Kate Hawkesby writes:

What we are seeing emerge now, I think, is a tale of two leaders.
We are seeing the contrast between the rise of Simon Bridges and the fall of Jacinda Ardern.
One started atop the world, all smiles, hope optimism and empathy. She even had a ‘mania’ attached to the end of her name by an enchanted media.
The other: Subterranean, invisible, unknown, constantly undermined by those around him, always looking down the barrel of potential coups.
Over the course of the past two years, their trajectories have been quite different.
Ardern is charismatic, she smiles a lot, she nods a lot, she says inspirational things and you want to believe her.
But slowly it’s being undone. The Empress has no clothes. She lacks commercial and interpersonal acumen. She is not a natural leader, she’s indecisive and farms things out too much _ reports, reviews, committees, working groups.

I lost count of the number of them when they hit 200.

She’s no CEO but she would make a great Head of Marketing and Communications – a lot of talk – a lot of PR, no substance.
Not transformational, not open honest and transparent, not decisive, not even aware of what’s going on within her own party.

Would be a great Minister of Tourism.

On the other hand, we have Simon Bridges.
Backed into a corner by conspirators sharpening their knives and people taking odds on his demise, he’s had to claw and dig his way into the fight. Today he’s looking more comfortable, self assured, and actually self effacing in respect to his weaknesses.
Yes he knows he will never grace the cover of Vogue and yes he talks with a fierce Kiwi twang, but he’s getting clearer on what leadership looks like.
And that’s the difference.

Fascinating story from ESPN:

The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. “He looked like death,” grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.
In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess — or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.
Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.
“Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners,” Sapolsky says.
It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times.

That’s pretty incredible.

Duncan Garner writes:

It’s simply too hard to accept she didn’t know it was an assault of a sexual nature. 
Her staff knew.
Her party knew.
Parliament knew. The media knew. 
Grant Robertson knew (but can’t say what).
Kelvin Davis heard a rumour in Māori. How helpful.
And even the woman selling the $3 coffees by the lift knew, although Kelvin wasn’t sure if she was talking about the assaults at Labour’s summer camp or this latest one. 
And Labour’s ruling council knew too. Ardern is on that body. Did she sit in on discussions over this? She won’t say. Why not?

We’re being asked to accept that the one person who didn’t know was the one person with the ability to remove the staffer from his job.

It looks like Labour put tribalism and its survival first, and the welfare and care of this woman a distant second. It’s no surprise. What a debacle investigating itself. It’s like putting a drug dealer in charge of his own trial. Not guilty, your honour, nothing at all to see here.  
And all this when the PM was herself spouting off about the #metoo era being the cleanout and welcome change that was well overdue.

That was change for everyone else.

So was Ardern living under a rock for the past nine months, hibernating until the northern summer broke and she could safely strut the international stage without minuscule domestic annoyances like a sexual assault complicating matters. 
Why can’t life be easier? Why do silly little matters like this have to blight my best work.

And the fawning international media phase has just started again with a Washington Post profile.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will not be drawn on whether the resignation of the ex-staffer at the centre of a sexual assault claim will lead to a compensation payout.
She is also staying tight-lipped on whether she considered invoking the “relationship breakdown” clause to end the ex-staffer’s employment contract because of any safety concerns.

If they won’t deny a payout, one can assume there will be one.

Radio NZ reported Jacinda Ardern as saying:

I believe mistakes were made

Wikipedia has an interesting page on that phrase:

“Mistakes were made” is an expression that is commonly used as a rhetorical device, whereby a speaker acknowledges that a situation was handled poorly or inappropriately but seeks to evade any direct admission or accusation of responsibility by not specifying the person who made the mistakes. The acknowledgement of “mistakes” is framed in an abstract sense, with no direct reference to who made the mistakes. A less evasive construction might be along the lines of “I made mistakes” or “John Doe made mistakes”. The speaker neither accepts personal responsibility nor accuses anyone else. The word “mistakes” also does not imply intent.
The New York Times has called the phrase a “classic Washington linguistic construct.” Political scientist William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the “past exonerative” tense,^[1] and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as “[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it“.^[2] A commentator at NPR declared this expression to be “the king of non-apologies“.^[3

Matthew Hooton writes in the NZ Herald:

Were Ardern a head of state like a ceremonial president or queen, she would be in her element. As Simon Wilson puts it, Ardern personifies “who we are now” at Buckingham Palace, the United Nations or Waitangi, at least as judged by a certain demographic.
But as head of government, it was soon obvious she has no ability to formulate and progress an agenda, transformational or otherwise. There is nothing behind her words.
All her Government’s major initiatives have failed. Despite its advance billing, the Wellbeing Budget was unconnected to the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, earlier hailed by Finance Minister Grant Robertson.
Ardern has ruled out further rebalancing the tax system away from wages and towards capital gains.
KiwiBuild has entered the Kiwi vernacular as a synonym for failure. Poverty, homelessness and suicide have all worsened. Fees-free tertiary education has had no material impact.

In terms of actual outcomes (ie something measurable that has improved people’s lives), they seem to have achieved nothing except good intetnions.

Perhaps most cynical of all was this week’s Suicide Prevention Strategy which, after two years in office, consisted mainly of setting up a new Suicide Prevention Office. By the time it gets its mission statement, logo, offices and espresso machine, another thousand families will have mourned a loved one.
This seems to have been Ardern’s sole strategy through her 11 aimless years in Parliament: emote over a problem, then propose a working group or other process as a substitute for taking responsibility, decisions and actions herself.

Ouch.

So 513 days after “Sarah” informed someone working for Labour of her alleged sexual assault by a staffer in Jacinda Ardern’s office, he has quit his job.

