Every few months Ipsos does a poll and report on what issues are most important to New Zealanders and which party they think is best to manage that issue. Here’s their current top five issues:

1. Inflation/Cost of Living 53% (+29% from Feb 21)
2. Housing 51% (-9%)
3. Healthcare 27% (+4%)
4. Petrol prices 25% (+17%
5. Economy 24% (+1%)

So inflation and petrol prices have shot up from a year ago.

Poverty/inequality was 2nd place a year ago at 28% but now is out of the top five at 20%.

So National would much rather want an election about cost of living than poverty. The election is 18 months away, so this may change but inflation does look to be here to stay for a while.

So on the top five issues what is the gap between Labour and National and what was it a year ago?

1. Inflation -7% (was +23% a year ago)
2. Housing -6% (was +23%)
3. Healthcare +12% (was +39%)
4. Petrol prices -6% (was +22%)
5. Economy -11% (was +20%)

Labour is now behind National on four of the five top issues. A year ago they were miles ahead on 19 of the 20 top issues and now they are behind on four of the top five.

This is hugely significant. You win elections if you are seen as better than your opponents on the issues that matter most to the public.

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

There are number of vital truisms that every politician should have drilled into their brain from day one.  Many are simple facts.  Some are in the category of plain but profound.  Get them wrong and the nation suffers.

Take the “law of unintended consequence”.  Some politicians become quickly obsessed with a hobby horse notion.  It is often driven by ideology and ideology comes with blinkers.  The consequence of the idea and then the policy is clear in their mind.  For example, “we want to slow down landlords buying additional houses because it is driving up house prices”.  Simmering below the surface, unseen, is a burning hatred of people accruing assets and making profits.  That just increases the blinker effect.   Tax them, regulate them, penalise these capitalists.  That should have a major impact, slowing down buyers of second third and more houses competing and bidding up the market.

Impose the rules/taxes and then wonder why your office is getting flooded by people desperate to rent a house. Unintended consequences.

Another sister axiom to take aboard is “incentives matter”.  If you pay people to be idle don’t be surprised if they stay idle and encourage their friends to join them.  Pay subsidies to foresters and sit back and watch good, high producing sheep and beef, even dairy land go into trees.

There is a more subtle example.  Employ and pay people well to care for those on welfare.  Tell them you want to see them help the unemployed and the sick back into work.  Logical and sensible?  Not when you realise that if they were successful and, with the help of some miracle, got all those on benefits in their patch back in work, there would be no job for them. It is called “perverse incentives”.

We have thousands of people on the public’s payroll and heaps in the private sector working for the good of the welfare of the needy.  Individually they may well be genuine and mostly are.  Challenge them with the notion of perverse incentives, explaining they are subtly encouraging welfarism and they would be shocked and hurt.  But reality tells you that collectively the system is reliant on individual goodwill and not well constructed for positive outcomes.  Why would you work assiduously to do yourself out of a job?

Why not turn the incentive around?  Imagine paying someone who has the required credentials a substantial bonus for every beneficiary they get back into work. 

The idea could go further.  There are a number of families that are dysfunctional.  No one works, drugs and crime are involved, living conditions are miserable, no fathers around – just sires, kids rarely at school and the problems are third generational.  There are families like this costing the taxpayers over a lifetime well millions, literally.

What if we said, “let’s calculate the net present value of those millions and we invest that into a capable mentor who was highly incentivised to help that family get back to “normal?”  Would it work?  Rodney Hide and I know it would because we tried it when we were in Parliament.  We paid a person a pretty significant sum to turn around three very dysfunctional families and in less than a year she achieved it.

It began with a plan.  A list of goals that our mentor worked out with each of the three families.  Underneath all the degradation, chaos and dysfunction were human beings, often guilty, shamed and wanting to better themselves but there was no way out.  Just take the state’s money and keep smoking, drinking, stealing, eating KFC.  Have another baby – its more cash coming in.  Any of the guys calling will oblige on the kitchen table, on the floor.  You get hit less if you are readily willing.

Now someone has turned up saying, “I can fix your face where you were hit with that bottle”.  “I can get the kids some new clothes and get them to school”.  “I have the cash to get you into a better flat”.  “I will drive the ‘uncles’ out”.  “I will help you get onto a better diet, stop smoking, get a job”.

