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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
They agree on some ratings and disagree on others. The big difference in how they rate seem to be on whether or not the Cr is a Goff Loyalist (known as Team A) or a Goff critic (Team B).
Orsman rates Team A slightly higher on average with 6.2 vs 5.6 for Team B.
Wilson has a far greater difference. He rates Team A more highly at 6.8 and rates Team B a lowly 4.1.
But the average of their scores is probably a reasonable reflection. So what is the average score per Cr, and who is top and bottom.
8/10 – Daniel Newman
7.5/10 – Chris Darby, Desley Simpson
7.0/10 – Phil Goff, Cathy Casey, John Watson
6.75/10 – Richard Hills
6.5/10 – Bill Cashmore, Ross Clow
6/10 – Jo Bartley, Alf Filipaina
5.5/10 – Efoso Collins
5/10 – Linda Cooper
4/10 – Chris Fletcher, Mike Lee, Wayne Walker
3/10 – Greg Sayers, Sharon Stewart, Paul Young
Those in bold are where both journalists gave them the same score. So they both agreed Newman is the most effective Councillor.
UPDATE: Worth pointing out that while the journalists might rank Greg Sayers lowly, the locals in Rodney seem to have a far higher view of him as he is running unopposed.
The UFB fibre to the premises project has two and a half years to go before completion, and you’d have to be very churlish to declare it anything else than a success. Apart from the occasional installation wobble, you rarely hear anything else than “yeah, we’ve got UFB” if you ask about someone’s broadband installation. Which is exactly how it should be, broadband that Just Works so that you don’t have to waste time and life over it.
Yep it has been very successful, and considering how much could go wrong, it is a tribute to those involved that it has delivered so well.
The local fibre companies were asked to take a leap of faith. Would people switch from copper broadband, and in enough numbers to bring a return on their share of the UFB investment? Were they rolling out hot new broadband tech or dropping millions on a giant, government driven white elephant that most people wouldn’t care about?
There were those who claimed it would be a white elephant as there was no need for fibre type speeds. They also claimed that mobile technology would be as good or better.
But the demand for fibre has been huge.
Australia took a different, more complex path with its NBN for political reasons and switched away from a pure fibre network. They are now literally paying the price. Across the ditch, the cost per premise to deploy the multi-technology mix NBN which can use copper, cable, wireless and in some places, fibre broadband has gone up to A$3100 ($3288) this year and the government has had to top up the network build funding with tens of billions of dollars.
The latest cost estimate is A$51 billion for an inferior product to what NZ did for NZ$1.5 billion (actually around half that from a pure investment basis).
Despite the higher cost, Aussie NBN customers receive pretty sad broadband service. Telstra for example advertises 20 to 40 megabit/s minimum NBN plans for up to A$90 a month. For the same amount or a little more, UFB customers can get 900/400 Mbps fibre connections. I can also tell you that Aussies hate to hear that comparison, and that there’s 10 gigabit/s UFB on trial currently.
I think the fibre initiative is the best infrastructure project in recent history.
the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines – is now considered one of the top ten threats to global health. This doesn’t just mean active anti-vaxxers. It means parents who aren’t sure. It means those who delay vaccination, because it seems like the easier decision.
This is timely with the growing number of measles cases in NZ. And let’s look at the change in vaccination rates in the last ten years.
So from the year ending 30 June 2009 to year ending 30 June 2017 the 24 month vaccination rates increased from 80% to 93% for all children and from 73% to 93% for Maori children.
This didn’t happen by accident. The last National Government made lifting vaccination rates both a national health target but also one of the 10 all of Government Better Public Services targets.
Committing yourself in public to an actual measurable outcome (not just spend more money and hope) is risky. It is a public failure if you don’t get an improvement. But they worked for almost all targets. With leadership from the Government, the public health staff responded to the target and got a huge improvement. In fact in 2017 the Maori vaccination rate (historically low) was slightly higher than the overall rate.
But what happened when the Government changed. The Government first scrapped all the Better Public Services targets. They didn’t want to commit to anything measurable. But even worse they also scrapped all the health targets. They promised that they’d come up with some new targets, but two years later they haven’t.
And what has happened to vaccination rates in the two years since Labour scrapped the targets? The overall rate has dropped 2.4% and the Maori vaccination rate has dropped 7.1%.
It is easy to blame anti-vaxxers and the like. And we should blame them. But we should also blame the Government for abolishing the health targets around vaccinations and the BPS target. These were tools with a proven record of success and they dumped them because they didn’t want the accountability.
UPDATE: A few people on Twitter are claiming that Labour didn’t abolish the immunisation health target as there is still an MOH page collating data for it.
The reality is that Labour did announce they were dropping the health targets when they became Government. Then facing an outcry, they said they’ll come up with some new and better health targets. Two years later they have been unable to come up with a single one.
In the interim yes the MOH still collates data on the old health targets but that is all they do. They are not published in newspapers as they used to be. The Minister doesn’t follow up with DHBs that are under performing. They are no longer the first item on every DHB’s agenda. The DHBs know that there is no longer a political price to pay for not meeting the targets.
Some have also claimed that there have been measles outbreaks around the world, so it is not just a NZ problem. Well firstly I never mentioned measles in my post. I’m talking all immunisations. And we had a clear trend where the rate increased and it is now decreasing.
