Rob Mitchell looks at how Justin Lester lost.

One key extract:

A public crying out for meaningful change, sick and tired of waiting for buses that didn’t show, had to make do with a rainbow crossing, bilingual street signs and a little al fresco dining.
Rather than growing city business, as Lester had promised, he was fronting a council closing so many doors – the town hall, St James Theatre, its main library among many others.
A stronger mayoral team might have helped accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. 
But Munro left, to be replaced by then Labour Party vice president Beth Houston as the mayor’s public affairs adviser.
She out-ranked Lester in the party and now, as one insider points out, “often orders came back from the Labour Party, rather than the city’s agenda being pushed at the party caucus”.

So Lester’s adviser was effectively actually his boss. This is the problem of having Mayors who are bound to a political party. They work for that party, rather than the city.

This is why we had a Mayor who didn’t fight for the Mt Vic tunnel.

But the Labour machine that had swung behind his campaign three years earlier, including co-ordination out of party offices, volunteers pounding the streets and Grant Robertson robocalls, was nowhere to be seen in 2019.
Details are unclear. Lester either declined offers of support or it simply wasn’t there. 

I hear he even went on holiday just before or during the campaign.

Martin van Beynen writes:

One of the problems is the open-ended task of the Pike River Recovery Agency.
Getting under way in early 2018, the agency was initially funded at about $22 million for three years. Its allocated funding increased to $36m last year and to the end of June this year the agency has spent about $18m. It expects to spend another $12m up to June 30, 2020 but it’s a good bet its work won’t be done by then.

In seven months? Of course not.

The agency is no doubt staffed by dedicated and skilled people who want to complete their mission but at the moment they essentially have a blank cheque.
That’s why I think the decision to re-enter was ill-considered and driven partly by an emotional Labour Party tie to its roots with the miners of the West Coast. That’s all fine, but it should not have used taxpayer money to indulge its sentimentality.
A compensation payment to the Pike River families and a finite sum given to the West Coast in memory of the miners who died at Pike River would have been a more fitting and wiser use of the money.

For $40 million you could have given $1.25 million to each of the families. Would do far more good than reopening a tomb.

Newshub reports:

Winston Peters says the Police Commissioner was “wrong” to say the Government’s target of 1800 new police included attrition, or officers that will leave over time.
Police Commissioner Mike Bush appeared before the Justice Select Committee on Thursday and was asked by National MP Brett Hudson to clarify confusion over the Government’s target.
Hudson asked Bush: “Do you stand by that the target for 1800 police is 1800 new police and that includes the fact that some will leave over a period of time?”

The outgoing Police Commissioner replied, “Yes.”
That’s despite the Government appearing to change the target last month to 1800 graduates, not taking into account attrition, causing confusion about exactly what the policy is.
In Parliament on Thursday, National leader Simon Bridges asked the Prime Minister if there are now two different new 1800 police targets.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, standing in for Jacinda Ardern, pointed to New Zealand First’s coalition agreement with Labour where the policy came from.
“Strive towards adding 1800 new Police officers over three years,” it says.
“There was never anywhere a statement being net new – words matter,” Peters said. “What the coalition agreement says is to strive to ensure that there are 1800 frontline new police.”
Bridges pointed to the comments made at the Justice Select Committee where the Police Commissioner agreed that the target included attrition, or net referring to the amount left over after all deductions are made.
“As much as I admire Police Commissioner Bush, by adding the word net, he got it wrong,” Peters said.

The Government is really treating the public as dumb fucks, with this insistence the 1,800 target wasn’t for additional officers. Of course it was.

Stuff reports:

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City in the US, is opening the door to a 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, warning that the current field of candidates is ill equipped to defeat President Donald Trump. …

If he were to launch a campaign, it could dramatically reshape the Democratic contest less than three months before primary voting begins.
The 77-year-old has spent the past few weeks talking with prominent Democrats about the state of the 2020 field, expressing concerns about the steadiness of former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign and the rise of liberal Sen. Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren, according to people with knowledge of those discussions. In recent days, he took steps to keep his options open, including moving to get on the primary ballot in Alabama ahead of the state’s Friday filing deadline.