“You have to want to do this and be willing to cooperate.  I will drive you hard to reach the goals you and I and the kids are setting down today.  But there is a better future for you if you work with me and stick to the rules.  Get it wrong and I will kick arse.  And hard.  Get it right and we move to the next goal in the plan”.

Each goal achieved earns the mentor a substantial bonus.  Right incentives.  It wont work every time, of course.  Human nature is too fickle and independent for that to be true.  But it sure beats handing out more and more welfare benefits and expecting people to change and their carers to commit to elimination of dysfunction.  If having kids gets you a bigger cheque and better accommodation, you have more kids.  Wrong incentive. 

Where are the mentors?  If there was $100 K, $200K for a part time job steering a family into a better life there would be a heap of applicants.  Retirees would love it.  The taxpayers and the community would benefit but most of all people living in a hell on earth could be given a future and the critically important generational cycle broken.

It would be a better use of the millions doled out to community groups and individuals who got generous dollops of cash for getting their mates vaccinated.

It is a bottom up driven plan as opposed to top down, Wellington solutions.  It deals with people not problems.  It is kindness in action, not in rhetoric.  It is human.  The lefty liberals would hate it.  The unions would go ballistic.  The soppy media would go nuts.  It would take balls to deliver it. 

Bill English would like it. His Catholic upbringing gave him the conscience to want to help the needy.

Most of all it gets the incentives right.

A Herald story reports:

Kahu, who also lives with asthma, is among the estimated one in five secondary school students who are addicted to vaping.

The figure has emerged from research by the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation, which surveyed more than 19,000 students in Years 9 to 13. Like Kahu, many have never smoked tobacco.

That stat is contradicted by the Ministry of Health’s annual survey.

It instead shows the number of 15-17 year olds vaping daily to be 5.8% in 2020/21, compared to daily smoking among that cohort crashing to just 1.1%.  Back in 2013/14, 7.9% of 15-17 year olds smoked daily.  Professor Beaglehole from ASH has pointed out that 1% of 14 year olds now smoke daily, down from 15% 20 years ago and that as vaping has gone up, smoking has gone down.  So the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation claims that vaping is somehow a gateway for smoking when in fact its rise has seen in the biggest fall in Maori smoking and smoking rates ever.

Now the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation want to ban vape sales within a kilometre of schools. Let’s think about how big an area that is. A circle with a 1 km radius has an area of 3.14 square kilometres which is 314 hectares. So the ARF want to ban vape sales over an area of 314 hectares around every single school.

What would this insane idea mean? It would mean the entire Hamilton CBD would not be allowed to have a shop that sells vapes, as it is within 1 km of Hamilton High School. Clifton Terrace School would knock out the entire Wellington CBD.

Basically it would ban vapes being sold in every single urban area in New Zealand. Such stupidity.

A guest post by Shannon Lindsay:

Representatives for overseas New Zealanders, including Charlotte Bellis’ lawyer,  dispute Grant Robertson’s claims that MIQ staff are helpful and communicative.

The Deputy Prime Minister said during Tuesday’s [1 February 2022] post-cabinet press conference that MIQ staff, regarding emergency applications, “always try to make contact with people and try to make arrangements that work.” He added: “They continually communicate with people who apply.”

Grounded Kiwis spokesperson Alexandra Birt listened to Robertson’s comments and “couldn’t believe my ears”.

“I have helped countless people who have been declined emergency allocations, all of whom received a generic template decline email, no specific reasons for their decline, and definitely no offer of additional support,” she said.

“In some cases, even after multiple follow-ups from the emergency applicant, the decline came through after the date that the person was meant to travel — of course meaning they had missed their flights.

“These are emergency applicants. Vulnerable, desperate, and in highly emotional situations — and yet the system couldn’t be more devoid of empathy if it tried.”

Tudor Clee, the pro bono lawyer who has represented pregnant Kiwi journalist Charlotte Bellis and others in similar situations, also rejects Robertson’s claims.

“Having read the communications between MIQ and over 30 families making pregnancy applications, I unequivocally reject his assertion,” he said.

“MIQ staff have no medical qualification and are, by definition, making obstetric decisions. In a majority of cases they ask for information already supplied or information that is nonsensical or medically irrelevant.

“In 87 per cent of pregnancy cases it has been followed by a rejection that often fails to explain why the supporting documentation was inadequate, leaving the parents-to-be distraught and in limbo.

“The communications are just disgraceful,” he said.

