Stuff reports:

Those behind the unique Hundertwasser Art Centre being built in Whangārei have welcomed extra Government money but say costs will not keep rising.

An extra $4.5 million of funding from the Provincial Growth Fund will ensure the $30m art centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery has enough money to be finished.

Construction started in September 2018 when the cost was expected to be $26m, which was a jump from the original $16.25m estimate. But additional costs included asbestos removal from the old building, deeper pilings being needed and extra seismic strengthening.

Once again another government project that has doubled in costs. That means that even if there was a positive BCR for it, it almost certainly isn’t positive now.

Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones said the art centre was expected to bring more than 250,000 visitors to Whangārei each year, with an economic benefit of $26 million a year for Northland.

I can guarantee you it will not. Whangarei is not going to have an extra 5,000 tourists a week, just because of one arts centre. Especially while the road from Auckland is only two lanes some of the way. It’s a five hour return journey from Auckland.

They are basically projecting a near doubling of tourism to Whangarei, all because of this arts centre. It’s beyond wishful thinking to delusional.

Also even the local Whangarei tourism portal has more subdued numbers. They say 140,000 extra visitors with a net economic benefit of $3.5 million. I’ll take bets from anyone that Whangarei visitor numbers will not be 50,000 higher than in 2019, within two years of the arts centre being complete.

Also open to bets that the cost will exceed $30 million!

NewstalkZB reports:

The Government has suspended the exemptions for people in managed isolation to be granted leave on compassionate grounds.

The crackdown follows questions around the two women who tested positive for Covid-19 – and whether they should have been allowed to leave their Auckland hotel room if proper protocols had been followed.

Those protocols include the need to have spent at least a week in isolation and to test negative for Covid-19 before being granted compassionate leave.

Those protocols came into effect on June 9, and it remains unclear whether they were supposed to apply only to people who arrived in New Zealand from that date.

Health Minister David Clark, in a statement this evening, said compassionate exemptions would be put on hold until the Government had confidence in the system.

“Compassionate exemptions should be rare and rigorous and it appears that this case did not include the checks that we expected to be happening. That’s not acceptable.

“Our border measures are a key line of defence against Covid-19 and we must ensure they are as robust as possible.

“The Director General will be reviewing the processes around these latest two cases, noting that he has already made it a requirement that all individuals must return a negative Covid test before leaving managed isolation facilities from now on.”

It should always have been a requirement. The problem isn’t compassionate leave. It is a lack of rigour in the system.

Here’s what should happen to every inbound traveller:

1. Tested for Covid-19 as they enter New Zealand
2. Go into quarantine or isolation for 14 days
3. Tested for Covid-19 again the day before isolation ends

If there are compassionate circumstances, then you can shorten (2) but you never do away with (1) and (3). So if you have a dying relative maybe you only spend six days in isolation, but release is still dependent on a 2nd clear Covid-19 test.

A reader writes in:

Not sure if this is of any use to you, but I thought I’d do a comparison between the 2017 and 2020 Labour lists, and see if anything stood out. I ended up categorising the ‘movers’ as below, and certainly there is one thing that has stood out to me – of those candidates who are now in winnable list positions who previously were not (either because they are newcomers or because they were previously too far down), the overwhelming majority are women. Now maybe they are all there on their own merits, but I doubt it. Especially when compared with the rest of candidates who in 2017 were too far down to get elected, and in 2020 still are too far down – of that pool of 9 candidates, 6 are male, only 3 are female.

It seems to me that to be picked to succeed in Labour, first and foremost you need to not have a penis. 

Also, how the hell did Phil Twyford go up inside cabinet!

Anyway, here are my categories showing who has moved up or down. I assumed that Labour get 45% of the seats in parliament (so a little under that in party vote come 19 Sept):

Promoted inside Cabinet

Phil Twyford (up 1)

Jenny Salesa (up 5)

Kris Faafoi (up 4)

Damian O’Connor (up 3)

Demoted inside Cabinet

David Clark (down 8)

Andrew Little (down 4)

Stuart Nash (down 1)

Promoted inside Caucus

Kieran McAnulty (up 10)

Poto Williams (up 3)

Angie Warren-Clark (up 2)

Willie Jackson (up 2)

Trevor Mallard (up 22)

Demoted inside Caucus

Priyanca Radhakrishnan (down 21)

Willow-Jean Prime (down 21)

Jan Tinetti (down 19)

Ginny Andersen (down 19)

Paul Eagle (down 15)

Raymond Huo (down 13)

Jo Luxton (down 12)

