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.

Stuff reports:

The chairman of the Rātana Church executive has called for the return of its own political party, rather than continuing to align with Labour.

If the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the electoral system had been followed (which was scrap Maori seats but have a lower threshold for Maori parties) then this would be a viable idea. A Ratana party that got 1.2% if the vote would get two MPs.

He said it was time for Rātana to reinstate its political independence again.

“We have lost our grip and our way and our own political legacy, that being the Rātana Independent Party, [and] the time should come again that the Rātana Independent Party be reinstated so it is no longer suffocated under the history of Labour and the tendency to silence the Māori voice for the sake of the mainstream.”

But hey Labour make Kelvin Deputy Leader even though they don’t trust him to be Deputy PM.

Stuff reports:

A housing affordability report released by the OECD organisation of developed nations has ranked New Zealand top for unaffordable housing for its poorest families.

The OECD’s Building for a Better Tomorrow report said more than half​ of people in the lowest-earning fifth​ of the workforce paid more than 40​ per cent of their disposable income on housing costs in 2019​.

And in a few weeks law changes are coming into effect that will increase rental costs further for tenants.

The OECD report said both building more state houses, and tackling overly restrictive land regulations and planning processes, were things countries could do to tackle housing affordability.

Building more state houses helps a few thousand families. Tacking land regulations and planning processes will help hundreds of thousands of families.

RNZ reports:

The National Party says the Australian government’s push to make Google share royalties with news publishers is too heavy-handed.

Australia is introducing a landmark law to make Google, Facebook and potentially other tech companies pay media outlets for their news content.

But Google has hit back saying it could withdraw the search engine from Australia.

The Australian proposed law is basically legalised extortion where successful Internet companies will be forced to prop up failing media companies.

National’s spokesperson for digital economy and communications Melissa Lee said the Australian model is far too heavy-handed and has chilling connotations as to how other future technological innovations could be affected for the market here.

Good to see National rule this out here. But will Labour?

Here’s what percentage of the population has been vaccinated against Covid-19 in various countries:

1. Israel 39.8%
2. UK 9.3%
3. US 6.2%
4. Denmark 3.4%
5. Slovenia 2.6%
6. Spain 2.5%
7. Ireland 2.5%
8. Sebria 2.4%
9. Portugal 2.3%
10. Italy 2.2%
11. Romania 2.2%
12. Canada 2.1%
13. Cyprus 2.0%
14. Germany 2.0%
15. Estonia 1.9%
16. Poland 1.8%
17. France 1.6%
18. Greece 1.5%
19. China 1.0%
20. Costa Rica 0.6%
21. Bulgaria 0.4%
22. New Zealand 0.0%

Stuff reports:

A man who allegedly fired shots at police needed surgery for severe injuries caused by a flashbang distraction device thrown into the car he was in.

The 30-year-old man, who has name suppression, was still in hospital as of Tuesday recovering from the surgery he had after he was detained on January 3.

He was arrested after a series of incidents in Horowhenua and Manawatū, which started after police were called to stop a man driving erratically in Foxton at 5.30pm.

Police said the driver fired a shot at an officer, which missed, before hijacking a car from Foxton Beach.

The man then drove to Feilding, where he again fired at police, before crashing into a patrol car on Kimbolton Rd​, police said.

So he twice tried to murder a police officer.

Multiple sources have since told Stuff police used a flashbang device, something acting Central district commander Inspector Nigel Allan​ confirmed on Thursday.

He described it as a “distraction device” used by the armed offenders squad.

While not confirming it was the device which caused the man’s injuries – sources told Stuff it was – Allan said it was very rare for the device to cause harm.

There are overseas reports of people being seriously hurt by flashbangs.

An investigation by ProPublica in 2015 found at least 50 people in the United States were seriously injured, maimed or killed by flashbangs since 2000.

People harmed included police officers whose hands were amputated after devices prematurely detonated, a protestor who suffered permanent hearing loss, a teen who had a flashbang thrown into a rubbish container they were hiding inside, and a 12-year-old who got first and second-degree burns when one was thrown into their room.

Allan said the device was used against the man because police had been fired at twice and believed there was further risk.

“Distraction devices are a less lethal tactical option than a firearm.”

Frankly the offender is lucky to be alive. Once you start shooting at police officers, your life expectancy will often be in the minutes.

The Police did him a favour by only using a flashbang.

The Israel Institute of New Zealand has done us a service by going into the sewers of the Internet and pulling out anti-Semitic comments from three groups. They are:

• Kia Ora Gaza
• Action Zealandia
• Aotearoa Standing With Palestine

They point out:

To show how similar the anti-Israel and White Supremacist antisemitism is, we have put together a little quiz. See if you can correctly identify where each statement came from.

Go do the quiz and see how many you get right. I only got 11/23. Post your scores back here.

Some of the comments are:

• They’re all Jews running the USA into the swamp for the greater plan.
• Zionist Jews are really bastards, they are worse than animals.
• We can’t expect anything else from a shitrace of murdering thieves.