Stuff reports:

Former prime minister John Key says outgoing Air New Zealand CEO Christopher Luxon will be a “world class candidate” for the National Party nomination in Botany.
Luxon announced on Tuesday night that he was seeking the National nomination in the Auckland seat of Botany, currently held by former National MP Jami-Lee Ross.
He will have to go through the formal selection process but is very likely to become the National nominee – and win the seat in the next election, which is strongly supportive of the  party.
Key told Stuff Luxon was a “world class candidate” and “direct proof that a strong and effective opposition like National is a magnet for talent”

It is certainly great for National that they can attract someone of Luxon’s calibre. The fact his replacement as Air NZ CEO is the former US Chief Executive of the world’s largest company (Walmart) speaks volumes.

Luxon is a strong contender to get National’s nomination, but it is by no means certain. Unlike Labour, National’s selections are determined by grass-roots delegates. And sometimes they go for the local stalwart, rather than the “star”. The classic example is choosing Clem Simich over former All Black captain David Kirk in 1991.

Also while Luxon has an excellent set of business skills that should serve him well if he becomes an MP, they don’t always translate well. In the case of John Key they did, but it isn’t guaranteed.

So it is good news for National, but any talk of Luxon being the next John Key is very premature. First he has to win selection, then win an election and them actually perform as an MP.

Stuff reports:

A lawyer for the man accused of the Christchurch mosque terror attacks has denied reports his client is on any kind of hunger strike.
Jonathan Hudson told Stuff media reports claiming his client was on an “extreme minimal eating regime” were incorrect.

What a pity.

Food isn’t cheap. Bad enough we’ll be paying to feed him for the next 50 years or so. Least he can do is save us some money by eating less.

Ngatama James Kaienua is a Third Striker.

He is New Zealand’s 10^th person to be sentenced as a Third Strike offender since Three Strikes came into force in June 2010.

At the age of 28, Kaienua has almost 20 criminal convictions as an adult, and an unknown number of convictions as a Youth.

He has today been sentenced to 14 years imprisonment (with no minimum non-parole period) for his part in the violent robbery of a suburban Auckland dairy, in which a hardworking, completely innocent family were tending to their business.  Kaienua stood nearby as lookout while the mother and son of the family were attacked by Kaienua’s teenage accomplice with a large knife, suffering multiple stab wounds.  Kaienua unsuccessfully tried to convince the trial Judge that he had no idea his accomplice was carrying a knife. He was arguably the mastermind behind the whole plan and used his teenage accomplice to do his dirty work.

His first strike was committed aged 20, when Kaienua had sex with a 13 year old girl, in the process passing on to her a sexually transmitted infection, and was convicted of unlawful sexual connection with a young person.  He was sentenced to 2 years and 1 month imprisonment for that offending.

He was released from prison, early, on parole for his first strike offence. While on parole he, and two accomplices robbed a suburban Rotorua dairy armed with a weapon in the form of a solid wooden kitchen table leg.  He repeatedly bashed the shop keeper over the head with the wooden leg.  For that offending Kaienua was sentenced to 3 years, 9 months imprisonment and received his second strike.

Kaienua is also a convicted burglar.

Kaienua has an unwillingness or inability to control himself, seeks to take what he wants from vulnerable people – whether teenage girls, suburban dairy owners or home owners via burglaries.

Kaienua is a public menace, and a clear and present danger to the public.  He has been assessed by Corrections as a high risk of reoffending and a high risk of causing harm to others.  He has not been deterred by the repeated ‘strike’ warnings he has received.  He shows little to no prospect of changing his ways until he “ages out” of criminal offending, as most young offenders do when they finally grow up and gain some respect for others.  Three strikes now kicks in to incapacitate him from reoffending against the public by imprisoning him for an extended period – up to 14 years. 

Without three strikes he would have got a sentence of just over six years with parole eligibility after just two years.

I’m surprise the Judge didn’t impose a minimum non-parole period, considering his history of offending on parole.

He thoroughly deserves to be in jail for an extended period, and the New Zealand public thoroughly deserves protection from him.  That’s what prison – via Three Strikes – achieves.

The only question now is whether the Parole Board will get it wrong like they did previously, releasing him early from his first strike sentence, and release him early from the 14 years handed down by the Judge.

Fox News reports:

A new high of 51 percent wants Trump impeached and removed from office, another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed, and 40 percent oppose impeachment altogether.

The 51% supporting impeachment includes 13% of Republicans and 39% of Independents.

Trump’s response has been to attack Fox News and proclaim his new best friend is One America News.

Stuff reports:

Porirua Mayor Mike Tana is refusing to release an auditor’s report into his fuel spending, but insists its findings exonerate him.

I would have thought if you were exonerated, you’d be really really keen to release it.

Porirua Council CE Wendy Walker said she intended to release the report on Thursday but the mayor had asked her not to, “because of privacy concerns”. The council took legal advice before complying with Tana’s request.

So the Council wants to released, just not the Mayor.

Tana said he didn’t want the report released because it might affect his campaign, but said it cleared him.

I would have thought being cleared would help his campaign.

In figures obtained by Stuff in a 2018 Official Information Request, from December 2016 to November 2018 Tana used $12,354 worth of petrol.

Let’s assume $2 per litre so that is 6,175 litres used in two years. On an average of 100 km per 12 litres that is around 51,500 kms travelled which is equal to 80 trips from Auckland to Wellington.

The Mayor is allowed to use the Mayoral car for personal use. It would seems he certainly does.

Claire Trevett writes:

At the same time, a press release announced Ministers David Parker and Grant Robertson had overturned a decision by Shaw’s colleague, Land Information Minister Eugenie Sage, not to allow a land sale for Waihi Mines to develop tailings ponds.
Sage had rejected that application under the Overseas Investment Act in May and Oceana Gold, the company involved, had gone to the courts to review the decision.
The company had then also put in a new application in August – a move understood to have followed a gentle suggestion from Labour about what options it might have.
Had Parker and Robertson been happy with Sage’s decision, they could have refused to consider the second application and left it to the courts.
That they did not do so indicates they believed they would lose in the courts.

I think it was very clear that Sage had made an illegal decision, that would easily lose in the courts.

The reason for that is in the press release the ministers issued when they announced the second application had been allowed.
“The Ministers noted that they are required to assess only the benefits described in the Overseas Investment Act when making their decision.”
That sentence effectively indicates Robertson and Parker believed Sage made a decision for political (or at least irrelevant) reasons rather than the criteria set out in law.

So a Minister who can’t or won’t follow the law.

It was a complete steamrolling of Sage and should have Sage considering whether she should continue to hold on to the portfolio.
It amounted to a show of a lack of confidence in Sage’s willingness to properly conduct such decisions, and that Sage was too conflicted by her political beliefs for the job.

Yet the PM keeps her on.

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.