Back in 2017, people were angry that the previous government had allowed housing to become so unaffordable, and they were therefore willing to give the top jobs to politicians who were promising to fix this and other social problems. Labour, in particular, won votes on their specific promise to build 100,000 affordable homes. It’s now officially a broken promise. Housing Minister Megan Woods announced today that the promised 100,000 house figure will be scrapped, and no new target will replace it. It’s the kind of cynical “solution” that leads voters to lose faith in politics and have a low opinion of politicians. In abandoning the promise of 100,000 affordable houses, it seems the minister wants us to believe that it was the existence of this target that was the problem, not the government’s failure to deliver.
The target wasn’t a minor aspect of the policy. It was the central aspect. Labour MPs repeated 100,000 new affordable homes time and time again.
Next year Labour will make a variety of promises about what they’ll do if given a second term. Voters would be silly to now believe them.
The PM said she only found the allegations against her staffer included sexual violence this week, after The Spinoff article appeared on Monday.
This is what you need to believe, to accept that she is telling the truth.
That no-one at any stage before this week informed her that a member of her staff had been accused of rape or sexual assault
That her Chief of Staff who knew, never told her
That her office director, who knew over eight months ago, never told her
That her Chief Press Secretary, who knew, never told her
That her closest friend and colleague, Grant Robertson, who knew three months ago, never told her
That she took advice on an e-mail sent two months ago accusing the staffer of sexual assault, but never actually read the e-mail
That she didn’t read a single newspaper item or listen a single radio or TV broadcast or read a single story online over the last five weeks which mentioned the allegations included sexual assault
That the daily print out of political newspaper clippings to her, somehow omitted all the ones which mentioned the sexual assault allegations.
That she never once asked a member of her staff what exactly were the allegations against the person who worked for her, after he stopped coming to work five weeks ago
That when she said she told the Labour Party Council a month ago they are not the appropriate body to investigate a sexual assault, she was using that hypothetically and had no idea that was one of the complaints
That when Mike Hosking asked her on the 6th of August about “this bloke who may or may not have sexual assaulted someone” she didn’t hear the question properly
That despite the fact some of the complainants had gone to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition with allegations about a member of her own staff, she never sought details from anyone at anytime about those allegations – she just relied on a verbal assurance from the party president
The rail line north of Auckland between Swanson and Whangārei will receive funding worth more than $94 million to “bring it out of decline”.
This is $95 million to try and help Shane Jones finally win an electorate seat.
The reality is only 1% of freight in Northland goes by rail. This money won’t change that. They are spending $95 million on the method that 1% of freight goes by, and won’t spend money on the method 95% goes by.
The freight takes seven hours by train vs three hours by road. There is just one service a day and the volume of freight is around 400 tonnes so less than a dozen trucks.
So they’re spending $95 million to have a dozen less trucks on the road. Insane.
Pornhub says it “strongly opposes” the Government’s proposed crackdown on porn. Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin has warned of an “avalanche of pornography” bombarding young people, and the Government is considering sweeping changes to stop kids accessing adult material. This could include a New Zealand-wide R18 porn filter – where residents will have to provide age ID to have access to porn websites.
It’s like we’re in a timewarp back to the 90s. Filters don’t work and are a bad idea.
If the Government restricts access to sites like Pornhub, I imagine there will be a huge backlash, as Pornhub is in the top 25 sites visited by NZers.
We have now seen two separate emails to Labour's investigating panel attaching a document in which a complainant refers clearly to her own alleged sexual assault.
The reasons Jacinda Ardern is in the mess she is over this alleged sex abuse scandal are several-fold. One, she didn’t own it. Two, she let it drag. Three, she didn’t seem to want to know. Four, she showed no real direct concern for the alleged victims. Five, she seemed to think she and the Labour Party are two different things. Six, her strength is empathy – and that’s been found wanting. Seven, when she finally got to it she hired someone to sort it, the QC.
