The Herald reports:

Mason Pendrous’ family were chased for unpaid hostel bills while the university student lay dead in his room, his stepfather claims.

Defies belief.

It was only when Holland asked the young man’s friends to check on him that one climbed on to the roof at the Sonoda halls of residence and looked into his room that his body was found.

That suggests Sonoda management was hard to contact. When I was at a hostel, if we had concerns over someone we’d knock on their door, and if no answer go get a house tutor with a master key and unlock their door. If students had to climb on the roof to look in, suggests management were heard to get hold of.

Holland said he’d made numerous attempts to contact Pendrous since then and had emailed the university in August asking after his son.
“I just feel a bit frustrated that nobody, either at the university or at CLV chose after four or five weeks to chase him up. To find out why he’d not been to lectures, to find out why he’d not eaten,” he told RNZ.
“They swipe in for food. He didn’t swipe in. So at some point, an alarm bell must rise and say, ‘Hang on, he’s not eaten here for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is’.”

The moment he contacted the university, this is exactly what should have happened – check records. Or even easier if contact the hostel management and have someone unlock the room.

The full report into the decision to grant convicted drug smuggler Karel Sroubek permanent residency is here. Here’s a key extract:

Where a decision is to be made by the Minister (rather than a DDM) which has factual or legal complexities, or is unusual or novel, the Minister should request and receive advice from INZ (as and when the Minister considers necessary).

Translation – the Minister didn’t ask for any legal advice. Previous Minister did.

Stuff also reports:

Grounds contained in the case file summary, which Lees-Galloway used to make his decision, were understood by immigration officials to be “sufficiently powerful”, such that the original decision of the minister was unexpected, the report says.

Immigration stuff were stunned that the Minister gave residency to a convicted drug dealer. This wasn’t even close to a borderline call. It was an obvious slam dunk no.

But for some reasons ILG said yes – possibly due to lobbying from well connected friends.

Stuff reports:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Turkey’s military has launched a long-expected offensive into northeastern Syria targeting US-allied Syrian Kurdish fighters that have played a central role in the fight against the Islamic State militant group.

A shameful act by an authoritarian state against one of the few good actors in the region who have opposed both Islamic State and the Syrian regime.

The White House announced Sunday that it was withdrawing US troops from the area that Turkey planned to invade, igniting a firestorm of criticism. Republican leaders denounced Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds. Pentagon officials struggled with explanations, humanitarian workers warned of civilian casualties, and Kurdish commanders said they might be forced to abandon their Syrian prisons holding thousands of captured Islamic State fighters and head for the front lines against Turkey.

You betray one set of allies, and others will be less willing to trust you in future.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants some voting to be online for the 2022 local body election as turnout around the country fades.
In the country’s biggest local election, voting returns for Auckland Council have reached just 17 per cent, lagging behind 2016s turnout at this same stage, and in Wellington voting is also slower.
Local body elections are conducted using postal voting, with the postal system gradually declining and deliveries no longer daily in urban areas.

Having postal voting as the main voting method for local body elections is stupid. The postal system is dying in the Internet age. It’s like insisting people have to use a horse and buggy instead of a car.

“We need to see at least the beginning of online voting in my view, and I have held that view for some time,” Ardern told Stuff in an interview.

The PM has the right view. And online voting doesn’t have to be a website, which gets all the security boffins clenching their buttocks. It can be as simple as you still get your voting papers in the post, but can photograph them on your smartphone, and e-mail them to the returning officer. Just use the Internet to deliver the vote, not to store and count them.

And if you think that is insecure, I have really bad news for you. We already do it for parliamentary elections. Around 70,000 overseas voters delivered their votes via the Internet in 2017.

“There is strong support for online voting with 74 per cent of Aucklanders telling us after the 2016 election that they would prefer to vote online,” Mayor Phil Goff told Stuff in 2018.

Auckland would be a great city to trial online voting in as you could compare turnout stats in areas that use it to those which do not.

Danyl McL writes:

So one of the coalition partners in our government – whose Ministers are completely autonomous; the Prime Minister appears to have no power over them whatsoever – has a discretionary $3bn fund to give away, they’re actively and aggressively soliciting donations from the industries they’re dispensing the fund to, but no large donations are ever declared. Instead the party gains significant funding through loans from a mysterious foundation.

If this was happening as part of a National Government, the Greens would be calling on the Serious Fraud Office to investigate. Instead not a peep as they’re scared of the big bad Winston.

