Newshub reports:

A senior quarantine official has blown the whistle on the border-testing botch-up.

He says claims that staff were reluctant to be tested are not correct – and that workers requested a regular testing programme “multiple times”, but their concerns were ignored.

“They haven’t taken our protection or the wider community’s protection seriously by not having a testing programme,” he tells Newshub.

The worker, who’s been at the airport ten years, says frontline staff requested a regular testing programme “multiple times”, but management declined this.

“Just [got] told it wasn’t available, or they didn’t have the resources to do it,” he says.

Health Minister Chris Hipkins says “they should not have been declined tests”.

And Biosecurity New Zealand Northern Regional Commissioner Mike Inglis says they’ve “made sure that we’ve encouraged staff to be tested”.

“At any point if a staff member feels ill they’ve been told to stay at home,” he adds.

And Newshub can reveal that in the past month, at least 18 Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) staff, who interacted with returnees, have been sent from the airport to work in other parts of Auckland and other cities – all without a COVID-19 test.

I can’t say I’m surprised but it illustrates the total disconnect between what Ministers are saying, and the reality on the front line.

Ministers have implied that the problem was some staff didn’t want to be tested, and making it mandatory was a heavy handed step. The reality was staff were pleading to be tested, and the Government was refusing.

Willi Huber has died aged 98. He from all accounts led an excellent life in NZ, and leaves behind many family members who loved him.

He is one of the pioneers of Mt Hutt skifield, and they have a run named after him. His contribution to New Zealand has been a good one.

However before he came to New Zealand he was a Nazi and a member of the Waffen-SS, which he volunteered for at age 17. There is no evidence he personally took part in war crimes, but the Waffen-SS was found to be a criminal organisation involved in numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Now as I said the other day, I think you judge people by the entirety of their life, not by the worst thing they did. But serving in the Waffen-SS is not quite the same as making a stupid phone call.

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation quotes the Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

As a historian, I can state unequivocally that serving in a Waffen-SS unit on the Eastern front, there is no way that Mr Huber could possibly not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS and the Wehrmacht in the territories of the Soviet Union, where 1,500,000 “enemies of the Reich,” primarily Jews, were murdered individually during the years 1941-1943.

Huber’s statements ring incredibly hollow in the face of the historical record of the Holocaust on the Eastern front. If we add the fact that he volunteered for the SS, and his comments that Hitler was “very clever,” and that he “offered [Austrians] a way out”  of the hardships after World War I, it’s clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn’t deserve any sympathy or recognition.

I’m still a bit conflicted. His statements about why he joined and that he never was aware of the atrocities do indicate a lack of repentance.

For my two cents what I would have looked for is did he ever try and atone after WWII. Did he denounced what happened? Did he ever visit a synagogue and ask forgiveness? Or did he not think he needed to? Maybe he did it in private, and never broadcast it.

In the end I think of his family who only knew a loving husband, father and grandfather, and hope they can realise his past doesn’t diminish what he was to them.

But to me, I do think there was either a minimisation or lack of repentance for his role in the Waffen-SS, that will mean he is somewhat defined by his past.

Stuff reports:

Cases of coronavirus in New Zealand have increased by 13.

Twelve of them are linked to a cluster in Auckland, director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announced on Tuesday, while another is still under investigation.

Meanwhile, genome testing has shown another Auckland case of Covid-19 is not connected to the existing cluster.

The case that was not linked to the existing cluster was found after a possible connection between two cases was confirmed on Monday in Auckland and an outbreak in the community was under investigation.

They key thing here is the man with the infection not linked to the current cluster was only tested because of the Government’s belated catch up with testing frontline staff.

It makes you wonder how many cases over the last few weeks were missed because the Government wasn’t testing frontline staff, as they promised.

Let’s just hope there are no more clusters.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

This is the first of a series of posts on polling and the United States’ 2020 presidential election.

In the days before the 2016 presidential election, almost all polls showed Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Donald Trump. Some pundits proclaimed that Clinton’s victory was a 99% surety. It is claimed that even Trump believed she would win. She didn’t. Ever since, supporters of Trump have brushed off poor poll results with the retort that the polls were wrong in 2016 and will be proved wrong again in 2020.