Ten ex-patriate New Zealanders I contacted via the Grounded Kiwis Facebook group confirmed they had received little assistance from MIQ with their emergency applications.

An English teacher stuck in Japan, who has multiple medical reasons to return to New Zealand and did not wish to be named, has had his applications for an emergency MIQ spot turned down several times.

“MIQ has been a nightmare to deal with, I’ve basically been doing it full time for the past month of back and forth and trying to get in contact with a real person by phone to discuss my situation,” he said.

“All replies from every avenue has just been generic copy and paste ‘tough shit’ sort of vibe. A bureaucratic, dehumanised wall to bash your head on.

“Also, I don’t see what grounds they have or qualifications to interpret my own medical needs.”

Malcolm Mitchell, a Kiwi IT consultant based in Melbourne, applied for an MIQ emergency spot to attend his father’s Invercargill funeral on 10 January this year.

“I received generic emails and then I was told, ‘We are unlikely to approve applications under the exceptional circumstances category to attend a funeral or tangihanga where there may be multiple people gathered. This would create an unacceptable risk of potential COVID-19 transmission’,” he said. I can confirm that MIQ did email Mitchell that response.

“Yet exemptions were granted for a DJ to play at a music festival and many other entertainers and sports people.”

An MIQ spokesperson said: “MIQ is sympathetic to the difficult circumstances many New Zealanders are experiencing due to the global pandemic. We understand it is a stressful time for travellers applying for Emergency Allocations of MIQ vouchers.

“MIQ undertakes much of its communication with applicants via email, as this is the most effective and timely way for us to communicate given the high number of applicants, international time zones, and the amount of information that often needs to be communicated. We use email as our primary method of communication to ensure a fair and consistent process, which is particularly important when such crucial decisions are being made.

“We have a dedicated team who work just on emergency allocation requests. They work hard to ensure everyone is treated fairly. They work seven days a week to ensure that applications are turned around as quickly as possible, and the distressing situations facing some of the people who apply are not ignored. We encourage people to carefully read the criteria and make sure all the relevant supporting information is included upfront in their initial application. This will ensure faster processing and less need for us to seek additional information, which slows the process down. “We are currently experiencing very high volumes of Emergency Allocation requests due to widespread travel delays around the world and the delay to Step 1 of Reconnecting New Zealand. If people have submitted an application, we appreciate their patience and will be in contact with them as soon as we can.”

A reader has alerted me to this document called Ethical Values for a Pandemic, published in 2007 by the National Ethics Advisory Committee. They refer to the Siracusa Principles of international law about which human rights may be restricted in the interests of public health. Two key principles:

• Only as a last resort can human rights be interfered with to achieve a public health goal
• When restrictive measures are required, the least restrictive measures possible should be used

Now consider that we have 10 cases a day of Covid-19 at the border and over 2,000 in the community yet the Government still prevents New Zealand citizens from accessing their fundamental human right of returning home.

It is clear that the Government has ignored the advice of its own Ethics Advisory Committee.

The Immunisation Coalition in Australia has an excellent data tool which gives you relative chances of catching Covid-19, dying from it and also the chance of getting myocarditis from the vaccine. It would be great to have such a tool in New Zealand.

You enter your age (54 for me), your vaccinated status (triple) and the level of community transmission (high) and it gives you simple clear data. Mine is:

• Chance of catching Covid-19 in next two months: 1 in 190 (1 in 69 if unvaccinated)
• Chance of dying from Covid-19 if I get it: 1 in 25,000 (1 in 2,900 if unvaccinated)
• Chance of getting myocarditis from the vaccine: 1 in 140,000 for first dose, 1 in 1,000,000 for further doses. Background chance of myocarditis generally is 1 in 23,000 over two months.
• Chance of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine: 1 in 85 million for first dose, 1 in 600 million for third dose. Background chance of dying from myocarditis generally is 1 in 880,000 over two months.

So if you are 54 years old and unvaccinated you have a 1 in 200,000 chance of getting Covid-19 and dying from it in the next two months. If you take the vaccine your chance of getting myocarditis and dying from it is around 1 in 66 million.

