Stuff reports:

The man behind a court challenge to Otago University’s medical school admissions scheme is getting support from other parents whose children missed out.

University leaders say they will “strenuously oppose” the legal challenge and limiting special category entrants would “slow the rate at which a representative health workforce could be achieved”.

If your only criteria is acheiving a representative health workforce, then why not reserve 100% of places for the next decade until you acheive that?

Otago University’s pro-vice-chancellor of Health Sciences, Professor Paul Brunton earlier said the university had an obligation to train health professionals equipped to meet the needs of New Zealand’s diverse communities.

“Māori comprise only 3.4 per cent and Pacific people 1.8 per cent of the medical workforce, whereas the proportion of the total population who identify as Māori and Pacific is, respectively, approximately 15 per cent and 8 per cent,” he said.

And I would have no problem with a quota to ensure 23% of medical students are Maori or Pasifika, which over time would ensure a representative workforce. But what Otago has goes well beyond that:

For the 2020 intake, 120 of the 202 places available to first year Health Sciences students went to those entering under special categories. Of those, 79 (39 per cent) were Māori and Pasifika. There is currently no limit to the proportion of the places available for special category students.

So 60% of places are reserved for those who meet a quota category, and 40% went to Maori and Pasifika – almost twice their proportion of the population.

The man, who asked not to be named, said his child completed the health sciences course at Otago University last year straight from high school. The student achieved A+ grades for the requisite papers and a UCAT (an intelligence/suitability test) result above the 90th percentile. His child was denied entry.

Māori and Pasifika applicants were accepted for 2020 with B- averages and no consideration of UCAT scores.

So the student who missed out got straight A+ and was deemed in the top 10% in terms of suitability.

Stuff reports:

Auckland Harbour Bridge lane closures following a truck crash have prompted renewed calls for an additional crossing as traffic in the city ground to a halt for a second day.

Travel mayhem on Friday came after two trucks were caught up in a 127 kilometre per hour wind gust and one crashed, causing damage to the bridge, shutting the centre four lanes.

NTZA said the lanes could be closed for weeks, and traffic woes continued on Saturday.

With 200,000 cars a day, having four lanes closed is chaos.

National has pledged to start work on a second harbour crossing in 2028, and included funding for it in its $31 billion infrastructure package.

Labour has said it would look at a second harbour crossing between 2030 and 2040, but critically it has said it might be for rail only, and not allow cars.

Five Thirty Eight has released its Senate forecast. At this stage they forecast a 50:50 tie so the Vice-President would determine the balance of power in the Senate. Taking into account the presidential forecast that gives the Democrats a 58% chance of controlling the Senate.

Many seats are close. Their current forecast is:

• Maine – 53% Democrats win
• Iowa – 59% Republicans hold
• North Carolina – 62% Democrats win
• Colorado – 68% Democrats win
• Montana – 68% Republicans hold
• Georgia – 75% Republicans hold
• Alabama – 78% Republicans win
• Arizona – – 78% Democrats win

So Democrats win 4 and lose 1 to give them 50 seats. But you could well get a net gain of just one for the Democrats and you also could get a net gain of five, so result could be 52:58 in either direction.

The Senate election will be very consequential. The House is not competitive this time, so the likely four options after the election are:

1. President Trump, Dem House, GOP Senate (status quo)
2. President Trump, Dem House, Dem Senate (lame duck)
3. President Biden, Dem House, GOP Senate (divided Congress)
4. President Biden, Dem House, Dem Senate (Dems can implement much of agenda and appoints Judges)

My posts this week on Patreon are:

• The race for Waiariki
• The race for Papakura
• The race for Mangere
• Meet the Minors – my take on the 12 minor parties contesting the 2020 election. Warning: Humour may offend.

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, aged 87.

While her judicial philosophy was not one I shared, she was a titan of the legal world. Some of her achievements:

• Graduated 1st equal from Columbia Law School
• Served on Harvard Law Review and Columbia Law Review
• Professor at Columbia Law School
• Appeared six times before the US Supreme Court, winning five out of six
• Praised by Justice Scalia as the leading litigator on behalf of women’s rights
• Appointed to US Court of Appeals for DC in 1980
• Appointed to US Supreme Court in 1993 and confirmed 96-3

Obviously much focus will now be on her replacement. We will see every Senator argue the opposite of 2016. All Republican Senators will claim a replacement should be confirmed even though it is an election year and all Democratic Senators will claim there should be no replacement as it is an election year. I will be pleasantly surprised if even a single Senator argues the same way in 2020 as they did in 2016.

The most likely replacement it seems is Judge Amy Comey Barrett who is on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh District. She is only 48 years old and if appointed would probably mean a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the next 15 years or longer.

