Not even Simon Collins is claiming Jacinda Ardern won the 2nd debate. All the pundits are either saying it was Collins or a tie. The calls to date are:

• Mihi Forbes, Newshub panel – tie
• Trish Sherson, Newshub panel – Collins
• Josie Pagani, Newshub panel – Collins
• Luke Malpass, Stuff – tie
• Audrey Young, NZ Herald – Collins
• Simon Wilson, NZ Herald – tie
• Claire Trevett, NZ Herald – Collins
• Fran O’Sullivan, NZ Herald – tie

A much better debate the the travesty in the United States!

Jacinda Ardern campaigned on child poverty reduction. She said it was the reason she was in politics. She appointed herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction. So how has she gone?

Well there are many ways you can measure child poverty, but most of the measures are about income distribution or inequality. They are not that useful. For example if every family in NZ had a 25% increase in their income, those measures would not show fewer people in poverty. Also if every family in NZ had a 50% drop in income, they would not show more people in poverty.

The most useful measure in my opinion is material deprivation because it measures actual need, such as can a family afford a second pair of shoes for a kid. So how many fewer children are in poverty or material deprivation today than in 2017?

Well there was a big reduction in child poverty, but it was under National. The number of children in material deprivation dropped from 195,800 in 2013 to 139,600 in 2017. That’s 56,200 fewer kids in poverty.

Under Labour, the number has grown to 151,700 or 12,100 more kids in poverty.

Thanks to all those who took part in the poll yesterday on whether this graphic should be turned into an advertisement and promoted online.

There were almost 900 votes and 86% keen to see it as an advertisement.

We also had the following pledges:

• 16 x $1,000 =$16,000
• 106 x $100 = $10,600
• 149 x $25 = $3,725
• 282 x $10 = $2,820
• Total = $33,145

If we get even half of that, then we can get the advertisement seen by around 200,000 people which would be great.

I’ll work on getting it modified so it is suitable to be an advertisement, and then do a formal call for donations.

I’m on a plane shortly, so will miss much of the debate. Use this thread to discuss how the debate is going, and how you think Biden and Trump went. Hopefully some people will even judge it on the actual debate, not their prior like or dislike of the candidates!

NewstalkZB reports:

Gus van Soest was just 40 when he decided to end his life, as his body succumbed to an incurable disease. As Kiwis consider how to vote on the euthanasia referendum, his sister reveals the rollercoaster of emotions a family faces when a loved one decides to die. Carolyne Meng-Yee reports.

Despite months of meticulous planning, Gus van Soest was late for his own death.

By this final stage, his body was so ravaged by motor neurone disease that he needed caregivers to dress him for his living wake.

Doctors and donors were waiting at the nearby hospital to receive Gus’ organs. Helicopters were on standby ready to deliver them. Timing was everything.

At the age of 40, Garmst (Gus) van Soest had decided it was time to end his life, on his own terms, in his native Netherlands.

For the past five years he had suffered the debilitating and cruel consequences of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease – a rare and incurable neurological disease that aggressively attacks nerve cells.

The condition is inevitably deadly – about 50 per cent of patients survive for less than three years after diagnosis.

The disease robbed Gus of his ability to control his arms and his tongue – over time he lost the ability to talk, walk, eat, write and drive. He depended on 24-hour care as a breathing machine kept him alive.

For the last two years of his life, Gus could only communicate with his eyes.

He used a device on his iPad with two cameras that tracked his eye movements so he could “write” messages. He wanted to use the last method of communication to tell his loved ones he was ready to die.

A terrible terrible ordeal.

By 3.30pm, Gus was ready. A hospital room was transformed into a lounge with Iris’ favourite flowers and Gus’ favourite incense burning. His last wish was that everyone meditated to empty their minds for what was to come.

Reneke, Iris and five friends held onto Gus while he was given medication by two doctors, and a series of injections that quickly made him unconscious.