If someone is 20 years old and triple vaccinated, the stats are:

• Chance of catching Covid-19 in next two months: 1 in 66 (1 in 24 if unvaccinated)
• Chance of dying from Covid-19 if I get it: 1 in 440,000 (1 in 51,000 if unvaccinated)
• Chance of getting myocarditis from the vaccine: 1 in 59,000 for first dose, 1 in 17,000 for further doses. Background chance of myocarditis generally is 1 in 25,000 over two months.
• Chance of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine: 1 in 35 million for first dose, 1 in 10 million for further doses. Background chance of dying from myocarditis generally is 1 in 2.1 million over two months.

So if you are 20 years old and unvaccinated you have a 1 in 1.2 million chance of getting Covid-19 and dying from it. If you take the vaccine your chance of getting myocarditis and dying from it is around 1 in 4.4 million.

Craig Greenberg is standing to be Mayor of Louisville. He is a Democrat and an attorney and businessman.

On Valentine’s Day a man entered Greenberg’s campaign office and fired at him. He was not injured but his sweater was grazed. The man arrested for the attempted assassination is 21 year old Quintez Brown. Brown is a community activist and active in BLM. He was also a potential candidate for the Council.

Black Lives Matter paid the $100,000 bond and Brown is out free, despite trying to assassinate a politician 60 hours earlier.

This is crazy, and both Democrats and Republicans are decrying that someone can try and assassinate someone and be out on bail two days later.

A good article at The Dispatch that explains what has come out about the Clinton’s campaign involvement in the Russiagate allegations.

Durham’s most explosive assertion—and this was new to the latest filing—was detailing that internet data, which Sussmann had taken again in updated form to the government in February 2017: domain name system (DNS) data connected with, among other entities, “Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and the Executive Office of the President of the United States.”

Internet traffic from the White House, exploited by a private actor with ties to the Clinton campaign? It’s not hard to see why conservative media would pick up the ball and run with this, and so they did: Fox News’ report said the Clinton campaign had “paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House,” while the Daily Mail asserted that the firm had been paid “to hack into [Trump’s] White House and Trump Tower servers.”

This is a big deal. It isn’t necessarily illegal or hacking, but it is highly unethical. I say this as a former director of the company that managed the .nz servers for New Zealand.

Why was this data collection likely legal? Because Neustar had contractual access to it. The Virginia-based company is one of the world’s largest providers of DNS services, with annual revenue north of $1 billion, and it had a contract to perform such services for the White House.

What, precisely, did the data entail? Describing it as “internet traffic,” as Durham did, is accurate but perhaps slightly misleading to us non-techies—it isn’t synonymous with, say, users’ web history. DNS servers are like internet phone books, translating web addresses that are intelligible to human beings (say, “thedispatch.com”) into IP addresses, the strings of digits that tell a computer where to find the server where that website lives. When one server needs to find another, it consults the DNS server to find out where to look, which the server then logs as a DNS lookup. DNS lookup logs thus don’t tell you what one server is communicating with another—merely that two servers are in communication.

What companies like Neustar offer clients is, in essence, a phone book that stops you from dialing scammers—if a particular server is known to have been used for phishing schemes, for instance, it may swoop in and prevent your computer from establishing a connection with that server. This is why DNS lookups are logged in the first place—if your organization’s being targeted, it’s good to know when and from where.

But Durham alleges that Joffe put this data to use in a way that was anything but routine: “Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.” In the end, this research bore fruit in the form of a theory of Trump’s ties to Russia—which made its way into the press in the last days of the 2016 campaign—that a “Trump server” was secretly communicating with Russia-based Alfa Bank. (The theory fell apart in days; the “Trump server” in question turned out to have belonged to marketing company Cendyn, which sent marketing emails for Trump hotels.)

In the original indictment of Sussmann, Durham provided an email from Joffe suggesting a motive for his actions: “I was tentatively offered the top [cybersecurity] job by the Democrats when it looked like they’d win. I definitely would not take the job under Trump.”

So a top executive at a company paid to managed DNS data used that privileged position to try and find data that would support the allegation that Trump was compromised by Russia. And he did so, after having been offered a top cybersecurity job by the Clinton team.

Again not illegal, but stinks badly.

Joffe, a tech executive with non-trivial ties to the Clinton campaign—they shared a lawyer in Sussmann, and Joffe believed he had been offered a tentative position in a Clinton administration—used his position atop a company with extensive government and private-sector contracts to go digging for information on Clinton’s opponent, an effort in which Sussmann was involved and for which (Durham asserts) Sussmann billed his time to the Clinton campaign.

I think Trump is a sociopathic menace to society. But what Joffe did was wrong, regardless of your view on Trump.

