Henry Cooke writes:

It is becoming harder and harder for the Government to credibly say that the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out is going according to plan.

Unless the plan was to be the slowest country in the developed world to vaccinate our population. Then it is right on track.

After all, 1.7 million Kiwis who are either over the age of 65 or have an underlying health condition became “eligible” for the vaccine in May as part of “group 3”. Thus far just 34,000 of them have been fully vaccinated – 2 per cent – and there are stories up and down the country of people technically eligible who have called up their doctors and been told to keep waiting.

So when they say general rollout begins on 28 July, that will probably be just one person!

We’re at the bottom of the OECD in terms of doses administered, and it looks unlikely we will change that any time soon.

This is not the front of the queue – this is so late you might miss the whole movie.

In fact the movie has finished, and everyone else has gone home.

Through involvement in South Auckland Middle School and Middle School West Auckland over the last seven years I have developed an improved understanding of the communities – their passions and strengths – and the challenges they face.

This past week the government took an incredibly cheap shot that once again indicates that they take their voting base entirely for granted.

For many of these families the one thing they own that costs in the thousands is a car. In these parts of Auckland it is a necessity – for work, for getting their children to school and other activities, for helping wider family with grocery shopping, etc. Many of these families are already effectively victimised by circumstances that lead them to lenders who finance their cars (among other things) with interest only, or high interest loans, for high maintenance, high mileage vehicles. The families can spend years paying a loan to find they have made no progress. They will now be forced to keep these cars for longer until they get to the stage when the get told: “it would cost more to repair it than for me to give you another interest free loan – for a lot more because of the new emissions tax.”

So while our media quite rightly highlight the impact of the electric car subsidy and petrol/diesel tax on farmers they also need to see the impact on the poor. The subsidy is on EV’s which they simply cannot afford – the cheapest Tesla is $73k and the tax is on something they must have. No one has suggested alleviation for poor families for “legitimate use”.

The economic effect of a sales tax is clear … the price goes up. The economic effect of a consumer subsidy is also clear … the price goes up. I have no doubt that the $73k Tesla will relatively quickly get a lot closer to the $80k threshold. Both the seller and buyer win and it is on the taxpayer. Not smart economics in any way shape or form. Virtue signaling at its worst. Even the NY Times questions both the environmental and human rights impacts of EV’s – especially when burning coal for electricity is ramping up as it is in NZ.

How else are the poor kept poor?

• Keeping decile 1 – 3 schools underfunded in comparison to the needs they face. John Hattie states that the key element for improving academic outcomes is the length of time students stay in school. A typical decile 10 school will have 90%+ of their students in school past 17 years of age. For decile one schools it is closer to 60% – as just one metric. If you don’t get good qualifications you are far less likely to earn a cycle breaking income. Labour also removed direct interventions such as Aspire Scholarships and Charter Schools. The PM, while acknowledging that the Charter School removal was keeping a promise to the Teacher Unions, also promised that “work was being done” on improving the Designated Character School model. No evidence of that has appeared after 5 years. Add to that a completely untargeted Free Fees tertiary policy that is one of the reasons why the last stats released from Canterbury University has one student out of 2,000 doing engineering accepted from a decile 1 school.

• Taxes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes, as well as GST, are regressive, as is the effect of Lotto and other forms of gambling. We have surely now reached the limit of reducing cigarette addiction through tax/price. A carton of cigarettes costs at least $350. Yes – smoking is a choice – but for long term addicts that $350 must punch a huge hole in the budget. 55% of the price of a litre of petrol is tax (plus 10% if you live in Auckland). The is a $29 per litre tax on alcohol and we keep stacking the poorer suburbs with bottle stores.

• We won’t fund a world class child and youth mental health programme like Mike King’s even though it would cost less than 1% of the $685 million Boomer Bridge. Maori, Pasifika and low socio-economic youth are over-represented in all negative statistics – including suicide.

