A guest post from Jeremy Callander:

A long overdue reimagining of our health system is underway, one that we are told will
bring much improved health outcomes to all New Zealanders, but particularly to Maori.

You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not holding my breath.

If Kiwibuild and our government’s management of the present housing crisis are
anything to go by, I’m picking that the emperor will be found to have no clothes faster
than you can say “Team of Five Million”.

I hope and pray that I am proved wrong…

But on the topic of improved outcomes, Dr Chris Tooley, chief executive of Te Puna Ora
Mataatua (a regional provider of health and social services across the eastern Bay of
Plenty), recently made the comment that:

“Māori have suffered through a colonial context and systematic [sic] injustices and
smoking or alcohol or any kind of addiction is just a response to having experienced that
kind of trauma.

Now of course, this is a single sentence published (and now re-published) in
isolation. But it conveys sentiments that we are increasingly expected to accept without
qualm or question.

My wife and I are not addicted to nicotine, alcohol or any other drugs (well, maybe
caffeine…). So Dr Tooley’s comment got us thinking about the familial and ancestral
advantages that have inexorably predestined us to a life of unearned ease, free from
addiction brought on by historic traumas. The following is not an exhaustive list, but I
think it paints a pretty good picture of the privilege and comfort that my wife and I, as
conquering colonialists, have enjoyed:

1. When my parents got married, they had nothing.
2. When my wife’s parents got married, they had nothing.
3. When my wife and I got married, we had almost nothing.
4. When I was studying law full-time (2009-2011), my wife and I worked three parttime
   jobs between us and our total weekly grocery budget for ourselves and our
   two preschool aged boys was $47.
5. As a three year old, my mother-in-law escaped with her family from her Sovietoccupied
   homeland, in utterly brutal and unimaginably treacherous conditions.
   They arrived in New Zealand possessing no English, no possessions and no
   money.
6. My wife’s maternal grandfather spent five years in a Nazi death camp. It
   destroyed his physical and mental health and he died about eight years after
   arriving in New Zealand.
7. My wife’s paternal grandfather permanently lost the use of an arm to polio as a
   boy and died early as a result of the polio. His widow never remarried.
8. My wife’s paternal great grandfather fought in World War I, came home with
   PTSD and took his own life in the front yard. His children were pulled out of
   school to help his widow run the farm. His sons fought in World War II and his
   daughter, my wife’s paternal grandmother, never really got over any of it.
9. My maternal great grandfather was shot at Gallipoli and then died in Dunedin of
   Spanish Flu.
10. My maternal grandfather died from alcoholism.
11. My paternal grandfather fought in and survived World War II, but then died when
    my father was five. His widow, my grandmother, suffered poor physical and
    mental health her entire life. She never remarried and my father grew up in
    poverty.
12. By the time I had turned 40, I could name over a dozen people (i.e. people with
    whom I had some kind of filial or familial relationship) who had taken their own
    lives.

But as I say, this list of privileges and advantages is far from exhaustive.

Nonetheless, I think we can all heartily agree that the main reason – nay, the only
reason – my wife and I are not addicted to nicotine, alcohol or any other drugs, is that
none of our Scottish, Hungarian or Irish ancestors were ever, ever invaded, massacred,
systematically oppressed, starved or dispossessed of their ancestral lands by their
colonial overlords.

Nope. None of those things ever happened. No colonial contexts or systemic injustices
to see here.

Haven’t we been lucky?

Jeremy Callander
Vile Colonial Oppressor

A fascinating article by Ann Beaglehole:

An account of Jewish refugees interned on Somes Island during the Second World War with
Germans, and other enemy aliens with Nazi sympathies. It describes the security concerns
about aliens in general, the classification of refugees and the experience of Jewish refugees is
the internment camp.
At least eight of the men who were interned in New Zealand during World War II were
Jewish, part-Jewish or had a Jewish background. They had come to New Zealand before the
war as refugees from Germany and Austria, fleeing Nazism.[2] For three or four years of the
war they and other anti-fascist refugees were imprisoned with German nationals who
included among them some fervent Nazis.[3] At camps set up on Somes Island in Wellington
Harbour and for a shorter time at Pahiatua in the central North Island, they were locked up
and guarded ‘lest [they] escaped to help their mortal enemies’.[4]

I was unaware of this piece of history. I knew of the internment camps but had no idea that actual Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler were locked up for months and years, alongside Nazi supporters. And it gets even worse:

But the most painful aspect of internment was probably the bitter experience of being confined with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who ‘were arrogant and confident of a German victory’. Permitted to wear Nazi paraphernalia, ‘to exhibit photos of the Fuhrer [sic] in their quarters, and to celebrate both national and Nazi festivals, they took pleasure in parading their beliefs and caused a good deal of trouble with Jewish and anti-Nazis internees in their attempt to convert them to their way of thinking’.

