I blogged in June around the controversy over Kainga Ora spending almost $500,000 on advertorial fluff pieces that appeared to be genuine news. The background is:

• Kainga Ora (Housing NZ) signed a contract with NZME to spent $25,000 a month for almost two years in return for stories they would write that would look like news stories.
• NZME failed to state that this was supplied content, and for many months they appeared without any disclaimer that they were paid for.
• The Minister of Housing, Megan Woods, denied in a written question that there was any agreement between NZME and Kainga Ora. This was false, and later blamed on a clerical error.
• One purchased article was in May 2020 and featured Arena Williams (now a Labour MP) and was full of details about what she had done for her community – it appeared three days before the Labour selection for Manurewa.

So all this is bad enough, but it gets far far worse. It turns out that not only did Kainga Ora know Williams was an aspiring Labour candidate, they decided to pretend they did not know!!

OIAs released to Nicola Willis show that Kainga Ora staff knew that Williams was seeking the Labour nomination in a few days and the response from the Senior Comms Advisor was:

we can just act as though we don’t know anything!

So their strategy was to promote an aspiring Labour candidate, and if questioned to pretend they didn’t know!

This is confirmed, as they negotiated with Williams:

She was worried that putting herself out there in the media might suddenly seem like she’s helping coordinate some publicity for herself. I assured her it wasn’t a problem in my view and we could proceed as though we didn’t know about her impending announcement

So Kainga Ora told the aspiring Labour candidate that they would just proceed as though they didn’t know she was about to be announced as the Labour candidate!

And if we can promise to show her the copy for approval, she might get some additional comfort from that.

So the NZ Herald published a story that was written by a Government agency, funded by taxpayers, whose content was personally approved by the aspiring Labour candidate – and none of this was known until revealed by Nicola Willis as none of the stories had been marked as advertorial.

We’re getting close to the pre-election period where it’s stipulated that: The neutrality of the public service and other agencies in the state sector must be protected throughout the pre-election period.

Kainga Ora doesn’t seem to understand that public service neutrality applies all the time, not just during the pre-election period.

The $500,000 was wasteful spending at the best of times anyway. But to spend some of it to promote an aspiring candidate and state in writing that the agency will just pretend not to know she is about to become the candidate is appalling ethics.

Newshub reports on the story here:

Newshub can reveal the Government’s housing developer Kāinga Ora brazenly took steps to cover up the fact it was using a Labour candidate in its taxpayer-funded advertising – risking its political neutrality.

Although it knew Manurewa MP Arena Williams was planning to run for Labour, emails show it hid the fact, choosing to act like it was unaware. 

And Nicola Willis sums up:

“Documents released to me under the Official Information Act show that just months before last years election, Kāinga Ora secretly commissioned, paid for and arranged publication of ‘advertorial’ material about Labour Party figure Arena Williams, and on finding out about her impending candidacy senior public servants agreed to ‘proceed as though we didn’t know’. …

“These actions by senior public servants show a flagrant disregard for the proper use of taxpayer funds and the need for public agencies to consistently act with integrity and in the public interest.

“I am gravely concerned about the culture at Kāinga Ora. New Zealanders have a right to expect that the Government housing arm will focus its time and money on getting houses built – not promoting Labour Party candidates.

Never mind that the waiting list for state housing has increased almost 500% – let’s spend $500,000 on fake newspaper stories making us look good.

Pano Kanelos writes:

I left my post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life? …

On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

We had thought such censoriousness was possible only under oppressive regimes in distant lands. But it turns out that fear can become endemic in a free society. It can become most acute in the one place—the university—that is supposed to defend “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” …

We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew. 

I mean that quite literally. 

As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

I am not alone. 

Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.   

We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt,  Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

We are a dedicated crew that grows by the day. Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse; our political views differ. What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry. And so we must be the cavalry.  …

Our rigorous curriculum will be the first designed in partnership not only with great teachers but also society’s great doers—founders of daring ventures, dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism, pioneers in tech, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences. Our students will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilization and learn to encounter works not as dead traditions but as fierce contests of timeless significance that help human beings distinguish between what is true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Students will come to see such open inquiry as a lifetime activity that demands of them a brave, sometimes discomfiting, search for enduring truths.