So just how badly did the pollsters do? And how likely is it that there will be a repeat?

First of all, it needs to be understood that almost all polls have been, and will be, wrong. Even if a poll is perfectly carried out, without bias, the mathematics mean that it is probably going to be inaccurate.

A poll consists of consulting a sample of a few hundred people out of 200-million-odd potential voters, and hoping that said sample is representative of the whole. It probably won’t be. But the laws of chance say that it will – probably – come close, and only occasionally land on the wrong planet. That is what the “margin of error” is all about.

Secondly, polls are an out-of-focus snapshot of the situation at a single point in time – some way ahead of the actual vote. The situation can change faster than polls can detect and report it. This is part of what happened in 2016: those who decided only in the final week broke strongly for Trump, an on-the-ground shift that polls could not entirely catch.

But on top of the limits to accuracy imposed by timing, and the laws of statistics, there is also the problem of polls being poorly conducted (to be fair, it is actually very hard – and expensive – to do a poll right); the problem of bias (which may be conscious or unconscious); and the deliberate production of outright rubbish, usually for political effect.

However, all those sources of error are double-edged. They can result in polls that overly favour Republicans as much as Democrats. Fivethiryeight.com reports that over the last 11 election cycles (including mid-terms) this happened almost as often as the reverse. Presidential polls significantly over-predicted for the Republican side in both 2000 and 2012. US Senate elections over this period saw over-prediction for Republicans more often than for Democrats, including in 2018.

In 2016 however, there is no dispute that the polls over-predicted for Hillary Clinton. There is some dispute over how badly – but that is mainly because the truth is actually quite complex.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research analysed the 2016 polls, and came to a very surprising conclusion: “National polls were generally correct and accurate by historical standards”.  

Their report explains that “Collectively, [the polls] indicated that Clinton had about a 3 percentage point lead, and they were basically correct; she ultimately won the popular vote by 2 percentage points.” The New York Times’ average of polls put Clinton’s lead at 3.1%. Fivethirtyeight.com put it at 3.6% (see here) and RealClearPolitics (see here) had Clinton ahead in the popular vote by 3.3% (though the median and mode were both 4%). RCP’s table shows that of the twelve public polls in conducted entirely in the few November days prior to the vote, nine gave Clinton a margin higher than she achieved. But only one put that margin greater than 4%. Ten out of twelve were within 2% of the actual result: a 2.1% margin.

The discrepancy between the polls and the outcome came from the fact that US presidential elections are decided not by the national popular vote, but by individual state results. And here, there were some major errors.

Of 17 swing states polled, seven had results within 1.5% of the polling averages published on fivethirtyeight. In three of those (Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada) Clinton actually did better than the polls projected.

But ten states produced results more than 1.5% better for Trump than the polls had projected and eight of those more than 4%. Three of those eight big errors came in Clinton’s top five “must win” swing states:  Pennsylvania (with a 4.2% error), Michigan (4.4%) and Wisconsin (6.1%). 

State polls were thus (mostly) less accurate than national ones, but even then the AAPOR explains that “Eight states with more than a third of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency had polls showing a lead of three points or less… The polls on average indicated that Trump was one state away from winning the election.” Fivethirtyeight warned at the time (Trump is just a normal polling error behind Clinton) that the outcome was finely poised, and that there was a substantive chance that Clinton would win the popular vote but lose the election.

Most (though not all) mainstream media pundits, being enthusiastic supporters of Clinton, simply failed to look closely enough at the data, got carried away on a tide of excitement, dismissed the evidence that the race was tightening in the final stretch, and predicted the result that they wanted to see. The polls did justify predictions that Clinton would win – but only marginally so – not the 99% level of certainty that some foolishly claimed. In reality, the contest was close enough that it took only a small error to change the outcome.

02Despite the caveats, experience has taught us that polls are still a better means of gauging the likely outcome of an election than consulting chicken entrails, taxi drivers, or what we think people ought to think. So the next post in this series will look at the 2020 situation.