“It took us by surprise. He had one more look at us standing around him and he was gone. His last look was a bit ‘panicky’. It was like he was thinking ‘Oh shit’.

“He would have felt unconscious but I don’t know if you are really ready to give in or give up.”

It took Gus 15 minutes to die but it felt like an eternity.

“He was never a quitter.”

Gradually Gus stopped breathing and turned pale. His skin went yellow and his lips turned blue.

“Right up until the medication I kept thinking to myself, ‘I want to be here, I want to do this for him, I want him to die surrounded by love and warmth but I just didn’t want to be there’.”

Isn’t an ending like this (while still very sad) vastly preferable to the alternative if he lived in a country where there was no choice?

Worth reading the entire article. Very moving

Someone (I do not know who) turned my blog post into a neat little Labour promise tracker graphic. It is very well done and in my view quite powerful.

In fact I like it so much, I wonder if readers think it is worthwhile turning it into an advertisement and paying to have it promoted on Facebook etc. It costs around 10 c a view on Facebook so even $1,000 would get it seen by 10,000 people.

I don’t think the promise tracker will have an impact on the election result per se. No single advertisement will. But I do feel strongly that Labour’s incompetence in delivery has not been covered enough in the media, and that more people should know exactly how appalling their record is. They shouldn’t get a free pass because Covid-19 has distracted us.

There are downsides to turning it into an ad. They are:

• People could complain about the ad to the ASA, and I’d have to spend hours of time rebutting them and defending it
• It would need an authorisation statement and would have to remove the Labour logo
• I’d become more of a participant than a commentator (which I prefer)
• I’d have to write up detailed paragraphs on each graph linking to the promise Labour made, and the data the result is based on, and I’m pretty busy (to put it mildly) already with running around 10 polls a week and parenting a three year old and ten month old.

But on the other hand, it would be nice to have more people see Labour’s incompetence.

So vote in the non binding poll below, to help me decide. Your vote is also not binding on you. Saying you’d donate $100 to promote it doesn’t result in any commitment. We don’t track individual votes. The vote is simply to give me some idea of how many people might support it, and how many people we could reach with it.

Labour in 2017 vowed to cut net migration by 20,000 to 30,000 a year.

Now personally this was a policy I opposed. I think it is a good thing to have migration. But Labour was blaming foreigners for house prices and taking jobs etc so they vowed to cut it by 20,000 to 30,000 a year.

How did they go?

Well in September 2017 as National left office net migration was 55,440. So for Labour to have kept its promise you’d expect net migration to drop to between 25,000 and 35,000 a year.

As at March 2020 (before Covid-19 travel restrictions) annual net migration had risen to 88,450. Rather than cut it by 30,000 they increased it by over 30,000.

Example No 6 of their incompetence or inability to actually achieve anything they promise.

Stuff reports:

The Serious Fraud Office has laid charges against two people over the NZ First Foundation donations scandal, but Winston Peters says his party has been “exonerated”.

Only Winston could claim having charges laid is an exoneration. As usual, he is talking nonsense.

The two people were charged with “obtaining by deception” on September 23 in the electoral funding case, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said in a statement on Tuesday.

The maximum penalty for this is seven years imprisonment.

The SFO would not name those charged, but said neither were Cabinet ministers, sitting MPs, candidates or staff member in the upcoming election, or current members of the NZ First party.

I would be willing to bet that both those charged have been members of NZ First for say at least 25 years or so, and only resigned their memberships a few days ago.

NZ First leader Peters attacked the SFO when responding to the charges, saying it had “exonerated the NZ First party of any electoral law breaches”.

“It’s a relief after months of this cloud hanging over the party that we have been fully cleared,” he said.

LOL. Fully cleared.

The electoral law breaches were relatively minor compared to the fraud charges laid. Having more serious charges laid is not exoneration.

Peters said he had taken the SFO to court over the statement it intended to make public about the charges it laid.

So Winston tried to deny the public the right to know charges had been laid.

Why would Winston have gone to court, if it is all an exoneration!

