Newstalk ZB reports:

A group of former Olympians and elite New Zealand athletes are challenging Government guidelines on transgender people playing in sport and calling for wider consultation.

The guidelines focus on the principle of inclusion, and cite evidence around the barriers New Zealand’s roughly 50,000 trans and non-binary people face in playing sport and the associated severe mental health impacts.

But this has irked a group of some of New Zealand’s most successful sportspeople, 43 of whom penned an open letter to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Sport Grant Robertson citing concerns around “fairness and safety in all sport” arguing the guidelines ignored the rights of female athletes.

Among those concerned were former Olympians Barbara Kendall, Lorraine Moller and Dean Kent, former Olympic Chef de Mission and Emeritus Professor David Gerrard, and New York marathon winner Alison Roe, and All Black Jeff Wilson.

While the guidelines were developed in consultation with the trans community and a wide range of experts and affected groups, including Save Women’s Sport Australasia which supports the open letter, the group want a wider consultation process involving all sports bodies.

“The existing process has not engaged meaningfully with key sporting organisations, clubs and their stakeholders,” Gerrard said.

Dave Gerrard was my doctor at Otago Uni and also a very well respected sports medicine specialist.

The issue of trans participation in sports is difficult as there are competing rights – the rights of trans athletes to compete with their identified gender and the rights of biological women to only compete against other biological women.

Being a biological male gives strength and speed advantages that are huge. It’s not that the top 10 men or even top 100 men can all beat the top women. Here’s some data you may not know:

• In 2018 alone, 275 school boys ran 400 metres faster than the world record for women
• In comparing times and distances for the 2016 US school champs for boys vs the 2016 Olympics for women, schoolboys beat the gold medalist in 23 out of 24 track and field events.
•  Females, on average, have just 52% of the upper-body strength and 66% of the lower-body strength of males.  Women have 45% less muscle tissue in their biceps, 41% less muscle in their elbow flexors, 30% less in their thighs, and 25% less in their knees. On average, women’s VO2max is about 20% lower than men’s.
• In 2017 over 15,000 men and boys ran faster than the women’s world record for 100 and 400 metres.
• A comparison in 2017 of faster schoolboys vs fastest women found boys winning the 400 metres by a huge four seconds, 1500 metres by 19 seconds and 5,000 metres by 83 seconds.

RNZ reports:

Household water – running through pipes and out taps – could incur a bill of $14,000 a year in coming decades.

Incredible.

This is if there is no reform in who delivers water services, but if new management bodies are set up, those water bills could be limited to $800-$1600 in 2051, the analyses, led by the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, suggest.

Reforming water management is a great idea in theory. But based on how this Government manages major projects it will cost five times as much and be ten years late.

Stuff reported:

Former politician Colin Craig is taking his decade-long legal fight against the press secretary he sexually harassed to the Supreme Court.

In May, the Court of Appeal threw out Craig’s bid to overturn a 2019 High Court decision which found he harassed Rachel MacGregor for years, while she worked for him in the lead-up to the 2014 general election.

It’s madness that this continues, and deeply unfair to Rachel MacGregor.

Newsroom reports:

A woman known for severe neglect of animals donated $53,970 to the Greens over 2019 and 2020, but despite saying it wasn’t aware of the abuse, the party – known for its strong stance on animal welfare – won’t be giving the money back. Pete McKenzie reports. 

The Green Party says it won’t return two five-figure donations from a woman convicted of animal neglect which required several horses to be put down.

Three weeks before being sentenced in the District Court for animal neglect described by the SPCA as amongst the worst it had ever seen, Lindsay Fraser donated $29,000 to the Green Party’s 2020 election campaign. She had also donated $24,970 a year earlier, making her one of the party’s biggest donors.

Off memory the Greens often call for other parties to refund donations, when the donor gets caught up in some sort of reputational issue.

Yet again they prove they are no strangers to hypocrisy.