That is significant.

I think he sees the hard left candidates as unelectable and Biden as flawed, so hence why he may stand.

Bloomberg is seriously wealthy, with an estimated $53 billion net worth.

People may be interested in how many MPs are in each age “generation”. They are:

• Silent Generation (1928 to 1945): 1
• Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964): 29
• Generation X (1965 to 1980): 72
• Millennials/Gen Y (1981 to 1996: 18

So Generation X is by far the most common generation in Parliament.

A good report from the NZ Initiative:

At the heart of the problem is our transport budget system:
• Fuel tax is a blunt fiscal tool that has survived beyond its time due to the administrative convenience in collecting tax.
• New Zealand’s Road User Charges (RUCs), which apply to diesel-powered vehicles and will soon apply to all electric cars here, are internationally recognised as a successful test case in road funding. That said, both fuel taxes and RUCs fail to price congestion costs.
The solution requires the introduction of congestion charging, which charges drivers higher road user rates at peak times in overcrowded routes.
Road Pricing Benefits:
• Efficient use of roads
• Shorter, safer and more reliable trips
• Higher productivity and wages
• A source of valuable information for future transport investments
• Financial incentives for other modes of transport (public buses, cycling, walking)
Introducing congestion charges can encourage commuters to find trip alternatives, such as other travel times, routes and transport modes. That would reduce the overuse of road services at peak times. In return, to avoid congestion charges becoming “just another tax”, commuters should expect the government to commit to a revenue-neutral system – where every net dollar raised through congestion charges would be offset by, say, a dollar less through property rate collection or lower fuel prices.

Can only agree 1005 with this. A revenue neutral congestion charging system would do more than anything else to reduce congestion.

Stuff reports:

A US judge has ordered President Donald Trump to pay $US2 million ($US3.1m) to an array of charities as a fine for misusing his own charitable foundation to further his political and business interests.
New York state Judge Saliann Scarpulla imposed the penalty after the president admitted to a series of abuses that were outlined in a lawsuit brought against him last year by the New York attorney general’s office.

Note Trump pleaded guilty.

Trump’s fine and the charity’s funds will be split evenly among eight organisations, including Citymeals on Wheels, the United Negro College Fund and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Excellent.

Trump also accepted restrictions on his involvement in other charitable organisations. 

Basically means the President has been found unfit to run a charity without supervision.

Trump also admitted in the agreements to directing that $US100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over a 24-metre flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, instead of paying the expense out of his own pocket.
In addition, the foundation paid $US158,000 to resolve a lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course, and $US5000 for ads promoting Trump’s hotels in the programmes for charitable events. Trump admitted these transactions were also improper.

So why were they authorised in the first place?

The Herald reports:

New information in Wellington’s mayoral vote recount saga shows Justin Lester doesn’t have the numbers he was counting on.
Final election results put Mayor Andy Foster just 62 votes ahead of Lester to claim the city’s top job.
Lester’s formal application filed in Wellington District Court for a recount pointed to 302 partially informal votes which were excluded because voters filled out the form incorrectly.
The application said 193 of them would have swung in Lester’s favour and just 109 in Foster’s, changing the outcome of the mayoralty.

But according to new information, 145 of those 193 votes would actually have already gone to Foster because he had a valid preference before the sequence break.

So even if the invalid votes were counted, the result could not be over-turned!

UPDATE: And it is all over as the Judge has turned down the recount application

A very interesting read of the review into why Labor lost the 2019 election despite leading in every poll for two years.

