The Herald reports:

The Green Party has caused outrage among its members by publishing an article criticising the party’s push for trans rights in its official magazine.
The article, written by long-time Green Party member Jill Abigail, appeared in the latest edition of party publication Te Awa and said some “older feminists” within the party were concerned the party was putting gender identity over the rights of biological women.
Abigail was particularly critical of MP Jan Logie’s comments in a previous issue that: “We continue to push for progress on LGBTQI+ freedoms, and resist the backlash that’s trying to undermine our trans and gender diverse whanau and roll back their hard-won rights”.
“I am a lesbian, supposedly under their umbrella, but I am part of the backlash,” Abigail wrote.

She said while trans people were vulnerable and “justly” claiming their right to equal treatment, the free speech of those who opposed “male-bodied trans women” entering “female-only spaces” was being shut down with accusations of hate speech.
The article was taken down after a about week, following a series of complaints by members.

Doesn’t this prove the very point Abigail was making?

Once upon a time if you disagreed with an opinion column in a political newsletter or magazine, you’d write a response to it and ask that to be published also. It was known as a debate.

Today the aim isn’t to respond, but to stop any views you disagree with being published at all.

UPDATE:

Many signatures on an open letter to the Green Party leadership protesting that Abigail’s letter was censored and deleted. The common theme seems to be the letter was very moderate and well reasoned and on a topic that should be able to be debated. Quite a few well known iconic feminist names such as Alison Laurie.

Matt Nippert asks Winston Peters if would accept a donation from a Chinese billionaire:

MN: So, to the best of your knowledge, New Zealand First have not talked with Lang about him donating? Is that what you’re saying? 
WP: [Pause] Well, look, if a member of my party was at the racecourse one day, interpreted a conversation with him it’s quite possible. But to the best of my knowledge the course on which you’re going at the moment is fruitless: We have not received any money from the Wolf, as I know him as. 
MN: I guess the outstanding question remains is: If this donation were offered by him, would you accept it? 
WP: An outstanding question? Who do you think you’re talking to? You’re going to have a hypothetical, and put it to me as an outstanding question? Bulldust mate. Where do you get off? Where do you get off with that arrogant attitude? “The question remains”. For you? 
MN: He says he’s considering donating to NZ First. Would you accept the donation? It’s pretty simple. 
WP: You’re going to slide mate, from facts to bullshit. Right? You’re not going to be able to slide from facts, with a modicum of detail, to flat-out bullshit and speculation. 
MN: So you would take the money? Or you wouldn’t? 
WP: Get a brain mate. That’s not the alternative answer, is it? 
MN: It’s a very straightforward question, Winston. 
WP: It’s not a straightforward question. It’s some silly, smart-arse question by somebody who should know a whole lot better. 
MN: I’m just trying to figure out where this is going. 
WP: It’s not going anywhere, because it started nowhere. It’s built on the premise you’re going to write an article, based on nothing. Because you’ve got a charade of details you’re going to put out there. That’s what it’s based on. 
MN: It’s based on Mr Lang telling me he was planning to donate to you. 
WP: Good god, what a flimsy peg you’re trying to hang your story on. God. 
MN: Well, I’ll flick it to my editors and see if they agree with me. 
WP: They probably will, the bloody morons. 
MN: Winston, are you hanging up on me? 
[CALL TERMINATED BY WP]

I think this was Winston’s way of saying of course he’d take the donation.

NewstalkZB reports:

It’s believed the death of Peter Ellis will not affect the Supreme Court bid to clear his name.
The convicted child sex offender died yesterday, two months before the court is scheduled to hear his appeal.
He’s always maintained his innocence, despite being found guilty of abusing children at a Christchurch creche in 1993.

I’m glad the appeal can continue.

I hope Peter can rest in peace without a conviction to his name. Time will tell.

Stuff reports:

Said to be frustrated with Wellington’s lack of progress, city council chief executive Kevin Lavery dropped a bombshell on Thursday by not seeking re-appointment.

