The Herald reports:

Late last night, the Ministry of Health said 51 of the 55 people granted early leave between June 9 and 16 had not been tested before they left managed isolation.

It had taken more than a week for that question to be answered because an integrated IT system did not exist – but is now being built – and health officials had to match name and date of birth details from their systems with information held at isolation facilities.

The 55 people represent the highest risk because they didn’t complete 14 days of managed isolation before being in the community, and the prerequisite of a negative test before leaving was not observed.

Of the 55, four were tested before leaving managed isolation, and two of the four were tested the day they left, meaning the results were unlikely to have been known when they left.

So basically only two of the 55 released early were known to be safe. Even for this Government, that is a new level of incompetence.

Radio NZ report:

Pressure is mounting on the government and health officials to explain how many people left managed isolation without being tested for Covid-19 since 9 June.

The Opposition leader says it is an absolute shambles and a “national disgrace” that the information is still unavailable a week since it was first asked, despite repeated requests from politicians and the media.

It has been eight days, and they still can’t answer what is the most basic of questions – how many people have left without being tested.

Stuff reports:

The Government has conceded its flagship transport has been put on ice, again.

It had been obvious for months the project was troubled, with coalition partners NZ First openly saying it wouldn’t progress this Parliamentary term.

The Government has now conceded that the project has been axed with Transport Minister Phil Twyford saying it would be kicked back to officials after nearly three years of deliberation.

Auckland Mayor Phil Goff said he was “disappointed” and “frustrated” with the outcome.

This is a huge broken promise. Ardern promised it would be built and working by the end of next year.

The problem wasn’t NZ First. The problem is it took the Beehive geniuses three years to even try and decide the route and the type of rail. Stuff which should have taken three months took three years.

The project was beset by leaks from NZTA, suggesting incompetence and a lack of direction from the Beehive.

More than suggesting incompetence.

Stuff reports:

Arbuckle has been a Marlborough District councillor for 10 years, with three cracks at the mayoralty in that time.

He ran for NZ First in the 2017 general election, but as a late replacement.

This year, after a couple of stints at the party’s “candidates’ college”, he feels better prepared to challenge for the Kaikōura electorate.

I wonder what they teach them at their candidates’ college. Here’s my guesses:

• How to launder money through a foundation
• How to spot an immigrant at 100 yards
• How not to sell policy off too cheaply
• Who is Deputy Leader this week
• Why Vote Racing should be larger than Vote Health
• How to find Wogistan on a map
• How to hire your partner as your electorate agent
• A legal guide to claiming the maximum superannuation entitlement regardless of eligibility
• How to create a fake identity to sign off a poll done by your wife’s polling company
• The best way to sell residency to Chinese businessman
• How to make $156,000 disappear

The BBC has a useful article where they assess the 12 (actually 11) women under consideration to be Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential nominee. They rank them out of five stars for charisma, experience, fundraising ability, voter appeal and their special power (their unique appeal).

I’ve taken their data and tabled it below.

Overall Kamala Harris ranks strongest, which matches the conventional wisdom. I’ve included Michelle Obama as they did, but she doesn’t so I don’t include her in the commentary.

If charisma is most important Abrams and Bottoms are best. But I’m not sure you want a VP candidate more charismatic than the main candidate.

If it is experience then Harris and Warren are tops. This is pretty important as they are the likely presidential candidate in 2024 if they win.

Harris is seen as best with fundraising. Important but 2016 showed the biggest budget doesn’t always win. Also Biden’s campaign is now raising more than Trump’s (but starting a long way back).

If it is simply voter appeal then Demmings, but most people vote for the main candidate not No 2.

So all in all the smart money is on Kamala Harris.

Stuff reports:

Christchurch Central’s Labour MP has accused city leaders of supporting a “1980s-style austerity” budget that will cost thousands of jobs and damage the city for years to come.

Duncan Webb blasted Christchurch City Council on Tuesday for proposing to cut its capital programme by $168 million, and increase rates by just 3.5 per cent instead of the 4.65 per cent, proposed before the Covid-19 crisis.

Families and businesses in Christchurch have had their incomes slashed, and Duncan Webb is complaining that the Council is only putting up rates by 3.5%.

It shows how out of touch some MPs are from the reality of struggling families and businesses.

It also shows economic stupidity. Increasing taxes during a recession actually causes the recession to deepen.