• Treating the housing problem as a demand-side issue. They have failed to open-up supply, had Kainga Ora buy up land and crowd out private sector construction, and intervened in the rental market in ways that can only create greater scarcity and higher prices.

• A 2021 budget that had almost no incentives to get into work. A good education followed by a good job is the pathway to alleviating poverty.

Jacinda Ardern cannot seriously say that she is intending to reduce child poverty (or any other form) while advocating as range of policies that include the above list. What will it take for the MP’s from lower socio-economic electorates and the Labour Maori caucus to actually take a stand for their constituents?

Alwyn Poole
Villa Education Trust
[email protected]

Moises Naim writes:

We all know someone like this: a friend who over and over again falls for the wrong man, or a talented colleague who bounces from job to job because he seemingly cannot tolerate any kind of authority. Sigmund Freud called this the “repetition compulsion”—a psychological pattern where people repeat the same bad behaviors despite being aware of their negative outcomes.

But this phenomenon doesn’t only afflict individuals. It also affects political groups and even entire nations that get enthralled by leaders whose ideas have already been tried and exposed as failures. These bad ideas, which should be dead and buried, have a way of periodically reappearing and gaining popularity.

Several years ago, I called this condition “ideological necrophilia”: “Necrophilia is a sexual attraction to cadavers. Ideological necrophilia is the blind fixation with dead ideas. It turns out this pathology is more common in its political rather than sexual form. Turn on your TV tonight and I bet you will see some politician passionately in love with an idea that has already been tried and failed, or defending beliefs that have been proven false by incontrovertible evidence.”

What a great term.

Maoism is a good example. The doctrine stressed the need for “permanent revolution,” insisted that peasants should be the central protagonists of political and economic life, made agricultural collectivization the norm, and privileged small industries over large-scale economic units. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, and other policies wrought havoc on the nation, producing a massive famine and eventually leaving more than 40 million Chinese dead. In the 1980s, an assessment of Mao’s legacy by an official Chinese newspaper concluded: “In his later years he made big mistakes over a long period, and the result was great disaster for the people and his country. He created a historical tragedy.” Such stark conclusions should have bankrupted Mao’s ideas, yet self-proclaimed Maoist rebels and political parties remain in a surprising number of countries.

I love all the communists out there who claim that the problem is that the 50 countries that have tried it and failed miserably, were all doing in the wrong way.

Consider, for example, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, a great 21st-century exponent of extreme populism. Before his death in 2013, he doggedly pursued policies known to have failed in Venezuela and elsewhere: fixing prices of goods and services at levels below their costs of production; wresting private companies from their owners and giving them to politically appointed operatives; allowing government spending and indebtedness to skyrocket; promoting consumer spending through unsustainable handouts, subsidies, and credits; discouraging investment; stimulating imports rather than exports; and imposing strict foreign-exchange controls.

The result: The country with the largest oil reserves on the planet is now importing gasoline. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation rate and critical shortages of food, medicine, spare parts, and much else. A nation that used to have the highest income per capita in Latin America is now in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. 

And for many years Venezuela was hailed be leftish academics and others as a role model.

An interesting poll by the Asia NZ Foundation asking people about 19 countries and if they view them as friendly or a threat. The “net friendly” score is those who said friendly less those who said a threat. The scores in order are:

1. Australia +85%
2. Canada +80%
3. UK +78%
4. Japan +67%
5. Germany +55%
6. Thailand +44%
7. South Korea +42%
8. Philippines +41%
9. India +37%
10. South Africa +37%
11. Vietnam +37%
12. US +30%
13. Indonesia +24%
14. Bangladesh +15%
15. Myanmar +6%
16. China -4%
17. Pakistan -5%
18. Russia -31%
19. North Korea -36%

Somewhat surprised to see Pakistan so low.

The Taxpayers’ Union has published some of the so called science projects that have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the taxpayers.