Stuff reports:

The Green Party and The Opportunities Party have announced they will both support the introduction of rent caps which would limit the amount a landlord could increase rent.

Of their many awful ideas, this is one of the worst.

Megan McArdle in the Washington Post writes:

There aren’t that many things you can get economists to agree on. Fiscal stimulus, minimum wages, monetary policy, health care, bank regulation — on almost all the major issues of the day, you can find a respected economist to argue for either side.

But there are a few questions where there’s near unanimity, and rent control is one of them. Pretty much every economist agrees that rent controls are bad.

Rent control is just a form of price control, and they have failed in almost every country that has tried them.

Declining housing stock is just one of the many potential costs of rent controls; others include a deteriorating housing stock as landlords stop investing in their properties, and higher rents. Yes, higher, because rent control creates a two-tier housing market. There are cheap, price-stabilized apartments that rarely turn over, because why would you give up such a great deal? Then there are the uncontrolled apartments, which everyone else in the city has to fight over, bidding up the price.

Just another reason not to vote Greens.

A guest post by KrazyKiwi:

This chart uses publicly available Covid-19 statistics and published research on case reporting to show how few Covid-19 infections result in death. The chart has <i> four</i> data series plotted. Yes, four. More on this shortly.

At the beginning of the pandemic our consciousness was flooded with images of death. Bodies being removed from hospitals, funerals, scary charts, and a narrative that implied that every one of us could be next. The messaging made it clear that experts would guide us to safety, and compliance with their instructions was essential for ones’ survival.

Fast forward to today, and what should be clear to anyone with more than passing scrutiny of the official narrative is that deaths no longer cut it in terms of perpetuating the fear narrative, one that has been so successful in having populations relinquish many of their civil liberties with little protest. To keep the pandemic going, governments together with their obliging media partners have switched the focus to ‘cases’. Suspected, probably and confirmed ‘Cases’ have been supplanted as a cognitive proxy for deaths, and once again populations seem to have taken the bait, with a ‘case’ being feared to the extent that continued compliance with restraints on our life and liberty are broadly supported.

The problem with this strategy are the data. Covid-19 is similar to 100s of other infections in that the vast majority are inconsequential to the extent that the sufferer does not seek medical attention, and their immune system deals with the infection promptly. Unlike deaths which are rigorously cataloged, infections do not become ‘cases’ because they are not reported and subsequently managed by a health authority.

So how many Covid-19 infections become ‘cases’, and how many remain unrecorded, resulting in natural recoveries? There have been a number of published studies on this topic, with one of the most frequently cited being Chow, Chang et al. (2020). Global prediction of unreported SARS-CoV2 infection from observed COVID-19 cases. Their study suggests that there are nine unreported infections for every one ‘case’.

Back to that chart. It has four data series. The solid green series shows infections that have recovered, the <i>dotted</i> yellow series shows total infections, the pink series shows officially reported cases, and the red series shows deaths.

The Chow, Chang et al analysis makes it possible to chart infections vs deaths over time and, importantly, to calculate an population-wide Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of 0.28%. In other words 99.72% of those infected with

Covid-19 recover, and this why the green infection and yellow dotted recovery series are visually indistinguishable. Of course, the 0.28% fatality rate is skewed towards the elderly and those suffering a number of non-trivial comorbidities, so for children and healthy adults the real risk of dying as a result of a Covid-19 infection is smaller still. In truth that risk is vanishingly small.

Here is the official Government advice on what we should do at Level 2:

• Keep your distance when outside your home
• You should keep at least 2 metres in public and in retail stores, like supermarkets and clothes shops and 1 metre in most other places like workplaces, cafes, restaurants and gyms
• You are encouraged to wear face coverings in situations where physical distancing is not possible, like in shops
• Wearing face coverings is advised where it’s not possible to practise physical distancing or to carry out contact tracing. For example, in crowded spaces on Tertiary Education Organisation campuses,
• At Alert Level 2, when not on public transport, we recommend you consider wearing a face covering when you cannot maintain physical distance from people you do not know
• Keep a 2 metre distance in public. Take extra care if you interact with people you don’t know as it won’t be easy to do contact tracing if needed. 

But hey what’s more important – a group selfie, or promoting Covid-19 safety.

National has announced that it will cut income tax for 16 months from December 2020 to March 2022 to help families during the economic crisis caused by Covid-19. This will also help businesses as boosting after tax incomes boost spending.

I’ve done a quick calculation of what this means for people at different incomes.

The biggest percentage reduction in tax is for those $20,000 and those earning $60,000 and $70,000. After $70,000 the more you earn the less your tax cut percentage is.