Stuff reports:

The Government has again bowed to fishing industry pressure and refused to extend a marine reserve around Campbell Island, a subantarctic sanctuary recognised for its value in conserving and maintaining unique creatures.

Campbell Island/Motu Ihupuku is uninhabited and is New Zealand’s southern-most island. It is accepted as one of the most pristine places on earth and an important breeding ground for seabirds and marine mammals.

The move has exposed a split between the Green Party and its Government partner Labour over protection of the oceans.

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage says she backed enlarging the sanctuary. But she was overruled by Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash, who sided with industrial fishing interests.

Once again the Greens get zero. And the Kermadecs have got nowhere also.

The Herald reports:

An Auckland father who admitted bashing his newborn baby repeatedly for the first four months of her life – causing 14 broken bones – has been jailed for more than four years.

Just four years for 14 broken bones?

Patrick Gower writes:

It is time for the Government to stop making excuses and actually test travellers on arrival at the border.

Yes, test for COVID-19 at the actual border and not three days later at hotels as we are now. 

Test people as they come into the country. Don’t just hand them a pamphlet – make them take a test for the disease so those with the coronavirus can be identified as soon as humanly possible.

Then we can separate them from the rest as fast as we can, and isolate and contact trace at the earliest possible point. Results would be back within 24 hours.

Under the current ‘third day test’, people are mixing and mingling until day four. Mixing with each other, with staff, with regular people while out on their exercise.

I agree. Other countries are testing at the actual border. We should have been doing the same since we entered Level 4.

Clearly the Government has decided it is too hard to test at the border. To me, that means the Government is too lazy. It should at the very least be running trials or random testing every second day. 

But as we have seen with the substandard response at the border, the Government probably just can’t be bothered. 

It would be hard to do, but far from impossible.

The Herald reports:

A deal is said to be close to being signed on Auckland’s long-disputed Ihumātao with the Government reported to be about to pay more than $30 million to buy the property from owner Fletcher Living.

1 News has just reported the Government is “closing” on a deal to resolve the dispute over the land occupied for years by Save Our Unique Landscape (Soul) after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern “became personally involved”. …

1 News said a rōpū whakahaere would be established in the form of a trust or board, comprising Government, Auckland Council and mana whenua representatives. That entity would decide what should happen to the land and whether it is developed or not, it was reported.

Land would be purchased under the Housing Act to avoid clashing with Treaty of Waitangi settlement process.

This does several things:

• Encourages protesters to occupy privately owned land, as the Government will then reward them for it
• Means the Government has destroyed more houses with this move than it has created with Kiwibuild
• Fatally undermined Treaty settlements as full and final by doing an additional Treaty settlement for this land. They may claim it isn’t a Treaty settlement in form, but it is in substance
• Set up a precedent that privately owned land is now fair game and undermines private property rights

This is not the end, but just the beginning of a new chapter.

Radio NZ reports:

He said there were about 2400 people who had left a managed isolation facility but had not had a test, they were now being followed up with, and have either been tested or are being tested.

The original reporter has clarified that 2,400 people left a facility between 9 June (when testing was meant to become mandatory) and 16 June, and the Government is unable to answer the question of how many left without being tested.

So it could be anywhere between 2 and 2,400!

HDPA writes:

The Government’s initial response hints that it did immediately realise the trouble it had on its hands. First, came the appeal directly to the public, bypassing media scrutiny. The evening the news broke, the Prime Minister used a Facebook live event from her office to assure New Zealand her “expectations have not been met”. It took less than 60 seconds for the strength of feeling to become obvious to anyone reading the messages ticking up from the bottom of the screen. “They should never have been allowed in”, “there is no room for trial and error here Jacinda”, “we stayed home for 6 weeks and you let these people in without testing them. Why!!!”, “your team dropped the ball”.

Next, the Prime Minister tried to blame external forces with a they-made-us-do-it finger-pointing exercise, suggesting this would never have happened had commentators and the opposition not kept banging on until she was forced to give compassionate exemptions so new arrivals could say goodbye to their dying loved ones. Shills for the Labour Party took the same line on social media.

Sprinkled throughout were attempts to show Things Were Being Done. The Health Minister banned all further compassionate exemptions. The Prime Minister called in Air Commodore Digby Webb to oversee all border operations but failed to mention he was already involved and she was only giving him an extra job. Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield banned all transtasman flying without a face mask, as if that might’ve made any difference in this debacle.