Where’s the Government apology for this?

A very very lengthy but fascinating article in the New Yorker on the impact of genetics on outcomes, and the depressing attacks on the science from both the left and the right.

A couple of extracts:

On her left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. 

So where do they matter:

Polygenic scores can now account for a good deal of a population’s variance in height and weight, and have been shown to predict cardiovascular disease and diabetes. “This is really a cause for celebration,” Plomin told me. “Imagine the advent of predictive medicine—to be able to identify medical issues before they occur.” Researchers have also found links with complex behavioral traits. “Significant hits have been reported for traits such as coffee and tea consumption, chronic sleep disturbances (insomnia), tiredness, and even whether an individual is a morning person or a night person,” Plomin notes, in his 2018 book, “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.” The new research, he writes, “signals the start of the DNA revolution in psychology.”

This has huge potential.

The largest gwas for educational attainment to date found almost thirteen hundred sites on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores—about as accurate a predictor as traditional social-science variables like parental income. 

Fascinating, to put it mildly. This might partially explain why boys do far worse at school than girls?

As she put it to me in an e-mail, “Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we’ve only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.” She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them. “Common intuitions about the scale of inequality in our society, and our imaginations about how much progress we would make if we eliminated the visible inequalities by race and class, are profoundly wrong,” she wrote. “The science confronts us with a form of inequality that would otherwise be easy to ignore.”

This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to reduce inequalities between sexes, races and socio-economic status. But it is a useful reminder that focusing solely on them is not a good idea.

Radio NZ report:

The prime minister has been poorly advised over saliva testing, a top US-based epidemiologist says.

Yale researcher Dr Anne Wyllie, who is a New Zealander, has criticised the government over months’ long delays in using saliva testing to get on top of Covid-19 outbreaks.

The quicker and less invasive tests have been widely used overseas for over a year.

But the Ministry of Health has persisted with PCR nasal swabs which take much longer to yield a result and therefore slow down the detection of outbreaks.

Dr Wyllie told RNZ’s Nine to Noon Jacinda Ardern has been given poor advice.

“There’s so much misinformation out there even amongst the government that I’ve even heard on some of the daily briefings.

“Things that are just downright wrong are being said by the prime minister with regards to saliva testing so misinformation amongst the government prevails.”

We often hear about how we should listen to the health experts, so we should take notice when an expert says the Government is spreading misinformation on saliva testing.

Dr Wyllie has a Bachelor of Medical Science in Immunology and Microbiology from Auckland Uni, a Masters in Biological Medical Science from Auckland and a PhD in Medical Microbiology from from Utrecht University (ranked 49th in the world).

Her work saw her awarded a Covid-19 Research Award from Yale School of Public Health. The Yale School of Public Health is seen as one of the top schools in the US.

In 2017 Jacinda Ardern’s very first promise as Labour Leader was that Labour would build light rail to Mt Roskill by 2021. Previously Labour had a more realistic policy of within a decade, but Ardern needed momentum so they presumably just made up a new date and announced it. And Aucklanders believed her.

In 2020 Labour again promised light rail in Auckland.

Now we find out that construction won’t begin until at least 2024. So they promised 13 kms to be complete by 2021, and the reality is they won’t even start until 2024.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it would have been “very, very difficult” to deport Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, the New Lynn mall terrorist.

However, she said the Government will explore whether there were other avenues that could have been taken to deport him.

Ardern has come under fire from Opposition Leader Judith Collins, who argued that two sections of the Immigration Act would have given the Government the grounds to deport Samsudeen.

“Immigration Law in New Zealand provides that the Minister of Immigration can certify that a person constitutes a threat or risk to security and, with Cabinet’s approval, the Governor-General can order that person be deported,” Collins said.

Collins noted that the Refugee Convention allowed countries to deport refugees on the “grounds of national security or public order”, which would likely cover Samsudeen.

This is why we need an independent inquiry into the attack. Was the Minister of Immigration made aware he could deport Samsudeen? If so, what consideration was given to it?

On the fact of it , this was an ideal situation for the Minister;s power to be used.

Lourdes Vano was No 15 on the Greens list at the last election, and is a decolonisation officer. I always wondered what decolonisation officers do, and now we know!

Personally I don’t think a 19 year old saying stupid stuff is normally newsworthy, but when they were given a winnable list ranking, it is different.

Put it like this, could you imagine how many days of headlines there would be if a 19 year old who was No 15 on the ACT Party list shared on social media how they are close to committing homicide against brown people, and even worse did so just after a terrorist attack. It would be the major news story for days and days, while this story will be ignored by the media.