That’s a huge blow. I had huge respect for Lavery. He was an excellent CEO.

Signs of Lavery’s resignation have been building for months, and increased significantly after his chief of staff, Kaine Thompson, quit.

Kaine is also a very good operator.

Informed sources point to a very strained relationship between Lavery and Wellington mayor Justin Lester and some elected councillors as a major factor for the decision.

Lavery managed to work well with Celia Wade-Brown so I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t on his side.

The chief executive is believed to be highly frustrated with the pace of progress on several city projects, including Let’s Get Wellington Moving.

He’s not the only one.

Lavery proved willing to take controversial stands, urging caution among councillors on the move to rebuild the Town Hall when the bill was $45m,

They should have listened to him. It is likely to now cost $150 million.

It is understood Lavery spoke to others of his frustrations with the lack of progress in the past triennium on those original eight objectives and especially around the eventual outcome of Let’s Get Wellington Moving. 

Calling the transport programme Let’s Get Wellington Moving is like calling North Korea the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. It is technically correct but the substance is the opposite of the name. LGWM is a plan to do basically nothing for ten years.

Henry Cooke writes:

The hyped game-changers are still months and months away, despite the fact this Government came to power almost two years ago.
Those are new urban development agency Kainga Ora – a kind of mega-developer which can cut through planning rules to build whole new suburbs – and the new $400m progressive home ownership scheme.
Woods is entitled to not be hurried, given the mess she inherited.
But the fact this progressive home ownership plan has still not gone to Cabinet beggars belief. It was in the confidence and supply agreement that created this Government, so why will we not see it in place until the start of election year?

The progressive home ownership plan is just a concept at the moment, despite as Henry says it being in the confidence and supply agreement signed two years ago. Why didn’t work start on it in 2017?

Same with the urban development agency. It should have been set up by now.

The Kiwibuild reset itself is the best example of how slow moving and incompetent the Government is.

They announced the reset in January and said it would be done in a few weeks. It took them seven months. And was that seven months used to come up with a significantly changed Kiwibuild? No. The only significant change is dropping the targets. My God, that should have taken them seven days, not seven months.

The Daily Mail reports:

Greens leader Richard Di Natale wants ISIS fighters to be allowed back into Australia and described terrorists who had travelled to the Middle East as ‘good people’ who had been brainwashed.
The Victorian senator is opposed to Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s push to strip dual nationals of their Australian citizenship if they had engaged in terrorist atrocities overseas.

No they’re not good people. There are many things you can call them but “good” isn’t one of them.

Khaled Sharrouf made his seven year old son pose with the severed heard of an enemy. No good person does that.

21 so called Conservative MPs have voted with Jeremy Corbyn to stop Brexit. Ruling out a no deal means that the UK Government has no negotiating power to change the deal that has already been rejected by Parliament multiple times. It makes Brexit basically impossible.

So there will be an election.

The latest poll has the Conservatives at 35%, Labour at 25%, Lib Dems at 16% and Brexit Party at 11%.

But this is FPP, so what that means in terms of seats, according to Electoral Calculus, is:

• Conservatives 378 (+60)
• Labour 184 (-78)
• Lib Dems 31 (+19)
• Brexit Party 0
• SNP 35
• Others 21

That would be a majority of 106. Of course things will change during the election campaign.

The latest net approval ratings for party leaders is:

• Boris Johnson +6%
• Jeremy Corbyn -59%
• Jo Swinson -5%
• Nigel Farage -11%
• Nicola Sturgeon -14%

I guess Corbyn can only improve!

To date Shane Jones has only managed to fund 24.6 million trees towards the promise of one billion trees. In two years that is all he has managed.

Meanwhile in Ethiopia:

Ethiopia planted more than 353 million trees in 12 hours on Monday, which officials believe is a world record.
The burst of tree planting was part of a wider reforestation campaign named “Green Legacy,” spearheaded by the country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Millions of Ethiopians across the country were invited to take part in the challenge and within the first six hours, Ahmed tweeted that around 150 million trees had been planted.

