Paul Matthew from ITP writes:

On one hand, it’s their network so their rules. On the other, these companies have grown to the point that they’re now a core part of the Internet itself – and their actions have a significant impact on everyone. They’re now in a position to – and arguably do – shape public opinion by either shadow- or outright- banning views they don’t approve of. 

Given the scale of these services, this means it’s now up to a very small group of extremely rich and powerful unelected men (mostly) to decide what is acceptable speech and content for Society as a whole, above and beyond that deemed in law.

Surely we all have to agree that that’s a problem.

And we’re not just talking about speech. For example, these services have the proven ability to massively influence election outcomes and much more. At the other end of the spectrum, their algorithms can actively push content to you that research [pdf] suggests doesn’t just shape opinion, but that can fully radicalise large groups of people. 

So what’s the answer?

It surely has to be recognising that once a “service” reaches a large enough scale, their obligation has to at least partially expand from just their shareholders to society as a whole. And looked at in this context, you could certainly argue that this might include obligations around not censoring content and users except where content is explicitly illegal – as doing so infringes their right to free speech (remember, we’re thinking societal obligations here).

I think this will be one of the huge issues of the decade. Being banned from Twitter is not the same as being kicked off a small blog such as Kiwiblog. When an platform reaches giant global status, their decisions have profound impacts on free speech.

The Herald reports:

A man who killed a stranger after headbutting him during a dispute over a supermarket car park has become eligible for parole – just six months after being sentenced for the death.

Emilio Richard Mac Tanirau Whaanga appeared before the Parole Board late last year, just months after being given a sentence of three years and three months in prison.

In December 2019, the 24-year-old, who at the time was serving a one-year sentence of intensive supervision for stomping on another person’s neck, became angry with a fellow shopper after believing he had parked in an incorrect car park in Lower Hutt.

So he was already on “supervision” for stomping on someone’s neck, which is pretty close to attempted murder. After getting an insanely light sentence for that he then killed someone because he thought they were parking wrongly, and he gets just 39 months for that. And now he is already eligible for parole.

And the Government wants to abolish the three strikes law so he can carry on offending with more ridiculously light sentences.

A police summary of facts read to the court after Tanirau Whaanga pleaded guilty early last year revealed he went off to do his shopping after knocking the man out, leaving him lying on the ground.

On his return from the supermarket he walked back past the victim without bothering to help and tried to drive away. He only stopped when he was blocked by a taxi.

He was arrested by police at the carpark soon after and tried to justify his actions saying the victim had walked into his head.

Sounds remorseful eh.

Tanirau Whaanga read out a letter of remorse to the victim’s family during his sentencing, saying he was “ashamed” and “highly dishonoured”.

“It has broken my heart knowing what has happened . . . forever grieving in sorrow and regret,” he said.

“I’m truly sorry from the bottom of my heart, and God bless.”

Bullshit PR written by his lawyer.

Peter Dunne wrote:

The question of whether Medsafe would approve the Pfizer Covid19 vaccine was finally resolved this week. Up until then, the constant and near fever-pitch “will they, won’t they” speculation had been one of the biggest “beat-ups” of recent times.

There was never any doubt that Medsafe would approve the vaccine – for a couple of reasons. First, the idea that New Zealand regulators would find evidence against approving the vaccine that no other regulators anywhere in the world had found was simply preposterous. And, second, once Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Agency (TGA) approved the vaccine, as had happened a couple of weeks ago, it was really game-over as far as any potentially different decision in New Zealand was concerned. This is because since the Clark government’s failed attempt in the early 2000s to merge Medsafe with the TGA the standard practice on both sides of the Tasman has been to regard approval of a new medicine in either Australia or New Zealand as approval in both countries, to save duplication of effort and resources.

New Zealand Ministers and officials should have known this full well, which makes their public statements that notwithstanding the worldwide approvals, followed by the TGA’s decision, it would be unwise to prejudge what Medsafe might conclude, look utterly hollow and ludicrous.

