The Taxpayers’ Union has launched a campaign aiming to force New Zealand’s mayors and regional council chairs to commit to a 12-month rates freeze in light of current economic challenges.
While the Government prioritises economic relief for struggling families and employers, most local councils are still planning significant rate hikes in the coming months. Some plan to hike rates up to nine or ten percent from 1 July.
In the letter to mayors and chairs, Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director Jordan Williams says, “The Government is currently prioritising economic relief for businesses and households facing economic calamity. But rate hikes at this time of economic turmoil will serve to exacerbate immediate financial stresses and undermine the Government’s relief strategy. Any economist will tell you that a recession is the most damaging time to hike taxes.”
Putting up taxes during a recession is callous. It makes the recession worse, and it hurts struggling families and businesses. Businesses facing massive revenue drops can’t afford a rates increase. Families who have had a member laid off, can’t afford a rates increase.
This is not a normal situation. Councils must realise they have to play their part. They can do what central Government is doing, and borrow against their balance sheets for 12 months, rather than make the recession longer and deeper.
The Government’s landmark freshwater reforms look in doubt after Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones indicated he would likely follow calls from some in the agricultural sector not to “hobble” them with new regulation at a time when the economy was weakened by the coronavirus outbreak.
The proposals were intended to clean up waterways, which had become polluted in many cases due to intensive farming and irrigation.
“I’ve got multiple requests to visit industry leaders around the regions, these calls are coming from our backbone industry leaders,” Jones said.
“They have all told me it is not an appropriate time to hobble our export earning industries,” he said.
Shane is right on this one.
It is economic suicide to be increasing costs on businesses in the midst of what may be the greatest economic recession in 90 years. This is not business as normal. Business incomes are not dropping by 1% or 5% but in some cases by 50% or 70%.
Parker declined to comment for this story, although Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told media at her post-cabinet press conference last week that the Government was “not at this stage” considering any moratorium on new regulations.
Why in God’s name not?
What part of economic emergency is hard to understand.
Any new regulation that is not both urgent and critical should be put on hold, until the economy is out of recession.
Bad enough the minimum wage increase is not being postponed, but to then keep loading other costs on businesses at this time will just lead to many more people losing their jobs.
Labour MPs are running ads like this up and down the country, and as paid ads on Facebook.
We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and Labour MPs are trying to win votes by talking about the recovery from COVID-19.
Could you imagine the outcry if National MPs were running adverts just days after the Christchurch earthquakes boasting of how well placed the recovery is.
Labour has been pretty much demanding that National not criticise anything they decide, as that is politicising an emergency – yet they think it is fine for them to run adverts seeking to gain political capital from the pandemic.
UPDATE2: Another Labour ad (they have paid to promote it)
The Government's Economic Response Package is designed to help cushion the worst effects of COVID-19, and support Kiwis, Kiwi businesses and Kiwi health systems through these unprecedented times. Find out what support you may be eligible for: https://t.co/T9U51oyqVHpic.twitter.com/Bk1Qo10gCd
So they’re proud of all the headlines. They’ve missed out the headlines where their response has been panned by hundreds in the medical profession, the entire teaching profession, public health professors and the former Chief Science Adviser to the PM.
UPDATE3: Not just Labour. Greens are fundraising off the pandemic:
I am about to ask you for the most important donation to our campaign this year, but first I want to tell you why it is so important.
The most significant financial decisions of this election campaign will be made on 1 April. These decisions will determine how effective and successful our campaign will be and what kind of future we will be leaving for our kids and grandkids.
In these uncertain times for our Green whānau I have an unshakable belief in us as a community. In the last two months, we have gone through a lot. So there has never been a more important time to come together as a community.That is why today I’m only asking for $3 to show your solidarity. Will you support our campaign?
So the Greens have let out of the bag another financial package on 1 April, and are using the pandemic as a fundraiser.
So due to frustration with the Government’s measures, Hone is organising a vigilante action up North.
This is the last thing we need. Only central or local government should be enforcing restrictions on travel. The Government needs to ensure vigilante actions are not tolerated.
The concerns of those up north are warranted. But the answer is to pressure the Government to take more effective measures, not to set up vigilante road blocks.
It’s good that the Government has now published a guide to what we can expect in the future in terms of restrictions on work and movement. Of course it should have been out weeks ago, not two months into the crisis.