Some key extracts:

• Labor lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda that looked risky and an unpopular leader
• The size and complexity of Labor’s spending announcements, totalling more than $100 billion, drove its tax policies and exposed Labor to a Coalition attack that fuelled anxieties among insecure, low-income couples in outer-urban and regional Australia that Labor would crash the economy and risk their jobs.
• A grievance-based approach can create a culture of moving from one issue to the next, formulating myriad policies in response to a broad range of concerns. Care needs to be taken to avoid Labor becoming a grievance-based organisation.
• Low-income workers swung against Labor.
• Labor lost some support among Christian voters – particularly devout, first-generation migrant Christians.
• Labor should position itself as a party of economic growth and job creation. Labor should adopt the language of inclusion, recognising the contribution of small and large businesses to economic prosperity, and abandon derogatory references to “the big end of town”.

A very good review. Will Labor take it to heart?

Newshub reports:

Momentum is building in Parliament for more transparency around who the public is voting for in local body and parliamentary elections.
National MP Matt King has put forward a Members’ Bill that would require the disclosure of candidates’ criminal convictions if the offences resulted in two or more years’ imprisonment. 
The proposal wouldn’t disqualify people from becoming candidates or affect people with convictions concealed under the Clean Slate scheme, or if there is a court order or other legal requirement that prohibits publication.

That seems a reasonable threshold. The offending would have to be very serious to result in a jail term of two or more years.

UPDATE: The Newshub story was incorrect on the threshold. It is anyone convicted of an offence with a maximum penalty of two or more years – regardless of what their actual sentence is.

Stuff reports:

Police Minister Stuart Nash says there could be fewer guns in the country than experts have calculated.
His comments come as police data shows they could struggle to collect even the lowest estimate of banned guns, under a gun amnesty and buyback scheme, which ends on December 20.
An April ministerial briefing paper revealed that police estimated between 60,000 and 240,000 firearms would be made illegal under gun law reform and in September police suggested that number was between 56,000 and 173,000.
But police have not set any specific operational targets for the gun buyback scheme.

Official figures show that between July 13 and October 29 about 32,659 firearms were collected and more than $62 million had been paid out so far.

It is politically convenient to claim there are fewer guns, because so few have been handed in. But more likely is that original estimates are correct and the buyback scheme hasn’t worked because the prices are set too low.

Stuff reports:

A group of West Coasters expect thousands of people will join their rally opposing Government policies they believe are hurting the region’s economy. 
The group, called Naturally Together, say November 17’s event aims to protect the industries that support the West Coast’s way of life, including mining, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and electricity generation.
Spokesman Peter Haddock, a businessman and Grey district councillor, said the region was facing significant pressure from a raft of new Government policies.
Among those concerning locals were the Government’s Freshwater action plan, the potential ban on new mining on Conservation land, the Indigenous Freshwater Fish Bill, the rejection of windblown timber legislation, and an upcoming review of significant natural areas by district councils. 

And the Government turning down a hydro dam that even DOC supported.

O’Connor said he had a “robust” discussion with Gibson. Most of the policies referred to were not yet decided on and would be subject to public consultation.
He felt it was ridiculous though to blame all of the region’s problems on the Government, which had written a cheque for almost $35 million to save the local polytechnic. 

O’Connor seems to think Government handouts is a substitute for policies that allow sustainable industries on the West Coast.

ABC News reports:

Sondland, a Trump megadonor who became one of President Donald Trump’s self-described “three amigos” on Ukraine, said he personally delivered the message to a top Ukrainian official that U.S. military aid was contingent upon the country’s ability to launch an investigation that Trump wanted.

So Trump’s own hand picked Ambassador has confirmed there was a quid pro quo and that Ukraine knew of it.

Sondland said: “Let me state clearly: Inviting a foreign government to undertake investigations for the purpose of influencing an upcoming U.S. election would be wrong. Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong. I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings. In my opinion, security aid to Ukraine was in our vital national interest and should not have been delayed for any reason.”

If only his boss agreed.

The Herald reports:

Internet NZ’s engagement director, Andrew Cushen, said legislating to enforce porn-blocking software would be costly, ineffective, provide “a false sense of security” and was an unjustified “nanny state” intervention.
“What we risk is an over-engineered government imposition that actually involves some pretty creepy stuff in terms of asking every adult to ask for permission to see a range of websites,” Cushen said.
Each household should be left to choose its own filtering software from a wide range of suppliers , he said.

