C&R released:

The deceitful collection of elector voting documents in the Māngere-Ōtāhuhu by-election is serious cause for concern and immediately needs to be addressed, says C&R candidate Malcolm Turner.

“I’ve received several reports that a person is knocking on local resident doors and asking to collect their voting papers. In one instance, this person demanded an elderly resident fill in their paperwork and then hand it to them.

“Three residents have confirmed to me the identity of the person in question and unfortunately it is alleged to be a candidate.

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“The rules are very clear. The candidate information guide states that voting documents should not be collected from electors by candidates or their assistants. Each elector should post or deliver their own voting document to the electoral officer.

“I have emailed the Returning Officer and Auckland Council asking them to officially inform candidates and their teams that interfering in the voting process by collecting another elector’s ballot is an offence under the Local Electoral Act 2001 and is liable on conviction.

Hopefully the electoral authorities will investigate this and charge the candidate, if he has truly been asking voters to have over their ballot papers to him.

J-Wire reports:

Israel transferred 2,000 vaccine doses to the Palestinian Authority (PA) on Monday, the first batch of a total of 5,000 doses. …

Despite the transfer of the vaccines this morning, the PA’s Ministry of Health denied accepting them, in a move that caused embarrassment among PA officials who found it difficult to explain the denial in light of photos taken at the Beituniya checkpoint of the transfer of the vaccines, a denial that led to the mocking of the PA on social media. Arab-language media sites reported on the transfer of the vaccines, and officials in Ramallah told TPS that the official denial was an embarrassing move while some called the Ministry of Health “liars.”

So even though under the Oslo Accords the responsibility for vaccinations for those living in Palestinian Authority areas is with the Palestinian Authority, Israel has donated 5,000 doses to the PA.

And the PA flatly lies and denies it has received any vaccines from Israel, despite photographic proof of them receiving them.

Mike Yardley writes:

With the 10th anniversary of the killer Christchurch earthquakes just three weeks away, I like many people were stunned and saddened to hear about Sir Bob Parker’s profound health battles over the weekend.

The former Christchurch mayor is in a long-term care facility after a major stroke and brain bleed that has left him with limited movement and confined to a wheelchair.

He is 68. …

I found it particularly crass over the weekend to notice one current city councillor on social media, who rubbished his mayoral record while he is facing the battle of his life.

Rather than wishing him well, this councillor opted to attack his shortcomings in the office instead.

Councillor Melanie Coker – gee there’s nothing like kicking a man when he’s down.

I find that absence of basic humanity repulsive.

Why is it some councillors place a greater premium on political recriminations than exercising basic decency?

A good question.

I note Cr Coker is the former campaign manager for Megan Woods who was thrashed by Bob Parker when she stood against him in 2007.

UPDATE: I’ve had sent to me the actual comments made and while they were (IMO) inappropriate, they were not nasty. The exchange was:

Johnny Davies

It has all gone down hill since he left. Get well Sir Bob

Melanie S A Coker

Johnny Davies it’s his Council that meant Christchurch was woefully under insured when the earthquakes hit.

Still ill advised, but not malicious.

Stuff reports:

New Plymouth and South Taranaki will both have a Māori ward after the 2022 election.

Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta was in New Plymouth on Monday to announce proposed legislation that will uphold council decisions to create Māori wards.

At present the wards can be overturned in public polls triggered by petitions supported by 5 per cent of council voters.

Mahuta proposes to have the new legislation through Parliament by February 21 to ensure that the nine councils around the country that were faced with holding a poll, including New Plymouth, will not need to.

This is a constitutional and electoral outrage.

The Government is going to ram a law change through Parliament under urgency to take away the vote from residents and cancel legally triggered referenda because they think people will vote the wrong way.

The Government thinks that voters can’t be trusted to make the right decision on Maori wards, so it is going to legislate away the right for referenda under urgency.

This is beyond disgusting.

A guest post by Alwyn Poole:

I know it is from Gettysburg but “government for the people” is surely a recognised democratic principle.

Near the beginning of the second term of this government – as we see through the Covid-response fog – people are slowly waking up to the significant societal problems that the government is making little or no progress on (and in some cases making worse).

A few of the issues and the people in charge:

1) The complete mess that Oranga Tamariki appears to be in with regards to early help and intervention for vulnerable children.