Liz Craig (down 12)

Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki (down 9)

Kiri Allen (down 6)
Jamie Strange (down 6)

Aupito-William Sio (down 5)

Deborah Russell (down 5)

Marja Lubeck (down 4)

Louisa Wall (down 3)

Duncan Webb (down 2)

Electorate Only to Winnable List (2/7 female)

Meka Whatiri (30)

Rino Tikikatene (31)

Nanaia Mahuta (10)
Peeni Henare (19)

Adrian Rurawhe (25)

Tamati Coffey (39)

Unwinnable List Position to Winnable (3/3 female)

Helen White (40 to 50), female lawyer from Auckland Central

Shanan Halbert (51 to 53), female Northcote candidate

Naisi Shen (50 to 40), female 

New, in winnable position (7/8 female)

Ayesha Verrall (18), female 

Vanushi Walters (23), female Lawyer

Camilla Belich (32), female employment lawyer, married to Andrew Kirton

Ibrahim Omer (44), male unionist, community advocate

Rachel Brooking (48), female lawyer

Angela Roberts (52), female former PPTA president

Neru Leavasa (54), female doctor

Tracey McLellan (55), female former vice-president

Unwinnable to Unwinnable (3/9 female)

Romy Udanga (47 to 73) male

Steph Lewis (42 to 57) female

Lemauga Lydia Sosene (44 to 56) female

Ala Al-Bustanji (62 to 74) male

Rachel Boyack (48 to 59) female

Nathaniel Blomfield (68 to 79) male

Kurt Taogaga (59 to 68) male

Dan Rosewarne (52 to 58) male

Gaurav Sharma (69 to 65) male

Winnable list to Electorate Only

Greg O’Connor (41 to nothing) male

Unwinnable List to Electorate Only

Anna Lorck (46 to nothing) female

Retiring

Clare Curran (was 23)

Ruth Dyson (was 24)

Thanks to the reader for a very good analysis. I’ve also done an analysis on Patreon detailing which candidates would get elected as which level of party vote.

Stuff reports:

Monday marked another deadline for the Government’s troubled Auckland light rail project. It was the last Cabinet meeting before the pre-election period kicks in on June 19.

That deadline has been kicked around – mainly by the Opposition – as the last possible day Cabinet would sign off on light rail, given the convention for governments to restrain their decision-making in the three months leading up to an election.

But light rail is the policy equivalent of Monty Python’s black knight: After each bout of terrible news, it rises to its feet, crying “I’m not dead yet”.

And technically they’re right: Light rail, unlike the capital gains tax, or the “feebate” electric car scheme, hasn’t been killed. Those projects were consulted on, axed by NZ First, and Labour and the Greens moved on. This is different: to this day, the Government continues to receive briefings on the project and Cabinet papers are still being prepared. Officially, the project is “on hold,” or “stalled”, but not “dead”.

To be killed off, you have to have been born in the first place, and hence light rail is more akin to still born. They promised light rail would be complete to Mt Roskill within four years and after three years they have yet to even decide how to proceed, if at all.

It is arguably a higher degree of incompetence that Kiwibuild.

Newshub reports:

The Simpson review recommends:

• Create centralised Crown entity called Health NZ to review financial performance
• Reduce the number of DHBs from 20 to 8-12 within five years
• Make DHBs more accountable to the entire population
• Health Minister should appoint DHB board members
• Create a Māori Health Authority 

I’m in favour of the first four major recommendations. I’d like to see the Government commit to them. Alas they have not, despite the spin.

Health Minister David Clark said Cabinet has accepted the case for health sector reform, particularly the recommendations to reduce fragmentation, strengthen leadership and accountability, and improve equity for access and outcomes for all Kiwis. 

He said decisions on individual recommendations will be taken to Cabinet over the coming months and into the next term of Parliament.

This means little. They have not indicated any acceptance of specific recommendations, and will probably try not to until after the election.

They’ve had the report for three months. Plenty of time to consider it and say what their response is. But they haven’t. We do not know if they will actually reduce the number of DHBs and make them all appointed.

National should show the Government up, and commit to the first four major recommendations asap.

Collette Devlin writes at Stuff:

Ardern has never said she lost confidence in Clark, and on Monday said he would remain in his role as minister, thanks to the success in beating Covid-19.

She gave him some credit for this, saying he had made “a lot of very good decisions” and was the right person to take the lead role in taking on the review’s recommendations.

But as most people will be aware, the person leading the charge against Covid-19 was not Clark. Health Director-General Dr Ashley Bloomfield was the public face of the response and the one actually in Wellington for lockdown.