This is a simple matter of competence.

The Minister of Health should have been asking probing questions about the quarantine systems in place. You don’t just assume everything is okay.

I would expect there to be a database of incoming arrivals with each person marked where they flew from, their entry day into isolation, the dates of their Covid tests etc. And if you had that, and protocols that no one gets released unless they have had two negative tests, then what happened couldn’t occur.

The Government then failed to foresee the torrent of revelations from within isolation facilities that flowed after that first story of the two long-distance-driving women: multiple accounts of people released without testing, multiple accounts of mixing in isolation facilities, multiple accounts of exemptions granted after exemptions were banned, revelations of travellers absconding from a gang funeral and not being rounded up.

There has been a torrent. I note the PM is not calling some of the claims false, so I guess that is the new tactic.

A reminder for those interested that I have done six electorate race profiles so far. You can see them all at https://www.patreon.com/pollingpolitics/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=electorate%20races

I’ve started from the South with Southland, and working my way North. The next one tomorrow will be Selwyn.

Fran O’Sullivan writes:

Todd Muller has quickly jumped astride the unexpected gift horse that Jacinda Ardern sent him and played himself into being a clear contender for the September 19 election.

Muller was quick to capitalise on the comedy of errors at the border, showing he is not a busted flush after all when it comes to being National’s leader. His stirring speech in Parliament mid-week held the Government to account for the lax quarantine procedures.

Pity that the Government benches had emptied out.

But it was the speech the newbie National leader needed to make to persuade his colleagues that the decision to shaft Simon Bridges as leader — if by a narrow margin — was the right one.

And the quarantine blunders are not going away. Every day there are multiple new stories on them.

Particularly around his pledge that an incoming National-led Government would not raise taxes to pay down the mega-billions of debt the Coalition is borrowing to get New Zealand through the impact of the Covid-19 economic crisis.

National’s plan will be to grow the economy to pay down debt. Labour’s plan will be to tax, tax and tax again.

As at the end of April 2020, the Government has managed 395 Kiwibuild houses.

Their election promise was to have built 5,167 by now, so they have achieved less than 8% of what they promised.

In terms of progress towards their 10 year promise of 100,000 Kiwibuild homes, they are at 0.4%.

One News reports:

A contact of one of our seven new positive cases is in quarantine after being moved between three separate isolation facilities in his first week, without being tested.

Todd Ealam was moved to the Jet Park Hotel today, where five of our positive cases are staying, including today’s two new cases.

They are a 59-year-old woman who travelled from Delhi, and the young child of the couple who travelled from India, who were announced as cases yesterday.

Mr Ealam was on the same packed flight from Melbourne as this week’s third new case – the man in his 60’s who originally flew from Pakistan and transited via the Australian city as well as Doha.

He’s been in New Zealand for eight days, but still hasn’t been tested for Covid-19, despite being identified as a contact.

This is not rocket science. We should be doing ideally triple checks.

1. Proof of negative Covid-19 test to board the plane at the overseas port
2. 2nd Covid-19 test either at arrival airport or within 24 hours
3. 3rd Covid-19 test immediately prior to release from isolation or quarantine

We’re meant to be doing thousands of tests a day, yet we’re not doing them of those who need them the most – the arrivals.

In June 2019 media reported:

On the train, Jones held a press conference, where he described the day as a great one for Hawke’s Bay.

Jones said KiwiRail had had “so little for so long”, and the $6.2 million investment so far was a big deal, especially in relation to moving trucks off the roads.

It would also allow businesses to grow their logistics capacity, and boost exports. …

He forecast up to six trains travelling the line per week, meaning about 5000 fewer truck journeys initially, and more than 15,000 as services increased.

So the Government told us there would be six trains a week and it would replace 5,000 truck journeys.

The Herald reports the reality:

Since January 26’s first train, only two further trains have travelled down the line, and the line is “not currently in use”, a KiwiRail spokesperson said.

That was in March. Since then zero further trains.

So taxpayers have paid out $2 million per train trip. It has replaced at best 150 truck hauls which is $40,000 per truck haul.

Stuff reports:

Social distancing protocols are being ignored.

People mingling with others at different points in their isolation, as children run riot in the hallways.

Nurses stationed in hotels are leaving work in floods of tears after copping abuse.

Some are even refusing Covid-19 tests.

