Sentencing Notes for Damian Wereta.

• Strike 1 – Feb 2013: aggravated robbery with a firearm and causing grievous bodily harm with intent to injure. 10.5 years.
• Strike 2 – Sep 2015: wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. 7.75 years.
• Strike 3 – Nov 2017: grievous bodily harm

The third strike consisted of:

you and four others attacked another prisoner without warning. A co-offender began the attack with punches to the victim’s head. Once the victim was on the ground, you punched and kicked him to the head and abdomen. You then repeatedly stabbed the victim with a shank to the head, neck and upper back. … You and they taunted the victim with Black Power slogans while he lay defenceless—and seriously injured. The victim was from an opposing gang, the Mongrel Mob. You then stabbed the victim twice more. You and your co-offenders taunted the Corrections officers. You said to them, “this is what happens when you put a mobster on my landing”. … The victim managed to stagger away. As he did so, you stabbed him twice more to the upper chest and neck. After what is described as a protracted negotiation with the guards, you dropped the shank. You and the other offenders then congratulated each other on what you had done. Some of your co-offenders tipped water and shampoo on the ground to make the difficult role of Corrections officers even more so.

The Judge also notes:

Gangs and violence are twins.

Useful reminder.

The final sentence:

I sentence you to preventive detention with a minimum period of eight years’ imprisonment.

I can’t see him getting released anytime soon.

Russel Norman writes:

Picture this. Jacinda Ardern standing in the middle of Queen St on the bonnet of a tractor with her middle finger raised as ten of thousands of climate strikers stream by.
She may as well have.
Wednesday’s post cabinet announcement means that agribusiness will pay zilch for their next five years of climate polluting. No mandatory measures from the Government to drive down agricultural emissions.
A cynical flip of the bird. …

To be clear, this polluters pact between the reactionary farming lobby groups and the Government is the opposite of climate action. 
It’s the type of lily-livered politicking which we’ve come to expect from National governments.

Yet one his own (former) Green Party signed up to.

Green Party leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw concludes for the Government saying that New Zealand is finally getting down to the business of keeping the planet safer. More like keeping polluting businesses safe from those businesses and people who genuinely want to save the planet.
Be in no doubt. This is the ugly face of realpolitik from an administration that seems to care more about ending up in opposition than it does about climate catastrophe. They may discover both will come to pass.

He’s definitely unhappy.

One News reports:

Former Wellington mayor Justin Lester Lester will formally apply for a recount tomorrow after losing city’s mayoralty race by only 62 votes.

Will be interesting to see what his grounds are, as you need something beyond “It was very close”

The Herald reports:

The Government moved quickly today to dismiss criticisms that its plans to make New Zealand’s rural sector greener was a backdown from a key election promise.
Instead, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Climate Change Minister James Shaw and a host of farming and agricultural sector leaders today talked up the importance of the new scheme and the “world-first” Government-industry partnership.
Instead of taxing farmers on emissions between 2020 and 2025 – the Government has instead opted to work with the agricultural sector to manage and mitigate on-farm emissions through the He Waka Eke Noa programme

I’m hearing there is a significant group within the Greens who are very unhappy with agriculture being exempted from the ETS until 2025, and possibly forever.

They’re also unhappy the Greens are supporting the anti-terrorist legislation, and the foreign land sales Green Ministers have okayed.

The target of their anger is co-leader James Shaw. It is not impossible he will face a leadership challenge – not necessarily from another MP.

It will be interesting times.

Guyon Espiner reports:

Land Information Minister and Green MP Eugenie Sage has given a foreign-owned forestry company a free pass to buy thousands of hectares of New Zealand land without applying to the Overseas Investment Office (OIO).

Japanese-owned Pan Pac Forest Products was given the special approval to bypass the OIO to purchase land for forestry for the next three years as the government sought foreign forestry money to help meet its tree planting targets.
The pre-approval was given to Pan Pac despite the Green Party having strongly protested land sales to foreigners and Forestry Minister Shane Jones saying he was sympathetic to rural concerns that converting productive farm land to forestry could cost jobs.

I’ve got no problems with the approval, but the fact Labour, Greens and NZ First all campaigned on policies of banning land sales to foreigners exposes their hypocrisy.

Georgina Campbell reports:

A deputy mayor is yet to be announced but it’s clear the left intend to have the final say, with Sarah Free increasingly looking like the most viable option.