Newsroom visited Fraser at her Masterton farm and confirmed she made the donation. She also asserted she was a long-time member of the Green Party who has repeatedly contributed financially to the party’s political efforts. She then alleged she was the victim of an illegal campaign of “harassment and bullying” by the SPCA.

Doesn’t sound repentant does she?

A person familiar with Fraser’s court case, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to talk frankly, said Fraser viewed herself as an animal welfare advocate. 

I guess she could be seen as that, in the sense that Clayton Weatherston is a victims welfare advocate.

Andrea Vance writes:

From the moment she took office in 2017, Jacinda Ardern promised her government would be the most open and transparent New Zealand has seen.

She also promised 100,000 Kiwibuild homes, Auckland Light Rail and a new Dunedin Hospital. Never has a Government broken so many promises.

This year, I have made more complaints to the Ombudsman than in any previous year. So far, every one has been upheld.

In my 20-year plus time as a journalist, this Government is one of the most thin-skinned and secretive I have experienced. Many of my colleagues say the same.

Yet it seems that it is only when National is in power, do we get groups springing up saying how the OIA must be reformed. Where is the Coalition for Open Government today?

Take the last week. Two senior Stuff journalists attempted to interview Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, at a time when the China-Australia-New-Zealand relationship is under intense international scrutiny.

It didn’t happen. Not because of any geo-political sensitivities. Nor something as trivial as a diary clash. The paranoid and hyper-sensitive minister objected to taking questions from two journalists at once.

Well being able to handle two journalists at once is obviously very daunting to a brand new MP. She has onlyh been an MP for 25 years. Maybe once she has been there 50 years, she could handle that.

My OIA request – which by law should be answered within 20 working days – was delayed, and eventually took five times that length.

That’s five months or so.

Since the current Government took office, the number of communications specialists have ballooned. Each minister has at least two press secretaries. (Ardern has four).

The PM has always had four or so, but it is a new development each Minister having two. In the past only the most senior Ministers with huge portfolio loads would have more than one.

And the prime minister’s office makes sure their audience is captured, starting the week and cementing the agenda with a conference call with political editors.

Interesting. Are those calls reportable?

Perhaps the trials and tribulations of the nation’s journalists do not concern you. Why should you care?

Because the public’s impression of this government is the very opposite.

They see a prime minister that has captivated the world with her ‘authentic’ communication style, intimate social media postings, daily Covid briefings and proactive releases of Cabinet papers.

It is an artfully-crafted mirage, because the reality is very different. This is a Government that is only generous with the information that it chooses to share.

It’s the same as the myth that the Covid-19 response was just following the science.

The Gazette News reports:

A UNIVERSITY has admitted it made “serious mistakes” after two professors were blocked from taking part in seminars over accusations of transphobia.

The University of Essex has issued an apology after a report found it acted unlawfully by blacklisting a professor.

It also withdrew an invitation extended to another professor after her views were compared to ‘hate speech.’

In December 2019, Professor Jo Phoenix, of the Open University, had been due to speak at the university on the subject of ‘Trans rights, imprisonment and the criminal justice system.’

The Times newspaper reported some university staff members had accused the professor of being ‘anti-trans’ and ‘exclusionary.’

Tracey Loughran, a historian at Essex University, took to social media to say: “This speaker is part of anti-trans platform.

“Free speech is one thing, but trans rights are human rights and we shouldn’t be debating human rights.

“The campus must be a safe space for trans people. There’s a speaker vetting policy, how did this slip through?”

In a damning independent report, recently released to the public, barrister Akua Reindorf said some people felt “unsafe and threatened” by the prospect of the professor appearing on campus.

The report said there was a “credible threat” students planned to barricade the room, while a flyer circulated bearing a violent image and profanities directed at the professor.

The seminar was cancelled and the university issued an apology to the trans community.