The other interesting thing is the Government’s proposed hate speech laws, strongly supported by the Greens. If they were in place, would Vano face criminal liability of up to three years jail for what she said?

I don’t think Vano should face there years jail for saying stupid, even offensive, stuff. But does the Government?

Stuff reports:

All of New Zealand outside of Auckland will move to level 2 at midnight on Tuesday while Auckland will stay at level 4 until at least next Tuesday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said.

She also introduced face coverings and 2-metre physical distancing to level 2 restrictions for large indoor facilities like gyms and libraries. A 50-person cap was set for hospitality and event venues while outdoor spaces can have up to 100 people.

“We are making progress but there are some critical challenges ahead. We continue to see persistent cases connected to the outbreak,” Ardern said at the post-Cabinet announcement on Monday.

Let’s hope Auckland can follow next week, and the current fast rate of vaccination continues. If so, then hopefully this can be the last lockdown.

Radio NZ reports:

The number of people deported from New Zealand has fallen by 40 percent.

There were about 1700 in the last financial year compared to almost 3000 the year before.

The decrease includes voluntary departures managed by Immigration New Zealand, which fell by a 1000 last year, to their lowest level in at least four years.

Deportations undertaken by immigration officials were also down from 642 to 453.

The numbers include overstayers and criminals who had been deported after their sentences.

Immigration New Zealand said the number of deportations could vary according to the complexity of cases.

It did not reply to a question about whether there had been a change to compliance action or fewer resources to deport people.

The lack of a response suggests there has been a change.

Audrey Young writes:

It is not often that Australian laws on deportation look attractive to New Zealanders.

But comparing Australia’s hardline law with the legal obstacle course in New Zealand that kept the LynnMall terrorist from being deported back to Sri Lanka, it is time to take a hard look at whether New Zealand has gone too soft.

A review needs to take place which should test the assurance by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern that absolutely every that could have been done was done before Aathil Samsudeen stabbed five shoppers on Friday, inspired by IS.

I agree we should be looking at law changes that make it quicker and easier to deport migrants who not only break our laws, but especially those who pose a risk to people’s lives. We have so many levels of review and appeal that nothing ever occurs in months, but in years. Look at the Kim Dotcom case which is soon to reach its second decade! Not that the Dotcom case is about our laws, but it is still an example of how unresponsive the system can be.

For example, according to the Prime Minister’s timeline, Immigration chose not to put Samsudeen in custody pending appeal of his deportation because Crown Law thought he would eventually be declared a protected person and be allowed to stay.

That sounds like failing to act because someone had second-guessed what a legal outcome would be.

There are other questions to be answered such as whether the original granting of refugee status was robust enough given parts of it were later found to be fraudulent, whether more could have been done for the offender’s psychiatric problems, why he was given supervision instead of intense supervision by the court in July, what law changes could have been made earlier.

These are all valid questions to be asked and answered. I would expect the Government to soon announce a Commission of Inquiry to look into whether this attack could have been prevented, and recommend potential law changes in future. Just because he didn’t manage (so far) to kill anyone doesn’t mean this was not extremely serious. If the Police had not assigned 30 or so officers to trail him 24/7 then there could have been a huge death toll.

Bipartisanship on the review is crucial. Lack of it prevented earlier attention to elements of the existing law, the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002.

Judith Collins was Justice Minister when it was taken off the Law Commission’s review.

That was because it would have faced a backlash from Labour which was already fomenting opposition to much-needed remediation of the GCSB legislation.

Maybe Andrew Little should now apologise to John Key. In 2015 Newshub reports:

The Prime Minister has revealed the Government is undertaking 24-hour surveillance; monitoring people it believes pose a risk of committing a terror attack in New Zealand.

And John Key says there are a number of Kiwis linked to Islamic State (IS), even trying to raise money for them, and is scared there might be more hiding under the radar.

“Their actions are significant enough to [pose a] potential threat – exactly what [I] can’t go in to,” says Mr Key.

But one man known to support IS posted on social media that he thinks the Prime Minister is lying, saying “no way do we want to commit terrorist attacks in our own country”.

There are 40 New Zealanders on a Government watch list, and Mr Key says one or two are being monitored around the clock.

So Key warned in 2015 that there were one or two people being monitored 24/7 and what was the response:

But Labour leader Andrew Little says the Prime Minister is scaremongering.

“[It’s a] desperate attempt to look tough,” he says.

Hardly scaremongering.

I have been working through a major data project on the state of education in New Zealand and a lot of information is emerging.

The hope is that someone (e.g. the Ministry – who have said that one of their people might be able to meet with me on October 6^th – such is their interest in the outcomes on NZ students) might use it to accurately improve things.