In absolute terms anyone who earns $90,000 or more will pay $4,000 less tax during the 16 months which makes a big difference to disposal income. Anyone earning over $60,000 will pay at least $2,500 less tax.

This provides New Zealanders with a real choice – a Government that will help people through the tough times by temporarily reducing taxes, or a Government that will increase taxes.

A sad but not surprising poll in the US of millenials (age 18 to 39) on the Holocaust. Some findings:

• 12% had not heard of the Holocaust
• 11% though Jews were the cause of the Holocaust
• Only 44% could name Auschwitz when asked for the names of any concentration camps
• Only 35% have heard of Oscar Schindler
• Only 37% knew six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. 10% thought more and 36% fewer.
• 3% do not believe the Holocaust happened

Newshub reports:

Labour’s candidate Ingrid Leary has recently moved to Dunedin from Waiheke Island.

Newshub asked her if she’d stay in Dunedin even if she didn’t win, and Leary replied she “hasn’t thought about not winning”.

But Newshub’s unearthed an interview Leary did with Radio Waiheke where she said: “It has been a safe Labour seat so if I dont win the seat I probably won’t ever be catching a plane back to Dunedin.”

So Leary will only live in Dunedin if she is elected an MP. Otherwise back to Waiheke. Not exactly commitment.

Leary said she meant she won’t feel comfortable coming back if she loses.

“I’m expected to win the seat, it’s a strong safe Labour seat,” she told Newshub.

“I’m working really hard to make sure it stays that way and I’d be very embarrassed if I didn’t win the seat, it would mean I’d done something terribly wrong.”

Nice spin, but actually Taieri is not a safe Labour seat. Dunedin South was but Taieri has very different boundaries. It includes a lot of South Otago including Balclutha.

The NZ First List is:

Marcroft obviously committed the unforgivable sin of having her own opinions!

Stats NZ reports:

Gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 12.2 percent in the June 2020 quarter, the largest quarterly fall recorded since the current series began in 1987, as the COVID-19 restrictions in place through the quarter impacted economic activity, Stats NZ said today.

“The 12.2 percent fall in quarterly GDP is by far the largest on record in New Zealand,” national accounts senior manager Paul Pascoe said

Measures to contain COVID-19 have led to historically large falls in GDP in many parts of the world, with countries’ results reflecting the nature and timing of their responses, and the structure of their economies. For example, New Zealand’s result compares to falls of 7.0 percent in Australia, 11.5 percent in Canada, 7.9 percent in Japan, 20.4 percent in the United Kingdom, and 9.1 percent in the United States.

So a larger fall than Australia, Canada, Japan and the US.

And the Government has no plan to rebuild the economy to get us out of deficits. Their plan is to have us running deficits for 15 years!

The United States death toll from Covid-19 has now hit 200,000. This graph of the seven OECD countries with the highest death rates shows how every other country which had a high death rate managed to dramatically slow the infection and hence death rates.

But the United States is not slowing at all. They have now overtaken France, Sweden and Italy in terms of death rates. In a few days or weeks they will overtake UK and Spain.

ACT leader David Seymour has taken the chance to spruik his views on freedom of speech, at a public meeting in Palmerston North.

Speaking to about 50 people at the Conference and Function Centre on Tuesday night, Seymour, after making a short campaign speech, was asked about Massey University’s decision to last year take down posters put up by students to protest growing restrictions on freedom in Hong Kong.

First-time voter and Massey University student Cay Chan raised the point, after posters supporting the Hong Kong protests were removed from the Palmerston North campus in October.

Chan said many students were still upset and were worried about the consequences of openly advocating political views on campus.

Seymour said it was a major issue in New Zealand and he had written a bill that would cut government funding to universities that did not take appropriate steps to protect and foster freedom of speech.

A financial penalty for being anti free speech is probably the only thing that can incentivise them to be pro free speech.

Some of them receive millions from the Chinese Government, so it is not surprising they go out of their way to placate their funders.

Catherine Marks and Colin Gavaghan write:

As the referendum on the End of Life Choice Act approaches, people naturally want to know – are the safeguards in the Act safe enough? As two lawyers (one practicing and one academic) with extensive expertise in this area, our answer to this question is a resounding and evidence-based ‘yes’.

Our analysis has found New Zealand’s assisted dying Act is one of the most rigorous in the world. It strongly mirrors legislation that is working well in countries similar to ours (culturally and in terms of medical practice), including Victoria and Western Australia, with some additional protections.

Reports commissioned by governments into the international experience, including recent comprehensive parliamentary reports from Australia, have all found the safeguards work well and that predictions of abuse or pressure on the vulnerable have simply not materialised. There has been no “slippery slope” – the laws have remained narrow and where there has been change, it has gone through a parliamentary process. As many reports emphasise, doctors are already trusted to assess depression, coercion and ambivalence in life and death situations.