The report found the cancellation amounted to a breach of the professor’s right to freedom of expression and the university’s legal duties to uphold this right.

The report added: “The later decision to exclude and blacklist Prof Phoenix was also unlawful.

“There was no reasonable basis for thinking that Prof Phoenix would engage in harassment or any other kind of unlawful speech.

“The decision was unnecessary and disproportionate.

“Moreover the violent flyer was wholly unacceptable and should have been the subject of a timely disciplinary investigation.”

We see this constantly. People claim a speaker makes them feel unsafe and that certain issues are beyond debate.

Well done to Essex for commissioning in the independent review, and apologising. The review report is here and worth reading, Every university should take note of it.

Free Beacon reports:

Google’s global diversity leader apologized privately on Tuesday night to the company’s Jewish employees for a blog post in which he argued that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war,” but the tech company remains mum on the controversy.

The guy in charge of diversity at Google said that Jews have an insatiable appetite for war. I should be shocked, but I’m not.

The latest residents survey showed satisfaction with Christchurch City Council overall is now at 49%. This indicator has been tracked since 2007 so we can see how it has changed over time.

In 2007 (when Bob Parker became Mayor) it was at 79%. It pretty much stayed constant until 2010 when it was still 78%. The earthquakes struck and in 2012 it understandably dipped to 70% and stayed at 70% in 2013. Dalziel took over in 2013 and in her first term was between 64% and 74%. But since her second term it has fallen from 74% to 49% today. That is a terrible record.

Councillors need to ask themselves why they have had a 25% drop in satisfaction in just four years. That is a huge change.

Or … Vance Vanquishes the “ MOST TRANSPARENT” quote for good.

Or … What on earth is the point of a Vaccine?

The brilliant and brutally honest Mike King spoke the TRUTH to NZ’s true power base last week … the bureaucrats. Invisible, unaccountable, living in rooms padded on the outside to stop real humans with real needs getting to them.

“This is how out of touch these morons down at the Ministry of Health are – and they’re morons.”

“King has previously criticised Health Minister Andrew Little and the Ministry of Health for their “incompetence”.

“I’m not finished [with fighting for mental health care]. I saw Jacinda’s condescending response to me: ‘Oh it’s just Mike, we all know what Mike’s like’,” he says.

Andrea Vance has also woken up to this sort of nonsense.

“In her first formal speech to Parliament [Ardern] pledged: “This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”

Since then the numbers of faceless communications specialists have skyrocketed. The Government’s iron grip on the control of information has tightened.

And it is now harder than ever to get information.

In my 20-year plus time as a journalist, this Government is one of the most thin-skinned and secretive I have experienced. Many of my colleagues say the same.

Even squeezing basic facts out of an agency is a frustrating, torturous and often futile exercise.”

In a recent post Don Brash asked the silliest question I have ever read:

“DO WE NEED SO MANY BUREAUCRATS?”

“On 30 June 2017, close to the end of the nine years of the Key-English Government, people employed in the public service numbered 47,252. Just three years later, by which time the total New Zealand labour force had increased by 6.7%, numbers in the public service had increased to 57,149, an increase of 20.9%, more than three times the increase in the total labour force.”

In my field, education, those directly employed by the Ministry of Education (not counting consultants) has skyrocketed.

• 2017    2,632
• 2018    2,904
• 2019    3,253
• 2020    3,486

What on earth do they do? Our education is in a mess – less than 60% of students fully attend. There are 10,300 school age children not even enrolled. Our stats have us as the world’s worst English-speaking country.

So … why am I nervous? Because we are asked to take so much on trust and many of these people pump themselves up as experts. My wife, Karen, is about to directly experience the provisions of the Ministry of Health/MBIE in MIQ (she is in the air as I write). This is despite having been vaccinated in the USA (with documentation), having been in a low risk part of NY State (where she travelled to support someone who had experienced a significant health issue), living with people who have been vaccinated, being willing to self-isolate and undergo 2, and 5 days tests. Why the push to get people vaccinated if our own Ministry of health don’t recognise the efficacy? She will be far more at risk in MIQ than in her own home.