She keeps talking about the Labour Party as if it is some remote body she has heard of, not as if she is its leader.
How many alarm bells, red flags, call them what you want, do you need after something as disastrous as the summer camp for you to go nuclear when you hear of new and seemingly even more serious allegations against young members or volunteers of your party?
What is remarkable is that they dealt with this even worse than the summer camp. The summer camp issue went public because the party was non responsive for three weeks. Here they went non-responsive for six months. And the person in question wasn’t some random person, but a staffer of the Labour Leader’s office.
But the damage here for the Prime Minister is the simple inability to see and own trouble, the lack of desire to understand warning signs, or any level of seriousness. The image she has increasingly earned, and is looking like she is now stuck with, is a hands-off operator, a person for the press release and photo shoot, not for the detail. There isn’t an issue that a report, working group, chinwag, or minister can’t deal with.
And what makes this egregious, is this is her area of so-called expertise: empathy. Having won attention, and praise post-March 15, on a matter of a deeply personal and emotive nature within her own party, she seems to have completely missed the memo. The revelations on our show that she had not phoned, hadn’t talked to anyone, or had her people look into it. She had her people talk to Haworth – who is she, the Queen?
There was a highly popular television series in the 1960s called “Hogan’s Heroes” and one of its stars was a large German guard Sergeant Schultz who constantly came up with a rejoinder to any crisis, barking out: “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing.” It’s been hard this week to look at Jacinda Ardern and Labour Party president Nigel Haworth and not to think of the German’s theatric denials. It beggars belief that the leadership of the Labour Party didn’t know something about the allegations of sexual abuse levelled at a Labour staffer.
If they didn’t know, they must have been the only people in NZ who didn’t.
It was only yesterday when she read the account of the alleged sexual assault on a 19-year-old volunteer on the website The Spinoff that she claims she realised sex was involved. It seems as though Ardern’s been living in a soundproof cocoon for the past several weeks as the media around her raged about the alleged sexual assaults. And the same could be said of Haworth, who says he too was unaware of the serious allegation of sexual assault until he read the account yesterday. Not everyone can be telling the truth, between Ardern, Haworth and the complainants’ version of events so far.
And the complainants’ have documentary evidence to back up their story, in terms of informing Labour.
Don’t expect the guilt to fall on Ardern when the Queen’s Counsel they’ve hired to review the process Labour adopted in dealing with the complaint comes down with her finding.
The QC’s job is to exonerate Ardern (whom she reports to) and find a scapegoat. Or blame the system.
With both of them doing a Sergeant Schultz, they sound about as credible as he was.
I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing – Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand and Leader of the Labour Party
A famous quote from the Watergate investigation from Republican Senator Howard Baker was ” What did the President know and when did he know it?”.
Today Heather du Plessis-Allan asks much the same question. She writes:
We’ve asked the Prime Minister to come on the show this evening to answer questions about the Labour party staffer sex allegations. Our requests went unanswered. This is what we want to ask her: When did she know that the allegations against a staffer in her office were of an alleged sex crime? She told media yesterday: ”I was informed in the very beginning that the allegations made were not sexual.” She told RNZ this morning that she found out yesterday. “The first I’ve seen the complaints of that nature was when I read then.” Asked when that was, she said “When I saw them in the Spinoff.” That is very hard to believe. This has been reported in the media for the last five weeks. If you believe that yesterday was the first the Prime Minister heard of this, then you must believe that the Prime Minister of this country does not watch, read or listen to the news reported in this country. That she for the last five weeks has missed every bulletin, newspaper and programme that mentioned the fact this guy is alleged to have committed a sexual crime.
It is nearly impossible to believe.