Yep. Parents can decide for themselves what type of filter, if any, they want to use.

Stuff reports:

At the age of 10, Kiwi kids can’t drink, drive, buy cigarettes or even have their own Facebook page.
But 10-year-olds can be convicted of murder or manslaughter – that’s the current minimum age of criminal responsibility for those crimes in New Zealand.
However, the Government has agreed to consider whether the current minimum age should be raised, Justice Minister Andrew Little confirmed to Stuff.
“In January, New Zealand had its third Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council, and has agreed to consider whether the current minimum age of criminal responsibility, 10 years of age, should be increased to align with international standards,” Little said in a statement.

If a 10 year old can murder someone, then they should be held accountable for that murder.

Perhaps one of the most well known cases internationally is the story of murdered British toddler James Bulger.
Bulger, 2, was tortured and killed by 10-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in Liverpool in 1993. 
Thompson and Venables, by then aged 11, were tried in an adult court and found guilty of Bulger’s murder on November 24, 1993, becoming the youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century. 

A very good example of why you need to hold young killers accountable. They did not just kill Bulger, but tortured him also.

The upgrade to the FTA with China has been finalised. Upgrade is an optimistic word for it.

The original FTA (thank you Phil Goff) led to billions of dollars of more exports to China. It was the 5th Labour Government’s biggest success. Ironic that Winston and the Greens campaigned against it.

The “upgrade” will see around $36 million of tariff reductions on 1% of wood products. Some useful clarity around trading rules also. It’s definitely better than nothing, but can’t comp[are to the original FTA or the TPP.

Also a RCEP has been completed, but India has pulled out of it. We basically already have trade agreements with all the other signatories, so the gain is minor. Definitely welcome, but access to the India market was the goal.

Data from the latest HLFS:

• Just 23,000 jobs created in the last year, or a 0.9% increase
• 6,000 more unemployed than a year ago
• Unemployment rate is 4.2%

Here’s the job growth for September years for the last few years:

• 2016: 135,000
• 2017: 88,000
• 2018: 60,000
• 2019: 23,000

The US is the only major market we do not have a trade agreement with, or are not negotiating one with. It would be huge for NZ exporters and consumers if we could get one.

And I think I know how.

President Trump has shown that he will happily and proudly use foreign policy to reward countries that screw over his domestic political opponents. So let’s do exactly that.

Here’s what would work.

The Maori Labour Caucus lodges a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council against Elizabeth Warren. In it they claim that her pretending to be Native American has undermined the human rights of indigenous persons around the world, and they demand various UN bodies investigate their complaints.

For good measure I’m sure they could get some co-complainants such as the Maori Council.

The United Nations HRC is so PC that they could never decline a request from an indigenous group, especially against a US politician. So they would schedule hearings into whether Elizabeth Warren has trampled the mana of indigenous people around the world.

President Trump would be so delighted with New Zealand that we’d have “the best” free trade deal you can get within a few days. Hell he’d probably even through in some military aid.

It’s a win-win. We get a free trade agreement, and we cripple Warren’s candidacy (which is good as she would probably lose to Trump if she’s the candidate).

So come on Willie Jackson. Start the ball rolling.

Interesting reporting from Newsroom and Radio NZ from Winston’s lawsuit against various people over his claiming too high a rate on his National Super.

Here’s what was revealed in court:

• MSD staff noted down he said “Do you know who I am?” to a staffer
• answered a question on whether he had a partner instead with a response about his long-ago wife, by ticking a box saying they were separated and lived apart.
• never addressed the question of whether he had a partner at the time of the 2010 application
• did not read all the explanatory notes on the form
• did not fill out a series of questions relevant to whether he had a partner
• asked an interviewing official in 2017, when the overpayment was discovered, why someone in a relationship should be paid less than someone who was single, as he had two people who had been dependent on him
• three frontline staff said the MP was alone during that meeting, including one who was “very sure” Ms Trotman was not there.

A very interesting court case indeed.