A guest post by Melissa Lee MP:
As Parliament resumed for the 2021 sitting calendar, one of the first Bills that was put up for Introduction was the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. An innocent enough sounding title but in reality, a legislative leviathan that could threaten the future of free internet in New Zealand.
In summary, the Bill makes livestreaming of objectionable content a specific criminal offence and gives significant powers to the Government to create statutory web filters that ISPs would be required to implement as well as empower the Chief Censor to force media and digital platforms alike operating online to takedown live coverage of breaking stories.
The Government has chosen not to word this Bill that way. They are choosing to make it about the abhorrent attacks that took place in Christchurch, something near irrelevant to the proposal which had been in the works since before they took place. This Bill really is about Censorship and fighting free speech.
As my colleague Simon Bridges, Nationals’ Justice Spokesperson, said “the Government’s taking the opportunity to go with their instincts to take power to themselves, to take control for themselves, and to be able to cancel”. This Bill gives power to the Government to stop events like those that we’ve seen in the United States from being live filmed. Think about the George Floyd incident and think should it be a crime to film and broadcast such actions live. Also think about how people who share that livestream could be implicated. That is the reality as it stands of this legislation.
We have a definition of ‘objectionable’ in New Zealand law and it mostly covers what we all would absolutely agree with. However the reason we can agree with the definition is because of the stringent processes behind the scenes, the legal arguments, the court cases and the ongoing debate about this definition and its application. A law creating web filters invariably must be enforced through algorithms and AI which at their heart are cold calculating number crunchers and at their best for the immediate future, a weak alternative for considered and debated human oversight.
If filters based around the concept of objectionable are introduced we don’t know what we will lose access to and bluntly, we live in an age where technology is helping people get around those filters in ways that is becoming increasingly difficult to address.
The Bill is now open for submissions and I encourage you to read the facts and write to the Committee with your views. This is not a bill about online harm, it’s really the start of the next national debate on Free Speech and Censorship in New Zealand.
Be a part of it.
MELISSA LEE MP
National Member of Parliament
National Spokesperson for – Broadcasting & Media| Digital Economy and Communications | Ethnic Communities
YouGov has the latest approval ratings in the UK for the Royal Family. They are:
Also interesting is the change. Prince Harry since 2017 has gone from +70% to -3% and Meghan from +35% to -27%.
Stuff reports:
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta says Australian Minister Peter Dutton “only serves to trash his own reputation” by insulting New Zealand deportees by calling them “trash”.
Dutton, the Australian home affairs minister, was interviewed for a channel Nine News report about criminal deportees to New Zealand earlier this week, and said, “It’s taking out the trash, then we can make Australia a safer place”.
A personal attack on an Australian Minister isn’t exactly the diplomacy you expect from the Foreign Minister.
But here’s mu questions. If the Government will so vigorously criticise Australian Ministers for their statements and/or policies, why won;’t they be just as forceful with China’s Ministers over their genocide of Uighurs? Surely that should have Mahuta proclaiming they are trashing their reputatons?
Here’s the net approval ratings for recent US Presidents after 50 days:
So positive, but relatively low. I suspect partisanship in the US means no new President will ever get a net approval rating of over say +20% so they get judged off their party, not their performance.
Barry Soper writes:
Having worked with the past 10 prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern would be the most removed from the media than any of them. This woman who has a Bachelor of Communications doesn’t communicate in the way any of her predecessors have.
She’s the master of soft, flattering interviews and television chat shows, blanching at tough questions.
She’s commanded the Covid pulpit to such an extent that the virus has become her security blanket, without it she’d be forced to face the reality that her Government has been moribund.
The Prime Minister’s press conferences usually begin with a sermon – it took eight minutes for her to get to the fact that she was moving the country down an alert level last Friday. When it comes to press conferences her forearm stiffens and her hand flicks to those she’ll take a question from. Some of us are left barking from the sidelines.
Ardern doesn’t relate to the messenger, the team of journalists who make up the parliamentary press gallery, they don’t know her. All of her predecessors got to know the parliamentary media by inviting them to their ninth floor Beehive office, at least a couple of times a year. It puts a human face on the public performer.
This is not new. I recall how surprised some gallery members were when Ardern changed her cellphone number after the 2017 election, and her staff refused to give the new number out to any of the senior gallery editors.
It’s a good thing that senior journalists can contact the PM. Not that they do it often – you tend to work through their press team. But if getting the run around, they can text the PM.