The Herald reports:

Associate Health Minister Peeni Henare says measures like a sugar tax should be considered to drive up the cost of junk food and drink, along with warning labels.

No sugar tax in the world has been shown to actually reduce obesity. At best they reduce demand for the products targeted by it, and people simply substitute.

The real agenda is just another tax. They had a $7.5 billion surplus last year and instead of thinking how can we reduce taxes so families have more money to make ends meet, they’re looking at how to tax us more.

Stuff reports:

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has referred a massive leak of NZ First members’ personal details to the police and privacy commissioner.
The databases sent include the names, occupation, phone numbers, addresses, and paid membership status of more than a thousand people affiliated with the political party – including Peters and his partner Jan Trotman.
The information was sent along with a bundle of other documents in an email to Stuff, several other media outlets, and MPs Simon Bridges, Paula Bennett, and David Seymour.
Peters tweeted on Tuesday night that the leak was a “deliberate and malicious misappropriation of data by a disgruntled source.”

This is a bad thing. It is one thing to leak documents revealing issues around the campaign and finances. They can be justified. But to leak the membership database is very unfair to ordinary NZ First members. People should be able to donate to a political party without their names being made public.

It does make you wonder who is leaking. I presume only very senior office holders would have had access to the membership database.

Stuff reports:

New Zealand has exported measles cases to the United States, according to the American Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
A report from the CDC published at the beginning of the month, showed that two American measles cases were imported from New Zealand.
While the overall number was small, New Zealand exported more measles cases to the US than countries like China, India, and Australia, despite far larger numbers of those countries’ citizens travelling to the US.

Yay, our public health failure has not just infected NZ, but also the US. Great job.

National’s associate health spokesperson, Shane Reti, said the numbers showed the seriousness of the outbreak. Reti called on Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter to reinstate health targets including targets for vaccinations.

Should be a no brainer.

Genter rejected the claim the targets had been gotten rid of, noting that target data was still collected.

Only because journalists keep asking for it under the OIA. They scrapped the targets two years ago and promised to come up with their own. And they haven’t.

The Canadian Conservatives have asked:

After media reports revealed that Justin Trudeau wore blackface during an event at West Point Grey Academy, Canadians have been asking why exactly Justin Trudeau left his teaching job at the school. It’s understandable why people have questions, after all Trudeau’s story has changed four times since 2001.

The Conservatives detail the four public reasons he has given, but speculation is that is is none of the above.

Now this may be a rumour with no foundation. But the fact the Conservatives have called on the PM to explain why he did in fact leave the school suggests they are convinced it has substance – otherwise you would normally never get near it.

Going to be a fascinating next few days in Canadian politics.

Newsroom reports:

There are 15,473 vehicles in the government fleet and only 78 are electric. When the coalition Government came into power in late 2017, the agreement between Labour and New Zealand First stipulated that the entire fleet would be emissions-free by mid-2025, “where practicable”.
Although it was repeated as recently as June, that goal has been quietly revised to a commitment that, after mid-2025, all new vehicles entering the fleet will be emissions-free.

No wonder they dropped that target quietly because the difference is huge.

If the target is 100% electric vehicles for the government fleet by 2025, then one can measure progress. For example after two years of government, they have achieved only 0.5% electric despite being quarter of the way to 2025.

By making the target that after 2025 all new vehicles will be electric, it means they don’t actually have to achieve anything for the next six years. Effectively only if they got a 4th term, would they do anything.

It shows once again how this is a Government great on rhetoric but absolutely incompetent on delivery.

A good report from ASH on how the Government could achieve its Smokefree 2025 goals, focusing on lower risk products. Their summary:

we advocate a surge strategy based on driving down smoking by facilitating smokers to switch to smokefree alternatives such as vaping products, heated tobacco and smokeless tobacco products. These smokefree alternatives present much lower health risks compared to cigarettes and with the right tax structure can ease financial pressures on smoking households, mitigating both health and economic inequities

So would improve the health and finances of low income households with smokers.On the issue of regulation they say:

Effective regulation involves striking a balance between measures that are so weak they do not have the intended effect and measures that are so excessive that they cause unintended harm. For example, by obstructing smokers switching from smoking by making smokefree alternatives more expensive, less appealing, or more difficult to access. The way to strike this balance is to adopt risk-proportionate regulation. This imposes regulatory burdens and controls in proportion to the risk posed by the product, but also taking account of the opportunities it offers.

So these alternate products should be regulated, but less regulated than cigarettes.