This core purpose—the intrepid pursuit of truth—has been at the heart of education since Plato founded his Academy in 387 B.C. Reviving it would produce a resilient (or “antifragile”) cohort with exceptional capacity to think fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively. Such graduates will be the future leaders best prepared to address humanity’s challenges. 

An education rooted in the pursuit of truth is the antidote to the kind of ignorance and incivility that is everywhere around us. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed: “Education . . . means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.”

A superb initiative. Most of he legacy universities are doomed in terms of their culture. A new university with academic freedom embedded in its core should do well.

I normally highlight sentences which I think are too light, but in this case I’m starting with one I regard as too harsh, even though it was murder. The case of Cherylene Lawrence:

A mother who murdered her terminally-ill daughter has been jailed for six and a half years.

Cherylene Lawrence, 49, was sentenced in the High Court at Napier on Friday after pleading guilty to a charge of murder in September. …

She acknowledged that Chevana was particularly vulnerable, but took into account her “overall impression” of the case, specifically the pressure she was under to care for Chevana, the emotional impact of her deteriorating condition, the desire to end suffering, and the fact Lawrence posed little to no risk to public.

Gwyn said “the pain of watching your daughter deteriorate over the last 13 years of her life is unimaginable”. She acknowledged the professionals she dealt with often did not know how to care for Chevana.

Lawrence had dedicated much of her life to ensure Chevana had a good life, and this meant she had to sacrifice a lot, the judge said.

“It’s clear to me your personal circumstances would make life imprisonment manifestly unjust.

The Judge was right to find this is a case where life would be manifestly unjust.

At just 16 Chevana had been diagnosed with juvenile Huntington’s disease, a less common early-onset form of Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s disease causes the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the brain, resulting in movement, cognitive and psychiatric disorders.

Chevana’s condition deteriorated steadily over the years. She resided at care facilities until moving back home with her mother late last year.

Chevana would often lash out at her mother and other caregivers.

Lawrence struggled to cope. She became sleep-deprived and her mental health suffered. By mid-December she became despondent. She cried the whole time, and felt her daughter no longer had any quality of life.

In these circumstances I think even six years is excessive, I’d even consider home detention.

And contrast that with this case:

The man appeared before Judge Tony Greig this week on a representative charge of sexual violation.

Judge Greig outlined how the offending started when the man was almost 14, and his sister 11.

He said the man sexually violated and raped his sister on a “number of occasions”.

The judge said no sentence he could impose “would undo the harm you’ve caused”.

He outlined how the man had no previous convictions, had not offended since, had entered guilty pleas and showed true remorse.

Greig also took into account the sheltered childhood the man lived, with a “lack of sexual education”, and how when he got a computer he came across pornography.

“Anecdotally, pornography has led to a huge increase in sex offending in teenagers.”

He said “you would only have to casually peruse” pornographic sites to see that many portray non-consensual sex.

“It’s a well known problem, and as far as I’m aware, nothing is ever done to try to rectify it.”

Greig said he had to look at the man’s moral culpability, and the “seriousness must be viewed through the lens of you at the age of 14, 15 and 16”.

“For that reason” he discharged the man without conviction and ordered he pay his sister $10,000.

He raped his 11 year old sister repeatedly, and he got discharged without conviction!!!

Sure these is case that he doesn’t need to go to prison, but to discharge without conviction just seems absolutely wrong.

Audrey Young has done another of her regular ratings of the Cabinet. The numbers in brackets are the changes from the last one six months ago.

• 9/10: Robertson (nc), Sepuloni (+2), O’Connor (+5)
• 8/10: Little (-1), Henare (+1), Wood (-1), Shaw (nc)
• 7/10: Ardern (-1), Hipkins (-1), Parker (nc), Mahuta (-1), Jackson (+1), Allan (nc), Sio (+2), Twyford (+2)
• 6/10: Davis (-1), Woods (-1), Nash (-1), Tinetti (+1), Verrall (nc), Whaitiri (nc), Davidson (+1)
• 5/10: Faafoi (-2)
• 4/10: Williams (-2)

Public health experts at Otago University write:

Analysis of countries with reasonable quality data implies that the risk of Covid-19 infection for most vaccinated international arrivals is typically less than the current risk for Auckland residents. Current MIQ requirements for vaccinated arrivals to Auckland could therefore be dropped for most, without increasing the risk for Aucklanders.