By the way – many people have asked me how she had been getting on in the USA – given the “terrible” situation. She says that could not be further from the truth … life where she has been is “much more normal than NZ with people just getting on with things.”

I know and trust Mike King and don’t doubt his judgement on the people in the health bureaucracy. Are we being taken for fools?

Stuff reports:

Former TV3 journalist Kim Vinnell​ says she was turned away from a fitness class in Hawke’s Bay after refusing to be photographed with other members during exercise.

Vinnell took to Twitter on Tuesday saying Hastings F45 told her she could exercise there, if she signed a waiver agreeing to be photographed/filmed. She also posted about her experience on Instagram.

F45 Training is a combination of high intensity interval training (HIIT), circuit training, and functional training. The company asks that its members sign a waiver to be filmed and photographed for marketing and promotional purposes.

Trainers would never take close-up photographs of any member who did not wish to be photographed but sometimes members might appear in the background of videos or photographs.

If you don’t like their terms and conditions, then don’t go there. As a customer you don’t get to dictate to the company that they must change their rules to suit you.

Senior communications adviser at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner Charles Mabbett​ said that in general, “if consumers believe a company is seeking consent for something that they think intrudes on their privacy, they should choose to reject the conditions and choose to go somewhere else”.

Exactly.

Newshub reports:

Pike River families have filed for a judicial review challenging the Government’s rejection of a plan to continue searching the mine for more evidence relating to the 2010 explosion that killed 29 men.

Twenty two of the 29 victims’ families are supporting the application, which comes after Minister Responsible for Pike River Re-entry Andrew Little recently rejected a proposal to recover the mine’s main ventilation fan, which is considered the likely source of the explosion. 

Andrew Little is learning that nothing will be sufficient for some of the families. He spent $50 million on what will turn out to be a wasted effort, and they are suing him for not spending another $25 million.

This is the risk of pandering to emotion, and politicising the disaster.

The Guardian reports:

Several of the biggest theatres in the UK have pledged to only cast trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming actors in roles for characters with those identities, in a move industry figures have described as a tipping point.

The Royal Court, Oxford Playhouse, Contact theatre and the Royal Exchange in Manchester are among the supporters of the trans casting statement that commits them to “never cast, or endorse a production that casts, a cisgender person in a trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming role”.

Why stop there?

They should announce in future no straight actor can portray a gay character and to be equitable no gay actor can portray a straight character. Never mind half of Hollywood and Broadway might be out of a job 🙂

Actually the ban that is really needed is short actors playing tall characters. It was a travesty that they cast Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. They cast a 5’7″ inch actor as a 6’5″ character. This destroyed the film. Reacher’s massive height was an integral part of his character.

The kind folks at MG saw I had converted to an electric car (Nissan Leaf) and offered me five days of driving one of their new EVs, the MG ZS EV.

It retails at $48,990 and has a 45 kWh battery. This gives you a 260 km range on a single charge.

I’ve now been driving an EV for four months and I can see why people say you never go back. No more finding time to pop into a petrol station to fuel up. At home it takes me around 10 seconds to plug the cra in and start charging overnight.

The MG impressed me for its price tag. The safety features were especially impressive.

It of course has Apple Carplay plus an inbuilt navigation system, But the safety features include emergency braking to stop you hitting a car in front of you in case of a sudden traffic jam, or a pedestrian who steps onto the road. It also has lane assistance where it will keep you in your lane on motorways etc unless you indicate to change lanes. Driving up Ngauranga Gorge, the car steered itself around bends to stay in my lane. It even told me off for removing my hands from the steering wheel.

