A plot critical episode.

Some court judgments leave you really sad. This one reads:

The complainant and two female friends who were drinking in a bar were approached by the applicant who introduced himself. He explained that he had just been released from prison after a five-year sentence for “bashing a nigger”. In context, this suggested that the applicant was associated with the Mongrel Mob and that the victim of his assault was associated with Black Power. There was initially some friendly interaction between the complainant and the applicant in the course of which they danced and kissed.

I really don’t understand how someone comes up to you in a bar and proudly boasts he has just got out of prison for “bashing a nigger” and this leads to you making out with him.

I’m in no way suggesting what later happened is her fault. It is not, as the court found. I’m just staggered that some people don’t recoil in disgust at someone who is proudly boasting they bashed a “nigger”.

Stuff reports:

The government is close to announcing a deal on its contentious climate change legislation, striking a deal over agricultural emissions.
Stuff understands Climate Change Minister James Shaw and NZ First have negotiated a “split gas” target, which would see methane treated differently from other long-lived gases, like carbon.
Farmers are worried about the legislation because agriculture accounts for about half our emissions, mostly methane from belching live stock.

Methane should be treated differently. It doesn’t stay in the atmosphere anywhere near as long as other greenhouse gases.

The atmospheric lifetimes of different greenhouse gases is:

1. Tetrafluoromethane 50,000 years
2. Hexafluoroethane 10,000 years
3. Sulfur hexafluoride 3,200 years
4. Nitrogen trifluoride 500 years
5. Nitrous oxide 121 years
6. CFC-12 100 years
7. Carbon dioxide 30 – 95 years (around 20% remains for hundreds of years)
8. HCFC-22 12 years
9. Methane 12 years

Roger Partridge at NZ Initiative writes:

In 1998, a beginning primary teacher earned $31,000, which was 15% more than the median worker. A teacher at the top of the primary teachers’ salary scale earned $47,100 (75% more). Today, a beginning primary teacher earns $49,600, which is a shade less than the median worker. And a primary teacher at the top of the salary scale now earns $75,949 (only 43% more).

Of course, there is a difference between how the median worker and a primary teacher are paid. The starting teacher salary is on par with many other professions (accountancy, engineering, law, among others). But unlike teachers, the best among other professions can go on to earn salaries several times those earned by graduates starting their careers.

For primary teachers, things are different. Their union-negotiated collective agreement links pay rises to years of service, rather than to ability or performance. And the pay scale tops out after just seven yearly increments.

Perhaps that is the rub for primary teachers. A union-negotiated pay scale requiring all to be paid alike, regardless of ability, with fixed service-based pay adjustments is bound to limit how much teachers can earn. Teachers’ salaries are not modest despite their union coverage and collective agreement, but because of it.

Spot on. The collective contract rewards teachers for long service, not ability.

Wouldn’t it be great of schools could pay teachers whatever they think they are worth. They might pay a third year inspirational teacher $15,000 more than the 15 year veteran who doesn’t connect to students.

Jack Shafer at Politico writes:

New Zealanders needn’t worry about their government censoring the press. On Wednesday, five of the country’s major news outlets proved themselves only too happy to censor themselves.
Representatives of Radio New Zealand, TVNZ, Mediaworks, Stuff and the owner of the New Zealand Herald signed a pact agreeing to limit their news coverage of Brenton Tarrant, the man charged in the March 15 Christchurch massacre of 50 worshipers at two mosques. Following the guidelines, the news organizations vow to limit coverage of statements “that actively champion white supremacist or terrorist ideology,” avoid quoting the accused killer’s “manifesto,” and suppress any “message, imagery, symbols” or hand signs like a Nazi salute made by the accused or his supporters in support of white supremacy. “Where the inclusion of such signals in any images is unavoidable, the relevant parts of the image shall be pixelated,” the guidelines add.

I had no problem initially with the guidelines, but Shafer makes a strong case against them:

So what possessed New Zealand’s pressies to join forces, voluntarily, to limit their rights to report the news? According to reports, New Zealand publications worry that Tarrant might use news accounts to spread his white supremacist views to a larger audience, the way Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik broadcast his anti-Islam ideology in his 2012 trial. Tarrant might very well use his defense to propagandize, but even if he does, so what? An editor doesn’t need to sign a pact with other editors to keep him from transcribing every word and gesture of a showboating defendant. Because he can take that path without cooperating with anybody, we can assume that the editors trust themselves to avoid sensationalistic reporting of the Tarrant story, but they don’t trust their competitors to do the same—hence the desire for a press cartel to reduce journalistic competition to the absolute basics.

