But what people may not be aware of, is that the number of Islamic inspired terrorist attacks in Western countries is a tiny proportion of what they were, even a few years ago. The defeat of ISIL in Syria and Iraq has seen the number of attacks in the West decline massively. Of course any attack, is one too many – but look at the difference between the last few years and 2015 to 2017. In 2016 341 innocents killed and 1,144 wounded. So far in 2021 there have been only 19 killed and 20 (26 including the NZ attack) wounded. That’s a 94% reduction to those killed and a 98% reduction in those wounded.

When compiling this data, I was surprised how massive the toll was in 2004 when there were 725 killed and 2,719 wounded.

Any attack is unacceptable, but the massive decline in attacks in the last few years shows that the fight against extremism is working.

After a terrorist attack, a natural and important questions to ask, is could more have been done to prevent it? This shouldn’t be seen as political or partisan.

It is early days, but I have to say it does sound like the Government had done pretty much everything they could within the law to prevent this. I may be wrong, and it is important that there be a proper inquiry, but if someone is actually determined to attack others without fear for their own life, it is hard to stop them.

Details will come out soon, but it sounds like all legal options had been tried to prosecute him previously, but the law wasn’t adequate and is in the process of being changed.

I will be interested in whether deportation was an option, and if this was tried.

It sounds like he was only armed with a knife, which means he wasn’t able to get hold of a firearm which could have seen a huge death toll. It is very hard to stop someone possessing a knife.

He was a known threat, so not someone who slipped under the radar. The 24/7 Police surveillance, beyond doubt, save many lives.

I feel for the poor police officers who had to spend months or years following him around, knowing that sooner or later he was going to try and murder people, and they would have to intervene within second, probably with lethal force. I can’t even imagine the toll that would take on your mental health.

The Herald reports:

A man has been fatally shot by police officers and shoppers are understood to have suffered life-threatening injuries in horrific scenes at a West Auckland supermarket this afternoon.

Emergency services responded to the New Lynn mall mid-afternoon, with multiple people being injured. The Herald has been told at least one person suffered a stab wound, while Newstalk ZB understands two people have been shot.

Four people have been taken to Auckland City Hospital’s emergency department. It is understood the patients are all status 1 – which is in an immediately life-threatening condition.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is being briefed on the incident.

Police confirmed that a man entered a New Lynn supermarket and injured multiple people.
Police have located the man and he has been shot.

He has died at the scene.

This seems foreign to New Zealand. A random shooting/stabbing in a supermarket is chilling. Many of us will be thinking, we could have been there. It seems worse in a lockdown where supermarkets are around the only place you can go to.

Thoughts are with the families and friends of those wounded, and the wider New Lynn community. Let’s just hope the victims survive, and that we gain some understanding of why this happened.

UPDATE:

The PM has stated that this was a terrorist attack. The individual is a Sri Lankan National who has been in NZ since 2011 and has been monitored by authorities since 2016. He is described as inspired by ISIS.

The Police were literally following him 24/7 and shot him within 60 seconds of the attack. Our thanks to the Police for their quick action.

There will be questions about how he was at large, considering he was known to be such a risk. The PM said they have tried everything within the law to reduce the risk from him.

Its terrible to have had this terror attack. Violent extremism should be condemned, no matter what the ideology is behind it. I will urge moderators to delete comments that can’t differentiate between Islam and ISIS, just as there is a big difference between Catholicism and the IRA.

Matthew Hooton writes:

This week’s NZ Herald-Kantar poll shows a nation united behind our current Covid strategy.

Fully 85 per cent of us agree with Jacinda Ardern, Judith Collins and everyone else who matters that we should stick with the elimination objective — as Ardern puts it — “for now”.

Just 13 per cent of us are ready to start living — and some dying — with the virus today.

Prominent University of Auckland science communicator Siouxsie Wiles says she is relieved by the results, claiming unnamed domestic and international pundits have been “screaming” for New Zealand to drop elimination. She must watch more Fox News and read more obscure blogsites than I do.

Across every party in Parliament and the entire New Zealand media — North Island and South Island, right-leaning and left, populist and more scholarly — there has been universal public support, all things considered, for Ardern’s bold but well-signalled move to put the whole country into level 4 the very day Delta was detected. No one in the New Zealand media disputes that Auckland must remain at level 4 for the time being, and probably for a good couple of weeks of zero community transmission.