They include:

•  $300,000 to prove it is “benevolently sexist” to believe that “men ought to protect and cherish women”.

•  $842,000 to find out why there aren’t many Asian people on New Zealand television or in cinema.

•  $300,000 to examine how New Zealanders are using dating apps.

•  $870,000 to find out whether multiculturalism harms indigenous people.

•  $300,000 to examine the relationship between housing and security in Papua New Guinea.

•  $870,000 to “re-imagine anti-racism theory in the health sector”.

•  $842,000 to study ethnic women politicians in New Zealand.

•  $300,000 to find out how religion affects inequality in Fiji.

The $870,000 to re-imagine anti-racism theory in the health sector is my favourite.

Stuff reports:

The OECD is calling for an easing of land-use rules, the building of more social housing, and is cautious about rent controls in a new “toolkit” to ease the housing crisis afflicting many countries.

In a report published on Tuesday, the OECD said New Zealand had land-use policies that weakened the feedback loop from higher house prices through increased construction to house price moderation.

This would do more than anything else to reduce house prices. Labour know this. They campaigned on it in 2017 but broke their promise and have done almost nothing to free up land for housing.

news.com.au reports:

The World Health Organisation has been accused of sexism after releasing a draft report that pushed for women of “child-bearing age” to be prevented from drinking alcohol.

The controversial advice was laid out in WHO’s draft of its Global Alcohol Action Plan 2022-2030, which urges countries to raise awareness among the public about the risks and harms associated with alcohol consumption, with particular focus on how children are impacted when exposed to alcohol while still in the womb.

In order to lessen these impacts, the organisation suggests preventing not only pregnant women from drinking alcohol, but any woman of “child-bearing age”.

“Appropriate attention should be given to prevention of the initiation of drinking among children and adolescents, prevention of drinking among pregnant women and women of child-bearing age,” the report states.

I look forward to the Government announcing they will act on this, as they always say they follow the science!

Matthew Hooton writes:

National has little choice but to withdraw from the multi-party consensus on the Climate Change Commission — or at least insist the Government ask its chair, Rod Carr, to resign.

This is not because National is against urgent action on climate change, but because it supports it.

This is key. If you want stronger action on climate change, you should not do what the Climate Change Commission has said.

It has become clear that the commission is not primarily or even mainly concerned with New Zealand reducing global emissions. If it were, it would reject entirely the domestic ring-fence imposed upon it.

By far the biggest contribution New Zealand can make to reducing climate change is funding projects in developing economies to reduce their emissions and prevent clear-felling of rainforests.

Such projects cost less than $20 to remove the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2e tonne) from the atmosphere. Yet the Ardern Government regularly spends over $1500 per CO2e tonne on its projects to reduce emissions.

The atmosphere has no geographic boundaries. A tonne less CO2 emitted in say Nigeria has the exact same impact as a tonne less in New Zealand.

So if you care about the environment and have $1,500 to spend, what is better for the environment – reducing emissions by one tonne or by 75 tonnes? No brainer.

But despite the commission believing climate change is a global crisis, it doesn’t want New Zealand to do this. Instead, it wants New Zealand to achieve net zero when measured almost entirely by activity within our borders.

Even then, it says we could achieve net zero for around $50 per CO2e tonne, or a cost to emitters of around $4b a year, just a little above the current price of $41. That money would go to other New Zealand businesses. But the commission doesn’t want to do that either.

Instead, Carr explicitly rejects New Zealand achieving the biggest possible reduction in CO2e emissions for the least cost. He says he wants to use climate change to radically transform every aspect of how we live our lives.

The Commission has chosen to not go for the policies that will cost the least, to achieve the goals. So They are proposing it costs us more to achieve less.

Climate change policy is ultimately about neither more nor less than correctly pricing the CO2e externalities of human activity.

The ETS, the cap-and-trade scheme developed in 2007 by Labour’s Climate Change Minister David Parker and National’s Nick Smith, cannot fail to deliver net zero emissions whenever the Government decides to set the cap at zero.