Both Key and Clark would frequently receive and reply to texts from journalists.
Ardern is a celebrity leader and she’s determined to keep it that way, which is why she’s turned her back on the Newstalk ZB Mike Hosking Breakfast Show.
The questions were too direct, they got under her thin skin but, more importantly, she didn’t know the answer to many of them. She was exposed on a weekly basis and it simply all became too much for her.
In doing so, she’s turned her back on the highest-rating breakfast commercial radio show in the country by far and she has also turned her back on the many listeners who at the last Covid election (her description) switched their vote to her.
Leaders have in the past become exasperated with the media and at times with good reason but few, if any, have shied away from the tough questions. The regular Newstalk ZB slot for prime ministers has been jealously guarded by them for the past 35 years. This is the only regular slot she’s bowing out on.
Maybe they should put the Labour Deputy Leader on instead? 🙂
Stuff reports:
Parliamentary Service boss Rafael Gonzalez-Montero says he is totally confident that he did the right thing by suspending a parliamentary staff-member who was accused of wrongdoing. …
Under questioning from National MPs in the Governance and Administration Select Committee on Wednesday, Gonzalez-Montero said he was confident he had treated the man fairly – suspending him with pay while he re-investigated a complaint made about him.
After National MP Michael Woodhouse asked whether he might settle the ongoing employment case, which has cost the public purse at least $37,500, Gonzalez-Montero said he was unwilling to settle.
“I simply believe that we have done nothing wrong, so I’m not willing to settle,” Gonzalez-Montero said.
“I’d rather lose because we have done the right thing.”
Umm, if you lose then it is precisely because you have done the wrong thing, not the right thing.
The problem is that it is us taxpayers who fork up if the case is lost.
Stuff reports:
Parliamentary Service, the organisation that looks after the workings of Parliament and MPs’ offices said it will look into whether a subletting arrangement involving the Labour Party’s Petone electorate office is above board, and whether appropriate conflicts of interest were declared.
In a select committee meeting on Wednesday morning Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, chief executive of Parliamentary Service said it would both investigate whether the electorate deal was within Parliamentary rules and whether appropriate conflicts of interest were declared. He said that so far, he was happy everything was above board.
The deal, revealed after an investigation by Stuff last year, involves the local Labour party pocketing $4500 a year in profit thanks to a subletting arrangement. Labour rents its office premises from the building’s owner, the NZ Professional Firefighters Union for $1500, it then sublets that office space to the local MP for $6000.
It’s even worse than it appears. The $1,500 they pay is for a larger office space than the area they sublet to Parliament. So they both make $4,500 off the taxpayer and get their own party space effectively for free also.
Stuff reports:
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the only reason Australian tourists aren’t spending up in Queentown right now is the New Zealand Government.
Morrison was asked about the National Party’s new position that New Zealand should open immediately to travellers from Australia, provided they can show a negative test.
Australia itself is mostly reopening itself to quarantine-free travel for New Zealanders from Friday morning.
Morrison said it was a matter for the New Zealand Government, and it was totally up to them.
“If the New Zealand Government doesn’t wish Australians to visit New Zealand and spend money in Queenstown or Wellington or other parts of the country, that’s a matter for them. It’s always been a matter for them,” Morrison said.
It should be s non brainer that Australians who have been vaccinated should be allowed to travel here without quarantine. It is the whole point of vaccinating.
There is a massive backlog for MIQ places and such a move would free up capacity.
News.com.au reports:
The European Union has been blasted as a “total disgrace” for allowing Italy to block a quarter of a million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine from reaching Australia — and some Brits are even offering to forego their jab so more can be sent here.
Amid a botched rollout across the EU, the Italian government notified Brussels of its decision to prevent 250,000 doses from being exported to Australia at the end of last week.
The European Commission could have objected to that decision, and did not.
I should be surprised, but I’m not.
The UK has vaccinated 33% of their population. The EU has vaccinated around 9%.
The NZ Taxpayers Union has announced:
The Taxpayers’ Union is committing to creating a Tauranga Ratepayers’ Alliance following the alarming news from the unelected Council commissioners that they plan on a 22% then 12% cumulative rate hikes over the next two years.
This is appalling – a potential 46% increase in rates over three years – and by unelected commissioners.
It is important to understand that the appointment of Commissioners in Tauranga was on a very different basis to Kaipara and ECan.
