Stuff reports:

In the wake of the measles outbreak sweeping the country, the National Party has said it might sanction sole parent beneficiaries who don’t vaccinate their children.
National’s social development spokeswoman, Louise Upston, has gone further, telling Stuff that she is open to broadening the scope beyond beneficiaries to cover more child-related payments, if that’s what New Zealanders want.

I’d extend it to all Government child payments, including Working For Families. People can choose not to vaccinate their children endangering other kids, but we can choose not to give them money if that is their choice. Taxpayer money should come with responsibilities.

As of yesterday there have been 1,957 cases of measles in New Zealand. This is a third higher than the US with 1,250 cases despite the US having 70 times the population. So our rate is around 100 times greater than the US.

Stuff reports:

For the second day in a row, beleaguered Transport Minister Phil Twyford appears to have given Parliament incorrect information, crucial documents leaked to Stuff reveal.

He only misleads Parliament on days ending with a Y!

The latest leak revolves around a NZTA assessment of a New Zealand Super Fund proposal to build Auckland’s light rail. Last week Twyford told Parliament that NZTA “didn’t complete an assessment” of the NZ Super Fund’s proposal to build the multibillion-dollar light rail project.
The existence of an assessment, denied by Twyford, is significant because NZTA’s former board said it used the document to justify its dismissal of the Super Fund’s plan. 

Leaked documents obtained by Stuff show that the NZTA assessment was in fact complete enough to send to the NZ Super Fund for a response.

Basically NZTA had completed their assessment. NZSF simply didn’t like it and lobbied Twyford to reject it.

Another Stuff article gives a nice summary of all the Twyford troubles:

• Denied NZTA board members wished to stay on, when they did
• Denied he had received any correspondence from Julie Anne Genter about transport in Wellington when he had
• Denied discussing the NZTA board with photographer and blogger Patrick Reynolds despite having dinner with Reynolds shortly before appointing him
• Denied NZTA had completed an assessment of the NZSF proposal, when they had

Coughlan notes:

If it’s true that Twyford forgot he’d asked someone to be a guardian of that $4b pot of money, well that starts to look pretty negligent. No one begrudges a minister for not knowing niche details of their portfolio, but if you’d asked someone to be on the board of your key agency – of $4b – well, you think you’d remember that. 

But again his job is safe. A mere three or four false answers and f***ing up the two largest infrastructure projects the Government has is definitely not grounds for losing your job. So long as he doesn’t assault his press secretary, his job is safe.

Stuff reports:

Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter has admitted she would only back Wellington’s $6.4 billion transport programme if a mass public transport system was built before an extra Mt Victoria tunnel.
Genter released details of a letter she sent to Transport Minister Phil Twyford on March 26, in which she outlined her conditions for supporting the 20-year Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM) programme.

So this confirms what we suspected – the Greens effectively killed off an extra Mt Vic tunnel.

The package had been developed in consultation with what Wellingtonians wanted. It was put together by NZTA, WCC and WRC. They all agreed an extra Mt Vic tunnel was a priority.

But then the Greens vetoed it and we ended up with a shadow of a package which will lead to congestion around the Basin Reserve getting worse and worse for at least a decade.

Wellingtonians now know what they need to do, to prevent worsening congestion – vote for a Government without the Greens in it.

NewstalkZB reports:

Jacinda Ardern is urging the Green Party not to blame James Shaw for the Government’s climate agreement with farmers.
Farmers won’t be subject to emissions levies, unless the industry breaches the agreement.
Some angry Green Party members now want the Climate Change Minister to stand down as Green Party co-leader, accusing him of “selling out”.

Not sure this helps James.

Green Party members already think he is acting as a Labour Minister, not a Green Minister. So having the Labour PM defend him might actually make things worse.

The problem for the Greens is they have no leverage.

Muldoon 198428102019 by David Farrar on Scribd

Political junkies might enjoy reading this – Sir Robert Muldoon’s report on the 1984 General Election. A friend found it sorting through some old papers. Sir Rob seems to blame everyone but himself for the loss!

A couple of extracts:

The media were uniformly hostile. Journalists today are trade unionists first and professionals second, with very few exceptions.

And:

The Board of BCNZ, every-one of whom was appointed by the National Government, including one Dominion Councillor, have been a bitter disappointment as has the Chairman. They have totally failed to eliminate political bias from their employees.

Red Radio, even back then!