These are some of the allegations made by people from two of the country’s border hotels. …

McEwan also filed a complaint on Thursday after “a huge influx of new arrivals” were put in rooms “surrounding her”.

“They’ve been socialising in each others’ rooms. Children playing in the hallway. And I said to the hotel, it is actually making me quite anxious because I am coming to the end of my quarantine.

“I’m healthy. I’m well. I’ve followed the rules. And now I am being put at risk by people who are fresh off a flight. Yesterday, I was quite stressed about it,” McEwan said. …

“It has become clear that the policies and procedures in place regarding testing are not down to negligence at a facility level, but a direct order from the Ministry of Health itself.

It is clear the isolation facilities are a mess.

I like the idea from David Seymour that we should not be mixing new arrivals with people near the end of their isolation. He suggests there should be seven isolation facilities and each takes two days worth of arrivals, so that you don’t have new people mixing with old.

I’d also stipulate that any facilities used for isolation should be exclusively for that purpose – no other guests. Covid-19 will cost us over $100 billion and the Government is being too cheap to buy out entire hotels for the duration.

I’d also suggest we only have one port of entry – Auckland. No international flights to other centres. That way you have just seven isolation facilities in Auckland, and after people are released they can do domestic travel to their ultimate destination.

This should not be beyond the Government.

Tom O’Connor writes in Stuff:

This latest set of demands to rewrite history, or erase those parts some people don’t like, has grown out of the Black Lives Matter slogan presently sweeping the world. The mistreatment of African Americans, from the era of slavery to the present day, is something only America can correct. Showing moral support for the victims of such mistreatment however is commendable and typical of mainstream New Zealand more so than most other countries. Attempting to translocate that cause to New Zealand and then demand name changes for cities and the removal of statues and memorials on the spurious argument that they represent everything from slavery and oppression to murder and racism might convince a few politicians, out of fear of being labelled racist but most people will simply disengage at best or retaliate with equally ill-informed demands.

It should not be forgotten that the initial economy of almost every nation in the world, including New Zealand, was built on slave labour. From the Roman Empire to early Britain slaves, serfs and peasants were a massive forced labour source. Even the Australian economy was initially built on the forced labour of transported convicts. The 1830s flax industry of Wellington, commanded by Te Rauparaha, and the kauri timber trade in Hokianga, commanded by Tamati Waka Nene and others were both totally reliant on thousands of slaves. When Maori invaded and conquered the Chatham Islands in the same era the resident Moriori, who survived the initial conflict, were enslaved. It was simply the way things were done back then by all nations. If we were to pull down the statue of every person involved in or who might have benefited from slavery there would be very few statues anywhere in the world and that may not be a bad thing.

New Zealand has, with doubt, a serious issue with racism which few are prepared to admit let alone address. But it needs to be resolved by an intelligent, well-informed and honest discussion. Changing names and removing memorials to the past will just make that task harder as the majority of people will simply continue to turn their backs on it.

A very reasonable column that the appeasers should read.

A useful history lesson from The Prow:

As in many other cultures, slavery was a key element of Māori society.  Mōkai (servants or slaves) were usually spoils of war, condemned to lives of drudgery, danger, heavy physical work and obedience to their masters or mistresses’ whims;  they were expected to fight under supervision, could be used to negotiate with enemies, or as food if supplies were short.  Female slaves might be prostitutes, or become secondary wives to their conquerors. …

The Treaty of Waitangi, 1840, outlawed the taking of slaves, and made all Māori British citizens, but did not affect pre-Treaty arrangements.

So in the case of NZ, colonisation led to the end of legal slavery.

I’m in no way saying colonisation has been wholly beneficial, but I get sick of people who try to portray everything done by the British and NZ Governments as evil, and that pre-colonisation society was wonderful.

RNZ reports:

New Zealand is among the first countries to negotiate a trade agreement with the UK post-Brexit.

Trade Minister David Parker said the UK is one of New Zealand’s oldest friends.

“New Zealand and the United Kingdom have a close relationship, including strong trade and economic ties, common values and traditions and a shared history. A free trade agreement will be an important new milestone in that relationship.

“In the post-Brexit environment, it makes more sense than ever for us to be working together to grow this partnership for the future,” he said.

The UK is New Zealand’s sixth largest trading partner, with two-way trade totalling almost $6 billion last year.

I’m quite optimistic on this FTA. It may come close to being a true FTA with minimal quotas and tariffs.