NewstalkZB reports:

The Waikato Chamber of Commerce is concerned the Hamilton to Auckland train service is financially and environmentally worse than driving.

A report for the chamber shows per trip driving costs $48 compared to $294 on Te Huia which includes the $12 fare and a $282 subsidy.

Based on the assumption of one person per vehicle, carbon emissions are 20kg per person driving and 31.5kg per person on the train.

It’s time for the Government to can this massive waste of taxpayer money which is achieving nothing.

You could fly the couple of dozen people who use it to Auckland via helicopter every day, and it would cost less than what Te Huia is costing.

Scores of people on social media and in the media have been labelling those at the protest everything from terrorists to neo nazis to white supremacists to a danger to democracy. Apart from a few vox pops, no one has made a serious effort to find out who the majority of people there are, and why they are there.

Up until now. Sean Plunket’s The Platform commissioned Curia Market Research to conduct a scientific survey of the protesters at Parliament. Curia staff spent all day Saturday and Sunday at Parliament asking a few short questions of those present.

The response rate was an unprecedented 95%. Only a handful of people declined to be surveyed. The vast majority were eager that there was finally someone there wanting to know who they were and why they were there.

While I was concerned about health and safety issues, my staff report that they did not encounter any threatening behaviour at all. In fact they say even the Mongrel Mob members there were polite. Maybe 1% of those surveyed made a critical comment of the fact the staffer was masked (and the response was that their employer had asked them to be masked), but that was it.

The full results are at The Platform.

Aaron Smale at Stuff writes:

When the Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni admitted she hadn’t read a report from the royal commission, it was all downhill from there.

After nearly a week of waiting for an interview with her, I finally got a call from Sepuloni as she travelled from Rotorua to Auckland on Thursday. I wanted to talk to her about a change to the legislation governing oversight of Oranga Tamariki.

Second question in, I asked if she had read the report on redress from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care – a pertinent document for someone whose ministry was responsible for setting up oversight for Oranga Tamariki.

She hadn’t read it. It appeared she hadn’t heard of it.

She’s the Minister for Social Development and she hasn’t even read (or possibly heard of) a report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

Wow, she makes Phil Twyford look under-rated.

Claire Trevett writes:

Hindsight is a very effective strategist, but there is one moment police may look back upon as the lost opportunity to nip the anti-mandate protests at Parliament in the bud.

That was on the afternoon of the first day the protesters arrived – Tuesday nearly two weeks ago.

The protest was much, much smaller then, and three or four tents were put up that afternoon.

Parliament asked police to provide protection while Parliament’s security went in to remove them.

The police ruled it out for reasons that remain unclear.

Nothing happened and by the next day more tents were up. More tents have been set up every day since. By Friday, the Beehive was nearly surrounded.

That was the time to take action. It is now too difficult for the Police to remove people, but they could have done so when it was just four tents.

There have been moments that have begged to be lampooned. High among them was Police Commissioner Andrew Coster’s so-called towing crackdown.

Coster did not front publicly until Tuesday – a week after the protesters arrived. He said the protest was now “untenable” and put protesters on notice that if they did not move their cars, the towing would begin the next day. He also admitted they could not find towies to do the job, and the Army didn’t have the right equipment.

The next day the only car that was actually towed was a police car, which had a flat tyre.

Almost funny, except for the disruption being caused to many in Wellington.

National’s Simon Bridges had long ago made it clear what he thought of Coster’s approach to policing, saying he was a “wokester” who was too soft on serious criminals.

Useful to remember the Commissioner is decided upon solely by the Prime Minister. They are not appointed like most government department chief executives. Ardern personally selected Coster.

Stuff reports:

He said the Government had 7.3 million RATs in the country, but would have 22.5 million by the end of the month. Next week, he said 9.2 million would arrive.

But access to those tests remained heavily restricted, with only specified “critical services” in food supply, emergency services and lifeline utilities able to access them.

To access those tests, companies had to undergo a qualification process – which the National Party hit out at as “overly bureaucratic”.

Only certain, pre-approved businesses would qualify to be able to use RATs – and only under certain circumstances.

In many countries RAT tests can be purchased at the supermarket. The NZ Government has been so incompetent that it didn’t order any in time, so first it stole the stocks private organizations had ordered and now it has set up a rationing system that is bureaucracy gone mad.