They note the average smoker now pays $3,310 a year in excise tax, a 50% increase since 2011. They also note that Maori have paid more in excise taxes in two years than the total Treaty settlements over the last 25 years.

They also calculate a pack a day smoker who switches to vaping would reduce the cost to them from $9,000 a year to around $900.

Their recommendations include:

• Control, rather than prohibit, advertising of low-risk alternatives to smoking such as e-cigarettes
• Allow owners and managers of premises to determine policy on use of non-combustible tobacco and nicotine products.
• Introduce a proportionate notification regime and avoid a pre-market authorisation system.
• Require plain packaging for combustible products, but not for smokefree products.
• Develop a risk-proportionate taxation regime for nicotine products with the highest taxes on cigarettes and very low or zero taxes on smokefree alternatives.
• Encourage public health authorities and the Ministry of Health to provide pragmatic user-centric advice on e-cigarettes and other reduced-risk products.

I hope the Government takes heed of this report.

Not too shabby.

Politico reports:

London may not be planning to nominate a commissioner to Brussels but if it does, some say there’s only one option: Nigel Farage.
Conservative MP Steve Baker told the Telegraph’s Chopper’s Brexit Podcast that the Brexit Party member of the European Parliament would be the obvious choice to be the U.K.’s European commissioner, if Brexit is delayed and the country is able to nominate one.

Oh that is delicious. If Boris is forced to ask for a delay, and the EU agrees, then the person they hate most in the world will be made a powerful EU Commissioner.

If that won’t encourage a member state to veto an extension, I don’t know what will!

A great description of NZ First by one of it’s own candidates.

The Herald reports:

In a report titled “NZ First Concerns & Issues Regarding Election”, Helen Peterson – who was 20th on the party’s list in 2017 – said “members who paid huge amounts of money towards the campaign and promised repayment did not receive any reimbursement”.
“Money allocated to support the campaign was not used for the purpose in which it was donated,” she alleged in a list of dozens of complaints.
“Members felt exploited as they financed the party’s activities with little recognition or reward.”
The report goes on to say complaints had been ignored and describes the party as “disorganised, dishonest, and hypocritical”.

The only surprise is that she was surprised.

It also laments the party’s selection process meant there no MPs in the House were representing Auckland.
“[It] leaves Auckland, who have the highest population, and where there are a third of the country’s total electorates without a New Zealand First Member of Parliament representing them,” Peterson said.
The Herald earlier reported complaints the selection process was “sexist” with the top 18 members of the party’s list only including three women, and included people with membership of less than six months while long-serving members were pushed down.

NZ First doesn’t have criteria such as other parties in terms of geographic balance or length of membership. The only criteria is what Winston thinks of you.

Stuff reports:

The four largest private landowners in New Zealand are all foreign-owned forestry companies, an RNZ investigation has found.
Despite a clampdown on some overseas investment, including a ban on residential sales to offshore buyers, the Labour-led government has actively encouraged further foreign purchases of land for forestry through a streamlined “special forestry test”.
Since the government was formed, the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) has approved more than $2.3 billion of forestry-related land sales – about 31,000 hectares of it previously in New Zealand hands.

And not just forestry land

Overall, nearly $5b of sensitive land has changed hands through the OIO since the government was formed.

Now personally I have no problem with foreign ownership of land. They can’t take it away and allowing foreigner buyers mean sellers (who are mainly NZers) get the best price for their land.

But Labour, NZ First and Greens have all campaigned vigorously against foreign land ownership. Labour basically promised to abolish it and instead they’ve approved $5 billion of sales.

The first two years of National Government saw just 31,000 hectares of land sold – a rate Labour claimed was awful despite it being 1/4 of the last Labour Government.

Now if $2.3 billion of forestry land sold is 31,000 hectares and total land sold has been $5.0 billion that suggests Labour has approved sales of around 70,000 hectares in two years.

Stuff reports:

The figures supplied to National by Police Minister Stuart Nash, show about 1400 more people have joined a gang since the Government took office in 2017 and National leader Simon Bridges blames a lack of action by the Government.

So which areas have had the biggest increases? In order they are:

1. Tasman +82%
2. Southern +62%
3. Waikato +44%
4. Bay of Plenty +30%
5. Central +30%
6. Eastern +30%
7. Waitemata +23%
8. Counties Manukau +21%
9. Auckland +19%
10. Canterbury +16%
11. Wellington +15%
12. Northland -2%

Quite a few people have asked for a voting guide for the Auckland Council elections. I’m not in Auckland but follow the Council closely, so happt to share my thoughts.