I was also puzzled by Wiles claim that pundits have been screaming for NZ to drop elimination at this point in time. I honestly can’t think of a single significant pundit in NZ who has said this.

The more surprising part of the NZ Herald-Kantar poll is that a slim 52 per cent majority believes we should move away from elimination once more than 70 per cent of us are fully vaccinated.

That vaccination rate seems a bit low. Even those most eager to see borders return to normal talk more about 80 per cent, or higher. Vaccinologists seek over 90 per cent.

I don’t think we should set the move away from elimination around a specific vaccination rate, as that gives too much power to the vaccine sceptics. In a recent Patreon post where I laid out my post-lockdown vision, I said:

We should transition out of lockdowns around three months after every New Zealander eligible to receive a vaccine has had a chance to be fully vaccinated.

Let’s say that there is capacity for everyone to have their first vaccine by the end of December. Then second vaccine by end of February, so around May or June 2022, lockdowns should end.

I don’t think the end of lockdowns should be based on what percentage are vaccinated. That gives too much power to those who refuse to be vaccinated. It would punish all of NZ, for them choosing not to be vaccinated. It should be based on everyone having had the opportunity to vaccinate.

Hooton continues:

Criticism of Ardern is not that she again locked down the country on August 17. Everyone accepts she had no choice, given the circumstances. The criticism is why those circumstances prevailed.

The circumstances include inexplicable delays in vaccination procurement, the failure to vaccinate border and other frontline workers, the lack of saliva testing, the absence of Bluetooth tracking and tracing, mishaps at MIQ facilities, the non-expansion of ICU capability, and the brutality of the booking system for New Zealanders abroad needing to get home and towards those dying and their loved ones.

Yep the strategy is good. It is the implementation that is not good.

The Herald reports:

Government minister Stuart Nash is so confident that 90 per cent of New Zealanders will be vaccinated by Christmas that he’s even bet a case of award-winning wine on it.

During an interview on NewstalkZB, Labour MP Nash bet senior National MP Mark Mitchell a case of Hawke’s Bay’s Craggy Range wine on 90 per cent of New Zealanders being vaccinated by the end of the year.

It would be great if Stuart Nash is proved right, but I have to say it is highly unlikely. No major country has even got to 80% to date.

Newshub reports:

A man with the deadly Delta strain of COVID-19 has been arrested after allegedly breaking out of a quarantine facility, putting Aucklanders and Auckland’s lift out of lockdown at risk.

Newshub understands this is allegedly not his first escape. Initially, after the man tested positive, he was allowed by the Ministry of Health to isolate at home

Newshub has been told he breached that isolation order on Wednesday, left the house, and when he came back police busted him.

The Ministry of Health then sent him to quarantine on Wednesday night and he allegedly broke out. His family have been very cooperative. 

It was the man who breached the rules, but it was the Government that breached the public trust – the magnitude of that cannot be understated.

Not only did it neglect to tell the public a Delta case was in the community overnight, but it also hid the fact he’d been out in the community during the day yesterday as well

So this infected guy was out in the community on Wednesday, and the Government never told us.

And then he escaped from MIQ close to midnight, and the Government didn’t even mention it at the 1 pm press conference.

Newshub reports:

The Greens have thrown their support behind calls for a purpose-built managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facility, saying it’s looking like the pandemic is going to drag on for longer than initially thought. 

The current system of using converted hotels has been stretched to its limits with the recent Delta outbreak. More have been turned into quarantine facilities for confirmed cases and close contacts, and capacity in others has been reduced to cut down the chance of infected people passing on the virus. 

COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins on Wednesday urged Kiwis based overseas planning to visit home over summer to stay away, pausing the release of new spots. 

I’ve also been advocating this for ages. Not only is it a no brainer for Covid-19, but if done right, could be used for emergency or transitional housing in the future.

The idea has the backing of epidemiologists and public health experts like Nick Wilson and Michael Baker. Dr Wilson this week told RNZ existing hotels are not fit-for-purpose.

“We really, as a country, need to be moving to what Australia is doing and building purpose-built facilities which are single storey separate units like they have in Howard Springs in Australia, and all very good ventilation.”