Here is what you have to do if you are an employer with an employee that you wish to have take a RAT.

1. Try to register with MBIE as a critical business or organisation. For some insane reasons schools don’t even qualify.
2. The employee who needs a RAT test has to go out into the community and find a RAT collection point (they only have two or three for all of Auckland).
3. They need to have proof the employer is a critical business
4. They need proof they work for that employer
5. They need proof of identity
6. They need proof they were a close contact

If they can manage all that, then the Government will give them a RAT test. Yay.

This week Curia did a poll for Family First on vaccinations and mandates. As far as I know it is the first poll to ask why people got vaccinated – was it motivated by health reasons, or due to coercive measures if they didn’t get vaccinated.

The full results are here.

In terms of why they got vaccinated the findings were:

• Protect personal health, 70% said it was a large or the main factor
• Protect health of others, 76% large/main
• Due to vaccine pass, 36% large/main
• Due to vaccine mandate 31% large/main

The results suggest that only 70% to 75% of those vaccinated did so primarily for health
reasons. Around a third of those vaccinated said vaccine mandate or pass requirements was a
large factor in their decision.

Why this is important is the Government (and repeated by many in the media) keeps saying 94% of adults have been vaccinated, so those against are only 6%. But that is an incorrect way to interpret it. Because a significant minority of that 94% only did so because the state coerced them into it through vaccine mandates. So this is why opposition to vaccine mandates is greater than 6% and many of those opposed are themselves vaccinated.

Another key finding was that people support flexibility with the mandates. 61% think unvaccinated employees should be able to keep their job if they agree to have regular rapid antigen testing as an alternative. This is not a radical right policy, but in fact the policy of Joe Biden. Yet it won’t even be considered here.

Even Labour voters support this flexibility. This measure was supported by 74% of 2020 ACT voters, 70% of National voters and 58% of Labour voters. Only 2020 Green voters were not majority in support, but still a plurality at 42%. So such a change would have broad coass-party appeal.

Another interesting finding is the difference between respondents who were double and triple vaccinated. 80% of those who are triple vaccinated did so reasons of protecting their health. But only 54% of those double vaccinated cited health as a large factor. This suggests that there will be significant hesitancy in getting a booster as boosters are not mandated.

David Fisher writes:

Dismissive arrogance towards the protesters at Parliament is making the situation worse.

That’s not just Parliament’s high-handed approach. Opinion pieces and public sentiment that mock and sneer at people’s sincerely held beliefs serves to isolate those in our community who reckon the Government has got it wrong.

Those who do believe this are greater in number than vaccination figures would suggest.

Many suggest the protesters are a tiny minority because only 6% of adults are unvaccinated. But they don’t realise some of those 94% who got vaccinated didn’t want to do so, and felt coerced into it.

And there are others who were enthusiastic to personally get vaxed, but think the mandates are wrong.

To dismiss those people – as the Prime Minister does by citing our 95 per cent vaccination rate – is wrong. To mock those people, as some in Parliament have done, is worse. Isolation is a classic part of the radicalisation process. The further and harder you push people away, the more fixed they become.

Spot on.

For every person that did make the journey, there are many others who wished they were there. They are people who stayed home and expected when they came out it would be over, who got their jabs and then thought that would be it, who had children stuck overseas, who knew someone who couldn’t go to their mother’s funeral, who lost their house when they lost their job.

Across our country, there are decent, well-intentioned Kiwis who have packed the car, readied the campervan, bought plane tickets and travelled to Wellington.

They arrived as a formless mass, unclear as to what they wanted other than a general rallying cry to “end the mandates”, a move that will come but most definitely will not under threat of protest and Omicron.

The problem is the Government won’t give any idea of when the mandates will end. If they said something like “They’ll end once we have 90% of people boosted” or “They’ll end when Covid cases are less than 100 a day” then those against the mandates might accept that. But refusing to give any idea of when re might return to a non coercive state, means those feeling oppressed have no reason to go home.

The way out of the protest is not through the protest but with the protest. Rather than dismiss the protesters, recognise that the views they hold are genuine and hard-earned. Recognise they dedicated considerable thought to their views and adopted a stance that is honest and principled.

Having done so, recognise too that it is the one thing on which we disagree that is making it difficult to see what we like about each other. Finding a circuit-breaker to do that is hard but necessary.