In Kaipara the Council mismanaged a sewerage scheme so that the costs blew out from $17 million to $62 million. That’s on a population of 24,000 so was at a cost of around $3,000 per resident. And they broke the law in setting rates, needing an Act of Parliament to validate them. So Kaipara was in crisis.
With ECan, the Council was failing at basic duties. It was only processing 29% of consents within the statutory timeframe. It had no water plan. It had no regional planning framework. Some consent applications had been waiting five years for a decision. So they were also a Council in crisis.
Tauranga City Council is different. The reason the Council was sacked was not because the Council was unable to meet its legal duties. It was sacked because the relationships between the Mayor and some Councillors was so toxic that it was dysfunctional at the governance level. Now that can certainly justify appointing Commissioners, but the Commissioners should regard their role as status quo good governance, not radical change with no mandate.
A guest post from Southern Ward Cr Fleur Fitzsimons:
Much has been made by some commentators about the so-called “left-wing bloc” on the Wellington City Council and how this has supposedly added to the woes of the City.
Likewise, the presence of party-backed candidates has come under harsh scrutiny.
The most troubling aspect of this narrative is that the women who comprise this group are supposedly galvanised by grief over Justin Lester’s defeat at the last election, directing our collective ire ever since at Andy Foster. Come to think of it, that makes us sound less like a bloc than a coven!
The notion of a Justin Lester memorial committee, apart from being transparently sexist, completely misrepresents the integrity and experience we bring to the table.
The partisan divide at the Council has been overplayed to begin with.
In truth, there are friendships and alliances across the political spectrum. If someone looked into the voting records, they would find Councillors from a wide array of political starting-points supporting decisions made on behalf of the city.
While it was members of the “left bloc” who first called for an inquiry into the state of Wellington’s water infrastructure, as we saw burst pipes and trucks full of poo driving around our South Coast, this was a move that was supported by the Mayor and all but three Councillors.
The Council is unified behind the need for a focus on water infrastructure and “lefties” strongly support Sean Rush who is leading this work.
The request for work on a zero rate increase and better rates deferral schemes in 2020 was also supported from by a wide range of Councillors in the immediate aftermath of Covid 19.
The group of Councillors who resisted attempts to remove parking charges entirely during 2020 was also a diverse group that included Sean Rush and Jenny Condie. (The initial proposal was to borrow for a predicted $10 million loss in revenue but the group of Councillors restored the charges and channelled $1.5 million of the revenue gained into supporting community groups dealing with the human toll of Covid in Wellington).
Even attempts to privatise part of the Library Building last week and cut the book-buying budget drew supporters from across the political spectrum as did the ultimate decision not to go ahead, this was seconded by independent Councillor Nicola Young.
In fact, I can only think of one decision where there was a fairly obvious partisan split, that was the recent decision to remove a $76 million loan to the airport. While that decision fell along broadly left versus right lines, many on the left, including me, asked for further information before considering such a significant move from the Council.
I am a Labour City Councillor, I have now been elected twice on that basis.
Wellingtonians have been electing those standing under the Labour banner since 1919 when Peter Fraser and a group of Labour Councillors were elected to the Council. That is over a hundred years of Labour standing candidates and winning the support of residents.
I appreciate that not everyone supports this approach but it is part of the political tradition in Wellington and has been consistently endorsed by residents in elections – that is democracy.
The truth is that strict Party line voting rarely, if ever, happens at Council. When it does, it arises from sincerely held values we were elected to uphold, not out of deference to some sinister view of a Party machine or some homage to a former patriarch.
Stuff reports:
A photo of four female bar staff insinuating “size matters” will not be coming down from its position above a New Plymouth pub’s urinal, the owner says.
Doc van Praagh, owner of Crowded House Bar and Eatery, said he hadn’t received a single complaint about the snapshot of his bar managers looking over the men’s urinal sporting various expressions.
He said the photo, which features one of the women holding a tape measure while another looked shocked as she pointed downward, was just a bit of fun.
I’m sure the vast majority of locals love it.
The picture has been the subject of social media discussion in Taranaki, with one male patron who visited the bar labelling it problematic in that it objectified men, and created a double-standard.
It would never be acceptable to display a picture of men judging women’s anatomy in a female bathroom, he said.
And a spokeswoman for Gender Equal New Zealand said the image reinforced harmful gender norms and sexualised depictions of people.
Some people really need to lighten up.
Stuff reports:
Both ACT and National hold the position that 14 per cent of councillors are already Māori, which is equal to the proportion of the general population.