They have determined that Aucklanders are at more risk from other Aucklanders than returning NZers who have been double vaccinated.

In Canada, for example, after adjusting for their lower testing rate, there could be 130 new cases per million people per day. While this rate is higher than in Auckland, their vaccination rate is 75%. That means their case rate in the vaccinated is estimated at 68 new cases per million people per day, less than Auckland’s 83. So if you’re at the supermarket in Auckland, a fully vaccinated person randomly teleported from Canada is less likely to infect you than an average resident Aucklander in the aisles.

Yet the Government says they will still have to go through MIQ until March 2022!

Given the limit it imposes on the right of NZers to enter their country, any requirement for MIQ must be risk based and consistent in order to be justified. With tested, vaccinated travellers from many jurisdictions having a lower risk of Covid-19 infection than Aucklanders; with no vaccination or quarantine requirements for Aucklanders permitted to travel outside Auckland; and with the decision to allow many known positive cases in the current outbreak to isolate at home in Auckland, current MIQ requirements for tested vaccinated travellers have become inconsistent and arbitrary.

Furthermore, filling MIQ rooms with arrivals who typically have a lower infection risk than Aucklanders wastes limited MIQ space. Public health would be better served by having those rooms available for community cases, when their homes are not suitable for home isolation.

This is key. The Government’s MIQ requirements actually increase the risk to New Zealand as NZers who have actually tested positive to Covid-19 are shut out of MIQ, as most of the capacity is being used for incoming NZers who have been double vaccinated.

Stuff reports:

The gunman who killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques says his guilty pleas were obtained under duress due to mistreatment in custody, according to a memorandum from his lawyer.

He has the right to appeal, but considering he livestreamed his murders and wrote a manifesto justifying them I’d say his chances of success are around the same as Labour delivering 100,000 Kiwibuild homes.

Ellis complained the Chief Coroner repeatedly describing the offender as “the individual” – also used in the Royal Commission of Inquiry report – rather than using the offender’s name, was a serious breach of human rights and “deeply offensive and unlawful”.

I think mass murdering 51 people is deeply offensive and unlawful. Choosing not to use someone’s name is trivial in comparison.

A guest post by Alex Penk:

New Zealand is becoming a class-based society, and no-one seems to be blinking an eyelid. The Prime Minister accepted serenely that her Government’s policies were creating “two different classes of people”, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. “That is what it is,” she agreed. But there’s very little commentary or public concern about this. Even the Opposition’s rumblings have been muted. Maybe most people are so sick of the costs and uncertainty of lockdowns that they don’t want to think about the collateral damage of creating a two-tier society. But creating division is a fraught proposition even if you think it’s justified. We cannot take this so lightly. It’s time we had some debate.

Ring-fencing our unvaccinated neighbours and excluding them from swathes of our common life will create fault-lines running through families, communities, and the nation. The Government’s vaccination mandates are already seeing people lose their livelihoods, and its traffic light scheme limits their freedoms at all levels. Together, they are a large stick to prod the hesitant into vaccination and marginalise the non-compliant. Others’ decisions will have an effect too, like the University of Auckland’s intention to close its campus to anyone who isn’t fully vaccinated. The impacts will be uneven; as many have pointed out, Māori will be disproportionately affected.

There seems to be a general acceptance that “to the vaccinated will go the spoils but for the unvaccinated life will be very miserable indeed”, as one senior commentator put it. But societies only hang together if we believe that we’re all connected and that we owe each other something. Without this belief there is no “we”, only “us” and “them”.

The effects of this approach will be long-lasting. First, because they’re dehumanising. People are more than their vaccination status, but a two-tier system strips them of that dignity and makes their medical history the primary fact about them. Ugly comments on the article about the University of Auckland illustrate this already: “The Government should mandate vaccinations for all beneficiaries.” “I don’t want to come into contact with antivaxers.” Second, because the effects will be intergenerational. Imagine the children of a teacher who lost her job under the vaccination mandate. Their prospects could be poorer, economically and socially, thanks to their family’s loss of income and sense of exclusion.