He stood up day after day and fielded difficult questions from the media. Where was Clark? Where was the minister in charge?

During the last pandemic (swine flu) the Minister of Health fronted twice daily press conferences and fielded the bulk of the questions, with MOH staff in a secondary role.

Here the Minister of Health wasn’t just invisible, but he wasn’t even allowed to be in Wellington!

But Clark’s weakness was not just over lockdown. He often manages to mar what should be strong stories for the Government.

On Sunday the Government announced $92.6m of funding into testing labs, pharmacies, midwives, hospices and call centres to further strengthen their readiness for any future outbreak.

Clark, who was late arriving, took a tour of the SCL Covid-testing lab at Wellington Hospital for the announcement.

He did ask some (simple) questions but looked disinterested.

Perhaps he did not want to be there. It is understood he initially planned to remain in Dunedin and send out a press release instead. Some members of the media were even told he would do embargoed interviews on the Friday ahead of the PR.

But then came the nod from the powers above that he had to make a show in Wellington.

When it finally came to his moment in the limelight, he read from a script and did a very bad job of going off-script to answer questions. Incompetence was shining through.

He was unable to answer questions in much detail, and he should have been across the issues.

For a journalist to label a Minister as incompetent, is unusual, It means things have to be really bad.

Clark did not carry himself like a minister on Sunday. He came across as a first-term MP out of his depth.

The only thing he seemed to be interested in was the Highlanders’ win, the first thing he referred to at the start of what should’ve been an important Government message, and turned into a waffling mess.

After this poor performance, can the public have confidence in him to undertake such an enormous task as reforming the health system?

So we have a Minister of Health who can’t be trusted to manage a health crisis, or even a photo op. A No 4 on Labour’s List who has failed to deliver even 1% of Labour’s two iconic 2017 policies (Kiwibuild and light rail) and a No 2 who isn;’t trusted to hold a press conference be Acting Prime Minister.

Stuff reports:

The March 15 terrorist was wrongly granted a firearms licence due to a string of police failures, sources have told Stuff.

The terrorist, who pleaded guilty to New Zealand’s worst mass shooting in March, was not properly inspected by police vetting staff when he applied for a firearms licence in 2017.

Stuff has been told that, among other errors, police failed to interview a family member as required, instead relying on two men who met the terrorist through an internet chatroom.

The error was overlooked when police granted him the firearms licence, allowing the Australian citizen to stockpile the semi-automatic guns later used to murder 51 people.

You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

Police gave Tarrant a firearms licence on the basis of two referees who he met through an Internet chatroom!!!! They didn’t talk to a single person who had ever interacted with him in real life. This is damning.

Sadly this is a not a huge surprise. I talk to a lot of firearms owners and almost without fail they are scathing of the Police’s role in vetting owners, as in they are nowhere near thorough enough.

If this report is correct, this tragedy was preventable. If the Police had demanded proper referees, they may have found out that Tarrant was unsuitable.

Any further changes to firearms laws should be conditional on taking vetting away from the Police, and transferring it to a dedicated agency.

Stuff reports:

Former National government minister Steven Joyce has been awarded costs of nearly $269,000, after winning a defamation case last year against NBR publisher Fourth Estate Holdings Ltd, and its owner Todd Scott.

High Court Justice Pheroze Jagose released his decision following a defamation trial centred on a column written by commentator Matthew Hooton, and tweets about it from Scott. Written in March 2018, the article was critical of Joyce’s time in government.

Hooton issued an apology as part of a legal settlement with Joyce. But NBR and Fourth Estate Holdings Ltd continued to defend against defamation claims from Joyce.

Joyce did not make a claim for damages, so none were awarded, but Justice Jagose has awarded Joyce costs against Fourth Estate and Scott.

This really was a monumental own goal.

All NBR and Todd Scott had to do was retract the column and apologise for it, as Hooton did. Their costs may have been a few thousand dollars at most.

But we had the bizarre spectacle of a publisher refusing to back down on a column that the column’s own author had apologised for. And the end result was they of course lost in court and have costs of over $250,000.

It would be a huge shame if this leads to the end of NBR, as it has been a valuable part of NZ media for many years.

Am amazing article in The Age about the Victorian Labor Party and the outright corruption inside it.

The MP at the centre of it has now been sacked, for making the mistake of having his words recorded.