If you were to have a Mayor from the left, Sarah would be the best bet.

Unluckily for Foster, out of all the policies on his list, it was floating the idea of selling the council’s share in the city’s airport that hit the headlines.
There was swift pushback with terms like “asset sales” and “privatisation” being thrown around.
But this idea of asset recycling didn’t come out of the blue.
It’s an idea clearly mooted in both the council and Wellington Chamber of Commerce chief executives’ pre-election reports.
Essentially it means divesting assets and recycling the proceeds to other priorities.
The council has a growing list of projects on its hands like the closed central library and the massive $6.4b Let’s Get Wellington Moving transport plan.

It is almost amusing how kneejerk some people are. They seem to think money grows on trees, and they can rarely explain what benefit there is to ratepayers from holding a minority stake in the airport. A minority stake means we have no control, and are at the mercy of the majority shareholder. Whatever expansion plan the majority shareholder decides on, the minority has to fund.

And would ratepayers rather have a new central library or keep a minority stake in an asset they don’t control?

Pink News UK reports:

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has explained her government’s decision to delay a ban on traumatising gay conversion therapy, acknowledging a need for “religious freedom”.

The controversial practice of so-called gay ‘conversion therapy’ was raised after more than 20,000 people signed petitions calling for it to be outlawed in New Zealand.

My personal view on conversion therapy is it is a hoax that is quite harmful. You can’t change who someone is attracted to. Sure you can get them to repress it, but you can’t change something as fundamental as attraction.

“We believe more work needs to be done before any decision is taken to ban it,” it said in its report. “In particular, thought must be given to how to define conversion therapy, who the ban would apply to, and how to ensure that rights relating to freedom of expression and religion were maintained.”

I think banning it would be problematic. How do you define it in such a way as to exclude someone just giving advice?

And would a ban achieve anything? I suspect so called conversion therapy is dying off, as the vast bulk of society no longer sees homosexuality as something needing to be fixed.

A crucial vote just passed in the committee stage of the End of Life Choice Bill. MPs voted 63 to 57 to make the law conditional on a referendum.

This means that all nine NZ First MPs will vote for the End of Life Choice Bill at 3rd reading, which should lead to it passing. That will then result in a referendum with next year’s election. Polls have shown 3:1 support for legalising euthanasia, so unless something untoward happens, we should expect terminally ill New Zealanders to gain the choice of an assisted death by the end of 2021.

Vox reports:

The top US diplomat in Ukraine just told lawmakers that President Donald Trump wanted hundreds of millions in military aid to the Eastern European country held up until it agreed to investigate Joe Biden’s family and another conspiracy theory related to Democrats.
In other words, there was a quid pro quo — one that could eventually lead to Trump’s impeachment in the House and even more trouble with the Senate.
William Taylor, the acting US ambassador to Ukraine, testified in front of three House committees on Tuesday as part of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry. He’s the latest in a parade of current and former US officials who’ve testified in the past few weeks about whether or not Trump withheld around $400 million in military aid to Ukraine for his own political and personal gain.
According to Taylor, that’s exactly what the president did. This is by far the most damning account of Trump’s conduct yet in the impeachment inquiry.

The testimony is damning and of course Trump should be impeached and convicted. Can there be a greater abuse of office than withholding military aid to an ally under threat from Russia, in an attempt to force them to smear his main political opponent.

In effect, Taylor told Congress that, in his understanding, if Ukraine wanted anything out of Trump — including a long-desired meeting and much-needed military aid to fend of a Russian invasion — Kyiv had to state unequivocally that it would look into the Bidens.

Taylor is is a highly respected diplomat who has served both Republican and Democrat Presidents. He is a West Point graduate and served in Vietnam in the infantry.

Tomorrow, 24th October, is World Polio Day.

In New Zealand, we’re fortunate that polio has, in most of our lifetimes, been consigned to the history books. Still, as recently as 1956 there were 897 new cases of polio reported, and 50 deaths from the disease. Today, most New Zealanders have no idea how debilitating polio was, although there are still Kiwis living with significant levels of disability as a result of contracting polio in their childhood.

Fast forward to the 1980’s. Rotary International was looking for a global humanitarian project. A multi-year programme had seen six million children vaccinated in the Philippines. Rotary set itself the lofty goal of completely eradicating polio, and was pivotal in the establishment of the Global Polio Initiative. From 350,000 new cases of polio worldwide in 1988, this initiative has reduced polio by 99.9%.

