This is so funny and also so perceptive.
It was very clear up until yesterday that the PM was planning to dissolve Parliament on Monday and have the election as scheduled on 19 September.
There were numerous people within Labour saying they know she doesn’t want to delay the election. But most tellingly is the timing of her announcement at 10 am today.
If she was planning a delay, she would have announced it over the weekend because with no delay the House must meet on Tuesday. Announcing a delay at 10 am on Monday gives rural MPs very little time to get to Wellington for Tuesday.
So she was clearly going to carry on but now Winston has publicly raised the issue of the majority of the House being against, and an implicit threat around confidence, I think she will buckle to Winston (as always) and delay the election. It will be as small a delay as possible, so October not November. I’d say October 17 to avoid school holidays.
The Curia poll of Aucklanders showed 58% want an election delay and only 29% want it to proceed on 19th of September, so a delay will also be popular.
And in the end the decision by the PM is primarily about what maximises her chances of Labour gaining a majority. If it was about public health then the decision would be a no brainer and a delay would already have been announced.
UPDATE: As predicted the election is now on Saturday 17 October.
Five Thirty Eight has launched its model for the US election and it currently has Trump at 28% chance to win.
That is far from an insignificant chance, and indeed in 2016 they had him at 29% to win, and of course he did. Other models were far more pessimistic on him.
But there is a bigger polling gap between Biden and Trump than Clinton and Trump. The 28% chance Trump is modelled to have reflects the election is still over two months away. If this was election week and the polls were the same, Trump’s chances would be deemed lower.
The current tipping point state in Pennsylvania. Trump needs to win that as well as Florida and Arizona.
In 2016 at the same time, 538 had Trump at only 13% chance to win so he is actually better positioned today than in 2016. However what worked for him in 2016 is that people who disliked both him and Clinton voted for him. Biden is not as disliked as Clinton and as the incumbent Trump less likely to attract undecideds.
The debates will be crucial events. However Republicans need to be careful about setting expectations. The more they insist that he is senile and dribbling, the easier it is for him to be seen to win the debate merely by being not awful.
In politics you generally talk your own candidate down before a debate and talk the other candidate up.
Curia had a long scheduled poll of Aucklanders being conducted tonight. Due to the interest in whether the election should be delayed I inserted a question (at my own cost) asking:
Do you think the election scheduled for the 19th of September should proceed on that date or should it be delayed?
The results are on my Patreon (which funds the ability to ask additional questions like this). They are quite decisive.
Winston Peters has written to the PM saying NZ First thinks the election should be delayed as an election on 19 September won’t be free or fair.
This means parties representing the majority of the House of Representatives support delaying the election, and hence having the House sit on Tuesday.
Peters points out even in a snap election such as 1984 there was 29 days to campaign, but in 2020 parties will only have six days to campaign before overseas voting starts and nine days for advance voting.
The last few paras of his letter are telling:
“New Zealand First believes we risk undermining the legitimacy of the election result, creating an awful precedent which could be abused by the Prime Minister’s successors.
“People will be driven to the conclusion, in the absence of any empirical evidence to the contrary, that the election date choice is being forced from a minority position to achieve a certain outcome.
“This is a most regrettable yet avoidable situation. We are here as Members of Parliament first and foremost, not just as members of political parties.
“We are releasing our letter of August 14 for the sake of transparency, and because we believe the Governor General of New Zealand needs to know that the majority in the House of Representatives favours an election delay.”
That last paragraph is very important. It is telling the Governor-General that if the Prime Minister advises her to dissolve Parliament, it is against the wishes of the majority of MPs in Parliament.
Chris Hipkins is very good at deflection. He has said that the reason the Government didn’t test all front line workers earlier is because mandatory testing is a heavy handed approach.
This is a total red herring. It implies that the problem has been front line workers don’t want to be tested. This is far from the case. They are upset they are not being tested.
The issue isn’t mandatory testing, but regular testing. What the Government should have done is schedule a weekly test for every front line worker. They didn’t do this. They didn’t even do a single test for two thirds of the front line workers.