Of course, the Government and other public voices have a difficult line to walk and a responsibility to promote health and safety. They’ll want to avoid the social and economic costs of other pandemic responses like lockdowns, and they might argue that anyone choosing to be unvaccinated has to take personal responsibility for that choice. But their strategy’s emphasis on vaccination is blunt and heavy-handed, and it would be easier for all of us to have confidence in it if it seemed they’d weighed other, less restrictive measures like rapid antigen testing more carefully. However, their own independent review described the Government’s approach to testing as “reactive and conservative”, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the concerns and interests of anyone who’s unvaccinated have been airbrushed out of the official response.

This isn’t an anti-vaxxer’s argument—I’m double-jabbed with no hesitancy or scepticism—but it is a plea for more respect and more balance. Respect means listening to the interests, fears, and decisions of our unvaccinated neighbours and trying to give them genuine answers instead of dismissing them or consigning them to some excluded zone. It means accepting that vaccination decisions involve trade-offs that each of us might legitimately make differently, and that pressuring people to act against their deeply and sincerely held beliefs is dangerous territory especially when it involves unwanted medical treatments. Balance means weighing up the long-term costs of our short-term response, and asking whether the desire to be physically safe now will make all of us and our children socially unsafe later. It means identifying the social and emotional costs and treating them as real costs alongside the health and economic ones. It means being realistic about the risks involved—not underplaying or overplaying them—and the consequences we’re willing to accept.

Unless we have some credible, responsible voices doing this, then the fringe and the extremes, the kind of people who organize protest marches in the middle of a lockdown, will continue to lead the debate. We have to be willing to ask whether creating a two-tier society based on vaccination is genuinely the right response, or if we can make other choices. More than that, we have to ask if we really want to put our nation on a new, class-based foundation. People who choose not to be vaccinated are not our enemy. They are our friends, our customers, our employers, our family. Let’s start treating them that way.

Alex Penk is an independent researcher and writer with a background in law and policy, and a rank-and-file member of the National Party. He writes at aplacetostand.substack.com

Stuff reports:

Light rail to Island Bay has been revealed as the centrepiece of Let’s Get Wellington Moving’s plans to reshape the capital’s transport network.

The four options to be considered for public consultation have been released. Three involve a tram line to Island Bay, with the fourth option based around elongated electric “bendy buses” running on dedicated lanes.

Every option includes a new tunnel under Mount Victoria, but none with additional car lanes.

When you ask Wellingtonians their number one desire for the CBD traffic, it is to four lane the Mt Vic tunnel. The Government is proposing a cruel trick where it sounds like they will do this, but in fact the two extra lanes will ban cars from them. This is crazy.

Steven Joyce had a great vision for the region. Four lanes from the airport to Levin. We’ve already seen the huge difference the Kapiti expressway has made. The days of 30 – 45 minutes stuck through Paraparaumu are gone. The expressway is superb. The extension to Otaki will be great, and Transmission Gully will be worth waiting for as the congestion at Pukerua Bay and Mana will become a distant memory.

But to really get the benefits we need to have the four lanes through the city also. And these four proposals do almost nothing for that. This is not the fault of the LGWM staff – it is the fault of their political masters who have basically instructed them to do nothing for cars as they see cars as evil.

Three of the four options would extend Arras Tunnel, meaning the Basin Reserve would no longer be a roundabout.

That is one bright spot, but they are talking about maybe doing this in the 2030s. We need it now.

Light rail to the South Coast would remove up to 500 vehicles in the morning peak hour and support the development of up to 21,000 new homes, Transport Minister Michael Wood said.

I’m all for light rail where it makes economic sense. The last time GWRC looked at it for Wellington they found the benefit to cost ratio to be 0.05 which means every $100 of spending produces $5 of benefits. And the consultation document fails to give us any BCR estimates for the four options. I am agnostic between the four. I want the option which has the best BCR. Asking people’s opinions without having that is like giving out menus at a restaurant with no prices on them. The document does give ballpark costs, but that is very different to costs calculated against benefits.

The other thing to note is that even if a decision is made, none of this would even start until 2028 by which time we will have had two more general elections and three local body elections. Inevitably decisions made in 2022 will not survive until then. You need to decide, and then start work asap. And some of the options have 15 years of construction estimated so what they are saying is you might get light rail or bus rapid transport in 2043!!!

And based on progress in Auckland, more likely to be 2053!