One of the most difficult things for the public has been the radical shifts in stance from the Government, often within 24 hours. We went from no need to take action against travellers from Italy to needing to take action against every country on Earth. We went literally within 24 hours from no need to cancel March 15 commemorations to cancelling then. We had the half hearted self quarantine policy which a few days later became the much needed travel ban.
So the four alert levels should help in terms of the public knowing what the likely next steps are. However there are still two big questions.
The first is it is not clear what the criteria will be to step down an alert level, once there. Is it expected Level 4 would last for weeks or for months? What is the criteria to decide Level 4 can be wound back to Level 3?
The bigger question though, and a crucial one, is whether the Government is right to have New Zealand at only Level 2, rather than Level 3 or even 4.
The difference may be massive.
An excellent analysis is on Medium by Tomas Pueyo. His previous analysis has been viewed over 40 million times, It has been endorsed by numerous public health experts.
He is scathing of the mitigation strategy which is around flattening the curve.
This is based on the UK. It shows flattening the curve still has the need for ICU beds well in excess of capacity by more than a factor of 10. And also it means the health system remains at over capacity for longer.
The current UK policy is the blue line. Better than the black line, but still terrible.
So the author recommends a suppression strategy:
Go hard right now. Order heavy social distancing. Get this thing under control.
Suppression does mean that people will eventually get infected, so what is the benefit of delaying it. He explains:
The US (and presumably the UK) are about to go to war without armor.
We have masks for just two weeks, few personal protective equipments (“PPE”), not enough ventilators, not enough ICU beds, not enough ECMOs (blood oxygenation machines)… This is why the fatality rate would be so high in a mitigation strategy.
But if we buy ourselves some time, we can turn this around:
We have more time to buy equipment we will need for a future wave
We can quickly build up our production of masks, PPEs, ventilators, ECMOs, and any other critical device to reduce fatality rate.
Put in another way: we don’t need years to get our armor, we need weeks. Let’s do everything we can to get our production humming now. Countries are mobilized. People are being inventive, such as using 3D printing for ventilator parts. We can do it. We just need more time. Would you wait a few weeks to get yourself some armor before facing a mortal enemy?
This is not the only capacity we need. We will need health workers as soon as possible. Where will we get them? We need to train people to assist nurses, and we need to get medical workers out of retirement. Many countries have already started, but this takes time. We can do this in a few weeks, but not if everything collapses.
He looks at how Governments need to do everything to get the rate of infection (r) below 1. And how all decisions should be data driven based on cost and likely effectiveness.
I really recommend people read the whole article, then decide for yourselves if you think being at Alert Level 2 is a sensible level or not. Should we going for a mitigation strategy or a suppression strategy? If the latter, then shouldn’t we be at Alert Level 4?
A neighbourhood’s residents have been left scratching their heads after an email sent by a local vegan asked them to shut their windows while cooking meat to stop “offensive” smells.
The anonymous email was shared on Twitter account Best of Nextdoor, which showcases “the best of community drama”.
In the letter, the vegan runner reveals to neighbours that it’s hard for them at the start of the year, “when the weather starts warming up and folks start opening their windows”.
“Several nights a week I’m out running around dinnertime, and when people have their windows open I can smell what they are cooking.”
The jogger says the smell of cooking meat “can be quite overpowering” and “offensive”.
“I’m hoping our community can have some empathy for its #plantbased neighbours by closing their windows if they’re cooking meat and only putting vegetables on their bbq.”
The person finishes by saying they “don’t want to be a stereotype”.
Well failed at that.
No surprise that this happened in Berkeley. It’s the only city in America where Jill Stein got more votes than Donald Trump. Only 3% of the population are Republicans.
All coal mines to be closed down and all coal imports/exports to be banned
All oil and natural gas extraction to be shut down in New Zealand
This would mean power shortages on a regular basis.
Total ban of any further imports of Petrol or Diesel fuelled vehicles
So poor people have to buy a Tesla.
To encourage other countries to make a similar effort as we are to implement their own targets (as determined by the IPCC), New Zealand will impose Tariffs on all imports from non-complying countries:
2022 – 10%
2023 – 20%
2024 – 30%
So NZ prices will massively increase while the other countries won’t care as we’re a minnow.
At first glance, Nathan Taylor might seem the very definition of a ‘right on’ hipster. He goes by the name of ‘Sockmatician’ online and he’s famous in the knitting world for his complicated double-knit patterns. On his Instagram, in between videos of people speed-knitting and many, many photos of socks, Taylor had posts about what it was like to be an HIV-positive man who came out in the 1980s. He dislikes Donald Trump and Brexit. He has even set up ‘inclusive hashtags’ such as #diversknitty, and his profile carefully sets out the pronouns people should use to address him.