You have to also believe that the Prime Minister didn’t ask what allegation was so serious that a staffer in her office stopped coming to work five weeks ago. You also have to square it with this comment she made yesterday in her press conference”: “A month ago I visited New Zealand [Labour Party] Council. Very seriously shared my view that they were not the appropriate place to undertake inquiries around concerning behaviour of members of the Labour Party. But particularly they are not the appropriate place to ever undertake an investigation into a sexual assault. And that would be their view too.” Why would she say to the Labour Party council that they were not the right people to investigate an alleged sex crime, if she didn’t know the allegations were of a sex crime? Because she did. She did know.
Of course she knew.
On the 6th of August, one day after the story broke in the media, Mike Hosking raised it with her right here on this station. He asked her: “How many people have quit your party as a result of this investigation into this bloke who may or may not have sexual assaulted someone?” Her response was: “I’m going to be very careful answering that question Mike because this is an inquiry and work is still underway and it is still a party matter.” Exactly when the Prime Minister knew is important for a bunch of reasons. Did she fail in her duty of care to staffers and volunteers? Was this supposed to be covered up? But mostly it’s important because this is now about her integrity It’s becoming increasingly hard to believe her version of events, and possibly this is the first time that we’ve had reason to question Jacinda Ardern’s honesty.
This makes it very likely that Party President Nigel Haworth will be thrown under the bus. Ardern is far too vital to Labour to be allowed to take the blame for this, so Haworth will go to allow her to look like she is taking action.
Newshub has obtained emails that show Labour was sent details six months ago of sexual assault allegations against a party staffer.
Not a party staffer, but a staffer in Jacinda’s office.
Jobs are now on the line. The Prime Minister said she will expect Haworth’s resignation if he’s found to have done something wrong. Haworth said he is “not resigning” but will “look into my situation as the process develops”. National leader Simon Bridges suggested the blame’s falling on the wrong person. “Whose employee is this person? It’s not Nigel Haworth’s – it’s Jacinda Ardern’s,” he said. It’s one of the few facts not being disputed.
Can you imagine that she wasn’t fully briefed considering it involved one of her own staff. To not be knowing what is happening in your own office is either incompetence of the highest order, or they’re lying.
But Foster said the ratepayer had ended up worse off from the original designs of LGWM.
What started as a $1.2b, largely road-focused proposal that was going to be 94 per cent funded by the government, had ended up several billion dollars larger and 40 per cent funded by the ratepayer, he said.
So the local authorities and NZTA were on board for a sensible package of road improvements than would be funded from petrol tax. And then Labour and the Greens got involved and it became a programme to do almost nothing for roads, and to cost way more.
Jenny Condie said the promise from government was just “a little pot of money with our name on it – in pencil”. Diane Calvert said the package was “not guaranteed”, and Norbert Hausberg said the whole plan was “slightly underwhelming” and the city didn’t need the “gold-plated” version.
What Wellington needs is very simple. It is also what the Lower North Island needs. Four lanes from the airport to Levin.
For this three things need to happen in Wellington. The Basin Reserve needs to have East-West traffic separated from North-South traffic. And the Mt Vic and Terrace Tunnels need to be made four lanes.
But what we have instead is no solution for the Basin, a vague commitment that maybe in 10 – 20 years the Mt Vic tunnel may be expanded and the Terrace tunnel will never be expanded.
It is clear the Government can’t make up its mind about targets. It’s good for child poverty reduction to have an overall target and short-term targets, so much so that it is now a statutory requirement to set targets. It is not a good idea to set a target for child immunisations. It is a good idea to set a target for the reduction of road deaths over 10 years. It is not good to have targets to reduce the rate of suicide because that could be interpreted as a tolerance for any suicide. It is not a good idea to set a target to lift NCEA results but it is a good idea to set a target date to reduce the prison muster. It was not a good idea, in hindsight, to promise 100,000 Kiwibuild houses over 10 years, even though the problem was with the short-term targets. But it is a good idea, apparently, to deal with the Kiwibuild nightmare by ditching every target that might not be met and say, as Housing Minister Megan Woods did repeatedly: “We will build as many as we can as quickly as we can.” It is not a line that would be acceptable in many other policy areas. Imagine the farmers saying: “We will lower methane emissions as much as we can, as quickly as we can.”