Again none of this is the fault of LGWM staff. It is the fault of the political masters who won’t give any funding to do stuff quicker, and have a hatred of private motor vehicles.

Thomas Coughlan reports:

The unemployment rate plunged to 3.4 per cent today, lower than it has been at any time since before the global financial crisis, but one group warns that official unemployment statistics may be undercounting Māori.

A report by Sense Partners has looked into how the unemployment rate has diverged from another measure for unemployment – the number of people collecting a benefit.

Normally, you would expect these two numbers to trend roughly in the same direction – as the unemployment rate goes down, you should see the same thing in jobseeker numbers.

Instead, the opposite has happened, Jobseeker numbers climbed and stayed high, while the unemployment rate fell to record lows following the first wave of Covid-19.

Sense Partners economist Shamubeel Eaqub said that just five years ago, benefit statistics registered 6,600 more people than the Household Labour Force Survey or HLFS, the official measure of unemployment collected by Stats NZ.

Today, the number of people on a benefit is 45,500 higher than the HLFS, suggesting a widening gap between what Stats NZ was surveying, and what is actually happening.

“Five years ago, jobseeker numbers and unemployment numbers were pretty much the same, and now they begin to diverge,” Eaqub said.

“It is concerning that benefit statistics and the official unemployment rate are telling such a different story,” he said.

While jobseeker numbers were high for all ethnicities, they were far higher for Māori, despite Māori making up far less of the population than other ethnicities like Pakeha.

“The divergence between HLFS and benefit statistics is acute across ethnic lines, and the largest for Māori,” he said.

This is a fascinating revelation that the gap between those on the dole and the official measure has increased to 45,000, when they used to be consistently very close.

The reasons is simple to divine.

Stats NZ has not changed their definition of unemployed. It is that you are all of the above:

1. Not employed
2. Available for work
3. Seeking work

This is a globally consistent measurement. And it tells us that 3.4% of the working age population is out of work, available to work, seeking work yet unable to find a job.

So why has there been such a growth in those receiving an unemployment benefit, so that the two figures are no longer close.

Well previously you needed to actually be looking for a job to get the dole. Now, under the new kindness regime, this is not applied in practice. The Government doesn’t believe in requiring people who get welfare to make a genuine effort to get a job.

So this means that the official measure of unemployment drops as those 45,000 are not looking for a job, but the numbers in welfare increase as they can get welfare without having to try and get a job.

Barry Soper writes:

But like everything with this Government, transparency is like mud in your eye. 

Asked about her decision to can the European jaunt, the Beehive spin-doctors simply said: “Options have been looked into but nothing has been confirmed.” 

Perhaps they were waiting for an American diplomat to tweet her impending trip to Europe, as one did just before Trade Minister Damien O’Connor headed off to the UK last month.   Up until that point no-one had been told he was about to climb on a plane. 

This week has been a terrible one for this Government, culminating in the shemozzle over how Aucklanders are going to travel out of the city for Christmas. 

Jacinda Ardern set the ball rolling saying the borders would remain in place but citizens have been told they can leave the congested city, but how they are going to manage it at the borders is beyond comprehension. 

The Minister of everything, Chris Hipkins, let slip they were thinking about having cars turn up at allotted times at the borders, imagine it, making it to the border on time with thousands of cars before you and thousands more following. 

Ardern’s 2IC Grant Robertson expressed hope there wouldn’t still be borders in place and pooh-pooed the idea. 

The thought of the Government telling you on what days you are allowed to have a holiday is something you expect to read in a dystopian novel, not in the NZ media.

Stuff reports:

An Auckland councillor is being criticised for likening the intensification of housing in the city to “gang rape”.

During Thursday’s Planning Committee, former mayor of Auckland and Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa ward councillor Christine Fletcher said the Medium Density Residential Standards, which would approve three-story development across most of Auckland, were equivalent to “rape”.

The bill follows new intensification rules passed by the Government and National, allowing buildings of this height on most sites in cities without any need for resource consent from August next year.

When told by chairman Chris Darby to withdraw her comment, Fletcher doubled down, stating the proposal was akin to “gang rape” because it was being done by both major parties.

Sometimes we can over-react to dumb or bad analogies, but in this case the analogy is pretty damn offensive – especially to actual rape victims.