Impressive.

Stuff reports:

Wellington Mayor Justin Lester has promised “significant progress” within three years on Wellington’s proposed Mt Victoria and Basin Reserve tunnels, and increased wages to help solve the city’s bus driver shortage.

That is nonsense. He signed up to a plan from his mates in Labour and Greens that means there is no work on Mt Vic tunnel for at least a decade. And it may not even allow cars in it.

Calvert said she was wary of Lester’s promises, given he had also pledged duplicate Terrace and Mt Victoria tunnels three years ago.
“Why would he deliver on these promises when he didn’t deliver on his pledges from three years ago? To me, it’s all a bit wishy-washy.”

Wellington needs a Mayor who will stand up to the Government on transport priorities.

Stuff reports:

A young man accused of indecently assaulting four people at a Young Labour summer camp has pleaded guilty to two charges of assault after the Crown withdrew indecent assault charges. 
On Monday, the 21-year-old, who has interim name suppression, denied five charges of indecent assault against four complainants.

Interesting. The Crown seemed to have a very strong case so why did they drop the major charges, when it seemed highly likely they would get a conviction?

Or maybe they were always ready to do a deal, and the defendant refused to do one, until now.

The accused’s lawyer Emma Priest, indicated she would be applying for a discharged without conviction for her client and permanent name suppression. 

In other words he gets no sanction at all.

I feel very sorry for the victims, if he gets away with zero consequences.

In May 2018 Stuff reported:

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has slammed the “kids at Treasury” over an analysis that halved the impact KiwiBuild would have on residential construction, and provided a sunnier forecast from another agency.
In the Budget documentation on Thursday, Treasury analysts reduced the amount of additional residential investment they believe the Government’s flagship KiwiBuild policy will bring in by 2023.
At the Half-Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update in December, the analysts predicted the policy would bring in $5.4b additional residential investment over 2018-2022. The analysts changed that figure to $2.5b in their Budget Economic and Fiscal Update, released on Thursday. …

“Some of these kids at Treasury are fresh out of university and they’re completely disconnected from reality,” Twyford said.

Well the reality is the “kids” at Treasury were right and Twyford was the one completely disconnected from reality.

If there is any criticism you can make of the Treasury analysis, it was actually far too generous, even when halved. The actual impact of Kiwibuild in residential investment looks to be close to zero.

Ministers don’t have to agree with advice from Treasury, or from any agency. But denigrating public servants as “kids disconnected from reality” is insulting and abusive.

Time has proven the kids were right, so surely it is now time for Twyford to apologise to them.

The Herald reports:

Northland’s Dr Lance O’Sullivan has renewed a call for benefit cuts and higher taxes for parents who don’t vaccinate their children.
His comments come as the number of measles cases in New Zealand approaches 1000, with some medical experts now calling the outbreak an epidemic.
As of Friday there were 938 confirmed cases in New Zealand. Of those, 474 people had not been vaccinated. Another 22 were only partly vaccinated and 389 did not know if they were vaccinated.
Just 53 of the people who caught measles this year had been vaccinated.

O’Sullivan told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking he favoured a “firmer position” on vaccinating children in New Zealand.
He agreed with the “no jab no pay” concept rolled out in Australia, where benefits would be cut if parents did not vaccinate.
But he said this was not about welfare bashing – he also wanted to see a higher tax rate brought in for non-compliance. “You’ve got to hit people at both ends of the spectrum.”

Maybe you could turn this suggestion around. If you vaccinate your kids you get a tax cut, in recognition of the reduced cost on the public health budget.

And if you are on a benefit and you vaccinate, you move to a higher rate.