So far, so woke. But recently Sockmatician has found himself accused of being a ‘white supremacist’, committing ‘violence against people from ethnic minorities’ and being ‘dangerous’. His crime wasn’t to suddenly join the alt-right, but something apparently far worse. He posted a poem on Instagram about ‘diversknitty’ in which he boasted it was a year since he had founded this hashtag, and asked that people use it kindly, rather than attacking one another.
What could be offensive about this? Taylor had apparently committed ‘violence against Bipoc’ — black and indigenous people of colour — by telling them how to conduct their arguments about inclusion. He was ‘tone policing’ people of colour and, as a white man, this was wrong.
On and on the comments raged — until Taylor turned them off, complaining that he had been misunderstood. The row naturally moved straight below the next post, which was ostensibly about a lace knit shawl, and into a spree of pictures and stories from other knitters about how much damage the Sockmatician had caused the Bipoc community. Then up popped a message from Taylor’s husband, who said he had gone into hospital. ‘Your messages of anger have been processed. Please now send love,’ it read.
No love was forthcoming. Instead, there was the sound of more knitting needles being drawn. Posters accused Taylor of ‘gaslighting’ them by using his mental health as an excuse for not being accountable. Some said they hoped he recovered quickly — so he could reflect on the damage he had caused.
So he got all this abuse because he dared to ask people to be kind to each other.
I decided to call both the phenomenon and the documentary, “The Purity Spiral”. A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.
But while a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou. …
It’s not just another word for ‘woke culture’, or even ‘cancel culture’, or ‘virtue signalling’. Even though intersectional social justice is a pretty great breeding ground for purity spirals, it is one among many. Nor is it confined to the Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity spirals: the ongoing parsing of ethnic purity into ever-more Aryan sub-groups. Perhaps the most classic one of all hails from Salem, Massachusetts.
It is a social dynamic that plays out across that community — a process of moral outbidding, unchecked, which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly.
A purity spiral propagates itself through the tipping points of preference falsification: through self-censorship, and through loyalty tests that weed out its detractors long before they can band together. In that sense, once one takes hold, its momentum can be very difficult to halt.
One of my friends and moderator on Right Minds, Matthew McCluskey, received a visit from the friendly local neighbourhood cops on Saturday night at 9pm. He’s allowed me to use his real name to provide some weight behind this bizarre story, as he usually performs his limited online activity under a pseudonym.
He was cleaning his Smith & Wesson M&P15-22 when the doorbell rang. There was a police detective at the door, with an armed escort waiting in the wings. He claimed to be doing a “follow-up check” on vetting, as Matthew had recently had his firearms licence approved.
No problems with follow up checks, but problems with what they asked:
Does the “right” in Right Minds stand for right-wing?[We had to pause our conversation at this point owing to my needing a full minute to laugh.]
Do you donate to any political parties or other organisations?
Do you know what New Conservative’s immigration policy is?
Do you know any representatives of the New Conservative party?
This is chilling, if correct.
If the Police can’t understand the difference between mainstream political parties such as New Conservative and radical extremist groups, then that is a huge problem.
During these bleak times we need some lightness, so for those who don’t know who Mittens is, meet Mittens.
Mittens lives in Wellington. He is famous, due to his wondering nature.
Mittens lives on The Terrace but every day and most nights goes out exploring Wellington. He turns up everywhere from the waterfront to Cuba Street.
But it isn’t just the fact he wanders around. He is very unusual in that he will go into any building he can find and make himself at home. He’ll take over a bed in a student hostel, sleep on a desk in an office etc.
Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.5 percent in the December 2019 quarter, after a 0.8 percent rise in the previous quarter, Stats NZ said today. …
Annual GDP growth for the year ended December 2019 was 2.3 percent, compared with a 3.2 percent growth in the year ended December 2018.
0.5% quarterly growth is pretty miserable. This is before the impact of Coronavirus. The next quarter will be (I predict) slightly negative and the June quarter will be massively down.
When people die from coronavirus, it’s generally because their lungs stop working.
The infection can cause a severe pneumonia, inflaming the air sacs in the lungs and then filling them with fluid, leading to serious trouble breathing without medical assistance.