If 0.5% of the front line workers don’t want to be tested, then that’s not a big problem. We’d have 99.5% being tested weekly vs 65% not being tested at all under the current Government.
There is a strong public policy rationale to make testing mandatory for front line workers, but that isn’t the core problem here. The core problem is the Government was refusing to test front line workers who wanted to be tested. It wasn’t scheduling regular testing at all.
So don’t let mandatory testing distract you from the Government’s failures. The issue isn’t mandatory testing – it is arranging regular testing.
Tim Murphy reports:
Winston Peters’ allegations in Parliament of who leaked his superannuation overpayment might impact two of the three declarations he is seeking in a Court of Appeal case, Tim Murphy reports
NZ First leader Winston Peters told the Court of Appeal he could not know who leaked details of his long-term superannuation overpayment – but weeks later told Parliament it was a ministerial press secretary and listed names of those who supposedly knew of the leak. …
Peters’ claims on July 22 under parliamentary privilege that a former press secretary for National MPs, Rachel Morton, overheard the ministers talking and leaked it to ACT leader David Seymour – and that it then it made its way to the media via the Taxpayers Union’s Jordan Williams, pollster and blogger David Farrar and the father of a National MP, John Bishop – were universally denied and ridiculed.
He tried to claim the leak was the result of ‘dirty politics’. Seymour told Parliament soon after that the allegation against him was utterly false, Morton (‘categorically untrue’), Williams (‘delusional’) and Farrar (‘insane’) issued denials and Peters’ theory about how this journalist and Newsroom came to learn of the overpayment and secret $18,000 repayment was wrong in every respect. Morton is understood to be applying to the Speaker for her denial to be recorded in Hansard under Parliament’s Standing Orders.
Curiously, Peters had taken an altogether different approach in the document he filed with the Court of Appeal challenging the High Court findings.
In the Notice of Appeal dated May 15, and just released to Newsroom, Peters’ lawyers told the court details of Peters’ payment “leaked from [the Ministry of Social Development] by persons the appellant [Peters] cannot (and cannot be expected to) identify”.
Further, and conflicting with his later parliamentary clam that Morton, a ministerial services staff member, had leaked the information, Peters’ lawyers say: “The leaked information, on the evidence adduced at trial can only have been by a member of the staff of the [Ministry of Social Development].”
Morton did not and does not work for MSD.
This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
WInston gets up in Parliament and names under privilege half a dozen people (including me) that he says leaked his Super details.
At the same time he files in court saying it must have been an MSD staffer.
So which Winston claim do we believe?
The correct answer of course is neither.
Joe Biden has picked Kamala Harris as his VP nominee. This was pretty expected. His pick is more significant than most due to the expectation (if he wins) than he would serve just one term, so she would be the front runner for the 2024 nomination.
This is such a failure of management and leadership.
The Government was told that it should be testing frontline staff weekly. But it turned not only wasn’t it testing them weekly, it wasn’t even testing most of them at all.
A really good Minister would have been insisting on daily testing reports which include testing of frontline staff. That is how you ensure it is done – require officials to report to you progress.
Hipkins is implying Ministers were misled over the extent of testing. If that is the case, then I am sure he will produce the reports from officials that were wrong, and then of course ensure the officials responsible are held accountable.
Or maybe it is that Ministers never asked for regular reporting on how many front line staff had been tested.
If I was a Minister, I would identify the say ten largest threats to keeping Covid-19 contained, and then make sure that I am getting reports on each area at least once a week, if not daily.
With the decision that Auckland remains in Level 2 for a further 12 days, it really is a no brainer to delay the election. But not just because of the impact on campaigning. Here’s my five reasons why the election should be delayed (as 71 other countries have done).
1 We need Parliament in sessions scrutinising the Government
There has never been a more important time for Parliament to be meeting so Ministers can be questioned in the House, and Ministers and officials in select committees.
It is scrutiny of the Government’s performance that leads to improvements and changes. Take for example the revelation by Michael Morrah that two thirds of border and isolation workers had never been tested for Covid-19, let alone weekly as recommended. That totally changed the dynamics around border testing.