That need not be 2050. It could be 2025, 2030 or whenever the Government decides to let the scheme run as Parker and Smith intended. And, as designed, the ETS could not fail to deliver that outcome at least cost.

So long as all sectors are in the ETS, then this is right. As the caps reduce, the price goes up and it is guaranteed achieve the emissions targets by the nominated date.

So in summary the Climate Change Commission has recommended policies that will reduce fewer emissions, cost us more to do it, and have no guarantee of actually working.

They were not agreeing to Carr and his colleagues using the commission to promote an extreme-left utopia that will in fact worsen New Zealand’s contribution to fighting climate change compared with Parker and Smith’s existing policy mechanism.

Collins is fast losing whatever confidence she ever had in Carr. If Ardern and Shaw won’t get rid of Carr, Collins should admit she was right all along and pull the plug.

I agree.

Stuff reports:

National leader Judith Collins has waded into a free speech debate after Christchurch City Libraries barred a controversial group from booking one of its meeting rooms following multiple complaints.

Speak up for Women NZ wanted to host a talk about sex self-identification on Tuesday and booked a room at Tūranga three weeks ago, but received notification that its booking had been cancelled on Monday.

After appealing the decision, the group was also told its meeting would not be permitted in any of the city’s libraries.

An email from library manager Chris Hay, seen by Stuff, said the subject of the group’s meeting may be in conflict with the library’s code of conduct, “particularly our commitment to providing a safe and welcoming environment”.

Of all the attacks on free speech, this is arguably the worst, especially as it comes from a library.

The reason this one is so bad, is because the issue they wish to discuss is a bill before Parliament.

The group was formed in opposition to the Government’s proposal to allow people to self-identify their sex in the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Bill. It planned to discuss aspects of the bill in Christchurch.

So there is a bill before Parliament that seeks to change the way people can change their sex on their birth certificate.

The SUFW group has a position that the current law is okay and does not need changing. So far from being some sort of radical position, they are in fact arguing that the current law is okay. I happen to disagree with them, but think it is outrageous that the intolerants try to shut down any debate on this issue.

The Christchurch Libraries have decided that the case for changing the law is so strong, that it must ban any group that wishes to defend the status quo. This fascist manager has decided that the public must be banned from hearing a view in favour of the current law and against the proposed law change.

The Age reports:

Magistrate Rodney Higgins, who created controversy in 2019 by embarking on a relationship with a court clerk 45 years his junior, has successfully claimed her $180,000 superannuation death benefit even though it was bequeathed to her struggling mother.

Mr Higgins, who earns $324,000 a year as a magistrate in Bendigo, made the successful claim on the death benefits of his late fiance Ashleigh Petrie after the fund, Rest Super, agreed with his argument that he was her de facto partner and therefore her “dependent”.

So she left the money to her mother but this judge who is on $300,000 and was with her for just a few months, sucessfuly claimed the money for himself.

What a terrible human being.

Mr Higgins, then 68, and Ms Petrie were a couple for seven months and lived together for about four months prior to her death. They were engaged in September 2019. During her relationship with Mr Higgins, Ms Petrie nominated her mother as the beneficiary of her superannuation and life insurance.

So this isn’t her choosing it to go to Higgins over her mother. She named her mother as the beneficiary.

But Mr Higgins has refused the mother’s pleas to share the money, citing his hurt that he was not given a portion of Ms Petrie’s ashes. Within months of the young woman’s death, Mr Higgins returned to his partner of 18 years, Lurline Le Neuf, whom he’d left earlier that year to be with Ms Petrie. They share a riverfront home in Shepparton.

He won’t share the money because he wasn’t given some of the ashes. Is he ten years old?