However, Jackson says, “95 per cent of them would not be advocating a Māori view’’.
“You advocate a Māori view, you forget about getting up on the council.
“Seymour is a classic example of absolutely being Māori, like Simon Bridges is, but neither of them ever advocate Māori positions, so they’re a total waste of bloody time,’’ Jackson told Newsroom.
This is very telling.
First of all there is no such thing as “a Māori view” as there is a diversity of views with Maoridom, just as there is within all cultures and races.
So what Willie really means is that unless you agree with his personal view of what is a Maori view, then you’re not a real Maori.
In response to Jackson’s comments that he was a “total waste of bloody time” on Māori kaupapa, Seymour says that’s a perfect example of why you shouldn’t “start classing humans by their race”.
“Māori don’t have to have a particular ideology,” he told Newsroom.
It was Seymour who advocated for and got charter schools across the line under a previous National-led government – Jackson benefited from that policy after helping to set up one of the Auckland-based Māori schools.
The Labour Party subsequently ended the policy.
“Willie Jackson was happy to be a sponsor and receive money under ACT party policy. I’d love Willie to tell us if that was a Māori position or not,” Seymour said.
Exactly.
Piers Morgan doesn’t hold back:
Here we had the Duke and Duchess of Privacy flinging out the filthy family laundry for the delectation of tens of millions of people all over the world, whilst simultaneously bleating about press intrusion.
They moaned about the terrible pain of their royal titles but were also outraged their son Archie wasn’t allowed to be a Prince.
They told of their constant trauma from nasty newspaper stories, but repeatedly insisted they never read any of them.
They claimed they were forced to sign gazillion-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify because Prince Charles cut off their allowance, despite Harry inheriting millions from his late mother Princess Diana and having his entire life bankrolled by the Royal Family.
And so, it went nauseatingly on.
In the middle of a pandemic that has already taken over 2.5 million lives, a staggeringly rich and entitled couple living in a $14 million sun-kissed California mansion wanted us all to know that THEY are the real victims around here.
Meghan even compared her former life living in a palace to the crippling freedom-robbing existence of coronavirus lockdowns, which must have sounded so empathetic to large families living at the top of tower blocks with three kids they’re trying to home-school and no job to pay for food.
‘I couldn’t even meet my friends for lunch!’ wailed the Duchess of Delusion, who flew to New York for a $500,000 baby shower with all her new-found celebrity pals, then flew back to London like any good eco-warrior on George Clooney’s carbon footprint guzzling private jet.
The sense of entitlement was so strong. Demanding their children be HRHs when the children of other siblings of monarchs (or heirs) are not, such as Princess Margaret, Princess Anne and Prince Edward.
Complaining they lost the financial support of the Royal Family, after they decided to pull out of being working royals.
‘Nobody told me how to curtsy or sing the British national anthem,’ wailed a 39-year-old woman, married to someone who can probably help with both.
Heh.
In terms of the claim that got lots of attention about concern over the colour of her children, this article notes that Markle and Harry contradicted each other over when the alleged conversation happened.
The massive change in behaviour and attitudes by Prince Harry used to baffle me, until I listened to a US podcast about a domestic violence survivor. She was a very senior executive, but her partner manipulated her but by bit to isolate her from all her friends and family, so that the only person she still had a strong relationship was him. And then he got her to move away to another city.
Note I am not suggesting Markle is physically abusive in any way, but that what she has done with Harry is pretty textbook psychological manipulation.
Not that at the end of the day I care that greatly. I like the UK Royal Family as a British institution but I strongly support NZ becoming a Republic. Then their antics will matter even less to us.
Meet Michael Parker. He had an ex-girlfriend. This is what he did to her:
She probably only survived as she escaped. Sadly she is thought to have killed herself since.
He was sentenced to nine years in jail for this vicious torture and assault. Thanks to the three strikes law he is ineligible for parole. Otherwise he could have a non-parole period as short as just three years.
Now you might say perhaps this was a one off. He was just having a bad day, and he should keep parole eligibility as he might not offend in future.
Well he has 48 previous convictions including threatening to kill, assault and unlawful sexual connection. I think it is safe to say he is going to keep on offending.
And here is were three strikes gets even better. The next time he does something like this he won’t get nine years with parole eligibility in three years. He won’t get nine years. He’ll get the maximum sentence of 20 years.
But when Labour repeal this law, he will go back to getting a series of shorter sentences with parole eligibility.