Documents released under the Official Information Act in July showed officials had been pushing the Government to build new facilities for a year. 

Think where we would be, if they had acted on this a year ago. I suspect we’ll get Auckland light rail before a dedicated MIQ facility, from this Government.

Stuff reports:

A man has been charged with filing false candidate donations and obtaining a total of $15,000 by deception.

Strict suppression orders prevent Stuff from identifying the man.

He is charged with causing a loss valued at $10,000 to another person, by deception and without claim of right, between July and August 2020.

This charge carries a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment.

He is further charged with obtaining ownership of a pecuniary advantage – namely $5000 – by deception and without claim of right in August 2020.

I don’t know anything about this case, except what is in this story. But it appears the person charged was a candidate for Parliament. Hopefully the suppression orders are lifted soon.

Stuff reports:

With Covid-19 loose in the community, Kiwis are clearly very keen to get vaccinated. In the last week well-over half a million Kiwis got a dose of the vaccine, with an average of 1.5 per cent of the entire population being jabbed every single day.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been keen to highlight this, holding up an A3 graph proudly at the 1pm podium that showed we could beat Australia at something else but rugby.

Yet while we are going faster than Australia, we’re still behind them – as the Opposition is keen to point out. Indeed we’re still behind almost every other developed country, although we did pass Mexico this week, meaning that phrase “the bottom of the OECD” no longer quite applies.

What an achievement – second bottom ahead of Mexico.

Stuff reports:

Opposition leader Judith Collins’ claims that she’s reached out to the Pasifika community largely affected by the current Covid-19 outbreak has been refuted by leaders of the Māngere church and others in the community. …

The church’s media spokesperson Jerome Mika said no one from his team had heard from Collins, or her office, since the outbreak.

He said he wasn’t sure what Pacific community Collins was referring, but it wasn’t any of the leaders and crisis management team of the church.

Mika said they were relayed messages of support from the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, however, and held regular Zoom meetings with the Minister for Pacific Peoples, Aupito William Sio.

Would it not be relevant to the story to mention that Jerome is also the Pacific Island Vice-President of the Labour Party?

South Auckland Pacific leader Efeso Collins said he hadn’t heard from Collins or from her office as well during the outbreak. He also said he had not heard from Ardern too.

“I have participated in very informative community Zooms led by Aupito, alongside the PM and the Director General of Health,” Collins said.

And Stuff also forgot to mention Efoso Collins is a Labour Party Councillor who has sought to be a parliamentary candidate for them.

This doesn’t mean that either man is incorrect, but it is appalling journalism not to tell readers that both the persons quoted as criticising the National Leader are high officials of the Labour Party.

Stuff reports:

A publicly-funded programme set up two years ago to help people buy their first home is yet to do so for even a single family.

The Christchurch Housing Initiative – Te Whāriki tū-ā-Rongo – began in September 2019 with the aim of helping 50 low to modest income families buy their own home through a shared loan scheme.

The programme was initially hindered by regulatory issues so it switched to a shared ownership model in mid-2020. But that was then beset by lending problems.

To date, eight families shortlisted for the programme remain in limbo over their chances to own a home.

So $6 million announced and over two years the only ones to have benefited are lawyers!

Stuff reports:

An estimated 375 people were left behind in Afghanistan when the Government stopped evacuation flights, and a “second phase” of the evacuation effort is far from beginning.

Again, if Cabinet hadn’t taken the weekend off, those three extra days may have got many of those 375 out.

Stuff reports:

Clinicians have been warned of the dangers of a rare side-effect after a woman, with other medical issues, died following a Covid-19 vaccination.

The Covid-19 Vaccine Independent Safety Monitoring Board (CV-ISMB) investigated the woman’s death and found it was due to myocarditis, which is known to be a rare side-effect of the Pfizer vaccine, the Ministry of Health said in a statement on Tuesday.

Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle wall. There are many possible causes of myocarditis – the most common is viral infection – and more than 100 people get hospital treatment for it in New Zealand every year.

The coroner still needs to rule on the case and the cause of death. The CV-ISMB believed the myocarditis was probably due to vaccination. The board also noted there were “medical issues occurring at the same time which may have influenced the outcome following vaccination”.

More than 3.3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been distributed in New Zealand. This is the first case in New Zealand where a death in the days after vaccination has been linked to the vaccine. There have been 3400 cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand and 26 deaths related to the virus.