I’m glad they told us it was about the three water reforms, as it could apply to so many issues!

It should be a no brainer that we have a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid response. The economic cost is well over $100 billion, let alone the health costs. If we have a RCI into Cave Creek and the Christchurch Earthquake of course we should have one into the largest pandemic in living memory.

Judith Collins has said that such an inquiry should look into:

The reasons for the slow vaccine rollout

•         The performance of the vaccine rollout itself, particularly for Māori

•         The preparedness of the health system for the outbreak, particularly ICU

•         The MIQ and quarantine system

•         Failure to adopt testing technologies like rapid antigen testing and saliva testing

•         Preparedness of the education system for the outbreak

•         Spending from the Covid Response Fund

•         The decision-making behind Alert Level changes and new step and traffic light systems

And of course all these areas should be inquired into, so we know how to do better next time. But there is no chance the Government will agree – because it goes to the heart of their decision making.

When an earthquake or a mine disaster occurs, the Government will hold an inquiry because it is highly unlikely it will find Ministerial decision making is at fault. Sure it will identify law changes needed in the future, but that is less sensitive.

But in the case of Covid-19, the entire issue is about how the pandemic occurred (as that was totally outside out control), but how the Government responded. And the last thing the Government wants is a report detailing all the areas of poor performance.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in The Telegraph:

A team of mathematicians at Oxford University has carried out the world’s best study so far of the economic windfall to be had from a turbo-charged decarbonisation based on unstoppable leaps and bounds in known technology. 

It concluded that the net gain is $26 trillion (£19 trillion), or $14 trillion under cautious assumptions. The faster it happens, the bigger the benefit. It can be achieved in 25 years, beating the global target of 2050. Most changes do not require lavish state funding any more than public money is needed to make mobile phones. 

“I know that there are some who say we are going too fast. I say to them first that there is a force out there stronger than government. That force is the market. And the market is going green,” said Boris Johnson, before rolling out his Net Zero Strategy on Tuesday.

With the right rules and policy signals – and seed money to bring the newest technologies to scale – free enterprise will take care of the problem, guided by Adam Smith’s Hidden Hand. 

Renewables will prevail because fossil fuels cannot compete. They will slide rapidly into obsolescence so long as the market is not obstructed, or so long as the authorities stop “standing on the hose”, in the words of Andrew Forrest, Australia’s former polluter-in-chief and now hydrogen king.

Cathie Wood from the technology fund Ark Invest likens it to the fate of the whale oil industry in the 1860s, once the fifth-largest sector of the US economy and chief source of lighting fuel. Within a decade whaling had mostly vanished because something better came along: kerosene.  

The Oxford report, by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, said global solar costs have been falling by 15pc a year since the mid-1990s in a textbook case of Wright’s Law, the so-called learning curve of innovation. 

The models long used by governments and agencies to predict solar performance assumed on average that costs would fall by just 2.6pc a year. It is why the establishment has been so fantastically wrong.

https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/b4eb6e75-ce1d-42d5-89dc-b55a662569eb.html?i=0&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2021%2F10%2F20%2Ftechnology-saves-us-oxford-sees-26-trillion-gain-net-zero%2F&channel=business&id=b4eb6e75-ce1d-42d5-89dc-b55a662569eb&isapp=false&isregistered=true&issubscribed=true&truncated=false&lt=false Ditto with lithium batteries. The “learning curve” has been 13pc a year since the 1990s. Electrolysers are only just starting, moving from toolshed phase to factory-scale production with advanced robots. They will track the same trajectory.

Unsubsidised new wind and solar have reached parity with fossil fuels across most of the world, cheaper for most of mankind, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Wright’s Law of technology still holds, so they will become even cheaper, subject to the supply of critical minerals. 

However, Wright’s Law does not hold for fossil fuels. The Oxford group found that coal, gas, and oil have traded at the much same level in real terms for 140 years, with ups and downs along the way but no structural fall in cost – a “random walk”, in academic jargon. 

Once the cost curves cross, the game is up. The collapse becomes unstoppable, or to borrow the Hemingway dictum, you go bankrupt two ways: “gradually, then suddenly”. 

It is a good reminder we don’t need hundreds of costly policies. We just need an Emissions Trading Scheme and a free market.