Shafer argues no cartel is needed – just let editors use their judgement.

Both New Zealand’s chief censor and its leading news outlets seem to think that expressions of white supremacism are as irresistible to the general population as an open bag of potato chips. This kind of thinking is normally seen in an authoritarian state, where “dangerous” ideas are officially cloaked from view by leaders worried about the threat to their own power. But in a free society, people have a right to know about those who have murderous designs on them. Once a Nazi has marked you for death, averting your eyes isn’t going to save you.

One needs to understand the nature of certain evil, to defeat it.

Worst of all, the pact has given New Zealand’s news consumers every right to think that the press can’t be trusted to tell the whole story because a misguided notion of “safety” comes first. Where might New Zealand readers go to slake their curiosity about political extremism? If it’s places like 4chan and 8chan, won’t we be sorry?
Drop the blinders, New Zealand. You can’t stop a threat you have blinded yourself from seeing.

This is exactly what happens. People head off to the extremes.

Stuff reports:

Online voting, or a return to the polling booth, could be needed for local body elections as the postal voting system cannot be “guaranteed”, Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) says.
Mike Reid, policy director for the organisation, told the Justice Select Committee on Thursday that the slow fadeout of postal services meant that postal voting – the main method of voting in local government elections – was becoming very problematic, and it would be hard to guarantee every vote was counted.
“Our issue is effectively that the quality of postal elections can’t be guaranteed. We can’t guarantee that people who vote by post can get their vote counted, any more,” Reid said.

“We don’t believe that we can rely on the postal services for local elections in the long term.”

Postal voting is highly insecure, cumbersome and dying off. People simply don’t go into post offices any more.

If they don’t introduce an option to allow you to e-mail or upload your ballot paper, then they will need to bring back booths and have scores of them around each city.

The Daily Mail reports:

Jewish activists called on Jeremy Corbyn to consider his position after it emerged he had endorsed a book containing anti-Semitic ideas.
The Labour leader wrote the foreword for a new edition of JA Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study while he was a backbencher in 2011.
He described it as a ‘great tome’ – even though it spread conspiracy theories about the Rothschild banking family and said finance was controlled ‘by men of a single and peculiar race’ who in turn controlled ‘the policy of nations’.
The Jewish Labour Movement slammed Mr Corbyn yesterday for endorsing ‘anti-Semitic propaganda’ and said he should consider quitting.

Example no 207 of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism.

David Parker announced:

Attorney-General David Parker has announced the appointment of a Supreme Court judge and a judge of the Court of Appeal.
Justice Joseph Victor Williams has been appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court.  
An appointment to the Supreme Court was required after current Supreme Court judge Justice Sir William Young was named to chair the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attack on the Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019. 
Justice Williams graduated with an LLB from Victoria University in 1986 and joined the faculty as a junior lecturer in law.  He graduated with an LLM (Hons) from the University of British Columbia in 1988.  
In 1988 he joined Kensington Swan, establishing the first unit specialising in Māori issues in a major New Zealand law firm and developing a large environmental practice. He became a partner at Kensington Swan in 1992, leaving in 1994 to co‑found Walters Williams & Co in Auckland and Wellington. 
In 1999 Justice Williams was appointed Chief Judge of the Māori Land Court.  The following year, he was appointed acting Chairperson of the Waitangi Tribunal and was permanently appointed in 2004.   
He was appointed as a Judge of the High Court in 2008 and a Judge of the Court of Appeal in 2018. 

This is no big surprise. Williams was a possibility for Chief Justice also.

Williams will serve on the court for 16 years. The new Chief Justice for 13 years. So Parker is making his mark on the court.

The Herald reports:

The Government is exploring the possibility of making classifications for on-demand streaming services, such as Netflix and Lightbox, mandatory.
Minister of Internal Affairs Tracey Martin said this would bring streaming services in line with other forms of media in New Zealand.

Totally the wrong way to look at it. The question should be “Is there a problem that requires fixing?”

Streaming services are different to broadcast. There’s no such thing as daytime or nighttime.

Streaming providers provide tools to allow parents to set what kids can watch. We don’t need a Government scheme interfering.

