An excellent article at Quillette:

These emotional attempts to suppress controversial or unpopular speech have increasingly made use of what I call the “Mourner’s Veto”—individuals will say that a speaker or a piece of writing has caused them to become distressed or sad or angry or frightened, and they will support these claims with allegations of “harm” or even threats to their “right to exist.” Reasonable debate and discussion then becomes impossible as activists make unfalsifiable but furiously emotive claims about alleged threats to their safety and wellbeing amid much weeping and claims of exhaustion and mental fragility. It is not healthy for the limits of permissible speech to be dictated by the most sensitive person in the room, nor to allow emotional appeals to supplant robust argument as the most effective strategy in a debate.

Spot on. We saw this at Massey University when some staff said that having Don Brash on campus made them feel unsafe.

First, offer unhappy employees a graceful exit. In response to the outcry at Penguin, some commentators suggested that the insubordinate employees should be fired. This is a mistake. Those employees have a right to hold and express their views. Although authors’ speech rights should obviously be paramount at a publishing house, we needn’t sacrifice those of its employees. The firm Coinbase recently offered an excellent model in the face of political pressure from staff—they offered any employee who wished to leave a generous severance package. My understanding is that few took it up.

That’s a good idea.

Second, companies need to get into the habit of ignoring social media and discontinuing the practice of outsourcing their public relations or editorial decisions to Twitter (New York Times, I’m looking at you). Social media has many advantages, but it can often swirl into a cesspool of performative outrage that in no way reflects what the average person cares about.

Excellent advice. Major corporates like Vodafone get spooked on the basis of half a dozen people tweeting about something.

In Parliament Tamati Coffey said:

It has been 20 years in the making and a whole lot of frustration, because Māori representation on local council has been dismal. In fact, because of the small provision, which enables 5 percent of the local voting constituency to be able to overturn what’s essentially, as the Race Relations Commissioner said, a racist piece of policy, a discriminatory piece of policy, actually because of that reason we have a lack of Māori being able to represent Māori at the decision-making table.

13.7% of the adult population are Maori and 13.5% of those elected to local authorities in 2019 are Maori.

Where are the fact checkers when we need them.

Stuff reports:

Wellington’s mayor is introducing the most challenging budget he’s ever seen, with the proposition of a 14 per cent rates increase for the city.

The capital is facing a myriad of cost pressures including ageing water pipes, insurance hikes, seismic issues, transport plans, and its social housing portfolio.

They want you to think it is all about the water pipes but actually it is an inability to prioritise spending.

They’re wasting over $100 million on a second music venue. The convention centre is likely to be a huge loss maker and they are proposing a massive $180 million central library rebuild.

How many people living in Wellington have had a 14% increase in income this year?

The Times reports:

Midwives have been told to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding” and to replace the term “mother” with “mother or birthing parent” as part of moves to be more trans-friendly.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust is the first in the country to formally implement a gender inclusive language policy for its maternity services department, which will now be known as “perinatal services”.

Staff have been instructed that “breastmilk” should be replaced with the phrases “human milk”, “breast/chestmilk” or “milk from the feeding mother or parent”.

I wish I could say this is satire, but it isn’t.

Stuff reports:

Radio host Sean Plunket has “decided to leave” Magic Talk, according to the company.

He was off-air Tuesday and Wednesday, afterStuff reported crisis talks about his future with the station on Sunday.

Plunket and his bosses at MediaWorks initially declined to comment. On Wednesday afternoon, MediaWorks chief executive Cam Wallace issued a statement saying Plunket “has decided to leave”.

His exit comes after advertisers threatened a boycott of the station, with concerns about hosts allowing racist rhetoric to air on the station. The incident to spark the boycott, a caller who told fill-in host John Banks that Māori culture is “from the Stone Age”, did not involve Plunket.

So Plunket has been forced out because of something John Banks said!

The owners are obviously terrified of the threat from corporates whom determine their advertising policy based on likes on Twitter. Anything controversial must be boycotted.

The only good thing about all this is that the driving out of almost all non-woke voices from broadcasting creates a huge opportunity for others. If I was Rupert Murdoch I’d be looking very keenly at New Zealand.

Steve Morris writes:

According to her advice, released under the OIA, the Minister expects Commissioners to set a “robust” budget as councillors, chosen by you, won’t “set rates at a realistic level.” The DIA has advised her that a “realistic” level is “a rate rise of 18-20% year-on-year” over the next ten years. This is despite Tauranga already having some of the highest residential rates of any city in New Zealand.