They really are all over the place.
I personally like targets. They are a form of accountability, and also an important tool for focusing the work of Government on.
You can have too many targets. The Clark Labour Government had around 45 different health targets and they were fairly meaningless. National pared them back to half a dozen and huge improvements were made.
But this Government seems to be allergic to any form of targets, unless it is targets for other people.
Take it as read; Maori and Pasifika young people have a lower IQ than Asian or European children. Take it as read; children growing up in homes in lower socio-economic areas of NZ have a lower IQ than decile 3 – 10 students. I would not reach that conclusion if the Labour/Green/NZ first government, the teacher unions, and educators generally were out on the street marching for improved education – as opposed to fattened wallets for underperforming employees. Do the Greens even have a current spokesperson for Education? We are currently accepting the status quo as the natural lie (pun intended) of the land. I have just gone through the NZQA Annual release of the “NCEA, University Entrance and NZ Scholarship Data and Statistics”. A lovely red covered book with the gloss of my tiny Renault. The denoted conclusions. – Girls are way brighter than boys (my wife has known and exploited that for the last 31 years). – Asians are way brighter that other ethnicities. – Europeans are way brighter than Maori and Pasifika – and those two ethnicities chop and change from year to year. I, of course – along with brain & developmental science – believe none of the above statements to be true. That is the case even after being a teacher since 1991 and observing these stats every year. However, it becomes very hard to argue that NZ society, the Ministry of Education and successive Ministers of Education don’t believe that this is the norm. I consider it appropriate to add that they could not care less about this in comparison to the priority of being re-elected. Hekia Parata was a disaster as Minister of Education. She oversaw a national standards regime that never quite got that progressions are at least as important as final outcomes each year (despite me offering her a perfect model). She placed all eggs in the 85% getting NCEA Level 2 – through whatever means – when it changes nothing and gives no one a ticket to tertiary education. Schools manipulated the data and met her requirements but nothing really improved. Chris Hipkins has come in with no ideas at all. He commissioned a NCEA review that produced an interim report that seemed broad based and positive – and then a final report that could have been written by a team from AGS, CBHS, St Cuthbert’s College and Kings High School of Dunedin. Without a replacement strategy Hipkins ditched National Standards. He then hammered a few families by throwing out the Aspire Scholarships programme, and appeared to kill off significant innovation by transitioning all Partnership Schools into the State System. The latter is not a bad thing if he and the Prime Minister keep their promise to develop the Designated Character Model. It has not happened so far. The results? Terrifying! Page 13 of the NZQA report looks like a hydroslide as the NCEA Level 1 results plunge by 1% for Asian students, 3% for European. Nearly 5% for Maori and over 4% for Pasifika. In one year! I would hate to think what our next PISA results might show. In terms of decile: If you grow up in decile 1 – 3 homes (like I did) only 27.6% of Year 13 enrolled students (not to count those who had already checked out of the system) got University Entrance. If you were a decile 4- 7 school nearly 48% qualified for the wonderful free fees Year 1 tertiary education. Approximately 65% of those in the higher deciles got that free ride. One of the huge issues is that at NCEA Level 3 Maori and Pasifika are not that far behind. What becomes very clear when you dig a little bit is that it is obvious, to meet the external goals, that schools are channeling brown and poor kids into courses that are not accredited for UE. You could not set up such long-term disenfranchisement and social inequity even if you had an evil master plan devised by Blackadder himself. The NCEA review will make this divide massively worse. The draft Haque report was such a waffle piece that two of the “researchers” could not stand ion a stage together and present a consistent and coherent argument. The recent collective contract agreements have locked and loaded the myth that all qualified teachers are of the same quality and Principals should be given no trust and opportunity to bring about genuine change through incentivising teaching in Decile 1- 3 schools. There is currently no party or politician in NZ who has the insight or energy to change the system for the children who need it. The families themselves must rise-up and ask for the very best for their children.