But this needs to be seen in a wider context. Having won the election so decisively last year because of public approval of its handling of the pandemic crisis, the government knows only too well the political benefits to be derived from continuing its close focus on Covid19 related issues. Given the inevitability of Medsafe’s approval of the vaccine, there was absolutely no justifcation for the Prime Minister’s special announcement that Medsafe had reached a favourable decision, let alone the separate detailed statement from the Director-General of Health of how the decision had been arrived at. None of it was news – it would have been more newsworthy had Medsafe not approved the vaccine – but it was just another occasion where the government could play the Covid19 card to good effect. By drawing out an announcement that anyone with any knowledge of these issues knew was always going to be an approval of the vaccine, the government was able to keep the focus on itself and then look like the good guys when it was able to announce as some dramatic breakthrough the only decision its independent regulator could have made, the same one which virtually every other regulator in the world had already made.

This is spot on. The media all breathlessly reported this as a major significant announcement, when in fact it was never in doubt. They got played.

Similarly, with the resumption of the daily 1:00 pm press conferences. There has been nothing said in any of those over the last couple of weeks that could not have been covered just as adequately in a departmental press release. But a factual press release without the accompanying spin would obscure the point that the government really is in full control of the situation. The press conferences are less an exercise in conveying information, than one of showing who is in control.

Again spot on.

A guest post by Martin Hanson:

In the 1990s two American social psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, began research to find out whether there was any relationship between people’s abilities and how accurately they judge their own abilities. They used undergraduate students as their subjects, and their research was published in 1999 with the title “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

The results showed that people of low ability tend to be ignorant of their ignorance and have an inflated view of themselves; without self-awareness, such people are less able to judge their ability. In contrast, competent students tended to underestimate their ability relative to others.

Known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, ignorance of one’s own ignorance is widespread in society, but when it dominates New Zealand’s education culture, it’s beyond serious, and indeed terminal, without radical action from the top. The essay that follows is my attempt to show that this is not likely to happen.

* * *

International comparisons
After I retired from the classroom I gave up trying to get NZ high school biology education to begin an honest conversation about the serious lack of academic rigour in high school biology, but the publication of New Zealand’s Education Delusion; how bad ideas ruined a once world-leading school system, a report by Briar Lipson of the New Zealand Initiative, has stirred me to take up the cudgel again.

With the aid of graphs, Lipson’s report presents unequivocal evidence from international studies that New Zealand students are falling behind their overseas counterparts. Some brief quotes from Lipson’s report:

“The OECD’s Programme for International Achievement (PISA) measures how well 15-year-olds apply their knowledge and skills in reading, maths and science literacy in real world contexts. In the year 2000, out of 32 countries, New Zealand’s students proudly ranked 3^rd in reading, 3^rd in mathematics, and 6^th in science literacy. By 2018 they had declined to 6^th, 19^th, and 6^th places respectively.”

The BBC reports:

The men always wore masks, Tursunay Ziawudun said, even though there was no pandemic then.

They wore suits, she said, not police uniforms.

Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a “black room”, where there were no surveillance cameras.

Several nights, Ziawudun said, they took her.

“Perhaps this is the most unforgettable scar on me forever,” she said.

“I don’t even want these words to spill from my mouth.”

Tursunay Ziawudun spent nine months inside China’s vast and secretive system of internment camps in the Xinjiang region. According to independent estimates, more than a million men and women have been detained in the sprawling network of camps, which China says exist for the “re-education” of the Uighurs and other minorities. …

First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.

Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.

Ziawudun has spoken to the media before, but only from Kazakhstan, where she “lived in constant fear of being sent back to China”, she said. She said she believed that if she revealed the extent of the sexual abuse she had experienced and seen, and was returned to Xinjiang, she would be punished more harshly than before. And she was ashamed, she said.

It is impossible to verify Ziawudun’s account completely because of the severe restrictions China places on reporters in the country, but travel documents and immigration records she provided to the BBC corroborate the timeline of her story. Her descriptions of the camp in Xinyuan county – known in Uighur as Kunes county – match satellite imagery analysed by the BBC, and her descriptions of daily life inside the camp, as well as the nature and methods of the abuse, correspond with other accounts from former detainees.

What is happening to the Uighurs looks to be arguably the greatest systematic human rights abuse of a minority group since the Holocaust.

The US has referred to it as genocide. We should concur and call it out for what it is.