Ultimately, most of those on Parliament’s forecourt want the same thing as those inside Parliament’s walls – for New Zealand to be a free and open democracy in which we are able to live our lives in the best way possible, subject to the freedoms enjoyed by each other.

What David Fisher says makes more sense than those who advocate the Police should go in and try to arrest over 1,000 people.

Newshub reports:

Health Minister Andrew Little was blindsided by the news 10,000 healthcare workers will go on strike. 

Those going on strike include contact tracers and lab workers who carry out COVID-19 testing, saying they’ve had enough of being disrespected by their employers.

There’ll be two 24-hour strikes on March 4 and 18 – when the Omicron outbreak could be at its peak.

“If we go on strike, COVID testing will be delayed. We need to be listened to by the Government and we need to be appreciated for all the work that we do,” says laboratory technician Sue.

But Little was blindsided when asked about it on Thursday.

“I’m not familiar with exactly what you’re talking about so I’m reluctant to comment on that,” he says.

“You’ve ambushed me, I’m sorry, you’ve ambushed me and I’m not familiar with that.”

How can a Minister not be aware 10,000 of his staff are going on strike?

Stuff reports:

Minimum wage workers working more than 43 hours a week are shifting into the third-highest tax bracket, and one tax expert says it highlights the problems with New Zealand’s system.

The Government announced last week that the minimum wage would increase to $21.20 an hour from April 1.

For people working a 40-hour week, that equates to $44,096 a year. But if they worked 43 hours a week at minimum wage, they would get to the top of the 17.5 per cent tax bracket, and any extra income would be taxed at 30 per cent.

This is what happens when you don’t index tax brackets to inflation. Here’s the average tax rate for someone on the minimum wage over the last decade.

• 2010: 13.8%
• 2014: 14.2%
• 2017: 14.5%
• 2020: 15.0%
• 2022: 15.3%

So a fulltime minimum wage earner is paying 1.5% more in tax than a decade ago due to the failure to index tax brackets to either inflation or wages.

Yesterday a remarkable and touching chapter of immediate post WW2 history closed with the passing of former US Airforce Colonel Gail Halvorson at aged 101. Halvorson was better known as the Candy Bomber or Uncle Wiggly Wings during the infamous Berlin Airlift.

In June 1948, as relations between the US (and its European allies) and the Soviet Union dramatically soured, one of the most poignant manifestation of what came to be called the Cold War was the sudden Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Just as all of post war Germany had been parceled into four zones administered by the victorious Allied powers (the US, UK, France and the Soviet Union) so too was Berlin similarly partitioned into four administrative zones administered by the same four powers. Berlin however was ensconced inside the Soviet Zone of Germany (that later became East Germany) and thus was surrounded by the Soviets. To ramp up the pressure on President Truman and to impose Soviet power in the region, Stalin ordered the blockade of all road and rail links into West Berlin from West Germany in an attempt to starve the citizens of West Berlin into submission thus enabling the Soviets to seize control of the whole city.

The western allies, led by the US, mounted an ambitious campaign of air lifts to fly in needed food, fuel and other supplies to keep the citizens of West Berlin alive. At the peak of the Berlin Air Lift, allied supply planes (mostly Douglas C47 Dakotas and C54 Skymasters) were landing at Berlin – Templehof Airport at the rate of 1 plane every 90 seconds. Over the 15-month period of the airlift, over 278,000 landings were completed, and 2.3 million tons of supplies airlifted in before the Soviets backed down and lifted the blockade.

A heartwarming chapter of the Berlin Airlift occurred in July 1948 when then Lieutenant Halvorson happened to spend a few spare hours of time off inside West Berlin. Given the short amount of time he was granted, he and his friend could not do much sightseeing. As they approached the airport along a road that bordered the perimeter fence of Templehof, Gail stopped to film the airlift with his home cine-camera. He noticed about 30 skinny German kids aged 6 to 15 crowding the perimeter fence and watching the landing and taking off of the planes and the unloading of the lifesaving supplies. Many of these kids wore rags for clothes and being it was summer, many of the boys were shirtless and had no shoes. Gail and his friend stopped and watched these impoverished local children play and he approached the perimeter fence. The children quickly crowded around the fence to talk to the American pilots.