“The timing of its decision to lay charges against the foundation constitutes a James Comey-level error of judgment,” Peter said, referring to the decision by then US FBI-director James Comey to reopen an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s emails shortly before the 2016 US presidential election.

James Comey decided not to charge Hillary Clinton. Here the Serious Fraud Office (which has a near 100% conviction rate) has decided to lay charges.

An SFO spokesman said NZ First brought proceedings against the office to stop it issuing a media release, on September 23.

The court ruled in favour of the SFO, the spokesman said, and released a statement on Tuesday when the timeframe for appealing the decision lapsed.

Again why did Winston try to prevent the SFO from informing the public charges had been laid?

Peters said he had now instructed lawyers to take the SFO to court and seek a declaration it had abused its statutory powers, he said.

Presumably the same lawyers who already lost to the SFO?

Peters has said the SFO would not find any wrongdoing, and NZ First was acting as other political parties do.

And again Peters was wrong. The SFO did find wrongdoing and has laid charges.

He routinely distanced himself from the foundation, saying he had “ensured it was legal but beyond that was not involved.

Yes Winston had nothing to do with it, except:

• His closest friend and confidant was a trustee
• Bills sent to Winston’s office were paid by the Foundation
• One of his MPs collected money for the Foundation

“The foundation is an entirely separate entity from the NZ First party, but that distinction will be lost on some and sadly ignored on purpose by others,” Peters said on Tuesday.

The Electoral Commissions’ view is that it was not separate. Even if it is separate that is different to independent. It was created by the Party which appointed the trustees. Someone in the party ordered money collected for the party to be paid into the Foundation and also ordered party expenses to be paid from the Foundation.

The two people charged of course have the legal presumption of innocence unless guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt. That will be resolved at trial.

The issue here is that NZ First had established a Foundation that collected and spent money on behalf of NZ First but whose activities were hidden from the Party President who resigned over the issue.

UPDATE: The Court Ruling is here. Key aspects:

• Winston wanted the SFO decision hidden until after a government had been formed after the election
• The Judge said “I do not consider NZ First’s case for judicial review is particularly strong”
• The Judge concluded “I consider there is a significant public interest in the New Zealand voting public being informed during an election campaign about criminal charges of serious fraud against people or organisations related to political parties“
• NZ First applied for an inunction 33 minutes after receiving a copy of the press release

Also of interest is that one of the defendants managed to get a District Court Judge to grant an interim suppression order, but the High Court overturned that. Also NZ First tried to appeal to the Court of Appeal, but leave was only granted for them to do so if done by today. NZ First presumably realised they’d lose in the Court of Appeal and only gain a few extra days.

. They really were desperate to keep us all in the dark.

Maori Television report:

The first Māori Television Curia Research poll was released tonight and revealed Labour with a huge lead at 51% as most preferred party. The closest was the Māori Party at 10%, with all others trailing in single digits. Voters also identified the Māori Party as the most preferred coalition partner with Labour – before the Greens and New Zealand First. …

Labour’s Adrian Rurawhe leads in the preferred candidates at 38%, followed by the Māori Party’s Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at 20%. Other candidates were 1% or less. But the poll also revealed 30% of voters in Te Tai Hauāuru had still not chosen their favourite candidate just three weeks out from the general election.

The challenge for the Maori Party is much the same as for all the other parties challenging Labour. Covid-19 has dominated so much that other issues are not getting much consideration.

Reuters reports:

Democrats in of the House of Representatives will introduce a bill next week to limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years from current lifetime appointments, in a bid to reduce partisan warring over vacancies and preserve the court’s legitimacy.

The new bill, seen by Reuters, would allow every president to nominate two justices per four-year term and comes amid heightened political tensions as Republican President Donald Trump prepares to announce his third pick for the Supreme Court after the death on Sept. 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with just 40 days to go until the Nov. 3 election.