Radio NZ reports:

Housing Minister Megan Woods has unveiled the hotly-anticipated reset of the government’s failed flagship policy.
The reset includes setting aside $400 million to help low-and middle-income New Zealanders buy homes through schemes such as shared equity and rent-to-buy, and reducing the deposit needed for a Government-backed mortgage to 5 percent.
The announcement comes seven months after former Housing Minister Phil Twyford said the programme would be reset.
Ms Woods acknowledged the 100,000 target was “overly ambitious” – to date, only 258 homes have been built.
“[It] led to contracts being signed in places where there was little first home buyer demand.
“Instead of the target, we will focus on building as many homes as we can, as fast as we can in the right places.

So basically there will be no target at all. 100,000 may end up being 500.

Examples of KiwiBuild houses built in the wrong places include developments in Te Kauwhata, Canterbury, and Wanaka.
Homes in areas that haven’t sold will now be released to the open market.

As I said this morning they failed on both supply and demand.

This isn’t so much a reset as a total retreat.

The Herald reports:

The man who murdered Napier schoolgirl Teresa Cormack – avoiding arrest for more than 15 years – is dying from a brain tumour in prison.
The 6-year-old’s body was found face down in a shallow grave at Whirinaki Beach near Napier eight days after she disappeared on June 19, 1987.
In October 2002 Jules Pierre Nicolas Mikus was sentenced to life in prison and preventive detention for the historic crime.
A jury also found him guilty of raping, sexually violating, and detaining Teresa against her will.

He denied the charges but after a trial in the High Court at Wellington Mikus was convicted and jailed for life.

His offending stretched over many years.

• At age 14 he raped a girl aged under 12
• At age 15 he sexually assaulted an adolescent girl
• At age 18 he indecently assaulted an adolescent girl
• At age 19 he indecently assaulted an adolescent girl
• At age 20 he got his 15 year old partner pregnant
• At age 24 he tried to rape a 14 year old girl
• At age 29 he raped and killed six year old Teresa

He will not be missed.

At 1 pm today the Government is going to announce a “reset” for Kiwibuild. Their hope is that people will focus on this new policy and forget that 100,000 affordable homes in 10 years was what they campaigned on and promised. It was arguably their most well known policy, and it was well known precisely because it was so specific.

Almost two years after the election they have managed 258 homes so they have achieved 0.26% of their election pledge. Even taking into account their interim targets they are woefully behind. They are building 0.6 homes a day. They promised 2.7 homes a day in the first year, 16 homes a day in the current year, 27 homes a day in the third year and 33 homes a day for the next seven years after that.

But the failure is three dimensional, not one dimensional.

Not only have they totally failed to get many homes “built” but they are also failing to sell them. Numerous homes have had to be purchased back by the Government meaning the entire budget for it is ruined as it relies on being able to reuse the capital.

And the third dimension of the failure is that almost none of the homes to date have in fact been “new” developments done by the Government to increase the housing supply (which is what Labour was promising). All they have done is buy some houses already under construction or planned from developers and stuck a Kiwibuild label on it.

So the failure is as close to total as you can get. It has failed on demand and failed on supply.

The announcement at 1 pm today will be of some interest, but the key thing will be why one should believe any of their promises or projections, when their track record is of under-performance to such a degree that their credibility is at the level of the Mariana Trench.

Radio NZ reports:

But a Treasury report, released to RNZ under the Official Information Act, advised the government that the evidence for both proposals was “mixed”.
“Neither measure would have a significant impact on emissions,” the document says.
The report points to Transport Ministry projections which predict the “feebate” scheme would reduce emissions by just 1.6 million tonnes over 20 years.
For comparison, New Zealand’s gross emissions are estimated at 80.9 million tonnes per year.

So this scheme will cost some families an extra $3,000 per car and the impact on emissions will be minuscule.

The reduction will average 80 kT against emissions of 80mT, so a reduction of 0.1% over 20 years!

Once again the government goes for glitz over substance.