An open letter to the Greens from 150 scientists aged under 30:

Climate change is one of the greatest crises in human history, and our current law severely restricts the development of technologies that could make a vital difference. In 2003 the 1996 Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act was modified to tightly regulate research into genetic modification (GM). This legislation and the surrounding public debate was driven by uncertainty about the risks that these new technologies posed to biodiversity and human health, and resulted in creating one of the toughest regulatory environments in the world for this field of research.
We, an emerging generation of New Zealand scientists with expertise in and/or undertaking research in the biological sciences*, are writing to request that the Green Party reconsider its position on the regulation of these technologies.

They young scientists are right, but I fear they are wasting their time.

The majority of Green Party activists do not believe in science. They have a near religious belief that anything that interferes with “nature” is bad and hence they’ll never support GM.

It shows that they don’t in fact thing climate change is an emergency, because if they did they would be saying we must use all the tools available.

Stuff reports:

Minister of Transport Phil Twyford has said repeatedly that the former board of the New Zealand Transport Agency – with which he had a fractious relationship – did not wish to be reappointed and that the replacement of all but one of the board members last month was due to the board’s term ending. 
But now sources have confirmed to Stuff that this was in fact not the case and that some board members did ask to be reappointed, raising questions over whether Twyford misled Parliament. 
Last week, Twyford was asked in Parliament by National Party Transport spokesman Chris Bishop whether he would “stand by his statement that no one on the New Zealand Transport Agency board asked to stay on?”
Twyford responded, “Yes, I do”. 

The story reveals that Twyford has told this lie on multiple occasions.

But he can relax – his job is safe. If stuffing up the two biggest election promises for the Government doesn’t get you sacked, then merely lying won’t.

Twyford’s spokeswoman hung up the phone when asked why Darrow wasn’t reappointed if Twyford had asked him, and he wanted to be on the NZTA board.

Pretty bad when the press secretary can’t even cover up the lie, and just has to hang up.

Finally the voters in the UK get the chance to throw out some of the current MPs. The current poll of polls shows:

• Conservatives 35%, 354 seats
• Labour 26%, 195 seats
• Lib Dems 18%, 31 seats
• Brexit 12%, 0 seats
• Greens 5%, 1 seat
• SNP 3%, 48 seats
• Others 21 seats

But the campaign may change everything. Will the Brexit Party and the Conservative compete in marginal seats which could allow Labour to win them?

Will voters punish Boris for not getting Brexit through?

Will the Lib Dems and Labour surge due to their promise of a 2nd referendum?

Stuff reports:

The Opposition claims that a proposal for a national body for student democracy would become a taxpayer-funded training ground for future Labour MPs.
But Education Minister Chris Hipkins says the party is being “paranoid” about something which hasn’t even been selected as a final option.
The proposal for a National Centre for Student Voice was one of several options to enhance student democracy in tertiary institutions, released by the Ministry of Education earlier this year. …

National’s associate tertiary education spokesman, Simeon Brown – a 28-year-old MP known for his strident conservatism – said the minister should shoot down the proposal as it would just act as a “taxpayer-funded training ground for Labour Party activists”.

Simeon is absolutely right. This is Labour trying to do a stealth version of compulsory membership. But they’ll use taxpayer money to do it instead.

It will be taxpayer funded activists to help Labour MPs campaign in marginal seats.

This is why the Government will of course proceed with it.

Labour made a very explicit promise in the election. No only would they do light rail all the way to the airport, but they would complete the first 13 kms to Mt Roskill within four years.

The black line shows the pro-rata distance each month. To be on track they would have done 6 kms by now. The red line shows what they have actually delivered which is of course zero because incredibly two years in and they haven’t even decided a route or a mode.

Andrew Sullivan writes in the NY Magazine:

It’s clear to me now — as it should be to any dispassionate observer — that the pro-Remain parliamentary and media elites in all parties have never had any intention of honoring the result of the 2016 referendum. And they still don’t. They are sabotaging that democratic decision simply because they did not like the result, and they’re too chicken to take that case to the polls. So they’re keeping this zombie minority government in power, while preventing it from achieving its primary goal indefinitely. For all this, in my view, they deserve nothing but contempt.
Look at the record. Every single major Remain supporter has explicitly said in public they would accept the 2016 result and implement some kind of Brexit that a majority of voters supported. But almost none have walked the walk. When Theresa May came up with a deal generous to the E.U. and Remain position, they voted overwhelmingly against it (alongside the Brexit purists). As the deadline approached without a new deal, these same parliamentary elites insisted that the default of crashing out without a deal was unacceptable, and so voted to extend the deadline, not once but twice. But when Boris Johnson shocked everyone by meeting the second deadline and successfully getting a second deal, the Remainers first voted for the bill in principle, covering their asses, and then voted to stall its process through Parliament because they said they needed more time to examine the fine print. Now that they’ve been given more time — surprise! — they don’t want it if they have to face the voters afterward. I give up.