For OT the last three years had NZ First’s (the 2.6% party in 2020) list MP Tracey Martin as Minister for Children. Martin rated 2.6/5 (that 2.6 again) in the 2020 Mood of the Boardroom and came 5^th in the Ōhāriu electorate . Very little progress seems to have been made – or worse – the Chief Executive has now resigned. Martin is out of the House but apparently straight into a Ministry of Education contract and the children are now in the hands of Kelvin Davis – who the Mood of the Boardroom had last out of 25 Ministers.

2) The growing divide in education results between the rest of the developed world and the sliding NZ system. Add to that the stark and growing outcome deficits for children with learning difficulties, low decile, Maori and Pasifika that are prevalent right through all education levels.

Education is a huge portfolio and oversees a bureaucracy of over 3,000. Chris Hipkins may well be capable but simply has too many roles that have big daily commitments – Covid-Response, Public Sector, Leader of the House – on top of education.

3) The ineffective response to issues of child poverty.

Child Poverty reduction remains with the Prime Minister.

4) The fact that we cannot effectively house those that cannot house themselves – but get so caught up in the media and politics of those who can.

Phil Twyford managed to do worse with this than could have been conceived after talking a good game in opposition. Mood of the Boardroom had him sneaking into 24^th spot ahead of Davis. Now in the hands of Megan Woods and it seems to be becoming the Ministry of Announcements and Re-announcements. There is a huge inability to let the market be the market and deal effectively with where it fails or people get/find themselves in a bad spot.

5) The very mixed results around crime, prison (and the strong evidence for lack of education and rehabilitation within them).

Poto Williams and Kelvin Davis share roles around these issues. Davis seems to be a byword for mediocrity and non-involvement and it is a big promotion for Williams who was ranked 21/25 in her previous roles.

6) The complete mess around transport infrastructure development and the effects on business.

Michael Wood who did not feature as a Minister in the last government but has taken over from the hapless Twyford.

Assuming Positive Intent

To make the world (or their part of it) a better place is what I would think all politicians would have as a major part of their initial desire to go into this arena. Ardern has stated that her primary motivation for going into politics was to solve child poverty in NZ. Some clearly take in harmful, even if sincerely held, ideologies, that if fully let loose would cause far more harm than good.

What seems to go wrong? Is it the quality of the people and/or a lack of accountability?

I do not know the full answer re the quality of the people but it does seems to me that the nature of our political system is highly rebuffing for genuinely effective change agents, people successful in the private sector and mavericks who just get stuff done.

Douglas Adams may also have a point about those who seem to have an innate desire to lead (or control):

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Clearly this could apply to MPs but also to the massively paid heads of our bureaucracies who also largely escape scrutiny – with the possible exception of Grainne Moss. That situation may serve to have New Zealander’s look more closely at the leaders in our other problematic bureaucracies.

Accountability for genuinely bringing about improvement seems low and there are all kinds of spin and mechanisms to protect Ministers and others in leadership roles. We were once told by a senior Ministry of Education official that they considered their primary role was to “protect the Minister” – and that was under National.

I am not sure that our media (of all forms) genuinely dig for results and improvement for New Zealanders but seem more interested in scandal and too easily distracted by the issues that the government want front and centre.

Whoever is in power; a strong, intelligent, unified opposition has the role of holding the government to account. With this term barely started it will be of high interest to observe this. At least ACT will have more than one question a week – which will annoy the Speaker no end.

And – despite the positive attempt at the beginning of their time it appears from a distance that some MPs simply lose the plot and get caught up in the contest and personality bluster. Frankly – I think that they forget what they went there for in the first place and/or get consumed with the retention of power (and baubles) as opposed to doing the good they thought they were going to do. Wellington becomes their bubble and the rest of NZ and the non-political class can wait until the next election. Maybe one thing that could change is that all politicians be limited to three terms and then have to take a term out of the State sector entirely before seeking re-election.

What to do?

If it is to truly be “government for the people” then the “the people” have to more active than just voting (or not) every three years. The MPs and the Public Servants rank below the population as a hierarchy. People have to be active and challenge for change. When I was asked by a group of New York educators why the down-trodden groups in NZ accept the education results of their children without taking to the streets in protest … I had no answer.