But the Government did not release this information voluntarily. Derek Cheng in the Herald reported media had been asking for this information every day for the last two weeks, and the Government had refused to supply it. Morrah managed to cobble the data together from other sources.
OIA requests don’t have to be answered for 20 or really 40 days. But oral questions in the House must be answered within five hours. Written questions within five days and select committees can question officials and Ministers on the spot.
We need Parliament to be sitting to make sure the Government is doing all it can to prevent further outbreaks. It is clear that without scrutiny, they don’t.
2 We need Ministers focusing on Covid-19
The Prime Minister is also the Labour Party Leader. I want her focused on the former role at the moment. The Minister in charge of isolation facilities is the Labour Campaign Chair. Ditto. The Minister of Health will be on Labour’s campaign committee. We want them all focused on Covid-19, not campaigning in their electorates or nationwide.
3) Auckland is locked down
A third of the population is in a Level 3 lockdown until 26 August. Voting opens for overseas residents seven days after that and for everyone else 10 days.
Election campaigns are about debates, meetings, speeches, policy announcements, door knocking, transport assistance to polls, events, launches etc. The vast majority of that can’t happen in Level 3.
4) It’s crass to hold an election while we have community transmission
The public are worried. Stress levels have hit boiling again for some people. Families have to worry about job security, about can they work and look after their kids, about if their parents will get sick etc etc.
What the public don’t want is politicians in their faces asking them for their vote. They want the politicians focused on Covid-19.
The public are not going to tune in to the latest conservation policy release from the Greens, or consumer affairs policy from National etc. They are focused on Covid-19.
5) The media coverage of an election will be strained
In the main the journalists who cover Covid-19 are also the journalists who cover the election – the press gallery. Not 100%, but in the main.
Normally in an election most of the gallery would be covering the election, and out on the road with MPs covering their speeches and events. But if the election proceeds with voting opening in 18 days, then the coverage will massively be about Covid-19 and not the election.
We do not have a set election date. The original date of 19 September was chosen by the PM, as is her right. And at the time it was a perfectly fine date. But it would be madness to continue with that date with Auckland in Level 3 lockdown for a further 12 days.
If the PM does continue with 19 September, I predict it will be a near record low turnout.
A transcript of his interview on Australian TV:
Patricia Karvelas:
“Your country’s top health official, Ashley Bloomfield, says the first case in this outbreak could have been in the community several weeks ago. Does this suggest elimination was really never truly achieved – that it was – sure, you were saying you’d eliminated it, but clearly you hadn’t?”
Winston Peters:
“Well, unfortunately, a lot of the conversation and a lot of the narrative is speculation. What we’d like to know is what we should know, and that is the exact details of what happened. And it is possible, with modern science and all the tracing that we’ve got, to find out what this – what the first origins were. And I could almost tell you right now what I suspect it is, because I’ve got inside information, but until it’s confirmed, I’m not going to say.
Karvelas:
“You’ve piqued my interest, obviously, because you’re Deputy Prime Minister, I imagine your inside information isn’t just innuendo or rumour. Can you give some indication about what those officials are telling you?
Peters:
“It wasn’t an official, I found out from somewhere else, but I think there’s been a breach inside our quarantine system, and I think, when that comes out very shortly, in a matter of maybe less than a day, we’ll find out that was the case.
“But you don’t always find out from your officials. You don’t always find out from the experts. It’s something you sort of find out by contact with other people. I’m not trying to be – trying to avoid your question, but these things are so difficult, and I just heard the New South Wales Premier expert talking – we went hard and we went early, but the question is, did we go hard enough and ensure that the policing, that the scrutiny and the quarantine was as tight as it could have been? And we need to know that.
Karvelas: “Ok. This sounds like what may have happened in Melbourne as well. Are you saying the hotel quarantining is what you understand to be the problem?”