What has been outlined in the stories is nothing short of sexual assault. What has been outlined as the party’s process in addressing this assault is nothing short of enabling. What has been outlined as the response from other parts of the party – for instance, a senior party official and ministerial employee telling a survivor that the alleged attacker was ‘too important’ to the party, or the survivors being banned from entering Bowen House or other parts of the Parliamentary precinct – is nothing short of despicable. Every day this enabling is allowed to continue is another day that the survivors are silenced and the alleged attacker is allowed to continue enjoying his position of privilege and authority within the party and indeed, your own office.
Their eight requests include:
2. We call on Nigel Haworth to formally resign as President of the Labour Party and to withdraw his candidacy for re-election at the November Conference …
6. That the Party’s ban on the survivors entering Bowen House and other parts of the Parliamentary precinct be immediately lifted.
7. That the New Zealand Labour Party inform and refer this matter to the alleged attacker’s employer, Parliamentary Services
Good on the members for trying to hold their own party to account.
Helen Clark has come out strongly for “yes” in next year’s cannabis referendum, and says she would have moved on cannabis herself if elected to a fourth term.
Really? How come she never mentioned this in 2008 when campaigning for a fourth term?
The report is a good one, which I broadly agree with. They recommend:
Legislate for the regulation of, and access to, a legal cannabis market. Models from both Uruguay and North America should be seriously studied.
Develop a structure for a legal market which prevents and/or discourages the emergence of large, commercial, for-profit cannabis producers and retailers
Expunge prior minor cannabis offences from the record, and also remove past convictions for supply where there was no compounding factor associated with the conviction, such as firearm use or violence.
Below is an extract from a standard employment contract for staff who work in the office of a parliamentary party leader.
As you can see the employment of a staff member can be terminated by the party leader, under “breakdown of relationship”. This doesn’t need an inquiry, a disciplinary process, a finding of misconduct. It just needs the party leader to decide they no longer have trust and confidence in the staffer.
Note this is a process that can only be initiated by the party leader under 22.3(b). Not the chief of staff, not Parliamentary Service, not the external political party.
It is quite commonly used. For a number of reasons a party leader will sometimes find they don’t want someone to continue working for them. It doesn’t mean the person is guilty of anything, or has even misbehaved. It just reflects that the leader has to be able to only have people working for them they are entirely comfortable with.
Jacinda Ardern has the sole ability to effectively activate this clause and remove the staffer from Parliament. She is aware of the dozen complaints against her staffer. She is aware at least one of them is of sexual assault. She is aware at least four parliamentary staffers have said they are scared to be around her employee.
She does not need to make a determination as to what happened. She does not need to have an inquiry. She doesn’t need formal complaints. She doesn’t need the Police. She doesn’t need to believe or disbelieve the allegations. She certainly doesn’t need the Labour Party Council involved. She can simply decide that she no longer wants the staffer to continue working for her.
Her insistence that this matter is nothing to do with her is patently false. She has a remedy open to her. It is inconceivable she has not discussed with her senior staff whether to use this clause. It appears she has made a conscious decision not to use it, because the staffer is so valuable to her.
The long-awaited reset of KiwiBuild confirms that the Government still doesn’t grasp why the policy went so spectacularly wrong.
Which is surprising as they were told almost non stop for seven years it wouldn’t work, and why.
KiwiBuild remains a policy that has been formulated to treat the symptoms of a problem that the Government has failed to properly diagnose or understand.
And it seems they still don’t.