An Israeli study has found myocarditis occurred in 2.7 per 100,000 persons vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine. The same study found that the risk of myocarditis with COVID-19 was 4 times higher (11.0 per 100,000 persons infected).

At some stage NZ will open up and if you are not vaccinated you are highly likely to get Covid-19. The global death rate is around 2% (4.5 million deaths from 220 million cases) which is a lot more than 2.7 in 100,000.

I’m booked to get my second dose in September and can’t wait.

Once again the “Matthew Effect” is in action – the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Students in Decile 1-3 high schools in New Zealand have 1/3^rd less opportunity to learn compared to students in the top 3 deciles – Decile 8-10. The average full attendance at Decile 1-3 is 41% and in the top three deciles 66%.  And worse, the pattern over time is down (-3%) in attendance from 2018-2020 for Deciles 1-3 students, and up 3% for students in Decile 8-10 schools.

The disadvantage across our system can also be shown through daily attendance. Even for our system as a whole in terms of per – day attendance at our schools – we have massive gaps between ethnicities, regions and deciles.

On the Monday before the latest long-down very close to 1 in 5 decile one students were not in school. For high decile schools only 1 in 10 was absent. On that Monday 92% of Asian students were at school 88 for European, 83% for Maori and Pasifika students. Auckland and Canterbury topped the regions whereas Te Tai Tokerau was the worst.

Daily figures are here:

https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/208880/Schools-16-Aug-20-Aug-2021-Weekly-Attendance-Report.pdf

We also have 80 high schools in NZ (I have the lists by school name) that have lost 30% of their students by their 17^th birthday and 24 of those have lost 40% of their students.

All keep in mind that we have 10,500 students not even enrolled in school.

The input factors in education MUST be addressed by all political parties and by the Ministry responsible. Keep in mind the Ministry of Educations motto is:

“We shape an education system that delivers equitable and excellent outcomes.”

Even with UE the State failures are all too obvious. Private Schools students get UE at 81% (which is why Labour MPs tend to send their kids to them), State Integrated at 65%, State at 39%.

We are condemning many of the most  in need to an adulthood with massively limited opportunities and very low aspirations and the demographics flow-on is in plain sight daily. 

I have been working through a full data set that has information/rankings on every high school in New Zealand. A cart load of work but should be of high interest to policy writers and commentators. Not free but for anyone looking for high quality in depth data it will save many hours: [email protected]

Justin Trudeau called a snap election two weeks ago to try and gain a majority (they are currently a minority Government). At this stage it looks to have backfired badly and he may even lose Government.

Here are how some of the main polls have shifted in the last fortnight in terms of the Liberal lead over the Conservatives.

• Mainstreet from +3% to -10%
• Ekos from +5% to -8%
• Nanos from +2% to -2%

Of course under FPP it is not so much the national vote, as the vote in each seat, but they are of course linked.

Trudeau’s lead as Preferred PM has dropped from +18% to +2%.

The election is 20 September. Will be fascinating to see if the trend continues.

NewstalkZB reports:

The Government is possibly running out of vaccines in September and it could be their own fault. 

In May Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins told Newstalk ZB that Pfizer had confirmed that New Zealand would receive 8 million doses in the third quarter, saying “we will get them all by the end of September.” 

But the shipment has now been revealed to be being delivered in October, leaving the possibility of New Zealand running out of vaccines in September. 

But looking back at a June interview Heather du Plessis-Allan did with Hipkins, it revealed the delay may be the Government’s own doing. In the interview he said that while Pfizer was still committed to the September deadline, the Government was talking to them about delivering some of those doses in October and November. 

Auckland University Emeritus Professor Des Gorman says he’s “gobsmacked” to find that [the Government] have “been deliberately delaying or asking for deliveries to be delayed.”  

A delay that will cause our vaccination rate to go down, in the middle of a lockdown, which Gorman attributes to being because we don’t have a high vaccination rate. 

Hipkins in his June interview suggested the delay was to make sure “we don’t end up with a whole lot sitting in the freezer.” But Gorman says they can last for very long periods of time and last weeks or months once defrosted.

If what Hipkins said is correct, this is a huge blunder. It means we told Pfizer to slow down delivery!