It isn’t an autonomous driving vehicle, but the safety features get you close to it. The car can read speed limit signs and alert you when the speed limit changes. They have a smart cruise control which will cruise you at a speed that maintains a safe distance between you and the car in front. Also the wing mirrors alert you to a car in your blind spot.

In terms of driving, I really got to enjoy myself. To save power I always drive my Leaf in eco mode which is great for range, but means more resistance. The MG has three levels of driving mode (eco, normal, sport) and three levels of regenerative braking. Driving the car in sports mode was a blast and I’m just sorry I wasn’t in the Wairarapa where I could have found a nice straight country road to really test it.

The MG handled smoothly and is reasonably well elevated off the ground, which makes you feel safer driving.

My kids loved the sunroof. You can open and close the sunshade and even pull back the roof entirely. My four year old was very disappointed I wouldn’t drive the car with him standing on the seat with his head popping out over the roof.

As I said I was pleasantly surprised by how many safety features you get for a car that is priced under $50,000. The equivalent Nissan Leaf looks to cost a bit over $60,000.

The next time we are looking to buy, this will definitely be on the short-list.

The Herald reported:

Reports that Team New Zealand have rejected a $100 million offer from the Government and Auckland Council to keep the America’s Cup in the country have been met with a call for the team to “stay loyal”.

“We need Team New Zealand to stay loyal. That was the catch-cry that they gave New Zealand, was to be loyal to them,” said Auckland Business Chamber chief executive Michael Barnett.

We should not get into a bidding war. If Team New Zealand want to host the defence overseas, they should do it. We should not have to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars to do it in NZ.

City Journal reports:

Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”

The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

In a set of related resources, White Men As Full Diversity Partners lays out its theory of privilege. The firm’s founders, Welp and Bill Proudman, have argued that white males must “work hard to understand” their “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “heterosexual privilege,” which affords them unearned benefits. The firm’s training programs are designed to assist white men in discovering the “roots of white male culture.” That culture, according to Welp and Proudman, consists of traits—such as “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” “operating from principles,” and “striving towards success”—which are superficially positive but are “devastating” to women and minorities.

Those poor bastards. Surely this is against the Geneva conventions. Spending 30 minutes listening to a woke w***fest would be torture enough. But to force them to endure three days of that is inhumane. Were they given sick bags?

Spiked writes:

Let me get this right – both the BBC and CNN have reporters who praised Adolf Hitler? Both of these broadcasting giants of the liberal elite have contributors who said the Führer was right? We need to talk about this. This is not normal in any way whatsoever. It speaks to a serious sickness at the heart of the so-called liberal establishment.

I think their thought process is along the lines of I support Palestine because all my friends do. Jews in Israel won’t give up their country therefore Jews are bad and Hitler should have killed them all.

In 2014, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge offensive against Hamas, Halawa tweeted ‘#HitlerWasRight’. We can be pretty sure she didn’t mean he was right to have been a vegetarian or to have been a fan of Beethoven. She also said, ‘Israel is more Nazi than Hitler’ – my emphasis. This is a vile anti-Semitic slur, in which the Jewish state or the Jewish people are essentially accused of having internalised the evil attitudes and behaviour of the regime that tried to wipe them out 80 years ago. Halawa also tweeted that ‘ur media is produced by ur zionist government in order 2 produce ignorant people’ and ‘#Zionists can’t get enough of our blood’.

Considering how virulently anti-Israel the mainstream media is, the irony of a BBC reporter claiming that the Jews control the media is beyond satire.

CNN’s seeming fan of Hitler is one Adeel Raja. He is a freelance journalist in Pakistan. He isn’t employed by CNN but he has contributed to the channel in recent years. This month, as the Israel-Hamas conflict flared up once more, Raja tweeted: ‘The world today needs another Hitler.’ Yes, that’s right – the American news giant that has spent the past five years telling us that everything is fascism, constantly insisting that Trumpism and Brexit and other populist revolts have ugly echoes of the 1930s, had a contributor who wants Hitler to return to teach those filthy Jews a lesson. To borrow a phrase from journalism on this side of the pond: you couldn’t make it up.