Claire did this four minute video on Facebook on Thursday. It has gone viral with a huge 4,200+ shares. She is so forceful she makes her brother look like the wimp in the family!

Graham Adams writes:

Rasch seems unable to see that the snipers she refers to might actually be the ones who are holding power to account. Nor does she seem to understand that fund guidelines limiting how the Treaty should be viewed mean a hugely important area of public discourse is off-limits for questioning, no matter how energetically journalists criticise the government in other areas.

Critics say the media has been very slow to spell out the fact that Three Waters will hand iwi 50 per cent governance of infrastructure paid for by ratepayers; or that the Maori Health Authority will have the right of veto over the plans for the other 84 per cent of the population; or that the blueprint Nanaia Mahuta published last week for reforming local government defines the Treaty as “an agreement to share authority in Aotearoa”.

In fact, each of the debates mentioned above turn on a view of the Treaty as implying a 50:50 partnership. To rule this interpretation out of bounds for discussion makes a mockery of the claim the government is not influencing editorial coverage through the media fund — even if it is not directly involved in day-to-day decisions.

Yep this is the crux of it. It isn’t that the funds buys journalists off. It is that the NZ on Air and the fund have effectively banned discussion of the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi. If you disagree with their interpretation, you can’t get funded.

In July, Rasch justified the Treaty guidelines this way: “Many media organisations do not understand Te Tiriti and the conversations they are curating run the risk of being biased, racist and not delivering to the Te Tiriti partner — Māori, or tangata whenua.”

In other words, if the implications of the Treaty are contested, it could only be because of racism, and not because reasonable people might see the push for a 50:50 partnership between Maori and non-Maori as fundamentally undemocratic and leading inexorably towards an ethno-state.

I want to improve the outcomes for Maori New Zealanders, but I also don’t want to turn New Zealand into the 1970s version of Fiji with power being based on ethnicity.

Last month, former Act MP and political analyst Dr Muriel Newman appeared on Sky News Australia to raise her concerns about the implementation of the recommendations set out in He Puapua — a process she said was happening rapidly.

One of the areas of concern she addressed was the Public Interest Journalism Fund: “[New Zealanders] see changes every day and wonder what on earth is driving it and unfortunately we’re in a situation where the government has spent $55 million on a public interest broadcasting fund.

“[This] is something the media can apply for to get grants and one of the conditions of doing that is they have to, if you like, speak out in favour of this Treaty partnership agenda.”

Newshub, which linked to the interview, claimed to have fact-checked Newman’s statement. It asserted: “There is no condition of the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, announced in February, for journalists to report favourably on ‘this Treaty partnership agenda’.”

Newshub’s fact-checker was, in fact, dead wrong. The section describing the fund’s goals recommends “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”. And the first of the general eligibility criteria requires all applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”.

Getting an important fact so completely wrong in a fact-check is hardly likely to convince an increasingly sceptical public that the media is not biased — especially around Treaty issues.

And again this is why trust in media keeps declining.

Kate MacNamara reports:

The taskforce itself was created in May 2020, but only in August did the Cabinet give the group, led by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the money and the mandate to begin negotiating with international pharmaceutical companies. At that point, most of the countries to which we typically compare ourselves had already begun their advance buying.

Ultimately, a negotiating team led by Bell Gully lawyers hashed out four agreements to buy vaccine candidates for New Zealand, inked between October and December of last year.

This was good news after the slow, unfunded winter months in which the taskforce focused on other efforts, including multi-lateral buying that ultimately fell short and developing domestic vaccine manufacturing capability that never came to fruition.

Along the way, the public was fed a soothing version of events shaped by outside PR help, the funds for which the Cabinet signed off in May.

So the Government in May signed off funding for PR around the vaccine but took another three months to sign off money to actually buy the vaccines!!

The agreement with Pfizer was signed on October 6, and that news was held for six days, and released by Ministers Chris Hipkins and Megan Woods on October 12, the Monday of the election week.

Again PR trumps over substance.

A PQ shows the average waiting time for public housing for those deemed Priority A (in urgent need).

In September 2015 it was 202 days. The former National Government set a target to reduce the waiting time by 20%. In September 2017 it was 104 days – so basically gone from six months to three months.

What has it done under this kind caring Labour Government? It is now 293 days or almost 10 months.