If you think the Council is doing a great job, then of course you’ll vote for Phil Goff, and his team. If however you want a Council that will be more fiscally responsible with your money, then here are my recommendations for each ward:

Mayor

It’s effectively a choice between Goff and Tamihere. Tamihere will shake up the status quo.

Albany

Wayne Walker and John Watson. Both these councillors have been tireless in holding the line against Phil Goff on issue after issue, including saving Western Springs and preventing the loss of marinas. They have worked to preserve some beautiful parts of Auckland, including Okura from land development.

Albert-Eden-Puketapapa

Christine Fletcher and Mark Thomas. This is a Ward where the Labour-City Vision-Greens machine has squandered their mandate. No one thought Cathy Casey would be under serious threat but she and local board allies like Peter Haynes are now facing serious headwinds on issues like Chamberlain Park and the disastrous Mt Albert town centre upgrade. If Mark Thomas joins Christine Fletcher, the centre-right’s majority will be greatly enhanced.

Franklin

Bill Cashmore is unopposed.

Howick

Sharon Stewart and Paul Young. Sharon Stewart will top the poll but Paul Young will face a tougher fight. He has been an outstanding warrior for his ward and is a strong ally on the centre-right.

Manukau

Efeso Collins is a worthy vote as he has shown real independence.

The second place is a choice between Alf Filipaina and a communist league candidate. I suggest you only vote once for Collins to send a message,

Manurewa-Papakura

Angela Dalton and Daniel Newman. Lucky voters in this ward have the option of these two candidates, both of whom are well known for putting their community ahead of party politics. Newman was rated the most effective Councillor by both Simon Collins and Bernard Orsman. Dalton is well respected for her work as a local board chair.

Labour has selected one candidate who refers to electing a woman to council as “… a crap statement” and another who lives in Remuera to run in this South Auckland ward.

Maungakiekie

Josh Beddell. Boundary changes in the form of thousands of voters moving from Ellerslie and St Johns coupled with a strong campaign from C&R now threatens the Labour majority up and down the ballot paper. Strategically voting for every C&R candidate (the Maungakiekie-Tamaki Local Board is on the brink of being flipped as well).

North Shore

Grant Gillon and Danielle Grant. Gillon is a fomer Alliance MP and Grant a National Party member but they have shown how to put the community ahead of party politics, working as part of the More For The Shore team.

Orakei

It can only be Desley Simpson.

Rodney

Greg Sawyers is unopposed

Waitakere

Whomever wins here will vote with Goff. Linda Cooper is the least bad candidate.

Waitemata and Gulf

There are three candidates who could win. City Vision’s Pippa Coom, C&R’s Sarah Trotman and incumbent Mike Lee.

If the election was STV I’d say vote Trotman 1 and Lee 2. But it isn’t. It is FPP and if City Vision pick up the seat, Goff is more likely to be able to push through big rates increases.

Mike Lee as the incumbent is most likely, in my opinion, to beat Coom. Lee is a leftie, but Lee has support from all sides, including Don Brash on the Right and Lisa Prager on the Left. No one councillor has done more to stand up to Phil Goff more than Mike Lee. He is also a fierce advocate for small business operators, heritage and water quality.

I think Sarah would be a great Councillor, but I’ve not seen any polling that suggests she can beat Coom. So this is about voting strategically.

Whau

Tracy Mulholland. Tracy is a sensible middle-of-the-road candidate who stands a real chance of beating Ross Clow, which would be another massive blow for Labour. The Whau Local Board may also flip if she wins.

Stuff reports:

NZ First voters would have preferred National to be in Government than Labour by a large margin, newly released survey results say.
The new public survey data shows 44.5 per cent of NZ First voters answered “National” when asked to pick between Labour and National leading the Government, with Labour 10 points behind at 34.1 per cent. …

This is one of the reasons why NZ First is now polling so badly. Their voters feel betrayed that Winston put the Greens into Government, rather than the largest party.

Stuff reports:

A second complaint involving the conduct of disgraced Catholic bishop of Palmerston North Charles Drennan has been referred to church officials in Rome. 
Pope Francis accepted Bishop Charles Drennan’s resignation, which was announced on Friday night, over a complaint made by a young woman in regards to “unacceptable” behaviour of a sexual nature. 

Drennan must be one of the few Catholic Bishops to resign over sex with a woman, rather than young boys.