It wasn’t the first time Raja expressed admiration for Hitler. In 2014, during the World Cup, he tweeted: ‘The only reason I am supporting Germany in the finals – Hitler was a German and he did good with those Jews.’

Sounds a lovely guy.

Newsroom reports:

A climate-conscious and increasingly cost-conscious Government has cancelled some of its biggest promised highway projects – even where groundwork has already begun.

It has defunded or indefinitely suspended funding for Whangārei to Port Marsden, Mill Rd, Papakura to Drury South, and Te Puna to Ōmokoroa, in the Bay of Plenty. 

I don’t think I can ever keep track of how many broken promises this now makes. It would be easier to count the promises they have successfully delivered on, than the ones they have broken or failed at.

And as reported this morning, the Government is to spend $785m on a new cycle and pedestrian bridge across Waitemata Harbour and linking the cycleway up to Auckland’s North Shore.

Business leaders are dubious. Auckland Business Forum Chair Michael Barnett said the fact the Government had been forced into cutbacks because its initial cost estimates for the Upgrade projects were so far wrong was deeply concerning.

No explanation had been given for the decision to scrap the Whangārei-Port Marsden highway project, in favour of upgrading the North Auckland rail line, Barnett said.

“Whangarei-Port Marsden was critically important a year or so ago, but now it doesn’t make the cut. What’s changed?

“What impacts will this have on the safety, efficiency and resilience of Northland’s road network? Where’s the case to support the massive increase in investment in the rail line? We need answers.”

And Barnett questioned the justification for spending $785m on new stand-alone harbour bridge that would support only a tiny number of users.

ACT’s Transport spokesperson Simon Court called on Michael Wood to release the cost-benefit analysis for the walking/cycling bridge.

The benefit to cost ratio will be miniscule. It is madness to incur the huge cost of constructing a second harbour crossing and not allowing any buses, trains or cars on it.

Gizmodo reports:

A 2018 ban on flavored tobacco products in San Francisco may have had some unintended consequences, new research this week suggests. The study found that high school teens were more likely to take up smoking after the ban than those living elsewhere.

We may see the same thing happen here as officials seem determined to treat vaping the same as smoking.

In 2018, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to enact a wholesale ban on flavored tobacco products, following a voter-passed measure. This ban included products like menthol cigarettes, as well as all flavored e-cigarette or vaping devices, and extended to all retailers, including dedicated vape shops. At the time, many public health organizations such as the American Heart Association supported the ban, while tobacco companies funded a $12 million ad campaign against it.

Proponents have argued that these flavor bans will make tobacco products less appealing to children and young adults, thus preventing them from ever picking up any nicotine habit. Yet in recent years, some drug policy and harm reduction experts have started to wonder if these sorts of bans could be counterproductive, especially when it comes to vaping devices. The argument is that these bans will drive some people who would have only ever vaped to instead keep using or switch to cigarettes entirely. And while e-cigarettes aren’t entirely risk-free, their harms do appear to be significantly smaller than other tobacco products.

The new study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, seems to suggest that this exact scenario has played out as feared among high school students in San Francisco.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Vaping is not good for you but smoking is deadly, so policy that makes iot harder for people to move from smoking to vaping will lead to more smokers.’

Before the ban, trends in smoking among high school students were pretty similar across different cities, Friedman found, with kids reportedly smoking less and less over time. But afterward, there was a clear difference between San Francisco and other places. Namely, rates of reported smoking in San Francisco seemed to rise but continued to drop elsewhere. Friedman estimated that 6.2% of high school students there smoked in 2019, compared to 2.8% of students in other cities. And when adjusting for smoking trends across all these cities, she estimated that the odds of high school students smoking in San Francisco more than doubled following the ban.

Well done liberal law makers in San Francisco.