The older children who spoke some English asked what he did, and he told them that he was one of the pilots who was part of the airlift. What happened next changed Gail’s world forever. These children profusely thanked him for what he and the Americans and British were doing to save them. They said that in July it’s easy to fly in here but in the winter, when it is cold and rainy it will be hard to keep flying in so please don’t give up on us when it gets tough. Realising that more was at stake than just food to keep them alive, one boy said, “We can get by on a little food, but if we lose our freedom, we may never get it back”. Having lived under the tyranny of Nazism, even these children knew that if the airlift failed, they would live under the tyranny of Soviet communism. Gail was gob smacked by the clarity and simplicity of what he was actually doing and its clear impact on these young hungry children who had survived the awful privations of the Allied bombings, the Battle of Berlin and the aftermath of the war.

Despite their deprivation, not one of these kids begged or asked for food until Gail realised that none of them would’ve had anything like candy in months even years and he dug into his pockets to see what he had to give and all he had was two sticks of chewing gum. What happened next transfixed Gail. The children to whom he gave the sticks of gum to broke the gum up into small pieces so that as many of the children could have but a tiny piece. Then those who could not have any gum took the foil gum wrapper and were content to merely smell the scent of the American gum, passing the wrapper from child to child until all who were gathered had shared. He knew that the citizens of Berlin were suffering and that he was part of a superhuman effort to save these people, but he saw a real-life consequence of the starvation of the people and its effect on these innocent children.

Wanting to support these young children in any small way possible, he pledged to get them some chocolate and other candy. The excited children begged to know when he would return with what to them would’ve been pure gold and something they had likely not seen in a long time. Gail knew that a short leave inside Berlin like he had been granted was likely never going to be granted again such was the enormous pressure of time on the pilots who flew these missions around the clock. He said to the children, I will drop the candy from the window of the plane when I am landing. To which the children responded, how will we know it is your plane for thousands of flights land every day. He said that as I am approaching the runway, I will wiggle my plane’s wings and then we will make the drop.

Gail and his friend returned to the airport and when back at the supply depot in West Germany, he got all his friends to give over their entitlement of chocolate and candy bars and he and his fellow crew members used their handkerchiefs to make miniature parachutes because to throw even small chocolate bars at 110mph might injure the children. Sure enough on his next flight into Berlin, as he approached the runway, he wiggled the wings of his plane and made the drop of the Hershey’s chocolate bars down to the now hundreds of eager children waiting in the vacant land on the approach to the runway.

Such was the popularity of the drop that Gail began casting around for spare candy and chocolate and handkerchiefs amongst the various pilots, crew and ground crew at the air force base and pretty soon the candy drops became a regular feature. Needless to say, the crowds of children swelled to thousands as the prospect of American chocolate dropped from a plane was on offer. After a few weeks, Gail was reported to his superior officers who at first reprimanded him for not asking permission first but eventually they relented and soon US chocolate and candy manufacturers came on board and thousands of people across the US made the mini parachutes and the candy drops became regular and widespread even across Berlin enabling tens of thousands of children to have a little treat above the mundane tightly rationed food they were forced to subsist on in what came to be dubbed as Operation Little Vittles eventually dropping over 20 tons of confectionary in 9 months!

Gail Halvorson became a hero to the people of Berlin. After the end of the airlift, he was showered with awards of gratitude by the Mayor of Berlin and the leaders of the nascent republic of West Germany. Gail maintained strong ties to Berlin for decades after and he made regular appearances at ceremonies held to honour the anniversaries of the lifting of the blockade. In 1970 he was appointed the senior US Airforce commander at Templehof Airport in Berlin in recognition of his strong connection to the city. When a retirement ceremony was held at the airport when his service in Berlin was up, thousands of the then children of Berlin in 1948 came now as elderly adults to meet the man who had brought a ray of hope and happiness during one of the darkest times of their young lives.

Gail Halvorson was a humble farm boy from southern Utah and Idaho and never sought fame or glory, merely to honour a promise to get some chocolate for a handful of blond haired disheveled German kids at the fence of Templehof airport. This small act of kindness mushroomed to a potent symbol of freedom and became emblematic of the efforts the allies went to to rebuild the country that they had shattered to defeat the horrors of Hitler’s regime.

PBS made a documentary about Gail Halvorson and his role as the Candy Bomber. A 5 minute summary is here when he talks about his first meeting with the kids https://youtu.be/5iaWzIX4mp0 and here is a link to the entire show https://youtu.be/jGc4vY_GwSc

Gail Seymour Halvorson – October 20, 1920 to February 16, 2022 – may he Rest in Peace.