Arthur Grimes writes:

Compounding this extraordinary situation is the collapse in migration. Since the pandemic, from April 2020, net immigration has averaged just 495 people a month – one tenth of the pre-pandemic rate. We have built large numbers of houses and apartments and yet we have few people arriving to fill them. So what explains the housing catastrophe of the past four years if it is not the traditional issues of high migration and low rates of building?

An excellent question.

Here, the Government takes centre stage. In 1989, the then Labour Government changed the Reserve Bank Act to focus monetary policy on keeping prices stable. It recognised that previous monetary policies under Robert Muldoon had made property speculators rich through borrowing to buy property in times of high inflation.

The current Labour Government, then in coalition with NZ First, decided to revert to a formulation of the act similar to that under Muldoon. After receiving advice from Treasury – and, indirectly, from Treasury’s advisers – it widened the act to include a new task for the Reserve Bank: to achieve “maximum sustainable employment” in addition to its price-stability mandate. The amended act came into force in December 2018.

I have seen no record that Treasury warned the Government that this change would lead to asset-price rises, including house prices. This is despite existing studies, including one of my own, showing that setting a “dual mandate” would lead to a ratcheting up of asset prices. The advice also ignored the Muldoon-period experience of property owners getting rich as a result of monetary policy settings that benefit those owning property.

Monetary policy under the amended Reserve Bank Act has lived up to the predictions: it has sparked huge increases in the wealth of property owners at the expense of Māori and Pacific peoples and at the expense of the young. House prices have risen by a staggering 44 per cent in less than three years since the amended act came into force.

Arthur is a former Chair of the Reserve Bank Board, so is an expert on monetary policy.

Housing supply constraints and high migration – which traditionally push up house prices – have not been the culprits on this occasion.

The central culprit has been monetary policy that has flooded the economy with liquidity. This liquidity in turn has found its way into the housing market.

And the result is great for home owners and awful for everyone else.

Andrew Chen writes:

We know that contact tracing is a critical part of our ability to contain any outbreak of an infectious disease. Bluetooth Tracing, offered through the NZ COVID Tracer app, is part of that process in New Zealand. Or at least, it should be. Technical folks over the last week have noticed that the most recent Bluetooth data made available to the NZ COVID Tracer app was on 17 August – the day we found out about Case A with the delta variant and the country went into lockdown. No Bluetooth keys have been uploaded to the central server since then, despite there being 512 positive cases at the time of writing. This therefore means that there have been very, very few Bluetooth-based exposure alerts sent to users. So why is there no Bluetooth Tracing data when there have been many Locations of Interest and related alerts sent out for QR code-based locations?

And the answer is:

Questions about the lack of Bluetooth keys have been put to MOH over the course of the last week, by myself and other members of the public, as well as by a number of journalists who have also asked me for comment. MOH has not provided a clear, defendable answer until the 1pm press conference on 29/08, when in response to a journalist question, Bloomfield pointed to the contact tracers not asking for Bluetooth information at the first case interview due to the number of cases, and also the demographic groups of the cases being less likely to use BT. He also claimed that “we have been using it where people have said they have Bluetooth turned on, and we’ve used that to send out messages,” but we know based on the MOH server that this has actually only happened for Case A. He added “we have given [the contact tracers] a nudge around that.”

I thought a lot about whether to write this article or not, because anything that might cause people to stop using NZ COVID Tracer is counterproductive in the age of delta. But MOH has had long enough to respond to queries and be upfront with the public about why Bluetooth isn’t being used. New Zealanders have been asked time and time again to “turn Bluetooth on”, and I have spent a lot of time trying to explain how it works, how to turn BT on, and why people should use it. It is frustrating to see the data potentially isn’t being used to support contact tracing. If, as I suspect, the explanation is that contact tracers simply aren’t asking for the information, then we need a policy decision as to whether this system is actually useful for contact tracing. If it is useful, then the contact tracing processes need to be amended to ensure that they are asking for BT information. If it is not useful, then we can have a different debate. Either way, this is about making sure we not only have the right tools to help us fight the virus, but that we are using them effectively.

This is pretty staggering. Basically the Ministry of Health has not trained contact tracers to ask if an infected person has used the bluetooth function. Considering the mounds of advertising on the capability, and how we were told it was vital people turned it on, this is hugely disappointing.