One News reports:

1 NEWS can exclusively reveal data from homes.co.nz and Infometrics shows the more houses that are built in a region, the slower the house price rise is.

In Hamilton, 14.8 percent of its housing stock has been built in the last decade, and house prices have risen by just over 13 per cent.

Christchurch and Tauranga also sit around the 14 per cent mark.

In Auckland, where just 9.5 per cent of its homes have been built in the last 10 years, price rises have roared past 20 per cent.

The capital fares even worse, with Wellington having had just 7.1 per cent of its housing stock built in that time, but its price rise is over 22 per cent.

Very good use of data to show what many have already argued – the problem is supply not demand.

Michael Basset writes:

Along the way, our modern Ministry of Education reveals that it is woefully ignorant of historical facts. For example, far from rushing to add New Zealand to the British Empire, Britain was extremely cautious before dispatching William Hobson; the Colonial Office was seriously worried that the Musket Wars between Maori had reached the stage where nothing short of military intervention would protect Maori. The Ministry’s paper makes elementary grammatical mistakes with its presentation, failing sometimes to get its nouns and verbs in agreement. I have only a few words of Te Reo. I wonder if all the Maori explanations that will be understood by only 2 to 3% of the population are more accurately expressed?

The content of the Ministry’s presentation is utterly depressing. Fancy selecting those three “big ideas”! Translated, the first one is that Maori history is fundamental to understanding everything about New Zealand. The second one, translated, is that the consequences of unstated, but implied, wicked colonization continue “to influence all aspects” of our history. The third is that colonists’ power exerted over the years has invariably inflicted damage, injustice and conflict on Maori. Nothing about economic development which lifted New Zealand after the Treaty from a state of anarchy where 25% of the entire Maori workforce between 1810 and 1840 had been killed and eaten, and others enslaved. The development of the modern economy is of no account in the Ministry these days where no one seems to give a thought to where their salaries come from. And, as I predicted, there’ll be no mention of the Musket Wars in the new curriculum.

Dr Bassett has three degrees in history, was a senior lecturer in history and a member of the Waitangi Tribunal. He has published 13 history books and authored four biographies for the Dictionary of NZ Biography.

If there’s one thing Jacinda Ardern does flawlessly, it’s announce things. 

It’s quite a skill, really, making announcements about a policy without any sort of plan to achieve it, and then have the country believe that what you’ve just said is significant, transformative or, as we heard this week, foundational. National was criticised for this all the time and often quite fairly. Under this government, however, such expediency has almost become a form of art. 

Some of us are a bit more cynical, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of people – including some in the media – find it easier to just go along with the polished soundbites provided to us by politicians. 

That’s why I couldn’t help but chuckle when I woke up a few weeks ago to the following Stuff headline: Labour announces that it will make more housing announcements this year.  

Finally, someone who was bold enough to point out that Labour’s first housing announcement of 2021 had already been made – and in May of last year, no less! 

What this “re-announcement” revealed was a vulnerability with Labour that is hard to ignore. It simply does not know what to do about what was once a “crisis” but which Ardern has since termed “the housing problem.”  

By February of this year, the Government will have considered advice from both Treasury and the Reserve Bank to try to take some heat out of the market. But Labour has been in power for three and a half years now. Why has it taken this long just to receive advice on how to tackle the market, and what on earth was it doing during that period? 

If we go back to the election campaign of 2017, Labour was yelling from the top of its lungs about the housing crisis – and rightly so. It even called for a state of emergency to be declared. But the current state of the market is not at all what Labour promised its voters.  

Perhaps it was naivety, or perhaps it was just general uselessness. Either way, this is not the transformational change that Ardern vowed would occur under her leadership. 

The most ardent of Government supporters will point to the banning of foreign investors, the good intentions behind KiwiBuild, fiddling around with stricter taxes, and the acceleration of the social housing programme as examples of action it has taken to address the issue. 

But nothing seems to have made housing any more affordable. Quite the opposite, in fact. In 2020 alone, the average house price went up from $628,000 to $749,000 – an increase of more than double the average wage for a worker. Home ownership is, quite simply, becoming nothing more than a fantasy for many hard-working New Zealanders. 