But if the rate of construction is not the problem, yesterday’s announcement shows that the Government still hasn’t got any ideas to make a meaningful difference to housing affordability. The announcement features sticking-plaster solutions: A rent-to-buy scheme, a possible shared equity arrangement, and reduced deposit requirements under the renamed “First Home Loan” and “First Home Grant” policies. These policies hint at one of the biggest hurdles for people trying to buy a home: Accumulating a deposit. For a few people, the changes will make homeownership more achievable. But they do nothing to address the fundamental question of why housing has become so expensive.
It’s tinkering.
The reality is that the limited supply of land available for new development or intensification is not keeping pace with demand and is pricing people out of the market.
Yep. Cities need to build up and build out. Instead the Government is passing laws or statements making it harder to build out, claiming our 1% urbanisation rate is threatening rural NZ.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Georgetown, Texas – population 75,000 – was to be the new poster child of the green movement. …
Environmental interest in Georgetown’s big push to generate all of its electricity from wind and solar power was amplified by three factors: the town and its mayor were nominally Republican; Georgetown is in an oil- and natural gas-rich state; and that state is deep-red Texas.
So what happened?
Georgetown’s electric bills went up as more wind and solar power displaced cheaper natural gas in the power portfolio of the Georgetown’s municipal utility. Politicians scrambled for cover. And the bloom came off Georgetown’s renewable rose. Now, largely embarrassed members of the City Council are trying to figure out how to unwind the renewable mess they and their predecessors voted themselves into. With their municipal utility facing a $7 million shortfall – money that has to be made up by the city residents through higher electricity costs – the City Council voted 5-1 in July to instruct the staff to figure out how to wriggle out of the Bloomberg PR deal. On Aug. 13 the Council voted 5-0 to officially kill the deal. The city is also raising property taxes.
What are the economics of 100% renewable?
In Georgetown’s case, for it to truly go 100 percent renewable energy using today’s state-of-the-art mass-produced batteries from Tesla’s Gigafactory, the city would need a $400 million battery farm weighing some 20,000 tons to avoid a blackout on a quiet winter night. And, after spending $15,600 for each household to build such a battery farm, its backup power would be drained in 12 hours, with a second windless winter night leaving residents shivering in the dark.
That’s a big battery farm. The weight would be twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
Labour party staffer is alleged to have committed a serious and sustained sexual assault on a 19-year-old volunteer early in 2018. The volunteer told the Spinoff the assault was compounded by the resulting inquiry, during which the alleged perpetrator was not stood down from any duties, which included the supervision of Young Labour volunteers. The complaint process, undertaken entirely by people within the Labour Party, has left her feeling “angry, quite fearful and desperate”. The alleged perpetrator has ties throughout the party hierarchy. The woman, who remains a member of the Labour Party, said the man’s level of influence left her constantly frightened of the impact of speaking out. Over the course of numerous in-depth interviews with The Spinoff, Sarah – whose name has been changed to protect her identity – detailed how she was pinned down and sexually assaulted at the man’s home during a private meeting to discuss party business in early 2018. The process that followed, beginning in April 2018 during the post-Labour Camp review undertaken by Maria Berryman, has completely eroded her faith in the party. Sarah is one of at least seven people who made formal complaints in relation to the individual, ranging from bullying, intimidation and sexual harassment through to sexual assault. She described him as having a “pretty senior and active” role in the party, and being well-connected with several high profile Labour MPs. The Spinoff understands that he remains working in parliament.
Not just in Parliament, but in Jacinda Ardern’s leader’s office.
The Labour’s leader office has taken no action to make parliamentary staff feel safe. They have falsely claimed it is an issue for the Labour Party, but it is not.
Sarah said she raised the allegations during an internal inquiry, with the investigating panel comprising three members of the New Zealand Council, the Labour Party’s governing body. Sarah and the other complainants were invited to appear before the panel at a meeting held at the Labour Party’s offices in Wellington. At the conclusion of the inquiry, after months with scant communication, the seven complainants all received an email from party president Nigel Haworth detailing the outcome of the internal investigation. “The recommendation was that no disciplinary action be taken in this case,” he wrote. “The New Zealand Council has accepted this recommendation.”