Luckily, this only appears to happen in a small percentage of coronavirus cases. And if you’re in a hospital when it happens, modern medicine can do the breathing for you with a mechanical ventilator. Oxygen continues to pump through your blood while your lungs slowly recover.
None of the confirmed coronavirus cases in Aotearoa have been serious enough to require sustained hospital care. And the efforts to “flatten the curve” are designed to make sure that when there are cases that do need serious hospital care, they don’t overwhelm the health system.
And yet nobody can tell me how many ventilators there are in this country. Not the ministry itself, not the minister of health, and not the director general of health Ashley Bloomfield.
This is because there is no general database of crucial medical equipment in New Zealand. And in the months since this virus made itself known no proper survey appears to have been done.
It almost defies belief that two months in, and no one in central Government has done a stocktake of how many respirators we have – until media starting asking.
As February progressed and McGuinness heard nothing about ventilator stocks, McGuinness got really worried.
She wrote to Health Minister David Clark on March 2 pointing to overseas ventilator shortages and asking about the situation in New Zealand.
“How many ICU beds does New Zealand currently have with medical ventilators and how many are currently being used?” she asked. “How many other respiratory devices do we have and do medical professionals consider they are useful (eg are they able to be repurposed into medical ventilators?).
“Has the Ministry of Health been in contact with suppliers or other organisations based in New Zealand that might be capable of manufacturing medical ventilators in preparation for possible outbreaks?”
She didn’t get a response.
It took two further weeks for the Government to catch on there may be a problem.
Got notified yesterday that my password had been changed on Linked In. It was done from Senegal.
So I quickly reset the password using my e-mail address and set a new password using the iPhone’s password generator – one of those long impossible to remember passwords that can’t be guessed.
I presumed that the original compromise was because I don’t always use unique passwords so a hack on another site could have allowed them to get into my Linked In account.
But what surprised me was that after I set a new unique password, the person in Senegal managed to change my password again. I can’t work out how they could do this, now I had a unique ultra strong password.
Anyone got any theories?
I have now turned on two factor authentication and that has stopped things (lots of attempts though).
The hacker also changed my profile photo to a woman, and renamed it “Sophia Katherine” and had me in the Army. So don’t be alarmed if you saw my gender change – I have transitioned back 🙂
There should be little surprise at Shane Jones’ latest racist outburst against Indians living in New Zealand. …
Playing minorities off against the rest of the population in this way is a classic New Zealand First tactic and is the height of electoral cynicism.
But it is also much more than that. It is a blunt expression of New Zealand First’s beliefs. Moreover, what it really shows is that racially motivated criticisms by New Zealand First MPs are not just some casual occurrence to be brushed aside as “their personal views”. There have been too many instances of this type of behaviour over the years for them to be dismissed credibly as just coincidence. Rather, they are at the heart of New Zealand First’s monocultural, anti-immigrant message, which the party is unashamed and unabashed in promoting. It is a deliberate pitch to that segment of the population that holds similar views.
One only need recall Winston Peters’ quarter century of attacks on non-white migrants; former deputy leader Peter Brown’s outburst that there were too many Asian immigrants coming to New Zealand; former MP Richard Prosser’s references to people from “wogistan”, Ron Mark telling a Korean born MP to “go home”, or Clayton Mitchell’s anti-Semitic comments in Parliament. The list goes on and on. Shane Jones is no different – he is just playing the same old tune his party has scratched out for years.
It’s a useful reminder that for NZ First racism is a strategy.
All the while, it is becoming increasingly ironic and incredible that the Labour Party which professes itself to the world as progressive, compassionate and kind should be propped up in office by such a regressive, racist coalition partner. Sadly, while National has already reduced New Zealand First’s relevance for the future by ruling out working with it, Labour is too electorally reliant on New Zealand First’s potential numbers to do likewise. And with the Prime Minister’s do-nothing response to New Zealand First’s racist attacks likely to continue, the country seems set to endure yet more ignorant and intemperate outbursts from Shane Jones and his colleagues over the next few months until the election, when the majority of New Zealanders will have the opportunity to finally put an end to this racism in politics once and for all.
If you don’t want Shane Jones in Cabinet, there is only one surefire way to achieve that – vote for National or ACT.
The maths is bleak. According to data from overseas outbreaks, around 5 percent of people who test positive for Covid-19 end up requiring intensive care. What percentage of the general population will catch the virus is anybody’s guess – forecasts vary from 20 percent of the global population to as high as 50 or 70 percent in some countries.