Peters: “No, I don’t know where this quarantine breach may have happened, but I think you can eliminate it being some new strain of Covid-19 that hitherto my country hadn’t seen.“In Melbourne’s case, of course, it was – how shall I say it without being too critical? – pretty slack oversight and supervision, where it was put in the hands of private industry, which was a disaster. In our case, we got the army in early enough to know that that wouldn’t have been the problem. But there’s been a breach, and we’ll find out in a matter of hours, or within a day.”
Karvelas: “Ok. You say you haven’t got it from officials but you are, as I say, the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, so – who are you getting this information from?”
Peters: “(Laughs) I – I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t answered that question.”
Karvelas: “I have to ask – who’s providing this information about quarantine breaches?”
Peters: “A source that was usually very reliable. Dare I say, it was one of your colleagues.”
Karvelas: “An Australian official?”
Peters: “No, no, no – a New Zealand colleague of yours.”
Karvelas: “A New Zealand colleague? A journalist?”
Peters: “A journalist, yes.”
Karvelas: “So there’s a story that’s about to break, you’re telling me, that there’s been a quarantine problem?”
Peters: “No. It won’t be breaking, because we want to know – he wants to know, and I want to know, and so do all my colleagues want to know. Are we going to be speaking with factual evidence when we do go public?”
So let’s take this in order:
This is our Deputy PM.
AP reports:
Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced Thursday they are establishing full diplomatic relations in a U.S.-brokered deal that required Israel to halt its contentious plan to annex occupied West Bank land sought by the Palestinians.
The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.
This is a win-win. Israel doesn’t annex West Bank land, and they get peaceful relations with the UAE.
Well done to Trump, Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The Herald reports:
Auckland University Professor of Medicine Des Gorman rated the Government’s response as “somewhere between two and three” out of 10.
“I’ve seen health systems manage medical emergencies worse than this but it takes some doing,” Gorman told Hosking. “It’s like we’re living in a parallel universe.”
He was particularly astounded that only a third of border workers had been tested up until this week. “I thought someone was pulling my leg.”
The failure to test two thirds of border and isolation staff is beyond belief.
On Radio NZ, Sir David Skegg said:
And so why has the Government not been testing frontline border and isolation staff. Stuff reports:
Moving to mandatory testing of staff at the border was a relatively heavy handed thing for a government to do, Hipkins said.
My God.
Mandatory testing of front line staff is not heavy handed.
Closing down almost every business in auckland is heavy handed.
Closing down the schools is heavy handed.
Banning groups of more than ten is heavy handed.
All of these heavy handed things could probably have been avoided if the Government was testing frontline staff weekly – which they were told they should be doing.
They made a deliberate decision not to test all front line staff. It was the wrong decision, and now businesses and families are paying the price.
This is a real test for the Prime Minister about whether she is making decisions for the public good or Labour’s good.
If the election is not delayed, voting starts in just 19 days. A third of the population is in Level 3 lockdown and the rest of NZ may follow. All political parties and candidates have suspended their campaigns. There is no door knocking. There are no public meetings. There can be no campaign launches. Rest homes are locked down. Schools are closed. Most people (in Auckland) can’t go to work.
71 other countries have decided that you want elections to be held at a time when you can maximise turnout, and decided to delay their elections. Labour for years has said it is vital to make it as easy as possible for people to vote and pushed through law changes allowing same day enrolment and voting etc.
So the decision to be made by the Prime Minister is a very important one, that will tell us a lot about Labour’s priorities.
Michael Morrah reports:
Newshub can reveal that just one week before our current community outbreak, 63.5 percent of all border and hotel isolation workers in Auckland had never been tested for COVID-19.
The Prime Minister says all staff will now face compulsory tests, but a public health expert says it beggars belief this wasn’t already happening.
They’re part of our most high-risk group: airport staff like Customs and Immigration, hotel workers like security.
All work in the vicinity of recent returnees, yet only a fraction had been tested prior to this outbreak.
This is beyond belief.
141 days ago the Government declared Covid-19 to be a national state of emergency and closed the country down.
We spent weeks in Level 4 and Level 3 and then came out if it and the Government assured us it was doing everything it could to stop Covid-19 having community transmission.