Parliamentary opposition and media need to do their job superbly and when they do need to be applauded and supported. Work hard to keep politicians on the real problems. Stay off the click-bait and send the market signals that true journalism is needed. Journalists respond to readership – when they do high quality work we must let them know. Surely the system must change in some form to make being an MP, being in government or being in Public Sector leadership more attractive to highly effective and private sector proven people.  The way many things are run now – including the stodgy traditions and petty nonsense of the House you would find few who would bother. People who get things done generally have very low thresh-holds for boredom, don’t suffer fools lightly and kick against control for control sake.

Newshub reports:

Newshub can reveal New Zealand Firsts two female MPs from the last Parliament, Tracey Martin and Jenny Marcroft, have resigned from the party.

Martin, a former Government minister, said she quit because what the party has become now is not the party she joined. She said New Zealand First no longer matched her values. 

When asked whether that related to policy or culture, Martin said both. 

This is not surprising. Around half of NZ First’s former MPs have fallen out with Winston and quit the party. And when it comes to female MPs, I think every single one has left.

NZ First has only had eight female MPs over 27 years and at least seven of them have quit the party entirely – Ann Batten, Jenny Bloxham, Deborah Morris, Robyn McDonald, Tracey Martin, Asenati Taylor and Jenny Marcroft. Possible Barbara Stewart also.

Okay, no more species supremacist language everyone.

Barry Soper writes:

What’s so special about businesses in the Cook Islands?

Well, they must have something worth preserving that our businesses here don’t have. Their Prime Minister, Mark Brown, told Heather du Plessis-Allan on Newstalk ZB Drive last night that kind donors from this country are paying the Covid wage subsidy through until the end of March with support packages being planned by the Government there to go through until the end of June.

The kind donors are of course New Zealand taxpayers.

The wage subsidy in this country stopped well before the end of last year and since then a number of businesses have gone to the wall.

This is bizarre. Surely businesses in the Cooks should get the duration of wage subsidy as businesses in NZ?

Stuff reports:

The Government is not sure exactly how much it is spending on third-party social services, advice from Treasury has revealed.

Treasury were also not sure how to measure the impact of the billions of dollars being spent – which one “working estimate” put at $7.8b, or around 7 per cent of all Government spending.

The advice to the Minister of Finance Grant Robertson, released to Stuff under the Official Information Act, concerns a large reform of “social sector commissioning” being undertaken by the Government.

The Government commissions a huge range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to undertake on-the-ground work, particularly to alleviate poverty. NGOs provide everything from housing to legal advice to free school meals on behalf of the Government.

Some NGOs like Wellington City Mission provide wonderful support services. Others are basically taxpayer funded lobby groups.

If we’re spending 7% of the total budget on NGOs, we should be making sure we are getting value for money and that they are providing actual services that people need, rather than merely lobbying the Government.

One News reports:

The National Party will now contest the Māori electorate seats, 1 NEWS can reveal. …

National last stood in the Māori electorate seats in 2002. The following year, the party wanted the seats gone, with former leader Sir Bill English saying in 2003, “The purpose of the Māori seats has come to an end.”

Leader in 2004 Don Brash called the seats an “anachronism” in Parliament.

Under Judith Collins, National’s policy is set to change. 1 NEWS understands Collins was intending to inform the caucus and announce the change publicly next week.

This is a sensible thing to do. Of course National will not win any of the seats, but having candidates there may increase the party vote for National in those seats. And I doubt National gains a single party vote elsewhere by not standing candidates in them.

My preferred policies on the Maori seats is that there should be a referendum on them, with any change needing a majority both of all voters, and of voters of Maori descent.

The choice I would give in any referendum is between the status quo of (seven) Maori seats or the Royal Commission’s recommendation of abolishing the 5% threshold for Maori parties.

This would mean a Maori party with 0.4% of the vote or just 12,000 votes would gain a seat in Parliament. You would probably end up with four or five different Maori parties in Parliament – which would be good as Maori do not have just one view. You might have an Iwi based party, a urban Maori party, a left wing Maori Party, a conservative Maori Party, an environmental Maori Party etc etc.

Radio NZ reports:

Hundreds of companies have dumped contaminants – like blood, fat, and toxic chemicals such as ammonia and sulphides – into sewers in breach of their trade waste consents over the past year, RNZ can reveal.