Our population is 4.8 million. 20% of that is 960,000 and 70% is 3.36 million.
If 5% need intensive care that is between 48,000 and 168,000.
These forecasts also assume the virus will continue to spread, perhaps seasonally, for at least the next 18 months, if not longer. This makes calculating the needed intensive care capacity – not to mention capacity for other resources, such as general hospital beds and active medical staff – exceedingly difficult.
Nonetheless, New Zealand’s stock of intensive care units – just 176 beds – doesn’t inspire confidence, David Galler says. Galler has been an intensive care specialist at Middlemore Hospital for more than three decades.
Let’s assume best case scenario and only 48,000 need intensive care and we can spread it over 18 months. And also assume each person only needs to be there for two weeks and we flatten the curve entirely. So highly optimistic assumptions.
In 18 months you have around 36 two week periods. So for each two week period you need 1,333 beds and we have 176.
And that is the optimistic scenario.
The pessimistic one is 70% get infected and they stay in for four weeks each. That means 9,333 people needing a ICU bed every four weeks.
In the optimistic scenario 13% of those needing ICU beds get one. In the pessimistic scenario 2% get one.
So we need more ICU beds, and soon.
I heard a good suggestion yesterday.
The cruise ship industry is now dead for six months or more. Why don’t we lease a cruise ship and turn it into a dedicated floating hospital for Coronavirus treatment?
Now that Biden is the presumptive nominee we can start to look at general election polls.
Now last time the national polls were accurate in terms of the popular vote, but not accurate in terms of state polls, so Trump won despite losing the popular vote.
The current RCP polling average has Biden 6.4% ahead of Trump. That is better than in 2016 when Clinton won the popular vote by 2.2% (but lost electoral college). But that doesn’t mean he’ll win as all about the marginal states.
So let’s look at current state polling:
Wisconsin: Trump 45%, Biden 45%
Florida: Trump 49%, Biden 48%
Michigan: Trump 42%, Biden 47%
Pennsylvania: Trump 44%, Biden 47%
North Carolina: Trump 45%, Biden 49%
Arizona: Trump 44%, Biden 48%
Minnesota: Trump 38%, Biden 50%
Texas: Trump 48%, Biden 45%
Georgia: Trump 51%, Biden 44%
Most of these states are within the margin of error, and of course campaigning yet to seriously start. So this is a snapshot, not a prediction.
If one assumes Trump holds Wisconsin, we have:
2016: Trump wins 306 votes
Trump holds Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Georgia
Biden holds Minnesota
Biden wins Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20), North Carolina (15) and Arizona (11)
Result would be Trump 244, Biden 298
Soon today’s polls Biden is ahead. But it doesn’t need much movement for Trump to win.
Trump can afford to lose 26 electoral votes to hold on. So if he retains Michigan and Pennsylvania he wins 270 to 268.
If he retains Pennsylvania and Arizona it is 269 each and the House has (currently) a majority of Republican controlled delegations so he would win.
If he loses Pennsylvania, he can’t afford to lose any other seats.
So expect to see a lot of campaigning in Pennsylvania.
Incidentally, because Arquette is too emptyheaded to realize this, there are TONS of coronaviruses out there. They're not a new thing. This particular strain, COVID-19, is new.
The Goebbels Gap: the amount of time between something bad happening in the world and someone figuring out a way to blame the Jews for it https://t.co/XXwmuvTmu9
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) March 1, 2020
Not heard of the Goebbels Gap before, but I like it. Will refer to it in future.
On its long-haul network Air New Zealand will be reducing its capacity by 85 per cent over the coming months and will operate a minimal schedule to allow Kiwis to return home and to keep trade corridors with Asia and North America open. Full details of this schedule will be advised in the coming days. …
Chief executive Greg Foran said, based on what the airline could see on Monday, its 12,500 workforce would drop by 30 per cent.
So 3,500 staff will lose their jobs. Terrible.
The New Zealand Airline Pilots’ Association president Captain Andrew Ridling said he understood it would not be a short-term measure.
“The industry is aware that, until this unprecedented situation developed, Air New Zealand would have had forecasted annual revenue of approximately $6 billion I would no longer be surprised if that forecast is reduced to around $1b,” he said.
Air NZ last year had costs of around $5.4 billion. If their revenue is $1 billion, it seems inevitable they will need government assistance.