Sullivan is right that the remainers or remoaners are doing everything they can to sabotage Brexit, as they can’t accept they lost. They need to be swept from Parliament.

Sullivan actually supports remaining but says:

I also believe in abiding by the result of legitimate national, democratic votes. Upholding that principle, even when it goes against our own strong wishes and personal vote, is foundational to liberal democracy. And retroactively nullifying by waiting out a referendum result solely because you lost is unacceptable, period. Consistently bullshitting about your own motives thereafter is contemptible.

Then he turns to Trump:

I’ve not been an impeachment fan, even as I have regarded the president as mentally ill and characteristically tyrannical from the get-go. I was long unconvinced by the Russia “collusion/conspiracy” claims, saw impeachment as inapplicable in most cases of executive wrongdoing, and only switched sides this year when evidence of obstruction of justice in the Mueller report became undeniable. But the Ukraine matter? If you were to look up an impeachable offense in a metaphorical dictionary, you’d see Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas as illustrations.

Ukraine is vastly different to Russia. As Sullivan says, what Trump has done is exactly what impeachment was put in the constitution to prevent.

But if what Trump has clearly done isn’t a big deal, or a high crime, then you have surely nullified the impeachment clause for the indefinite future. If the clause doesn’t apply to secret quid pro quos with foreign leaders that abuse congressional funds in order to skew the course of a domestic election, what on Earth could it apply to?

Makes lying over sex look trivial.

But then he turns to the Democrats, and I’ll summarise his views:

• Joe Biden: confused, addled, over-briefed, and clearly past his expiration date as a pol
• Bernie Sanders: appealing to millennial Marxists who have no memory of the 1970s
• Elizabeth Warren: unelectable by pledging to rip everyone off their current private health insurance. A supercilious, smug, know-it-all Massachusetts liberal who reveals contempt for the deplorables
• Cory Booker: On paper, he’s perfect. In reality, he comes off as an earnest cyborg from outer space
• Kamala Harris:  a feckless, authoritarian, lying opportunist who treats the Constitution as cavalierly as Trump, but without his excuse of total ignorance
• Tulsi Gabbard: despised by too many Dems to have a hope
• Amy Klobuchar: a ball of nerves and insecurity who seems to shrink upon exposure
• Beto O’Rourke: a woke, moronic bigot, who believes we live in a white-supremacist country
• Julian Castro: an open-borders globalist panderer dedicated to the vital cause of free abortions for transgender male illegal immigrants

The only two he rates are Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang. He goes on to say:

I’ll vote for anyone, including Warren or Sanders or even the vacuous “Beto” to defeat Trump. We proud human scum will not be distracted from the central task at hand. But let’s be honest: This is a field that has largely wilted upon inspection. For what it’s worth, I suspect Warren will win the nomination and dutifully lose the election just like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and the second Clinton. She has that quintessential perfume of smug, well-meaning, mediocre doom that Democrats simply cannot resist.

Warren is indeed now looking most likely to win the nomination.

The Herald reports:

Senior Cabinet Ministers were sounded out about an Auckland light rail bid from the NZ Super Fund in January 2018, months before a proposal was put to the Government.
But Transport Minister Phil Twyford says the subsequent proposal was unsolicited, and any suggestion that he has been lying about that is defamatory.

The weasel word here is “unsolicited”. That is meaningless in this context, as a Minister can’t legally solicit a proposal – only the agency can. But what a Minister can do is encourage and tell NZSF that such a bid would not be a waste of time.

Why else would those behind the bid have met with the Minister?

This is the first of a new monthly series charting Labour’s progress towards election or coalition promises. I plan to have a number of these in areas such as housing, police, light rail and forestry.

The black line shows the promise of 1,800 extra police officers in three years and what a linear trend towards it would be. The red line is the actual they have managed. With just a year to go they are 1,000 short of their promise and 400 below what you would expect to be on target.

This headline from the Washington Post was so bad, it has sparked it’s own Twitter hashtag of WaPoDeathNotices. So many good ones there, here are a few:

• Jeffrey Dahmer, connoisseur of exotic and locally sourced meats, dies at 34
• Gaius Julius Caesar, 56, noted author and Egyptologist, dies surrounded by his friends.
• Osama bin Laden, father of 23, killed in home invasion
• Ramsay Bolton, austere diplomat and animal caretaker, passed away at home surrounded by his dogs.
• Acclaimed mass transit administrator Benito Mussolini, dead at 61
• Adolf Hitler, dedicated art enthusiast, animal rights activist, and talented orator, dies at 56.
• Robert Mugabe, founder of Modern Monetary Theory, dies at 95.
• Ivan Milat, noted outdoorsman and driver, dies at 74.