Newshub reports:

The Health Minister has revealed that when the Government announced a new testing strategy for border workers two months ago, there was no system in place to keep track of how many workers had had a swab for COVID-19.

So they had no way of actually recording which staff had or had not been tested. This is pretty gross incompetence. It should not take too months to set up a database which can track staff and testing.

The Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, said he didn’t think there had been a failure or that the public had been misled. Hipkins also denied misleading the public.

That’s despite former Health Minister David Clark issuing a press statement on June 23, almost two months ago, announcing a “testing strategy to keep New Zealand safe”.

The strategy was to include “asymptomatic testing of all border-facing workers”.

So no one will take responsibility for the fact that what we were told never ever happened.

Hipkins and Dr Bloomfield continued to reassure the public they had a robust system in place on August 3, when Hipkins stated: “we do have a testing programme in place for all of those people”.

Dr Bloomfield supported the Minister’s claims, saying on August 3 the workers “are all part of a surveillance testing programme”.

And just last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated testing of border workers was happening “all the way through”. 

They all misled us.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, clearly irritated by what had happened, spoke about the issue on Monday, saying it’s not good enough.

“When we ask as a Cabinet for something to happen, we expect it to happen. So of course, that has not met our expectations,” Ardern said.

“No one, of course, said to us at any point, that I recall, that what we asked for was not happening.”

But Dr Bloomfield says he was providing regular updates.

“There’s clearly a dissonance with what the Prime Minister thought was happening, and what was happening on the ground,” he said.

If regular updates were being provided yet Ministers were insisting testing was happening as promised, then the only conclusion I can draw is Ministers either didn’t read or didn’t understand the updates.

On my Patreon I have done my normal monthly post analysing the key indicators that indicate if a Government is on track or not for re-election.

As you can see above the indicators are all very good for the NZ Government. They are also positive for the Australian Government.

The UK and Canadian Governments have a range of positive and negative indicators are changes of Governments are quite possible there.

In the US Trump has all negative indicators, but they have improved from June, so he does have some momentum.

It was reported on Friday that Roger Bridge resigned from the National Party Board on Friday after the revelations that (presumably) he made a phone call to late night talkback pretending to be Merv from Manurewa, and was critical of one of the people seeking National’s nomination for Auckland Central.

Resigning from the Board is the appropriate thing to do. The phone call was intolerable from any party official, let alone a board member. It was a stupid thing to do, and also politically pointless. What is the chance that one of the 60 party delegates would be listening to Marcus Lush that evening and be influenced by that phone call?

And it was very unfair to the nominee in Auckland Central to have a board member acting in such a way. We need to support nominees.

So the resignation is necessary. But I don’t think people should judge Roger by what may have been one moment of madness. Roger has worked unpaid for National for around 15 years as both a Regional Chair and a Party Director. He has made an enormous voluntary contribution and has been a good friend and mentor to many party activists and candidates.

A US journalist John Dickerson often says we should not judge people for the worst thing they have done in their lives, but for their overall contribution. I strongly agree.

In this episode of Taxpayer Talk, Taxpayers’ Union Research Officer Islay Aitchison interviews economist Michael Reddell on monetary and fiscal policy. Michael Reddell’s blog, Croaking Cassandra, can be found here.

You can subscribe to Taxpayer Talk via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio and all good podcast apps.

This is so funny and also so perceptive.

• Tues 18 Aug Parliament resumes
• Thu 3 Sep (likely) Parliament adjourns
• Sun 6 Sep Parliament dissolves
• Sun 13 Sep GG issues General Election Writ
• Thu 18 Sep Nominations close
• Sat 3 Oct Advance voting begins
• Sat 17 Oct Election Day
• Thu 12 Nov Writ must be returned
• Thu 24 Dec Parliament must meet by this date

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.

1. Her mother had a doctorate and her father is a professor
2. She worked as a prosecutor from 1990 to 2017, for 27 years
3. As a DA she increased the felony conviction rate from 53% to 76%
4. She is 55 years old
5. She is named after the Goddess Lakshmi
6. She has a degree in economics
7. As a child she attended both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple
8. She met her (Jewish) husband on a blind date

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.