“It would save the country a lot of agony and help lower the temperature over fights for the court that go to the fault lines of cultural issues and is one of the primary things tearing at our social fabric,” said California U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, who plans to introduce the legislation on Tuesday, along with Representatives Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts and Don Beyer of Virginia.

Partly due to rising life expectancies, justices serve increasingly long tenures, on average now more than 25 years.

Term limits for high court justices have for years had support from a number of legal scholars on both the right and the left. Several polls in recent years have also shown large majorities of the American public support term limits.

An 18 year term for future appointments (ie past ACB) is sensible for a number of reasons.

• You don’t want Justices carrying on until they are in their 80s or even 90s, waiting for their party to be in power so they can retire. In NZ the retirement age is 70.
• It makes the power balance (over time) on the Supreme Court proportional to which party wins the presidency the most as you get two appointments every four year term. This is much preferable than a lottery that is dependent on when someone dies.
• It would remove any incentive to court pack and increase the number of Justices

If this law had been in place in the past there would currently be a 5-4 majority to Republican appointees. You would have the following:

• Bush appointee – 2003
• Bush appointee – 2005
• Bush appointee – 2007
• Obama appointee – 2009
• Obama appointee – 2011
• Obama appointee – 2013
• Obama appointee – 2015
• Trump appointee – 2017
• Trump appointee – 2019

Of course any change can’t be retrospective and shouldn’t be. But it would be a good change for the future.

The Herald reports:

Labour is promising to keep Southland’s Tiwai Point smelter on life support for another three to five years while the Government works to transition the region’s economy.

If re-elected, the party would work to reduce the amount of money the smelter pays for electricity – the major reason why Rio Tinto said it was closing the plant.

This is farcical – Government Ministers personally negotiating how much a company will pay for electricity.

We have an Electricity Authority whose job under the law is to regulate what transmission costs should be.

From the Herald Mood of the Boardroom:

1. Grant Robertson (Finance) 4.18/5 (+0.66)
2. Jacinda Ardern (Prime Minister) 3.91/5 (+0.98)
3. Kris Faafoi (Commerce) 3.46/5 (-0.12)
4. Andrew Little (Justice) 3.24/5 (+0.10)
5. James Shaw (Climate Change) 3.15/5 (+0.10)
6. Chris Hipkins (Health/Education) 3.12/5 (+0.78)
7. Megan Woods (Energy/Housing) 3.07/5 (+0.63)
8. David Parker (Trade/Environment) 3.04/5 (-0.04)
9. Ron Mark (Defence) 2.69/5
10. Damien O’Connor (Agriculture) 2.67/5
11. Stuart Nash (Revenue/Small Business) 2.66/5 (+0.17)
12. Tracey Martin (Children 2.60/5)
13. Eugenie Sage (Conservation) 2.57/5 (+.28)
14. Winston Peters (Deputy PM/Foreign Affairs) 2.47/5 (-0.45)
15. Peeni Henare (Civil Defence) 2.38/5
16. Carmel Sepuloni (Social Development) 2.37/5 (-0.03)
17. Julie Anne Genter (Women) 2.37/5
18. Nanaia Mahuta (Local Govt.) 2.2/5 (+0.1)
19. Jenny Salesa (Building & Construction) 2.16/5 (+0.15)
20. Aupito William Sio (Pacific Peoples) 2.15/5
21. Poto Williams (Community & Volunteer) 2.06/5
22. Shane Jones (Regional Development /Infrastructure) 1.89/5 (-0.54)
23. Willie Jackson (Employment) 1.80/5
24. Phil Twyford (Transport) 1.61/5 (nc)
25. Kelvin Davis (Tourism) 1.59/5 (-0.37)

So 8 out of 25 Ministers ranked 3/5 or better and 13 ranked 2.5 or better.

The bottom ranked Minister (takes a lot to beat Phil Twyford) is the man who will be Deputy Prime Minister if it is a sole Labour Government!

Labour has been good at doing announcements on climate change, but bad at making decisions that will actually reduce emissions. They have set a target of net zero emissions by 2050, but their own official Government forecasts are for net emissions to keep climbing.