Stuff reported:

Over 12,500 eligible households are on the waitlist for public housing, a new record in New Zealand.
The waitlist has more than doubled in the last two years, even as the Government has seriously stepped up its public housing build programme.
The waitlist broke a 2004 record at the end of June when 12,311 eligible households were waiting, but that new record was broken again with the July figures, which show 12,644 households on the waitlist.

I am sure it is just a coincidence that the Government has passed all these laws increasing costs on landlords which of course increases costs of rentals.

Just coincidence that demand for public housing has doubled under this Government.

The Herald reports:

The Greens were the only party in Parliament to oppose a bill that will extend how long bars will be able to stay open to show Rugby World Cup games.
Despite the Greens opposition, the bill passed into law this evening with 112 votes to eight.
National, Labour, NZ First, Act and independent MP Jami-Lee Ross all supported the bill.
A spokesman for the Greens said the party had not seen any evidence that the bill is necessary.

“Given the special licensing provisions already available in the Act which allow premises to apply for extended hours, and the fact that premises can also remain open without serving alcohol, we don’t see the need for these changes.”

The killjoyism is high with these ones.

Duncan Garner writes:

The members of the Waitangi Tribunal that sit in high office and report on past grievances have got vocal, but I wonder if they’re out of control and too busy saying ‘tut-tut, you Pākehā decision-makers are running roughshod over Māori at every level of New Zealand society’.
You see, the latest 600-page report pans successive governments for the way they have treated iwi over freshwater.
Water is the lifeblood for us all but, apparently, it’s so important for Māori because they use it to bathe in and they use it to collect kai. Well, guess what, us Pākehā use it for that purpose too, and most other races, actually, I think all of them. 

Water is a universal lifeblood indeed.

But read this report and you’re told Māori are sidelined in the political process of managing water.
They have no tino rangatiratanga or sovereignty over water. And, the most controversial finding, Māori have a genuine property right over water – that they should be able to gain in an economic sense, too.
No, no, no, no, no. One race in New Zealand must never own the water over another race.
It’s just wrong.

Labour and Greens will want to act on this, but I suspect NZ First will hold them back.

Stuff reports:

He has spent 15.7 years in prison since 2000.
His shortest period on the outside was four days; his longest was seven months. His average was about nine weeks.
He has violently assaulted family members, partners, police officers and fellow inmates.

An average of nine weeks! And that is until locked back up again. He probably started offending within days each time.

When 38-year-old Jason Maney was this month sentenced for causing grievous bodily harm to his mum, the Crown wanted him given an indeterminate sentence of preventive detention, meaning he could only be released on parole if he showed he was willing to change.

Sounds ideal. The burden of proof goes on him having to prove it is safe to release him.

And Justice Timothy Brewer gave it some serious thought, remarking that Maney’s history meant he had a tendency to reoffend.

A tendency? That is like saying Serena Williams has a tendency to win tennis matches.

He recounted Maney’s latest offending, involving three to four  blows to his mother’s head in August 2016. He fractured her eye socket and nose. 

If he’ll do that to his own mum, imagine what’ll he do to others?

He sentenced him to three years and 10 months in jail. With time served, Maney will likely be released in about a year.
On Thursday McFarlane, of Rotorua, said he was “really confident” Maney would change his ways.
“He’s ready for change. If I didn’t have complete confidence in him I wouldn’t have worked through all this. I’d have told him he wasn’t ready,” McFarlane said.
“I think Jason is going to be one of those who we later say ‘that’s what we’re talking about, that’s what the programme is all about’.
“Like all the other men who have walked Jason’s path, what they’re lacking is love. That’s what we’re about,” he said.

When I hear terms like “complete confidence” I get nervous. There is no basis for complete confidence. A more honest appraisal would be that this is a risk, but a risk worth taking.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect we will hear more of Mr Maney in future in court.

UPDATE: I’m informed he is a second striker so at least his next strike (if occurs) will get him maximum sentence no parole. He committed his 2nd strike within weeks of being released. He also committed his first strike while on early release.