The wild polio virus is now endemic only in remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nigeria marked three years of being polio-free in August, and it is expected that the World Health Organisation will shortly certify Nigeria and the African continent as officially free from polio.

But it’s the last part that’s proving the hardest. The areas where polio has not been eradicated are remote, and often controlled by the Taliban, who are deeply suspicious of western medicines. Aid workers in these areas have been killed when trying to vaccinate children. Despite that, Rotary and its partners are determined to finish the job.

One of those partners is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill and Melinda have donated billions of dollars to the eradication of polio, matching every dollar raised by Rotary with two dollars of their own.

Tomorrow, Rotarians (myself included) will be out in force on the Capital Connection to Wellington, on the Wellington suburban network and at stations around Wellington, and on the evening train to Masterton. Dunedin Rotarians are hitting the bus network, and Auckland Rotarians will be on the trains next Friday, 1st November. You’ll spot us in our bright red End Polio Now t-shirts, and if you can spare a few dollars, we’d be hugely grateful. The goal tomorrow and next week is to raise $150,000 to help to vaccinate children in those last endemic areas.

Only one disease has been completely eradicated in our lifetimes; smallpox. Rotary and its partners want to double that total, and spare children all around the world disability, paralysis and even death through polio. You can help us to #EndPolioNow

Stuff reports:

More than $2 billion has been wiped off the value of power companies following the announcement that the aluminium smelter in Bluff is being reviewed and could close down.
The smelter directly employs about 900 Southlanders, but its possible closure could have ramifications well beyond the region by flooding the market with cheap electricity.

If the smelter closes, it will be devastating for Southland, and bad for shareholders (like me) of power companies. But it would be very good for pretty much every other household and business in NZ, due to cheaper power prices.

“The New Zealand Government has had a clear position since 2013 under the Key/English government that there will be no more financial assistance from taxpayers for Rio Tinto, which is already supported by Meridian for the power it uses.”
That hadn’t changed, she said.

Good. The assistance given by National was wrong and misguided. Rio Tinto should commercially negotiate for the best electricity price they can get. If it is not cheap enough for them, then that’s just the reality.

An interesting decision from the District Court in 2016 when it was asked to do a recount in the Dunstan constituency of Otago Regional Council by the candidate who just missed out by 5 votes.

Judge Kellar turned down the application, as he ruled there merely being a close result is not grounds enough. The applicant has to have reasons as to why the result may be incorrect.

Closeness of the voting by itself does not provide reasonable grounds to believe that the declaration is incorrect and that on a recount the applicant might be elected.

So merely saying “Hey maybe they missed a few votes” is not good enough. You need to point to a specific issue around the ballot and count.

With Lester 62 votes behind Foster, I think he would have a very hard time convincing a court to do a recount.

The results to date in Canada are:

1. Conservatives 34.4%, 121 seats
2. Liberals 33.1%, 155 seats
3. New Democrats 15.9%, 24 seats
4. Bloc Quebecois 7.7%, 32 seats
5. Greens 6.5%, 3 seats

So it will almost certainly be a Liberal minority Government supported by the NDP.

It’s interesting that in this case FPP helps the Liberals immensely. They got fewer votes than the Conservatives but 34 more seats.

There was a swing against the left. The Liberals lost 29 seats and the NDP 18 seats, but not enough to change the Government.

It will be interesting to see if Trudeau’s 2nd term is less scandal ridden than his first.

I might disagree with James Shaw on a lot of policy issues, but he is fundamentally a decent guy who would never make a tweet like this.

Kudos to the brave firefighters fighting the blaze.

The Herald reports:

Less than three months after being cleared of raping a young girl, a Mosgiel man began grooming a 14-year-old online.
Except she was not the innocent schoolgirl 63-year-old Evan Hedley Smith thought.
It was an undercover police officer – a member of the Online Child Exploitation Across New Zealand team.
Smith will be sentenced on a charge of grooming at the Dunedin District Court today after earlier pleading guilty.

Well done NZ Police.

So how did he get found not guilty to the earlier charges?