In October 2019, shadow attorney-general Ed O’Donohue made a rare complaint to the Judicial Commission about Mr Higgins. Mr O’Donohue alleged the magistrate lacked judicial independence due to his relationship with Ms Petrie and raised concerns about an incident involving his alcohol consumption at Crown casino. The commission dismissed these two allegations due to lack of information in April last year.

Mr O’Donohue’s third allegation – that Mr Higgins’ appointment by the Andrews government in 2017 was politicised because it followed stints as a Labor candidate for the state electorate of Shepparton in 2014 and the federal seat of Murray in 2013 – was found by the commission to be outside its jurisdictional scope.

This explains a lot!

Stuff reports:

The Government and Auckland Council have confirmed no deal has been reached to host the 37th America’s Cup in Auckland, and a “cash and kind” offer of $99 million has lapsed.

The confirmation comes a day before the end of the three-month period in which the two parties have exclusive rights to negotiate a hosting deal with the cup holder, Team New Zealand.

The news makes it more likely the next defence will be sailed overseas but does not preclude Auckland hosting an event as part of a wider overseas deal.

Good. It would have been outrageous spending $100 million on this.

If Team New Zealand want to defend it overseas, that’s up to them. Of course far fewer Kiwis will back them, or feel emotionally attached to the team, but that is their decision to make.

NewstalkZB reports:

Seven senior staff at Rotorua Lakes Council can now call themselves deputy chief executives, and one has had a minimum $40,000 pay rise.

Another deputy chief executive is undergoing a salary review.

The move has been described as “unbelievable” and “laughable” by a former Rotorua mayor, who says he believes there is little chance the change will enhance services to ratepayers.

A local government expert says it represents a “detachment from reality”, but a local government managers representative says the new titles are based on outcomes instead of functions.

I bet you none of those outcomes are keeping rates affordable for ratepayers!

I have an electric vehicle and love it. But I know that not every household can use an EV. It’s not just about price.

We have two cars. If both were EVs, we’d struggle as you don’t want to be stopping every 90 minutes to recharge the car if on holiday with the pre-schoolers. So the EV is used for 90% of trips but we definitely need the petrol car for longer trips.

If you live in an apartment block, you probably can’t charge your EV.

If you live in a hilly area of Wellington, you may not have a garage and hence can’t charge an EV.

This is why taxing petrol cars an extra $3,000 or so, to subsidise EVs is wrong. It punishes people over a decision they may have no choice over.

Stuff reports:

The Government’s housing developer Kāinga Ora has been paying $25,000 a month to sponsor media stories on NZME’s OneRoof real estate website.

But the stories from the KiwiBuild and public house developer did not carry a disclaimer making clear who was paying for them.

A disclaimer was added by NZME after Stuff approached the company for comment.

National’s housing spokeswoman Nicola Willis uncovered the content deal with a written question to Housing Minister Megan Woods.

“It’s a secret jack-up between the Government’s housing arm and a media provider to make what are ads look like genuine news stories,” Willis said.

Woods said in her answer to Willis the ongoing advertising agreement covered a page called “Our New Auckland” which featured advertising and “editorial content generation”.

“The purpose of this sponsorship is to raise awareness and education the Auckland public about the Kāinga Ora large scale developments, create a vision for the future, and to enable the sale of homes by its build partners.”

This section featured 64 stories styled to look like other news stories on OneRoof, many of which prominently featured Kāinga Ora affordable housing developments or talked about urban development in Auckland. Some even lifted quotes directly from pages on other sites that were more clearly run by Kāinga Ora.

But none of these pages made clear that the content was sponsored by Kāinga Ora with public money, a breach of the Advertising Standards Authority’s rules for this kind of ad.

What the Herald has done is what they condemned Cameron Slater for allegedly doing – taking money without disclosing it. Will they run any stories on themselves for this huge breach of ethics.

There are two issues here. The first is why is the Government spending $25,000 a month on housing propaganda ads rather than actually you know housing.