The blue line is net emissions for the last four years of National. The red line us the official forecast for net emissions since 2017 from the Ministry for the Environment. These were prepared for the Fourth Biennial Report.

The black line is what they would need to have done pro-rata to be on track for net zero by 2020.

Instead of reducing net emissions, they are planning to increase then from 55,000 kT to over 70,000 kT in six years.

The PM declared climate change her generation’s nuclear free issue. Well if this Government was in power in 1984, it would have probably accidentally built a nuclear weapon by now.

This week’s ONCB poll:

Labour Party – 47% (down 1%)
National Party – 33% (up 2%)
ACT – 8% (up 1%)
Green Party – 7% (up 1%)
New Zealand First – 1% (down 1%)
New Conservative – 1% (down 1%)
The Opportunities Party – 1% 
Māori Party – 1%
Advance New Zealand – 1% 

Labour is on 47% and National/ACT on 41%. If the Greens didn’t make it, then the race would be getting competitive. They Greens normally underperform to their polls, but 7% should be safe for them.

Key things to look for in next week’s poll will be where the Greens are and if the gap between Labour and National/ACT narrows further.

Best news of course is NZ First on 1%.

In the NRR poll they were in 6th place. It is possible on this poll they are in 9th place!

The media have been running a series of articles claiming errors in National’s fiscal plan, based on information from Grant Robertson or former Labour staff.

While there was one error, which I will detail, the narrative on this is almost farcical because of the time frames the forecasts cover.

The PREFU and National’s plan deal with forecasts out to 2035 or so – which is a period of 15 years.

Over those 15 years there will be around $2 trillion of government spending and around $1.8 trillion of government revenue.

The actual outcome in 15 years will be tens of billions different to what we are forecasting today. Even Treasury with its dozen of Budget staff often is out by $1 or $2 billion in a forecast for just the following year, let alone 15 years times.

What the competing forecasts are about is competing paths.

Labour’s path (which it doesn’t want to talk about) is 15 years of deficits, and $200 billion+ extra debt and a tax hike.

National’s path is getting back into surplus quicker, having debt peak at far less and a temporary tax cut. How it achieves this is pretty simple. They do two things:

• Scrap some of the current low quality Labour programmes such as free tertiary fees
• Increase future spending at a slightly lower rate than Labour

The 2nd bullet point is the key. It is what Bill English managed to do after the GFC. You spend up large for a couple of years to cushion the recession but then you clamp down on future spending increases by reprioritisation and fiscal discipline.

The 15 year plans (and even the three year plans) are not a cast in stone projection. Take for example Labour’s 2017 plan – they ended up spending masses more money than they claimed they would, because the economy had enough growth to cover it.

So arguing about $80 million here or even $4 billion in the context of a time period which has $2 trillion of spending is just silly, to put it mildly.

Now sure if National has made a mistake in their plan, this should be reported. But it’s a mistake which represents 0.2% of total revenue or spending over the 15 years.

So what are the areas of dispute.

Super Fund contributions

National’s fiscal plan was calculated and written primarily after the May Budget. Two days before the plan was released the Government released the PREFU and National over around 36 hours had to comb through the PREFU and look for what had changed since BEFU.

They missed that the rate of contributions to the NZ Super Fund had dropped. The three professional economists employed by NZIER to check the plan also missed this. It’s sort of understandable as Labour have spent years claiming having reduced contributions is evil. But there is a formula used to calculate contributions and this was applied to PREFU (Labour could have chosen to over-ride it but didn’t).

So what is the impact of this error. That National’s projected debt in 2034 would be 36% of GDP instead of 35%, as opposed to over 50% for Labour.

But again remember that debt figure is due to the difference between tax income and spending over 15 years which will be about $2 trillion.

NZ Upgrade Programme

Grant Robertson is claiming National has double counted NZ Upgrade Programme funding for our infrastructure programme.