Yet despite home ownership falling in recent years to below 65%, most kiwis own their own home. It’s probably reasonable to assume they are personally satisfied with the capital gain their most significant asset is making right now. You don’t hear too many stories about people selling at below market value out of any sense of solidarity. 

Better still, Ardern has guaranteed that their property will continue to increase in value. And for those who can afford to buy multiple properties – and have the leverage to do so – it’s only rational to make such an investment. In fact, it would be irrational not to – particularly with such low interest rates. 

Traditionally, we wouldn’t associate Labour with rich property owners. That’s the capital class. But here’s the thing. Labour has switched teams. It’s no longer prioritising workers or young families who are locked out of the market.  

Perhaps Ardern knows that she’s got the traditional left wing Labour vote locked in so transformational change can wait for them. Or perhaps she just no longer cares. What is clear, however, is that she wants to lock in centrist New Zealand too. They’re the people who voted for Labour in 2020 and they’re also, for the most part, property owners. The Government would be foolish to risk their majority all for the aspirational first home buyer. 

David Seymour summed it up perfectly when he said that Labour has “overseen the greatest transfer of wealth from those who work to those who own in the history of our country.” 

The harsh reality is that, unless the Government takes responsibility when it comes to the housing supply, rapid house price growth will continue. If it fails to do so, an entire generation of New Zealander’s will be locked out of the market. We will go from a property-owning democracy to a nation of renters. 

What a sad indictment of Labour’s legacy that will be. 

Monique Poirier has a Masters degree in Political Studies, and is a former small business owner and Parliamentary staffer. She is the Campaigns Manager for the Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance.

The head of the Tokyo Olympics is in trouble for saying:

“If we increase the number of female board members, we have to make sure their speaking time is restricted somewhat, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying,” said Mori, according to local media.

So he said he didn’t want more female board members as they speak too much. And what did he say when he tried to apologise?

Mori, 83, apologised at a hastily called news conference, but when pressed on whether he really thought women talked too much, he said: “I don’t listen to women that much lately so I don’t know”.

Oh dear.

Mori is a former PM of Japan and was once described as having “the heart of a flea and the brain of a shark”. I can’t work out if that is an insult as sharks are quite intelligent. I suspect we can conclude heart of a flea is not complimentary.

NewstalkZB reports:

At the pōwhiri – her fourth as Prime Minister – Ardern had announced the first Matariki holiday would be on June 24, 2022.

That was applauded by those present – a much smaller crowd than normal after a number of those who usually attend opted to stay away following the recent Covid-19 case in Northland.

However, Ngāpuhi elder Hone Sadler reminded Ardern of other problems Māori faced, referring to imprisonment rates, health problems, suicides and education, as well as housing

Ardern later defended the progress made on those other issues, saying not everything could be solved in a year – and denied she was simply turning up with promises she could not meet.

They’ve been in office now for three and a half years, not just one year.

And Labour failed to deliver on almost every major promise they made in 2017.

She said she would never give up on trying to make progress in health, housing or education.

To quote Yoda, “Do. Or do not. There is no try”

The BBC reports:

The UK will apply to join a free trade area with 11 Asia and Pacific nations on Monday, a year after it officially left the EU.

Joining the group of “fast-growing nations” will boost UK exports, the government says.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership – or CPTPP – covers a market of around 500 million people.

This is good news for New Zealand and good news for the UK. Fewer trade barriers helps exporters and consumers in both countries.

Grant McCallum writes on FB:

Yesterday a young man was driving from Whangarei to our farm near Maungaturoto when he was pulled over by the police. His girlfriend wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, he was on his learners license, his WoF had expired and he had two bald tyres. The two police decided, after he told them he was on his way to a job interview, to park up the car, drop his girlfriend home, and then drive him to our place. A distance of about 75km. This is outstanding community policing. They decided to give him a break. And it has paid off. We gave him the job. He starts on Monday. I then dropped him back to Whangarei. The rest is up to him. Great work Northland Police. New Zealand Police thank you for selecting and training such good people.

What a great story. Well done cops.

Stuff reports:

Treaty Negotiations Minister Andrew Little has announced a new $150 million Crown investment fund to cover Ngāpuhi Treaty negotiations.

Little said it would be operated by the Crown for the benefit of Ngāpuhi.