Some are bakeries, supermarkets and takeaway shops dumping the contents of their dirty grease traps. But some of New Zealand’s biggest manufacturers and brands are also discharging contaminants – many of them dangerous – and most have breached the conditions of their consents multiple times.

Data obtained from 68 city and district councils paints a grim picture of compliance, showing at least 270 companies have breached their conditions, while in several areas, compliance is rare or non-existent.

So what is the penalty for breaching these consents?

Despite hundreds of consent holders dumping contaminants into the sewers in the past year, not a single one has been prosecuted. Councils can’t stomach the cost of taking a prosecution under the Local Government Act or the Resource Management Act.

How many have been slapped with fines? None. A legal loophole means councils have no power to issue them, so are instead forced to take an “educative” approach with errant firms.

The upshot is hundreds of companies getting away with breaking the rules, and potentially damaging public infrastructure and polluting the environment. And RNZ can reveal successive governments have known about the issue for nearly two decades, but have done nothing to stop it.

So there is no penalty!

This is farcical. No wonder companies are always breaching the consents when there is no penalty for doing so.

“To be honest… it annoys us greatly,” Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) principal policy advisor Mike Reid says .

He’s explaining the loophole in the law that allows companies to get away with dumping their waste, knowing the council can’t fine them and they’re highly unlikely to face prosecution. Reid is frustrated that successive governments have failed to fix the error in the Local Government Act 2002 that prevents councils from enforcing their own bylaws with fines.

For the past 18 years, his organisation has written to every incoming local government minister urging an amendment to allow councils to issue fines to those that breach consents.

LGNZ President Stuart Crosby dispatched the latest letter just last month to Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Environment Minister David Parker and reminded them officials have been fobbing off concerns for 18 years.

“It is an issue that LGNZ has raised with multiple governments since 2002, but with no success,” the letter reads.

He signs off the missive: “We write to both of you because until councils are able to infringe breaches of, for example, trade waste bylaws, there will continue to be adverse effects on the quality of our freshwater.”

The Act was always supposed to give councils the power to issue fines of up to $200,000 for trade waste consent breaches.

“The ability to have an infringement fine was an essential way to being able to change behaviours without a lot of bureaucratic waste of time,” Reid says.

But after the Act passed and the regulations were being written up, Crown Law discovered a problem.

“What we had intended was that there would be one regulation that would be applied to every bylaw made under the Act… The way the legislation was written, it actually required regulation to be written for every bylaw a council wished to use. Given there are 78 councils… if a regulation was needed for every bylaw adopted…it would be totally, utterly impractical,” he says.

And repeated pleas to tidy up the Act so the rules could be carried out as intended have fallen on deaf ears.

You think a Government that claims to care about the environment would make fixing the Act a priority.

The Herald reports:

Former Police Minister Stuart Nash told Newstalk ZB the Government had met the target of 1800 new officers, claiming there was a misunderstanding in the wording previously used.

There is no misunderstanding, only misinformation.

“This is funded out for five years, it always was and we more than delivered our promise,” Nash said.

“What we actually said is we would deliver 1800 new police and we delivered 2200 new police.”

This is bullshit.

The policy and promise was for additional police. Nash himself said so.

However, at the Police Association’s national conference in October 2019, Nash was quoted the opposite when asked for clarification.

“Eighteen hundred more police, over and above the current rate, not 1800 more graduates, 1800 new police,” he said.

They know they are lying when they claim it was “new” police not additional.

Stuff reports:

The Government’s multi-billion dollar plan to build Auckland light rail – likely the most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history – didn’t analyse value for money when its final stage Cabinet paper was drawn up early last year.

This was despite the Government spending more than two years investigating light rail proposals and $5 million on a process to work out who should even build it.

It was only in February of 2020, when a draft Cabinet paper was being drawn up to finally select who would build and run the light rail line that Treasury, the Government’s economic policy shop, warned that any final decision should be delayed for another month because a standard cost-benefit analysis hadn’t been completed to find out whether the project was actually worthwhile.

“We are concerned that the Cabinet paper does not include a value for money evaluation,” Treasury said.

So Cabinet was voting on who they should use to do a $10 billion light rail project and they didn’t even have a cost benefit analysis!!