Something people may be unaware of is that doctors involve have to be certain that an applicant is eligible at every step of the process. It isn’t something they do just once at the beginning or even twice at the beginning and end.

Second, there is extensive evidence – including a 100-year study of coronial records in New Zealand – showing people take their lives prematurely when assisted dying is not available (while they are still physically able). 

I personally knew someone who killed themselves because euthanasia wasn’t available for them in the future.

In New Zealand’s Act, the eligibility criteria are very narrow. It is not enough to be terminally ill with fewer than six months to live. You must also be experiencing unbearable suffering that cannot be relieved by treatment that is tolerable to you and you must be in a state of advanced and irreversible physical decline. This means you must be very ill indeed and without prospect of recovery. You must also be at least 18 years old and assessed as competent to make a decision specifically about assisted dying.

And again the doctors involved must, at every stage, be assured you are eligible. If you are not, they face criminal penalties including jail for being involved.

New Zealand’s High Court analysed the Act following an application brought by Hospice NZ seeking various declarations on how the Act should be interpreted. The judgment emphasises the extent of safeguards set out in the Act, including in relation to assessment of any pressure. The process must be immediately stopped if a doctor or nurse at any time suspects pressure. Doctors are required to remind a person on multiple occasions they can stop the process at any time or defer. Importantly, doctors are skilled in detecting pressure and already do this in end of life decisions (for example to end life supporting treatment).

And again if a doctor or nurse continues despite suspecting pressure, they face criminal liability.

The extensive evidence we have analysed demonstrates beyond doubt in our view that New Zealand’s assisted dying law can be safely implemented. It is now over to New Zealanders to provide those facing an inevitable and intolerable death with choice and compassion at the end of their life.

We all get to vote. Make sure your vote counts.

The Herald reports:

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says NZ First turned down a proposal from Advance New Zealand to join forces.

“Advance New Zealand wanted to join New Zealand First but we said no,” Peters said.

He was speaking in Tauranga’s Red Square and responding to a woman holding a poster with images of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and communist symbols.

Asked why the party refused, Peters said the reasons would be “obvious to any sensible, sane, rational person”.

Not a hard choice is it. One co-leader is before the courts facing charges from the Serious Fraud Office, and the other co-leader is the sort of conspiracy theorist who probably thinks the moon landing was faked.

The PREFU released today shows how dire the economic situation is. Some key aspects:

• Unemployment to hit 7.7% next year and remain over 5% until 2027!
• A massive $32 billion deficit in 2020/21, which is 10.5% of GDP.
• Net debt to hit 55% of GDP in 2024
• Assumes border restrictions stay in place throughout 2021
• Annual growth after the recession end downgraded from 3.9% to 2.8%
• A near permanent deficit, with an OBEGAL deficit persisting until at least 2033 – so that is 13 years of deficits

So this is the status quo – an endless deficit, debt over 50% of GDP and unemployment remaining over 5% for seven years.

That’s one reason to vote for a party that is promising better than the status quo.

I’ve updated the graph showing the probability of Trump winning in 538’s model.

In 2016 his chances moved between 12% and 48% – a lot of variation.

In 2020 his high point has been 31% (higher than election eve 2016 which of course he won) and the low point 21%.

September has seen his chances slide from 31% to 24%. The Woodward book is probably not helping him as it means the headlines are about his handling of Covid, not the issues he wants to campaign on.

The BSA has ruled:

The Authority has upheld a complaint that a 1 News item reporting on National MP Simon Bridges travelling from Tauranga to Wellington during COVID-19 Level 4 lockdown breached the accuracy standard. The Authority found that the item, which was exclusively focussed on MPs breaking lockdown rules, was misleading in putting Hon Simon Bridges in that category. It found that the broadcaster had not made reasonable efforts to clarify that under the rules, he was allowed to travel to Parliament for work.

That story was very damaging. It is little consolation to have a correction months later, but at least we have an official ruling it was inaccurate.

UPDATE: In an unprecedented move, the BSA has removed the ruling from its website. I can only assumed they have been heavied or pressured by someone to do so.

Google however has cached the decision here.

UPDATE: The BSA has advised me:

1. The BSA has withdrawn a decision published on 15 September relating to a One News item about travel during lockdown by the then Leader of the Opposition Hon Simon Bridges.

2. It has come to our attention that the decision was made on the basis of an incorrect assessment of lockdown regulations.

3. The BSA is reviewing its decision and will reissue it as soon as possible.

4. The BSA regrets this situation.

My understanding is that the decision referred to the wrong version of the lockdown regulations.