The purpose would be to make a return on the money while long-running, and delayed, negotiations continue with the hapū of the northern iwi.

This is bizarre.

By effectively granting the money up front, this removes the incentive to actually do a Treaty settlement. The fact that other Iwi have had their settlements and profiting from them acts as an incentive to settle.

I’m 100% in favour of Ngāpuhi receiving a large settlement for the wrongs done to them by the Crown. But the settlement needs to be, well, settled.

Stuff reports:

Luxury department store David Jones will close its Wellington store in June 2022, after months of uncertainty over its future. However, its Auckland outlet will keep its doors open.

The flagship store, which opened in Lambton Quay in the heart of the city’s Golden Mile in July 2016, is understood to have told its employees on Wednesday that the business will shut its doors.

The store is home to some of the world’s most prestigious fashion brands, including the likes of Alexander McQueen, Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Prada and Versace.

Very sad for the staff, and customers.

It will leave a huge retail space available. I’m not sure there will be many other retailers that could occupy it.

The Government is planning to rush through Parliament under urgency retrospective legislation that will cancel nine local referendums on whether or not to establish a Maori Ward in nine local authorities. This will disenfranchise several hundred thousand New Zealanders.

They effectively argue that it is vital to have Maori wards, because without them, racist New Zealanders will not vote for Maori and they will be under-represented in local Government. Nanaia Mahuta said that “Increasing Māori representation is essential to ensuring equity in representation”. This implies that there is a huge under-representation.

This graph shows the proportion of local government elected officials who are Maori and the trend is remarkable, and very positive. Since 2004 the proportion of Maori has tripled from 4.2% to 13.5%. This shows that New Zealanders have been electing Maori to local authorities, without needing Maori wards.

This is a good thing. I’m proud of the fact that New Zealand has such high levels of representation from the indigenous population – both at central and local Government level. What was arguably a problem in 2007 has been solved through more Maori standing for Councils and more voters voting for them.

The 2018 census found 13.7% of adult New Zealanders were Maori. And the proportion elected in 2018 was 13.5%. Almost perfectly proportional.

So don’t fall for the big lie that Maori wards are needed to get adequate Maori representation on local authorities. It is simply false.

CBS reports:

The names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and other prominent figures including California Senator Dianne Feinstein will be removed from 44 San Francisco public schools, a move that stirred debate Wednesday on whether the famously liberal city has taken the national reckoning on America’s racist past too far.

The decision by the San Francisco Board of Education in a 6-1 vote Tuesday night affects one-third of the city’s schools and came nearly three years after the board started considering the idea. The approved resolution calls for removing names that honored historical figures with direct or broad ties to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation” of human beings.

They really are out of this world.

Reason reports:

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and yet the country has run out of gasoline. The socialist government has lost the capacity to extract oil from the ground or refine it into a usable form. The industry’s gradual deterioration was 18 years in the making, tracing back to then-President Hugo Chávez’s 2003 decision to fire the oil industry’s most experienced engineers in an act of petty political retribution.

The near-total collapse in the nation’s oil output in the ensuing years is a stark reminder that the most valuable commodity isn’t a natural resource, but the human expertise to put it to productive use.

It really is quite incredible. They have the largest oil reserves in the world and they have run out of petrol.

The little gas that is still available comes via periodic shipments from Iran. But the Venezuelan government doesn’t officially charge at most gas stations. It uses a quota system, so filling a tank can mean waiting in line for days.

Back to the USSR!

“PDVSA once had over 20 refineries around the world,” says José Toro Hardy, an economist and former director at PDVSA from 1996-1999. “We were able to move our oil from the nation’s subsoil into the tanks of American drivers,” he said. “And the entire process was managed by Venezuelan entities with Venezuelan oil wells, pipelines, Venezuelan tankers…We had built something gigantic, but suddenly, we were faced with a costly historic accident: Hugo Chávez won the election.

Chávez held power from 1999 to 2013, when he died of cancer. He dubbed his policy agenda “socialism of the 21st century.” It turned one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America into the site of a humanitarian crisis. Chávez rewrote the constitution, clamped down on the freedom of the press, nationalized over a thousand private companies, and destroyed the national currency through hyperinflation. 

And at least the people have equality – everyone is in poverty.