transport is taking flak for promising 129 fewer kilometres of cycle lanes than Wellington at almost eight times the cost per kilometre.
Last Friday, Auckland mayor Phil Goff announced a $1 billion climate action package aimed at reducing carbon emissions and delivering more buses, ferries, cycling and walking options as well as an urban tree canopy across the city.
More than $144 million will be spent on about 18km of cycle infrastructure – at a cost of about $8m per kilometre. Meanwhile, Wellington is promising to provide 124km of bike lanes – on top of the 23km which already exists – over the next decade for about $1.5m a kilometre.
Women in Urbanism Aotearoa chairwoman and urban designer Emma McInnes said it was “utterly ridiculous” that less than 20 kilometres of cycle paths should cost so much money.
It is ridiculous, but this is what you get when people spend other people’s money. Ratepayers and taxpayers are just seen as an unlimited source of money for wasteful projects.
No cycleway should cost $8,000 per metre.
Newshub reports:
The Auditor-General’s inquiry into the Ministry of Social Development’s (MSD) funding of private rentals for emergency housing has found it didn’t monitor the quality of accommodation and couldn’t show it was receiving value for money.
So the Government both paid far far too much for it, and the quality was crap. This reminds me of the old parable. There are four broad scenarios for buying something.
“In this instance, we saw agreements to pay suppliers an agreed amount to provide accommodation, and little more than that. The Ministry had no way of knowing what standard of accommodation was being provided (and, in many instances, where that accommodation was) and whether it met the needs of those being housed.”
A classic case of scenario 4. They had no interest at all about quality or it it met the needs of tenants, they just handed over the money.
Stuff further reports:
The Auditor-General has slammed the Government’s use of rental houses for emergency housing, saying they likely drove up rents in some areas.
The damning report found the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) was paying several times the market rent for private rentals, which it was using for emergency housing stays.
It found these rents were so exorbitant that it was “likely the higher rates it paid for these properties distorted the rental market”.
This is astonishing. Not only did the Government screw over the emergency housing tenants and screw over the taxpayers, they screwed over all rental tenants by pushing rental prices higher overall. A rare trifecta of incompetence.