That’s on top of a 6.5 per cent increase for rubbish disposal that commissioners will implement later this year. Taking a conservative view of compounding rates, the minister’s instruction to her commissioners will see an 80 per cent increase in TCC rates over the next three years. 

Councillors need to worry about the public acceptability of rates increases. Commissioners do not. The appointment of Commissioners may have been warranted, but they should not be used to impose massive rates increases on residents.

This chart shows the number of students who are absent from school more than 10% of the time. In eight years it has gone from 135,000 to 315,000.

And what is the Government’s answer to this. Stuff reports:

“Do we have a culture of excuses for children not being at school? Like somehow it is the school’s fault for not being exciting enough?” Goldsmith asked.

“What I’m seeing is lots of talk, lots of concern, but still a culture of excuses.”

Secretary for Education Iona Holsted said prosecution was not the answer and schools needed to be desirable.

“The answer is to make sure schools are places kids want to be, because they have alternatives. They walk,” Holsted said.

This is, with respect, bullshit. First of all what part of “compulsory education” is hard to understand.

But the truancy is not something happening just with say bored teenagers. It is in every year.

The Year 2 truancy rate has climbed from 29% to 43%. Is the Government really saying that this is because six year olds have alternatives??? Do we really think six year olds are not attending because they don’t see school as desirable?

This is a parenting issue. We need to stop blaming everything on the system and start talking personal responsibility.

Bomber Bradbury writes:

I philosophically hate religion for many, many, many fucking good reasons, but because NZ is a liberal progressive democracy, I tolerate religion.

I tolerate Scientology, I tolerate the Exclusive Brethren & I tolerate those who believe in a magical invisible flying wizard for all their personal choices!

I also tolerate that they don’t pay tax – BUT I SURE AS FUCK refuse point blank to fear them!

We lose free speech to criticise religion? How the hell is that anything other than a victory for the terrorist?

This is a liberal progressive SECULAR Democracy, if you want to believe in crazy myths and crazy invisible magical flying beings, that is your total right to, but equally, it’s my right to mock those beliefs when they collide with my individual rights

Absolutely.

You should not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their religious belief, but that is vastly different from a law that prevents you from criticising or even attacking the religion itself.

I read the terrorist’s manifesto and I don’t recall him referring to Trans Allies or gender identity, so why criminalising the misuse of pronouns is being mooted as a response to white supremacy terrorism is utterly beyond me! …

Why don’t we call this push for Gender Identity Hate Speech for what it really is? The criminalisation of Rachel Stewart & Ani O’Brien.

You have all seen how feral the trans debate between Gender Critical Feminists (TERFS by their enemies) and the Fourth Wave Feminist, Non Gender Binary Activist, Trans Ally Woke Stormtroopers has been online.

We’ve all seen the woke public shaming and cancel culture lynchings erupt in our social media feeds, like violent 1930s street fights as various factions attempt to mutilate the other for dominance.

The bewildering venom from this schism makes feuding Drug Cartels look tame.

I am putting money on the table that within a month of this law passing, it will be immediately seized upon by the woke to make criminal complaints against leading voices of the Gender Critical Feminist movement, people like Rachel Stewart and Ani O’Brien for old tweets they will have sent arguing their case.

Sadly he is not wrong.

Watching the Woke allow the entire NZ Intelligence apparatus off the hook for their total failure with the Christchurch terror attacks by demanding hate speech laws is one of the great intellectual failures of 2020 and 2021.

This is how ACT break 10% by June this year.

Might be right on that one also.

Stuff reports:

New Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March is currently in a Government-run managed isolation hotel after visiting family in Mexico.

Menéndez March was born in Mexico and was visiting for a “serious personal family matter,” a spokesperson for the party said.

He arrived back in the country on February 1 and is thus near the end of his mandatory two-week stay in managed isolation (MIQ).

His decision to leave the country contravenes the current travel advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) – which encourages Kiwis to not travel overseas at all.

Mexico is one of the most infected places on the planet. They have had 2 million cases and 166,000 deaths from Covid-19. Only the USA and Brazil have had more deaths.

I would think the only acceptable reason to travel there during this pandemic would be is if a close family member is terminally ill.

He was tagged in an Instagram photo in late-January by a friend in Mexico, although this account was made private soon after a rumour emerged surrounding his travel.

The problem for the Greens isn’t just the trip (assuming the reasons were valid) but trying to keep it secret. If an MP is going to be absent from Parliament because they have been travelling overseas, then you should be upfront with that fact – rather than just hope no-one notices he isn’t there.