National and NZIER dispute this. They rolled it into capital allowances but kept the label for consistency from an earlier plan.

Tax on Super Fund contributions

Grant Robertson is claiming National should have accounted for the lower tax revenue on the super fund contributions being suspended.

This is what you call a second order effect and no party even takes these into effect when doing opposition plans. We know this because Grant Robertson himself didn’t do this in 2017 when his plan was to increase contributions to the NZ Super Fund.

Labour desperately don’t want people talking about their fiscal plan, because 15 years of deficits is more n economic death wish than a plan.

AP reports:

President Donald Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Saturday, capping a dramatic reshaping of the federal judiciary that will resonate for a generation and that he hopes will provide a needed boost to his reelection effort.

Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said she was “truly humbled” by the nomination and quickly aligned herself with Scalia’s conservative approach to the law, saying his “judicial philosophy is mine, too.”

Barrett, 48, was joined in the Rose Garden by her husband and seven children. If confirmed by the Senate, she would fill the seat vacated by liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It would be the sharpest ideological swing since Clarence Thomas replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall nearly three decades ago.

On current life expectancy Barrett would serve 35 years on the Supreme Court, if confirmed.

Some facts about Barrett:

• Has six younger siblings
• Grew up in New Orleans
• Graduated 1st in her law school class at Notre Dame
• Clerked for Justice Scalia
• Like Scalia, she is an originalist – meaning she interprets the constitution based on what would have been the original meaning of the text when it was ratified
• Was Professor of Law at Notre Dame and three times received Distinguished Professor of the Year awards
• Appointed to 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017
• Her 7th circuit appointment attracted letters of support from all 49 faculty colleagues
• Has seven children herself, including one with Down Syndrome

My posts this week on Patreon are:

• The race for Manurewa
• The race for Takanini
• Exclusive: Who is voting for and against in the cannabis referendum?
• The race for Panmure-Ōtāhuhu
• The race for Botany
• The race for Maungakiekie
• The race for Pakuranga
• The race for New Lynn
• The race for Te Atatū
• Could court packing threat win it for Trump?
• Who would be an MP on the ONCB poll?

Subscriptions range from US$4 to US$8 a month plus GST.

The NY Times reports:

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Assuming he has not lied on his tax returns, this suggests what many have long suspected – he is not that wealthy.

In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses.

So which ones should we believe?

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

If Trump loses the election, it could be a race to see what happens first – bankruptcy or jail!

Jacinda Ardern told the Guardian that her Government would eliminate homelessness.

Now the definition of who is homeless can vary, but one of the better measures of those with the most pressing need is the social housing register run by the Ministry of Social Development, specifically those on the Priority A waitlist. These are defined as:

People who are considered at risk and includes households with a severe and persistent housing need that must be addressed immediately. The household is unable to access and/or sustain suitable, adequate and affordable alternative housing.

So those with an urgent severe and persistent housing need. This definition means it is relatively objective, and isn’t likely to be influenced merely by more people applying for social housing. To be Priority A you need to be at risk.

So what has happened under Labour. The Priority A waiting list when National left office was 4,054. In three years did they manage to eliminate it? Or even half it? 20% reduction? 10%?

This is also one of their biggest fails. Not only have they failed to progress towards their goal, they’ve gone backwards. In under three years the’ve seen those in the most critical housing need increase 350%.

Imagine what it will be given another three years? 30,000? 40,000?

The results of the Newshub Reid Research poll:

• Labour 50.1% (-10.8%)
• National 29.6% (+4.5%)
• Greens 6.5% (+0.8%)
• ACT 6.3% (+3.0%)
• New Conservatives 2.1% (+1.2%)
• NZ First 1.9% (-0.1%)
• Maori Party 1.5% (+1.1%)
• TOP 0.9% (+0.5%)

Again an exceptionally good result for Labour, but some comfort in the trend for the centre-right. National and ACT are up 7.5%.

NZ First is now in 6th place.