These complaints include sexual assault and Labour’s response is to “take no action”.
Told that the party denied hearing a complaint during its investigation, Sarah was adamant that both in documents supplied and her testimony that they were. What follows is a full description of her experience.
So Labour are now effectively saying the complainant is lying.
The story is tough to read (and immeasurably tougher to go through).
“I was scared,” she wrote. “I still am scared. This man holds a large amount of influence within the party.” He would boast, she added, about “his close relationship” with a Cabinet minister.
I’ve heard that his role makes him invaluable to Labour’s election campaign. Labour have decided he must be protected.
The man complained about is employed by Jacinda Ardern through Parliamentary Service. She could sack him, or suspend him, if she wished to. The wishes of the leader are paramount when it comes to the leader’s office. You don’t even need an inquiry. All leader’s office staff are on contracts where they agree their employment can be terminated with three’s months salary if the leader no longer wishes them to remain.
The glitter of Jacinda Ardern’s crown no longer sparkles or glistens quite so gloriously as it did not that many months ago. The Prime Minister’s political wizardry likewise no longer casts quite the spell over her opponents it once did. She no longer walks on water. Her struggle from now on will be to keep her head above the water. She’s been swamped by the backwash from her mishandling of matters mundane. Her legacy is at risk of being a long list of monuments to failure.
All parties within Parliament are pledging to work together to improve mental health and wellbeing in New Zealand. A Mental Health and Addictions Wellbeing cross-party group has been set up to demonstrate politicians’ willingness to collective and enduring commitment on the issue.
It is made up of National’s Matt Doocey, Labour MP Louisa Wall, Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick, New Zealand First’s Jenny Marcroft and ACT leader David Seymour.
Good to see.
Louisa Wall is chair of the Health Select Committee and told Newshub the focus is on wellbeing.
“It’s how we deal with stress, how we process life events, challenges and our ability individually, and as families, to be resilient enough to seek help when we need it, but also to know that we’re not alone. “It’s incredibly sad and traumatic that we have so many young people that choose suicide. I have an experience, my Youth MP in the last Parliament actually committed suicide.
God that is sad.
David Seymour says joining the group was a no-brainer. “It’s a positive development and I’m more than happy to support a cross-party group that takes the politics out of it and says there’s no political debate or disagreement about the fact that we need to do better with mental health,” he said.
Everyone wants to see the suicide rate drop. Solutions are very complex but we do need to do better.
A new Internet Draft has potentially far reaching consequences. It is from the Internet Architecture Board and is intended to influence the work of the IETF that “decides” on the protocols etc the Internet runs on.
The key segment is:
Many who participate in the IETF are most comfortable making what we believe to be purely technical decisions; our process is defined to favor technical merit, through our well-known mantra of “rough consensus and running code.” Nevertheless, the running code that results from our process (when things work well) inevitably has an impact beyond technical considerations, because the underlying decisions afford some uses while discouraging others; while we believe we are making purely technical decisions, in reality, we are defining what is possible on the Internet itself. This impact has become significant. As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments and revolutionize social orders, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying others’. All of this raises the question: Who do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code for? After all, there are a variety of identifiable parties in the broader Internet community that standards can provide benefit to, such as (but not limited to) end users, network operators, schools, equipment vendors, specification authors, specification implementers, content owners, governments, non-governmental organisations, social movements, employers, and parents. Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all of the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a need to balance the benefits of a decision between two (or more) parties. In these situations, when one of those parties is an “end user” of the Internet – for example, a person using a Web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet – the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should protect their interests over those of parties.
A fascinating report by KPMG which found in 2018 the black market in tobacco exceeded 10% of the total market for the first time ever.
This is a good reminder that if you tax something too highly, you reduce legal sales but increase illegal sales. The black market increased by 11% last year to 212,000 kgs.