Off memory MPs need the permission of their whip or musterer to travel overseas. I wonder if this was sought in advance. Also what is not clear is how long he was overseas for – was it a few days or weeks?

It’s understood Menéndez March applied to MBIE for an emergency allocation that would allow him to enter MIQ sooner but this request was denied.

There are tens of thousands of Kiwis trying to return home, who are waiting for a spot in MIQ. By choosing to go to Mexico over the summer break, he has denied one of those spots to someone else. Hence his reason for travelling needs to be exceptionally strong.

Stuff reports:

Grant Robertson and the Government were warned in January 2020 that there was a ‘significant’ risk Reserve Bank money printing would push up house prices and deepen inequality. Despite calls from the Reserve Bank that the Government would need to act to blunt the effects of this, nearly 13 months later, nothing has been done.

That one paragraph sums it up. They were told house prices would rocket up if they printed money, but they did it anyway and the end result was 20% house inflation last year.

Our beautiful but tiny country has a population of 1.49% of the USA. Our $US GDP is around $200 billion … California’s alone is $2.79 trillion. And yet … as a nation we take the weirdest public stance of looking down on the world’s greatest country and would critique it well before other major nations with human rights records that would make Atilla the Hun cringe.

Last week I met up with a tremendously successful NZ sportsman who has made a career in finance and financial advice in California. He is completely flummoxed in an ongoing way about NZ’s negative bias towards the USA but adores living there and is philosophical about the negativity and sensationalist reporting our mainstream media indulges in. The experience of living in the USA has very little in common with the way that our media presents it.

As a family we were very privileged to get to know Sir Peter Snell a little over the last 10 years before his passing. Arguably NZ’s best ever sportsman, a true gentleman, but someone who needed to escape our introspective mentality and was never forgiven by some for doing so. His academic career in Texas is one of our great seldom told stories.

The problem? Our young people risk missing out, especially under covid conditions, on some of the greatest life opportunities on offer through the lack of perspective of our education sector, politicians and media.

Our oldest child has lived in the USA for nearly 10 years. In two weeks he becomes a US/NZ dual citizen after having a Green Card as an “alien of extraordinary abilities”. He is a very high quality – US trained – Chemical Engineer who works at a superb NY State pharmaceutical call Regeneron. His wonderful wife grew up in Honduras and works, at 26, in a supervisory role for Cummins where they are well ahead on reducing emissions without the heavy metals of electric vehicles. (https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Isuzu-to-source-truck-engines-from-Cummins-for-key-models). Their combined income exceeds US$200k and, more tellingly, the 5 bedroom, 1 acre home in Albany cost them US$240 because in the USA there is freedom to build. This is even though the NZ population density is 18 per square km and in the USA it is approx. 36.

The college both our son and daughter in law attended is a public college in Tampa Bay – a city now famous for owning the Super-Bowl, the Stanley Cup and coming second in the MLB. The University of South Florida has some high-ranking faculties but also has more tennis courts than Auckland, an 18,000 seat Basketball stadium, two 400m tracks, gyms that are out of this world, a Division 1 football team that plays at Raymond James stadium, etc. So many colleges have this level of developmental environment for your people. This compares to NZ universities who do virtually nothing for sporting development and cost a blind fortune.

Between my wife and I we have visited the USA around 12 times in the last ten years. We have never experienced a single person being rude or aggressive or ever felt in danger in any way. The food is superb and you are not required to eat the whole portion. We have loved the experience of American theatre and all US pro sports. We have seen some of the most beautiful places and every State is like a different country.

My point? Our life-work is with young, low decile and Maori and Pasifika children to get them into a place where they are on fire academically and really want to make something of their lives. When they leave our schools they go into local high schools and thrive in terms of qualifications as well as winning many of the prizes. They are getting UE at a good rate and then … $50 a week just to catch a train to the University of Auckland that only provides for half of their development. Should they somehow get through that they face their first 10 adult years with a significant student loan and more barriers to home ownership and financial independence than the Chiefs found trying to get a touch down against Tampa Bay in the Super Bowl.

Many New Zealanders love to hate the USA but we need Pfizer for our vaccines and our erections. It is time we acknowledged it as a great place for our young people to be educated within many high-quality colleges, amongst students from a broad range of countries and with multi-dimensional opportunities. We should not impose our own Hotel California psychology on young people who need an adventure. Some won’t come back – but that is okay – to a person we are a nation that came from somewhere else. Those that do come back will add a great deal. Let’s look for the NZ government to treat international education opportunities for our young people on an equal footing for the support within NZ. We will be a better country for it and maybe also lose our small man’s syndrome towards the USA.

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.