As a point of political interest; here is the political oversight of the work electorates for ambition in our country based on the University Entrance achievements.

The data set is in spreadsheet form and includes sheets on 

– high-school size – largest to smallest

– number of 2020 leavers – largest to smallest.

– Level 3 NCEA and above percentage for school leavers for each school 2018-20 (ranked highest to lowest for 2020).

– UE percentage for school leavers for each school 2018-20 (ranked highest to lowest for 2020).

– Each school’s UE percentage for leavers for 2020 compared to decile mean and ranked highest to lowest across all schools.

– Level 3 NCEA and above gap to UE for leavers 2018-20 and ranked smallest to largest for 2020.

– Retention percentage until 17 years of age for each school and ranked highest to lowest.

– Percentage for each school of their leavers going onto L7+ Degree study – ranked highest to lowest.

– The anonymised data mean for full attendance across deciles 2018-20.

– UE percentage by school governance and school type.

It should be of interest to every school, politician, parent and anyone interested in improving NZ’s education system and future society.

Inquires to: [email protected]

Chris Keall writes:

Kordia is selling its money-losing Australian arm in a deal that will see the state-owned enterprise halve in size. …

In commercial terms, it’s relatively easy to make a case for Kordia to focus on the fast-growing cloud and cyber-security markets over the workaday business of helping to build mobile networks.

But it’s harder to see why the Government should own a company that focuses on the cloud and cyber-security – areas catered to be a plethora of local companies, including Datacom and Spark, and countless multinationals with an NZ presence.

Kordia began life as Broadcast Communications Ltd, a division of TVNZ that handled broadcast TV infrastructure. It was carved out as a standalone entity in 2003. It was doing a job that on-one in the private sector was putting their hand up for.

But today, broadcasting infrastructure fees are a relatively small part of Kordia’s business.

There was an arguable case for state ownership of Kordia when it was BCL. But there is no strategic reason for the state to still own Kordia, and a sensible Government would sell it.

That’s a great graphic from ACT. Share it far and wide.

Not as good as the Boris Johnson Love Actually ad, but still quite good. Takes a well known movie and uses humour to get across the point that the only reason for an election in the middle of a pandemic is Trudeau wants to get a majority, instead of minority, Government.

The latest projection based on the polls is:

• Conservatives 143 seats (+22 from 2019 election)
• Liberals 130 (-27)
• NDP 37 (+13)
• Bloc Quebecois 27 (-5)
• Greens 1 (-2)

The odds of different outcomes are:

• Conservative plurality 53%
• Liberal plurality 36%
• Conservative majority 8%
• Liberal majority 2%

Stuff reports:

The problem with saliva testing is that few of the announcements, orders, recommendations or pledges around it have ever spit-balled into actual tests for people to take.

Debates over the accuracy of the testing have stretched on for months as other countries approved its use. Now the Ministry of Health accepts its accuracy, but is unsure if the test for which it has granted a contract is a suitable replacement for nasal swabbing during an outbreak.

The Government has struggled to introduce regular saliva testing even to high-risk border workers, and managed to properly start the phased rollout only on August 11. This is despite saliva testing being commonplace around the world, and having been used to prevent outbreaks on US college campuses.

We are in the middle of a global pandemic and the Government has spent the best part of a year dithering over saliva testing, despite the fact it could make a huge difference in the fight against Covid-19.

The promise to get saliva testing under way goes all the way back to the Simpson Roche report, which recommended the tests, back in September 2020.

That’s a whole year ago. It should have been in place by December.

This year the Ministry of Health falsely claimed saliva testing objectives had been completed in its report to the Covid-19 independent continuous review, improvement and advice group after the February Auckland outbreak, an act which earned it a swift rebuke when the group looked into the issue in June.

“There is no clear timeline for saliva testing to be introduced into routine practice,” says a report from the group, written by ​Philip Hill and ​Debbie Ryan. “Indeed, this recommendation should not be labelled as completed, as saliva testing has not been properly introduced into practice.”

The Government lied about it.

The ​ministry ran a procurement process for a $60 million saliva testing contract for border workers in February, with the aim of standing up a testing regime by the middle of May.

A procurement panel had the choice between Rako’s diagnostically validated test, using a protocol with emergency use authorisation from the FDA, and one that didn’t, from Asia Pacific Healthcare Group (APHG).

The ministry chose the test that wasn’t diagnostically validated.

Almost beyond belief. They went with the company whose test wasn’t diagnostically validated. I suspect the reason they did so was petty – that Rako had put public pressure on the Government to use saliva testing.

Despite all the public noises about concerns around the accuracy of saliva testing, the ministry gave testing accuracy only a 10 per cent weighting within the tender process used to decide between competing bids.

Imagine that?

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.