Labour’s 2020 List is:

• 1 Jacinda Ardern
• 2 Kelvin Davis
• 3 Grant Robertson
• 4 Phil Twyford
• 5 Megan Woods
• 6 Chris Hipkins
• 7 Andrew Little
• 8 Carmel Sepuloni
• 9 David Parker
• 10 Nanaia Mahuta
• 11 Trevor Mallard
• 12 Stuart Nash
• 13 Iain Lees-Galloway
• 14 Jenny Salesa
• 15 Damien O’Connor
• 16 Kris Faafoi
• 17 David Clark
• 18 Ayesha Verrall
• 19 Peeni Henare
• 20 Willie Jackson
• 21 Aupito William Sio
• 22 Poto Williams
• 23 Vanushi Walters
• 24 Michael Wood
• 25 Adrian Rurawhe
• 26 Raymond Huo
• 27 Kiri Allan
• 28 Kieran McAnulty
• 29 Louisa Wall
• 30 Meka Whaitiri
• 31 Rino Tirikatene
• 32 Camilla Belich
• 33 Priyanca Radhakrishnan
• 34 Jan Tinetti
• 35 Deborah Russell
• 36 Marja Lubeck
• 37 Angie Warren-Clark
• 38 Willow-Jean Prime
• 39 Tamati Coffey
• 40 Naisi Chen
• 41 Jo Luxton
• 42 Jamie Strange
• 43 Liz Craig
• 44 Ibrahim Omer
• 45 Duncan Webb
• 46 Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki
• 47 Ginny Andersen
• 48 Rachel Brooking
• 49 Paul Eagle
• 50 Helen White
• 51 Barbara Edmonds
• 52 Angela Roberts
• 53 Shanan Halbert
• 54 Neru Leavasa
• 55 Tracey McLellan
• 56 Lemauga Lydia Sosene
• 57 Steph Lewis
• 58 Dan Rosewarne
• 59 Rachel Boyack
• 60 Arena Williams
• 61 Ingrid Leary
• 62 Soraya Peke-Mason
• 63 Lotu Fuli
• 64 Sarah Pallett
• 65 Gaurav Sharma
• 66 Emily Henderson
• 67 Terisa Ngobi
• 68 Kurt Taogaga
• 69 Kerrin Leoni
• 70 Reuben Davidson
• 71 Zahra Hussaini
• 72 Janet Holborow
• 73 Romy Udanga
• 74 Ala’ Al-Bustanji
• 75 Glen Bennett
• 76 Monina Hernandez
• 77 Claire Mahon
• 78 Jon Mitchell
• 79 Nathaniel Blomfield
• 80 Nerissa Henry
• 81 Mathew Flight
• 82 Shirin Brown
• 83 Liam Wairepo
• 84 Georgie Dansey

On current public polls Labour would get over 70 MPs. This will probably shrink with time but anyone in the 55 to 70 range is potentially an MP.

The promotion of Phil Twyford to No 4 is staggering. He has totally failed on their two iconic promises of 100,000 Kiwibuild homes and light rail in Auckland by 2021 and they promote him to No 4!

The ODT reports:

Dunedin’s Captain Cook Hotel will be renamed.

The famed pub and music venue will undergo a name change in the wake of protests and growing anti-racist and anti-colonial sentiments.

A post on the venue’s Facebook page, believed to be from operator Mike McLeod, tonight outlined the reasons for changing the name, saying Captain Cook was a symbol of colonisation and oppression.

I spent four years frequenting the Cook, when studying (or not) at Otago.

Cook is one the greatest explorers of his age. He mapped more of the world than any explorer before him. Judging his interactions in the 1700s by the standards of the 2000s is ridiculous.

As a property owner, McLeod has every right to rename his pub. But it is obviously being done under pressure of a global movement to impose a politically correct worldview on everyone.

I’ve started a new series on my Patreon. I’m going to profile all 72 electorate races over the next 15 weeks. I will do one electorate a day starting from Invercargill today and concluding with Northland.

In each post I review the 2017 results, the major 2020 candidates, any boundary changes and then an outlook for who is likely to win.

Each electorate will be classified as either safe, leaning or too close to call.

The first profile of Invercargill is here.

Fran O’Sullivan reports:

The Prime Minister has effectively cold-shouldered top businessman Rob Fyfe, who worked without pay for eight weeks as business liaison at the peak of the Covid-19 crisis.

On May 18, Fyfe wrote to Jacinda Ardern letting her know that after eight weeks embedded in the Wellington Covid-19 operations command centre he proposed to return to his Auckland home.

Fyfe confirmed to the Herald that three weeks on the Prime Minister has yet to acknowledge his letter.