David Cormack writes:

In the lead-up to the 2017 election there were two major policies of Labour’s that people seemed really enthusiastic about; KiwiBuild and the new rail system to go in Auckland. Twyford, for reasons that are now entirely unclear, was given responsibility for both. Boundless enthusiasm, confidence and some might say smugness poured forth as he promised the country 100,000 houses over 10 years and light rail up Dominion Road in Auckland by the time APEC rolled around in 2021.
So far he’s managed to make a complete hash of both.

It takes special talent to stuff up both projects.

While the Government continues to deny it solicited a proposal from the Super Fund for the light rail contract, there was engagement between Twyford and the Super Fund prior to the announcement of the bid. The fact that Twyford worked with Sir Brian Roche engaging with the Super Fund and then installed Sir Brian as Chair of NZTA is also a huge misjudgment. And the fact that not only will the light rail system not be ready in time for APEC it’s likely it won’t even have been started, is the final misstep that means Twyford just has to go.

In two years they haven’t even decided on a route or a mode.

Twyford’s inability to deliver on the two big promises he was tasked with really leaves the Prime Minister with no option but to remove him from any meaningful portfolio, or out of Cabinet completely. He is single-handedly hurting Labour’s brand as we head into the last 12 months of this Government before we go to election.

I predict there is no chance that Ardern will remove Twyford from Cabinet. If she started to remove Ministers for incompetence, then Cabinet might get rather small.

Newsweek reports:

The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek has learned. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.

A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid, and the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending DNA and biometric testing. The senior Pentagon official said there was a brief firefight when U.S. forces entered the compound in Idlib’s Barisha village and that Baghdadi then killed himself by detonating a suicide vest. Family members were present. According to Pentagon sources, no children were harmed in the raid but two Baghdadi wives were killed after detonating their own explosive vests.

A fitting end to them. It seems like a highly successful mission with no US casualties and the ISIS leader dead. Always a risk approving such a mission, but one which paid off so credit to everyone from the President down to those in the raid.

ISIS has lost all its territory but still remained a significant threat. This won’t be the end of ISIS, but it is a big blow to them as Baghdadi was the driving force behind them.

Stuff reports:

List, 47, says he wants to wait for the outcome of two party reports into the sex assault scandal before passing judgement.​ …

But he does say alcohol should be banned from all party events. “It’s not supposed to be a party.
“I don’t see why political events need to have alcohol.
“I know that sounds a little bit puritanical. But a lot of my experiences around the Beehive involved alcohol and New Zealand has got a drinking problem anyway.”

Wow going to be fun to be a Labour activist if List wins.

Newshub reports:

Newshub has obtained documents showing officials scratching their heads over exactly what the government wants to achieve with Auckland light rail. 

Briefings over a series of months show officials begging Transport Minister Phil Twyford to provide them with direction over the rail project so they can move it forward – and even by late July this year they still had no idea. It’s a promise to Auckland nowhere near on track.
In April, officials even prepared a presentation for Twyford explaining ‘why setting outcomes is important’. On the first slide, it said “we have no agreed outcomes currently” and the “Government position on outcomes essential to provide clear direction to design, delivery and implementation of light rail”. 

Ministers are trying to blame agencies and officials for the Auckland light rail fiasco but this makes it clear the problem was the Minister.

But the presentation still didn’t kick Twyford into gear. A briefing on July 23 later shows officials begging for direction, as they weigh up two very different proposals. 
It again says: “A key underpinning of the parallel process is to confirm the government’s desired outcomes from the light rail project” and tells the minister that for NZTA and NZ Infra to be compared on a like for like basis he must provide both organisations “clarity on outcomes the government’s seeking”.
Twyford wouldn’t be interviewed over these briefings. On Thursday he placed the blame for delays squarely at officials feet. 
“They dropped the ball and didn’t do the job that they were asked to do,” he told Newshub. 

The Minister couldn’t tell them what outcome he desired, and blames them for not having telepathy.

Metro News reports:

Students at the University of Oxford have voted to ‘replace clapping’ with a silent wave because it ‘could trigger anxiety’. They are instead being told to use ‘jazz hands’, where they wave their hands in the air. The motion to ‘mandate the encouragement of silent clapping’ was successfully passed by the university’s student union officers, following their first meeting of the year on Tuesday.

The snowflakes win again.