We just all assumed they were even partially competent and that all staff who worked at the border or isolation facilities were being tested regularly. Maybe not weekly, but certainly say fortnightly.
But it turns out two thirds of them have not been tested even once, despite having regular contact with returning travellers.
“It beggars belief that in an environment where the border is your major protection against a second wave that you are not exhausting every possible opportunity to mitigate risk,” said Professor Des Gorman, Auckland University public health expert.
It is pretty much the sole point of entry.
Jacinda Ardern says all staff will now get a test.
What is the old saying – too little, too late.
On Patreon I have exclusive results of a poll of 700 New Zealanders on whether the voting age should remain at 18 or be lowered to 16 as the Greens want.
This morning the Herald reported:
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield confirmed today a Mt Albert Grammar student in Auckland had tested positive – a person who was a close contact of the family whose members have tested positive.
He did not know if the student was one of the four probable cases announced yesterday. He said some of the original family who had tested positive were in quarantine – but not all of them.
“We don’t round up people in New Zealand, Mike,” Bloomfield told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking this morning. “We round up sheep, we don’t round up people.”
So that was a categorical rejection of mandatory quarantine or isolation for people who test positive. In fact it was rejected as degrading and akin to rounding up sheep.
Then at 1 pm this afternoon the Government announced mandatory quarantine for all new Covid-19 cases. So this is a total u-turn in around six hours.
It doesn’t give confidence that the Government has a well developed strategy in place. It looks knee jerk. This is not to say the mandatory quarantine decision is wrong. But this morning the Government is dismissing it as ridiculous and this afternoon they are announcing it.
TVNZ reports:
The Ministry of Health is under pressure over whether it misled the New Zealand public about this year’s flu vaccine.
Officials have repeatedly denied there was a shortage, but a six-month investigation by 1 NEWS has uncovered the ministry knew about it – and even warned the Government – despite telling the public a different story.
Ministry of Health emails, released under the Official Information Act, reveal a number of conversations explicitly discussing low stock levels and struggles to fulfil orders.
That includes a Pharmac staff member emailing the ministry saying on April 29: “…have you been briefing the Minister’s office on the flu vaccine stock levels, including that we are very low on stock now until the next delivery?”
“Yes we have been,” the ministry replied.
The next day an email to the ministry said: “I am not sure there will even be enough stock to over last nights’ orders.”
It came as Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield encouraged Kiwis to get the vaccination on April 29, and Finance Minister Grant Robertson assured there was availability on May 1.
However, there were also waves of emails to the ministry from doctors struggling to get their hands on stock.
This is just the same as with PPE gear etc. The Ministry says no problems or shortages and all the front line health workers are saying they can’t get hold of it.
Stuff is continuing its campaign and writes:
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has admitted he made a mistake in 2017 when he was part of the Parliamentary committee that forced Martin Matthews to resign as auditor-general.
Matthews was forced to resign after a report by Maarten Wevers found he didn’t act soon enough to detect and respond to a $726,000 fraud at the Ministry of Transport.
What was known to few back then, and has only since come to light publicly, is that Harrison was not the unsophisticated fraudster portrayed in the Wevers report, but a sophisticated repeat offender.
It is unbelievable that Stuff report a dubious assertion as fact.
There is no dispute that Harrison is a repeat offender, but the assertion that her offending was sophisticated, implying it was impossible to detect, is laughable.
A former MOT staffer has compiled a timeline of events and MOT staff raised issues around Harrison on multiple occasions. Matthews never investigated them, he just asked her for a response and accepted it. Go read the entire timeline.
He even got told the Victorian Police wanted her as a person of interest, and accepted her lie.
Her offending was detected early on by MOT staff. Not in the sense they knew it was criminal, but in the sense proper procedures were not followed. The sort of procedures an Auditor-General wannabee should be rigorous in demanding are followed. Staff kept complaining about invoices for services that had no contract in place, and got nowhere.
There will be types of fraud that no CE could detect or be expected to detect. This was not one of those.