And the second issue is these ads were disguised as editorial, with no identification that they were paid for. And both NZME and Kāinga Ora must have known. Surely Kāinga Ora saw the ads they had paid for.

Willis said it wasn’t good enough for Kāinga Ora and the minister to blame NZME and wash their hands of the matter.

“The only way we have uncovered this $300,000 deal is because I have asked written questions about it.”

Yep this only got exposed thanks to an Opposition MP.

Newshub reports:

But Ardern confirmed she’s ruling out exemptions for utes. 

“We did discuss that because we recognised that there is a lag in the technology right now. But after discussing it, debating it and working it through, it was going to be very difficult to operationalise,” she said. 

“A large number of those buyers of those vehicles are not using them for the legitimate use as those who work in the primary sector and the trades.”

So the PM is now deciding who is and is not a legitimate ute user, and hence imposing a tax on them as some people have no “legitimate” use for them.

Clarke is not in the trades or primary sector so by the PMs own words he is not a legitimate user of utes!

Stuff reports:

Kiwi UFC star Israel Adesanya has called out Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern over New Zealand’s lack of a coward punch law.

The UFC middleweight champion dedicated his unanimous decision victory over Marvin Vettori at UFC 263 in Arizona on Sunday (NZ time) to City Kickboxing teammate Fau Vake.

Following an emotional tribute to Vake, who died last month due to injuries suffered after an alleged attack while waiting for a taxi in central Auckland, Adesanya used his post-fight press conference to call on the New Zealand Government to act immediately.

Before making his plea, Adesanya looked down the barrel of the recording camera as he personally challenged the prime minister with an emotive message.

“Jacinda, I don’t know who else is in your f…… cabinet, but you know it was wrong, you know exactly what to do.

“I don’t know what puppet master is pulling the strings, but you’re the leader of the country, you handled the mosque shootings like a f…… champ, can you please do the same with this s… too,” Adesanya said.

Labour voted down a bill providing steeper penalties for coward punches that kill. I hope they reconsider their decision.

An article in Stuff shows how the pro-quota people are never happy. If you meet one quota then they invent others for you, so the self-flagellation continues.

Michelle Duff writes:

Boardrooms are still overwhelmingly white – it’s just that now, there are more white women.

Last year, the Government reached its 50 per cent target. 

So the gender target was achieved, so now they say you also need an ethnicity target. If you make that, then they’ll demand an age target or a sexual orientation one.

But in 2019, the first year it counted ethnicity in its annual gender stocktake, it found the makeup was 21.2 percent Māori, 4.6 percent Pasifika, 3.6 percent Asian and less than one per cent other ethnicities.

And how do they describe this?

“We are doing fantastic when it comes to gender generally, but when you look within it, it’s a replication of Pākeha democracy and privilege. I think now we are ready to look at other aspects of diversity,” Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Dr Saunoamaali’i Karanina Sumeo says.

So let’s look at these stats. First we need to look at the eligible population. While there is no hard and fast rule I’d say it is very rare to have someone in their 20s in governance roles. You need experience to perform governance well. So what is NZ’s over 30 population. It is 74% European, 14% Asian, 12% Maori and 5% Pasifika (adds up to more than 100% as some people in multiple ethnicities).

So let’s compare state governance percentages to over 30 population.

• European 72% vs 74%
• Maori 21% vs 12%
• Asian 3.6% vs 14%
• Pasifika 4.6% vs 5%

So in fact the statement about Pakeha privilege is wrong. Both European and Pasifika state sector board appointments are roughly in line with their over 30 population.

The big disparity is that Maori are vastly over-represented and Asians vastly under-represented compared to their population.

Ahead of the release of the latest figures, Sumeo is calling for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to support ethnicity targets for state sector boards.

Is she calling for the number of Maori to be reduced and Asians increased?

That Kiwibuild 100,000 affordable homes is really making a difference isn’t it?

In Wellington house price inflation was 42% including 37% in Porirua.