Remember this animal and his poor victim, when Labour repeal the three strikes law.
Stuff reports:
The Ministry of Health plans to ramp up surveillance testing for Covid-19 by hiring a private company to swab the saliva of border workers.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield on Thursday said the ministry wanted to use saliva tests for asymptomatic surveillance testing of border workers, likely swabbing twice a week on top of the routine use of nasal swabs.
Saliva testing for Covid-19 has yet to be substantially adopted in New Zealand, despite its use in countries like Australia and the United States.
A Government-appointed review in September said “saliva testing as a complementary methodology should be introduced as soon as possible”, and the ministry was in the early stages of a trial by February.
It shouldn’t have taken six months for this modest step.
Two universities in the US have managed to stay open by doing daily saliva testing of all staff and students.
You can get a result from a saliva test in around 90 minutes.
I’m told that if you did saliva testing in MIQ every day, then seven days of testing would give you just as much confidence about locating someone with Covid-19 as doing nasal swabs on Day 3 and 12. This means you could half the time people spent in MIQ which would double capacity.
The Stuff headline:
Gender bias in medicine still putting women’s health at risk
And the intro:
Mentally, physically and biologically, men and women are simply not built the same way. It sounds obvious, but we have only really begun to understand why.
These differences have not been reflected accurately in the field of medicine. Women’s health has too often been considered a niche area — even though it involves roughly 50 per cent of the world’s population.
What we do know is that being female puts us at higher risk of some of the most challenging conditions. Autoimmune diseases, for example, affect approximately 8 per cent of the global population, but 78 per cent of those affected are women.
Females are three times more likely than males to develop rheumatoid arthritis and four times more likely to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system.
This is al true and I’m all for more research into arthritis and MS.
But all we ever see are articles on female inequality, even in areas where in fact men have far worse outcomes. Overall male health outcomes are:
Would be nice to have some focus on these also.
The Herald reports:
Newstalk ZB breakfast host Mike Hosking says the Prime Minister is “running for the hills” and lacks a backbone after Jacinda Ardern cancelled her regular weekly interview with him.
Instead, Ardern says she and and other ministers will now appear on the country’s top-performing commercial radio show “as and when issues arise”.
Hosking said Ardern was “running for the hills” and the Government was “over being held to account”.
“She no longer wants to be on this programme each week. The somewhat tragic conclusion that is drawn is the questions she gets, the demand for a level of accountability … [is] a little bit tough,” Hosking told listeners this morning.
“They are just over being held to account.
“Without being too unkind to some of the other players in this market, the reality is the Prime Minister enjoys a more cordial and more compliant relationship with them. The questions are more softball, she favours a more benign pitch where the delivery can be dispatched to the boundary more readily with no obvious chance of an appeal,” he said.
PMs have been doing regular slots on the ZB morning show since 1987 when it was David Lange and Paul Holmes.
The Government has obviously decided to focus on doing Facebook Live broadcasts where no one can actually ask questions, rather than do shows where a host will vigorously question you.
Stuff reports:
The number of cultural reports and their cost to taxpayers has sky-rocketed, with mixed views on whether they are a good use of more than $3 million that could have been spent on rehabilitation rather than report writing.
Figures provided under the Official Information Act show the number of cultural reports invoiced to the Ministry of Justice shot up from 346 in 2019 to 1557 in 2020. The cost to the ministry rose from $639,311 in 2019 to $3,299,373 last year.
That’s $2,200 per report and I can almost guarantee you 90% of them are identical boiler plate templates with a small amount of customisation.
“But why are we as a nation spending $3 million a year on these reports, when it would be better spent on the prisoners and rehabilitation?”
Much of what is covered in S27 reports was and is still covered in pre-sentence reports, Money said.
“Anyone who has been a regular attendee of court over the years knows full well that judges have always considered mitigating factors such as those outlined in these reports, and have usually given a 15 to 20 per cent discount to the end sentence,” she said.
“If the system was functioning properly – and I think it was – we would be able to look at all of these things without spending exorbitant sums on S27 reports. And we’d do it for both sides, so the judge understood the effect on the survivor and their family and what rehabilitation might look like for them,” she said
“It’s hard not to be cynical about this and see it as a money-making exercise for some people. I know of some people who spend hours with whānau and write good, thorough reports for free. But others really are just ‘cut and paste’ and easy money.
“From what I see, the end result is the same with or without a cultural report,” Money said.
I can only agree that we should spend more money on rehabilitation and less money on report writing.