Transport Minister Michael Wood’s office said these decisions were made by the previous minister, Phil Twyford, so he could not say whether a cost-benefit analysis was eventually carried out.

Bullshit. Of course the current Minister would know.

In November, the Auditor-General wrote to the Ministry of Transport warning that the closed process it had been running to choose who would build and run the light rail line couldn’t necessarily guarantee “the best deal for everyone” including getting “value for money”.

Maybe they didn’t do a cost benefit analysis because they knew it would show the costs would be massively more than the benefits?

The last light rail CBA I saw was for light rail in Wellington. The conclusion of the Wellington Regional Council was that it would have a benefit to cost ratio of 0.05, which is close to zero. Basically for every $1,000 spent it would deliver $50 of benefits.

NewstalkZB reports:

New Zealand’s border personnel will be vaccinated against Covid-19 within three weeks of the first immunisation shipment reaching our shores, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.

But the country’s borders are likely to remain closed to most of the world for the rest of the year, as reopening them poses “too great a risk to our health and economy”.

Remember how they were talking travel bubbles with the Pacific and Australia in the first quarter of this year!

Spiked reports:

‘Freeze peach!’ That has long been the mocking, infantile cry of the middle-class left whenever anyone complains about clampdowns on freedom of speech. There is no ‘free-speech crisis’, radicals insist. No Platforming right-wingers on university campuses is not censorship – it’s just students freely choosing not to associate with people who have horrible views. And alt-right types being turfed off Twitter and Facebook is not censorship, either – that’s just private companies enforcing their terms and conditions. (Who knew lefties were so supportive of private property rights?)

Will these censorship deniers change their tune now that the left itself is coming under censorious attack? Amazingly, probably not. But perhaps there will be a smidgen of self-reflection. Some of the left-wing architects and cheerleaders of contemporary censorship, including Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, which has backed the No Platform policy for decades, are now being No Platformed themselves. ‘This is a disgrace!’, they cry, which would be funny if censorship were not so serious. These people helped to build the infrastructure of modern censorship, with its determination to crush ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensive’ views, and now they’re shocked to find themselves falling victim to it? Have they not read any history books at all?

On Friday, the SWP, one of the largest left-wing organisations in the UK, was taken off Facebook. The party’s own page was removed and so were the pages of dozens of SWP activists. The SWP described FB’s actions as a ‘silencing of political activists’. They’re right. This was a unilateral act of ideological censorship carried out by the capitalist elites of Silicon Valley against a perfectly legal party based in the UK. It demonstrated the terrifying power of the Big Tech oligarchy, which clearly has no respect whatsoever for borders, territory or democratically made national laws and feels that it can reach into any nation state it chooses and switch off the oxygen of publicity to any party, group or individual it disapproves of. The attack on the SWP was indeed a disgrace, and it’s good that the SWP’s FB pages have now been restored.

But there is something spectacularly hollow about the SWP’s complaints. The SWP has played a key role in promoting No Platform policies on campus, which essentially blacklist certain groups and individuals from speaking to students …

Can only agree with Spiked that the decision by Facebook was wrong, but that there is an irony in promoters of cancel culture ended up canceled.

Tom Pullar-Strecker writes:

We would be in a better position fending off Covid-19 if the Cabinet had made a different decision when it met on August 3.

About now – nearly six months later – we could all be getting Kiwi-designed CovidCards through the post, which people would wear to help contact tracers track down close contacts in the event of an outbreak.

The Government would then be facing another tough choice; should it require everyone wear the cards immediately, or only at times and in places where there had been community transmission of the virus?

Or should wearing the cards be purely voluntary, as is the case with the tools provided by the existing Covid Tracer app?

As it stands though, none of those options are available to it.

Instead, we are crossing our fingers that the virus doesn’t breach MIQ, with many of us fretting about the low take-up of the Covid Tracer app and ruing human nature.

A card which automatically use bluetooth to register which other cards are nearby would have been a far superior option. Very few people are still regularly scanning in to places they visit.

The CovidCard had the advantage that everyone could use them, and they didn’t need to connect to internet or mobile networks, he noted.

But they would probably take six months to roll-out, would need to be replaced every 12 months when their batteries died, and would probably cost at least $163 million over two years, he said.

$163 million is a lot less than the cost of locking Auckland down again.