It is incredible that it took this long. The level of incompetence here is staggering. You start to understand how the Kiwibuild fiasco also happened. Their default mode is stuff up.

Any competent organisation would have dealt with this within days, or weeks at most. You have someone trusted talk to the complainants, talk to the staffer, and then recommend an outcome.

Let’s think about how loud the sirens should have been warning at various stages on a 1 to 10 scale.

• One person makes a complaint against a staffer in the leader’s office – say a 4/10
• Seven different party members make complaints – 6/10
• Other parliamentary staff tell senior staff in the PMO they are scared of the staffer etc – 7/10
• The complainants are so unhappy they go to the media – 9/10
• The media report the complaints include sexual assault – 10/10
• Your own ministerial and parliamentary staff are talking to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition because they are so disgusted nothing has happened – 12/10

And even after that, it took five further weeks.

It is hard to know which scenario is the most damning:

• The PM really knew nothing
• The PM did know all about it, but they didn’t know what to do
• The PM did know all about it, but they valued the staffer so highly they tried to brazen it out

You have a choice of incompetence, lying or hypocrisy. You can decide which is worse.

There is a rumour it is even worse than what we already know. That he didn’t work for Ardern’s office when the alleged assaults happened, and they hired him *after* the complaints had been lodged with the party. That would be even more shocking.

The Civilian has a post from Jacinda Ardern that is so close to the truth it scorches:

I am every bit as angry as you are.
I am every bit as disappointed as you must be.
The people with power, oversight and the ability to do something about these processes within the Labour Party should be ashamed. Whoever those people are, I am running out of patience with them, and the way they continually let us down, while helpless people like you and me stand by and can only watch failure after failure.
I can assure you, earnestly, that the moment I found out about the fact that you had found out about the facts, I acted immediately to see what the situation was.
I would never sit on my hands if it ever became apparent to me that something had become apparent to you, and that’s my promise.

Kiwibuild is the highest profile failure for Labour, but far from the only one. Let’s look at their free fees policy which they claimed was the solution to the future of work, and would result in many more people undertaking tertiary education.

From the Herald:

• Tertiary student numbers dropped by 4,080 in the first year of free fees. Yes that’s right they spent hundreds of millions on a policy that saw fewer people doing tertiary study
• Labour said 80,000 students would take up fees free study. In fact only 42,150 did.
• One third of fees-free students failed or withdrew from at least one course
• Fees-free students are more likely to be European than other students, so it is not leading to more Maori in tertiary education
• Fees-free students are more likely to study at university than other students so it is not leading to more trades training.
• So the major beneficiary of fees free has been white university students

Mike Hosking writes:

Then the other Sunday they rolled out their cancer service policy, this was the one they should have rolled out before National. But better late than never… or was it?
In reality, it was nothing more than intention. They would end the postcode nature of the disease, how? No one seemed to know, they still don’t. I asked the Prime Minister last week, she told me to stand by for Heather Simpson’s DHB report. I did, it came the next day, and it recommended nothing.
I also asked about the targets they talked of. They already have targets, they are not being met, half of the DHBs are failing to meet them. So what do they do about that? Nothing. What did the report recommend about doing about it? Nothing.

They paid a member of the PM’s staff a huge amount of money to spend a year reviewing the health system, and the report comes with not even a single recommendation!

And then last Sunday, mental health. A scheme whereby you can go to your doctor and get your warts seen to and some mental health as well. Good theory, except it’s only at a handful of clinics. In other words, it’s not a policy, it’s an intention.

Which is what they did with the school lunches, the only difference being that wasn’t announced on a Sunday (given schools aren’t open). Lunch will be served at 30 schools, it may end up rolling out to 120, still a couple of thousand schools will miss out. Like hundreds of thousands of patients will miss out on mental health.
No one ever seems to point this out. Ardern is hardly ever held to account. She turns up, smiles, talks a big game, hugs one of the recipients of whatever the largesse involves, gets on the news, and is gone.
If there were votes for announcing stuff that may or may not ever happen it would be a landslide. Let’s call it ‘seed of an idea Sunday’ or ‘the policy that’s not really a policy’.
It’s a visual press release, where next to nothing changes, but you get your picture on the telly. If there are learnings, let’s at least start seeing them for what they are.

This is not new. In opposition I described her private member’s bills as press releases masquerading as legislation. Little seems to have changed.

I’ve combined together timelines from both the Young Labour Summer Camp indecent assault scandal and the sexual assault allegations against the staffer who works in Jacinda Ardern’s office.

I thought this would be a useful resource because the two are linked. They don’t only overlap in timing, but the review into the Summer Camp fiasco was meant to improve things. In fact things got worse.

A couple of things stand out. The first is that someone working for Labour was told about the sexual assault allegations almost 18 months ago.

The other is the total lack of timely action. It took 73 days for them to arrange a meeting between “Sarah” and Haworth after she complained to him. If that was an employer, he’d be in court also. And it took 118 days for the complainants to be told the outcome after they were interviewed.

Details taken mainly (but not exclusively) from the very useful timeline at The Spinoff.

Bryce Edwards writes:

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

Newshub reports:

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.

Newshub reports:

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.

Of interest is some stats by Pornhub about their Kiwi users.

• 39% are female
• Average age 39
• Gisborne users spend longest time online
• Most viewed categories are lesbian, MILF and threesome

That will see Nigel go shortly as the deserved but insufficient sacrificial lamb.

Mike Hosking writes:

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?

More head of state than head of government.

Barry Soper chimes in:

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.

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.

Bear that in mind with this Newshub story:

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.

UPDATE: Cactus Kate has a must read take on this.

Stuff reports:

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.

Audrey Young writes:

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.

A guest post by Alwyn Poole:

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.