In many countries you can just buy an RAT at the supermarket or pharmacy. In NZ the Government will not allow you to buy your own test and for some stupid reason has decided only unvaccinated people about to travel can get one. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

It is interesting to do a cost comparison of what the Government has delivered against what it promised.

The latest estimate for light rail is it will cost $608,000 per metre of light rail. That is $6,080 per cm.

Instead they have delivered 710 cm of press releases at a cost of $50 million so that is a cost of $70,422 per cm of press release.

So the press releases are costing more than ten times per cm as the light rail will!

Neale is right on this. Both the banner and the noose imagery is disgusting. We should have zero tolerance for this. Anyone who thinks like this is a danger to society.

Over 2,000 people have voted in the 2021 Kiwiblog Awards. The winners are:

• National MP of the year – Christopher Luxon narrowly wins with 26% followed by Chris Bishop on 25%, Shane Reti 24%, Nicola Willis 13% and Simon Bridges 12%. The top three were all within a few score votes of each other.
• Labour MP of the Year – Louisa Wall wins this year on 43% followed by Chris Hipkins on 38%, Jacinda Ardern on 11% and Nanaia Mahuta on 8%
• Minor Party MP of the Year – A battle between the ACT Leader and Deputy and David Seymour gets 83% and Brooke van Velden 17%
• MP of the Year is also a big win for favourite David Seymour on 62%, with Christopher Luxon on 19%, Nicola WIllis 10% and Simon Bridges 8%.

Congratulations to the winners, and the runners up.

The PSC has released annual workforce data. Some key extracts:

• Average salary up from $75,400 in 2017 to $87,600 – a 16.2% increase
• Median salary up from $64,300 to $76,600 – a 19.1% increase
• The number of staff earning over $100,000 gone from 15,055 in 2020 to 18,301 in 2021
• Public service FTEs up from 47,252 to 61,097 – a 29.3% increase
• Public service staff up from 48,871 to 62,853 – a 28.6% increase
• Core crown personnel costs gone from $6.9 billion in 2017 to $9.4 billion in 2020, a 36% increase
• Public sector salary costs gone from $3.6 billion in 2017 to $5.3 billion in 2020, a 50% increase

Stuff hands out its 2021 Political Awards:

• Worst Political Mistake: Judith Collins’ attempted takedown of Simon Bridges
• Worst Political Mistake Runner-up: The Government’s communication over the move from elimination and the alert level system to the traffic light system.
• Political U-turn: The Auckland Harbour bike-bridge
• Political U-turn Runner-up: 90% vaccination targets
• Rookie on the Rise: Chris Luxon
• Rookie on the Rise Runner-up: Rachel Brooking
• Opposition MP of the Year: Chris Bishop
• Backbencher of the Year: Louisa Wall
• Politician of the Year: Chris Hipkins
• Politician of the Year Runner-ups: Nicola Willis and Grant Robertson

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

• Chris Bishop for his relentless scrutiny of the Government on Covid-19
• Simon Bridges for his book, for helping unify the caucus, and portfolio performance
• Christopher Luxon for ascending to the leadership, and doing everything right since he did
• Shane Reti for his competence and credibility in health and vaccinating in Northland
• Nicola Willis for showing up the Government constantly in housing, but also working on bipartisan RMA reform to make new builds easier

The contest for Labour MP of the Year is between

• Jacinda Ardern for leading the response to Covid-19 and keeping Labour ahead in the polls despite everything
• Chris Hipkins for his management of Covid-19
• Nanaia Mahuta for driving through major policy changes that Labour wants
• Louisa Wall for her independence and achievements as a backbench MP

 The contest for Minor Party MP of the Year is between:

• David Seymour for leading ACT to their highest levels in the polls, and coming second in the preferred PM polls
• Brooke van Velden her her astute management of the new ACT MPs, and effective advocacy against the Government

Finally for overall 2019 MP of the Year, it is between:

• Simon Bridges for his survival and comeback
• Christopher Luxon for uniting the caucus and making National look more like a Government in waiting
• David Seymour for making ACT into a party of effective opposition and proposition
• Nicola Willis for showing you can drive policy from opposition, and her relentless showing up of the Government

You can vote in the embedded survey below, or at this link.

Paul 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:

• Engineer all cars so they can not go faster than 30 km/hr
• Ban all wine and beer over 1% alcohol
• Close down the entire forestry sector
• Ban people from going swimming in the ocean
• Quarantine everyone over the age of 70 in facilities to keep them safe

After all, it’s all about safety.