What the man was less keen to disclose was in June that year, he had been on trial at the Dunedin District Court where a jury found him not guilty on two counts of rape and six of indecent assault.
The complainant in that case – a young girl – said Smith abused her up to four times a week for 18 months.
At trial, the jury heard evidence that two used condoms from Smith’s bin were found by scientists to feature DNA from him and her.

The defence case was that the girl had blown the condoms up like balloons at times, or her DNA might have been transferred on to them from other items she put among the rubbish.
The jury was not convinced Smith had sexually abused her and unanimously acquitted him.

Now we didn’t hear all the evidence, but DNA from a young girl on a condom is pretty damn strong and the suggestion she used them as balloons is laughable.

Hopefully he gets a long sentence for the grooming, to keep the community safe.

Mia Sutherland, a school climate activist, writes:

If this coalition government is serious about tackling climate change and ensuring future generations are left with a prosperous planet, GMO law reform must be considered. …

In Lincoln, scientists from AgResearch are engineering a strain of ryegrass which, when fed to cows, has the potential to reduce methane emissions by 23 per cent. The ryegrass contains a High Metabolise Energy (HME) system, which promotes the production of lipids in the leaf. Higher levels of lipids, provided they don’t biohydrogenate, result in less material for the rumen to release as methane and more sustenance for the animal so they do not have to ingest as much grass as they regularly would. This ryegrass could not only reduce methane emissions, but could also cost farmers less money due to its high feed conversion efficiency.
This HME ryegrass has the potential to make a substantial difference to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions – 48 per cent of which can be traced back to the agricultural sector. Additionally, modelling has also shown a reduction in nitrate leaching. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions requires a new way of thinking, and if we’re serious about assisting farmers in their emission reduction we need to be considering less regulation of genetic engineering.

Mia is absolutely right. It is profoundly wrong to demand farmers reduce their emissions but refuse to allow them the tools to do so.

New Zealand’s strict GMO laws has meant that AgResearch have had to move its research to the United States in order to complete testing. How embarrassing is that? Progressive, NZ-born science is having to move away from home in order to develop. These current regulations can only be described as anti-science. 
Our prime minister has claimed that she wants to “demonstrate how [food producing] can be done sustainably” to the rest of the world. If this is a serious claim, we need to see action in the form of allowing crops with forward-thinking genetic engineering, such as AgResearch’s ryegrass, to be welcome in New Zealand.

Will New Zealand retain its anti-science laws, or will it allow our scientists to help us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?

First Massey banned Don Brash from speaking because some Maori staff and students disagree with what he said, and claimed it made them unsafe.

Then Massey banned a lesbian feminist from speaking because some staff and students said she was a TERF and made them feel unsafe.

And now in Strike 3, Massey has pulled down posters supporting protests for democracy in Hong Kong, because some staff and/or students complained.

I think this removes any doubt that Massey is now an authoritarian campus, not a campus of free speech and free exchange of ideas.

TVNZ report:

An American preacher known for his hateful stance against LGBTQI people has been refused entry to New Zealand on character grounds.

Now when I first saw this, I was skeptical it was justified as the term “hateful” has become so widely used to become almost meaningless. But in this case, it seems spot on.

Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church announced on his YouTube channel that New Zealand had become the 34th country worldwide to refuse him entry.

That gives an idea he is something special.

Mr Anderson has previously published video promoting Holocaust denial, and has said the Orlando gay nightclub shooting was a good thing.

And that is the very clear line being crossed – he actually celebrates murder of gays. We would no more let him in that we would let in someone who celebrates Islamic state terrorist attacks.

“I do hate homosexuals and if hating homosexuals makes our church a hate group then that’s what we are.”

For once the term “hateful” appears spot on.

Anderson has also prayed for Obama and Caitlyn Jenner to die, and the execution of homosexuals. The barrier for refusing entry should be very high. Far higher than merely offensive. But actively celebrating murders and praying for them reaches that barrier.

Michelle Duff writes in Stuff:

In many ways, this Government has been both ineffective and hypocritical. The Kiwibuild scheme and demotion of Housing Minister Phil Twyford is one example of a clear and damaging policy failure. The #MeToo scandal within the Labour Party has revealed what many of who work in the area of sexual violence already knew, but is no less crushing – misconduct is rife, and the minimising of it, protection of alleged perpetrators, and diminishing of women continues unabated, no matter the organisation and its stated ethos.

Both ineffective and hypocritical. and this comes from a journalist that has just written a biography of Ardern.