Nor has Ardern thanked him for the leadership he and his private-sector team brought to organising vital personal protection equipment for frontline health staff, ventilators and a world-class contact tracing app to cover clear inadequacies within the New Zealand health system.

Real kindness in action there.

I need to rest for a couple of days to help recovery after a minor surgical procedure today. So don’t expect any blogging from me until Monday.

Enjoy the weekend everyone!

The Herald reports:

Scientists are pushing for an official inquiry into New Zealand’s response to Covid-19, arguing it would better prepare the country for the next big crisis.

While the Government launched an inquiry into urgent legislation it used to implement its alert level system and lockdown, it hasn’t announced an independent probe into its wider response – something Act leader David Seymour has repeatedly called for.

Now, a group of Otago University experts have also asked for one, pointing out that while New Zealand had done an “extraordinarily successful job” of stopping the virus, a wide-ranging inquiry was still critical.

The scientists – professors Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, Associate Professor George Thomson, and Drs Jennifer Summers, Amanda Kvalsvig and Matt Boyd – argued the country needed to know the effectiveness of the various pandemic controls, and if they could be improved in the short and longer term.

This is a no brainer. The cost to the country of the response to Covid-19 is around $140 billion of extra borrowing. Anything less than a Royal Commission of Inquiry into our response would be farcical.

Mike Hosking writes:

So the day of reckoning, or at least a day of reckoning, has arrived. The jig is up.

Andrew Little, the Minister in charge of Pike River, fronts the appropriate select committee and reveals what most of us had worked out well before they ever entered the mine.

The retrieval of bodies is no longer practical. The simple truth, a decade on, is that the retrieval of remains was never practical.

Little perpetrates the con a little further by suggesting that the main reason they are still there, apart from perceived political gain, is to gather evidence for the crime committed. …

If it needs to be stated, let me state it again, there is no evidence, there will be no evidence, and there will be no charges. I called it in the CTV Building destroyed in the Christchurch earthquake, I call it on Pike River.

The chance that there will be some sort of evidence in the drift, 10 years on, which would allow the Police to file homicide charges is beyond miniscule. The $50 million spent will achieve zero.

The Guardian reports:

An episode of Fawlty Towers famous for coining the phrase, “Don’t mention the war!” has become the latest “classic” British television programme to be taken down from a BBC-owned streaming service, as broadcasters continue to conduct a reappraisal of old British television content.

The episode of the 1970s sitcom – in which John Cleese as Basil Fawlty goose-steps around a Torquay hotel while shouting the phrase – was recently removed from the BBC-controlled UKTV catch-up service.

What a bunch of cowards. This is arguably the funniest episode of the series.

The culture fascists are winning.

Here’s the episode in full for those who want to enjoy it again. ‘

UPDATE: The video won’t play on embedded sites but click on the link to play it within Youtube.

The Herald reports:

The identity of a man who threatened to kill former National Party leader Simon Bridges and his children and “feed them to the pigs” can now be revealed.

Hohepa Waenga, 20, from Te Teko, pleaded guilty to a charge of threatening to kill in the Whakatāne District Court today through his lawyer.

Waenga sent a private Facebook message to Bridges, the MP for Tauranga, on April 22, according to court documents.

About 3pm that day, Waenga was drinking with an associate at a Kowhai St address in Whakatāne.

The pair were watching a debate between Bridges, who at the time was the National Party leader, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the debate angered Waenga.

Waenga sent Bridges the message: “F*** you you ball head I’m going to kill your kids and you and feed them to the pigs you little b****”.

When spoken to by the police, Waenga admitted the events and in explanation stated he was angry at Bridges because he liked Jacinda.

That is so vile and disgusting. Death threats against MPs are bad enough but to explicitly threaten to kill his children is probably the worst thing you can say to a parent.

Ebbers also handed up a letter of apology which she said Waenga had written himself.

She urged Judge Ingram to continue name suppression, arguing publication of his name prior to sentencing could interfere with the restorative justice process.

Both police prosecutor Grace Collett and the ‘Bay of Plenty Times’ opposed name suppression, and Judge Ingram agreed to lift the order.

The judge told Waenga that it was in the “interest of everybody” to do so now.

He said Waenga having fronted up with a letter of apology in which he expressed remorse for his “dumb decision” was an important part of a restorative justice process.

Judge Ingram convicted Waenga on the charge and remanded him on bail for a restorative justice meeting and sentencing on August 5.

Name suppression would have been an outrage. His threats to kill Simon and his children carry a maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment. It is a very serious offence.