The fact NZ managed such a huge increase in the vaccination rate shows that leadership can make a difference. It can’t get you to 100% as there is always a hard core you can’t reach, but DHBs do respond to incentives and the Government setting a small number of clear targets does work – or at least it used to.
The Government intends exempting itself from the new workplace safety laws and mining regulations put in place following the Pike River Mine tragedy. This is ironically to enable their re-entry project. Politics is over-riding common sense.
Yep they are going to waive the very law put in to stop another Pike River.
It specifically criticised the single means of exit. Our Government implemented its recommendations with a new Health and Safety at Work Act (2015), new mining regulations and the new agency, WorkSafe NZ. These new laws rightly now require two means of exit from a mine and better ventilation.
Common sense – a single exit makes you so much more vulnerable.
A comprehensive 800-page report in 2015 concluded recovery of the men could not be done within the new safety laws.
The single exit issue was a significant factor in why Solid Energy Board resolved it couldn’t be done lawfully.
The reality is there will not be two exits. The explanation that it is not required because the Pike River Mine already has approval dating back to 2008 defies belief. This approval was deficient and was harshly criticised by the Royal Commission. The exemption is being sought because the ventilation in the mine does not meet the new regulations.
Yep the Government is relying on a 2008 approval, dating back to before the mine exploded!
This mine blew up because commercial pressures to produce coal saw safety rules compromised. We risk a repeat under political pressure. If the regulations are too rigid, revise them. We should not make exemptions. We would not do so for a new coal mine.
There shouldn’t be one law for Pike River and one for all other mines. Safety should be the same everywhere.
We need to call time on this charade. The men are not going to be recovered. There is not going to be any significant new evidence that changes the key conclusions. We need to heed the Royal Commission’s concluding message that the best tribute we can pay to the 29 lost men is to ensure the tough new workplace safety laws put in place in response to the tragedy are respected.
Instead the Government is pushing ahead just because it wants a photo opportunity.
I’m sure many readers recall the decades of claims that the world is about run out of oil, so hence we must stop using oil because we are at or close to peak oil, and soon production will diminish.
Yep the US alone is now producing over 12 million barrels a day. Almost all the experts were certain the production would keep declining, and they were wrong.
Never underestimate the difference technology can make.
After Winston chose Labour in 2017, Simon Wilson shared his dream of how wonderful New Zealand would change because of this. Let’s look at his dream and see how it is going:
I’m looking forward to all the interthings – the intergenerations and genders and ethnicities and urban/provincialities and all the rest – that the combined party leaderships of the new government represent, because our government suddenly looks a lot more like all of us.
The Cabinet has less women than the previous National Cabinet and the front bench is more white than National’s.
I’m looking forward to climate change being taken seriously
The Government says emissions will rise under this Government for the next few years and they have just declined a hydro dam.
I’m looking forward to a proper commitment to building tens of thousands of affordable houses in Auckland
LOL. They’ve managed around 50 or so.
And I’m looking forward to watching Winston make the most of his wise old years in parliament, because I’ve seen nothing in the last few weeks to suggest he won’t
Keep sipping the kool aid.
I’m looking forward to having a decent minister of health and to the day when we really have abolished rheumatic fever, and to the day the staff at our emergency departments don’t feel driven in their desperation to put out “full up” signs.
The reality is ED waiting times have got much longer (and the Government no longer even publishes them). Clark is widely seen as underwhelming as Minister and the number of children with rheumatic fever increased in 2018.
I’m looking forward to the day when mental health services are not in crisis and we do not have the most appalling rates of suicide.
Also sadly gone up.
It looks like Simon’s dream remains very much a dream.
I regret to inform my regular detractors I have not been axed and nor was I about to be, at least as far as I am aware. I know they would have enjoyed that. However, the fact is I am simply tired and I need time to recharge the batteries. …
And while I have loved, and continue to love, writing this column, I have been missing rather too much of life lately. Writing takes time. And unless you are lucky and good enough to be able to pay all the bills doing it, the demands of a regular deadline push and pull against the claims of career, health and family. It is often the last of these that suffers most. My boys are growing up way too fast. I need a few weekends bouncing on the tramp with them instead of sitting at a desk wondering just what to make of the associate transport minister refusing to release a letter sent to the transport minister. I need some time where, when I am begged to come along to the pool on a Sunday afternoon, I can unhesitatingly say yes.
A great call putting family time first. I tend to write my blogs in advance now so that I actually have time during the day and weekends for kicking around a soccer ball with Benjamin.
It is no secret that the ranks of the mainstream media are dominated by liberals in their various Left-wing, centrist and, occasionally, Right-wing forms. Which is not to say that journalists as a whole strive for anything less than fair and objective coverage – which is something I have come to appreciate through dealing with various editors and reporters over the years. But it has always frustrated me is that, where space is allowed for the non-liberal view, it usually seems that the angriest, least reasonable voices dominate. Lately, for example, broadcasters have been giving an awful lot of time to spokespeople for the so-called New Conservative Party. This fringe organisation received just 6253 votes at the last election. It has no real prospect of breaking into Parliament. By contrast, the Opportunities Party won more than 10 times as many votes. How often are its people interviewed on TV?
Liam was a very rare moderate voice.
Somewhere between 30 to 40 per cent of New Zealanders are conservative in their disposition. They are not, as a rule, bigots, know-nothings or uncompromising libertarians. When their more measured views are not properly and credibly articulated in the business of news, liberals let themselves off the hook.
Maybe Stuff will hire someone of similiar ilk to replace Liam?