Dr Patrick Carvalho at the NZ Initiative writes:

Under our fuel tax regime, a driver basically pays the same amount of petrol duties regardless of when and where the car is used – thus adding to the congestion in already overcrowded roads.
Moreover, fuel taxes are blatantly regressive, which means low-income families tend to bear a disproportionate share of road funding costs.
To understand the regressive feature of petrol taxes, it is necessary to look at the relationship between fuel economy and road usage.
The rationale for petrol taxes lies in the user-pays principle. In this sense, the fuel excise duty would be a proxy for road usage: the longer the distance travelled, the higher the tax dues.
Petrol tax receipts are, however, proportionate to fuel consumption patterns. This is in contrast to road user charges on diesel-powered vehicles, which charge drivers based on the exact mileage travelled.

Petrol tax, when introduced, was the best form of user pays available. It was an indirect form of user pays.

New Zealand should look at well-tested road pricing experiences worldwide to implement a comprehensive user-pays system based on three elements: distance, time and location.

Sounds the ideal to aim for.

Singapore, which started with a paper-based scheme in 1975, will implement a new network-wide, satellite-based road pricing system as early as next year.
Several other countries – including the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, Sweden and Norway – have also implemented different versions of road pricing arrangements and technologies. These are useful test cases, providing both success stories as well as lessons.
It is time New Zealand joined global best-practice in managing and funding its roads and highways.
First, outdated fuel taxes must go. Petrol-powered cars should be migrated to existing distance-based road user charge scheme in line with diesel-fuelled vehicles.

Easy to do now. Most cars drive with a GPS device in the car.

Second, without fuel taxes, the carbon footprint of cars should be consistently priced using the Emissions Trading Scheme. Further regulatory and explicit subsidy arrangements may also follow, helping address any remaining environmental concerns.
Third, congestion charges based on time and location would ensure a more reliable, faster and safer traffic flow. Evidence shows that even small but flexible charges can have a significant positive impact on road demand management.
As Professor Vickery once said, “You’re not reducing traffic flow, you’re increasing it, because traffic is spread more evenly over time. Even some proponents of congestion pricing don’t understand that.”
Fourth, while distance-based road charges should be the main source of road funding, congestion charges based on time and location should be used to reduce car queuing in busy roads. Hence, any additional net revenue from congestion charges should be ring-fenced to ease respective local traffic conditions.

Always been a fan of congestion charges. You should pay more at peak time than at 5 am.

Bret Stephens writes at the NY Times:

As prejudices go, anti-Semitism can sometimes be hard to pin down, but on Thursday the opinion pages of The New York Times international editionprovided a textbook illustration of it.
Except that The Times wasn’t explaining anti-Semitism. It was purveying it.
It did so in the form of a cartoon, provided to the newspaper by a wire service and published directly above an unrelated column by Tom Friedman, in which a guide dog with a prideful countenance and the face of Benjamin Netanyahu leads a blind, fat Donald Trump wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. Lest there be any doubt as to the identity of the dog-man, it wears a collar from which hangs a Star of David.

Stephens continues:

Here was an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Stürmer. The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.
The image also had an obvious political message: Namely, that in the current administration, the United States follows wherever Israel wants to go. This is false — consider Israel’s horrified reaction to Trump’s announcement last year that he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria — but it’s beside the point. There are legitimate ways to criticize Trump’s approach to Israel, in pictures as well as words. But there was nothing legitimate about this cartoon.

So what was it doing in The Times?
For some Times readers — or, as often, former readers — the answer is clear: The Times has a longstanding Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range, with some notable exceptions, from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous condemnation.

We get this in NZ also, where some MPs accuse Israel of genocide and condemn it regularly while ignoring far far worse human rights abuses in the region.

The problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its publication was an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.
Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?

Of course it would have never appeared.

The so called Welfare Expert Advisory Group has reported and their main recommendations are:

• Remove obligations and sanctions such as work assessments or naming the other parent
• Sole parent support recipients no longer need to look for work until the youngest child is six (instead of three)
• Increase main benefits by up to 47%
• Increase abatement thresholds to $150 a week or $250 a week for supported living
• Index benefits to average wage instead of inflation
• Increase family tax credit to $170 a week
• Allow people to claim welfare even if married or in a relationship to someone who is working

They have conservatively estimated the cost of this to be $5.2 billion a year. Now current spending on benefits are $4.4 billion a year so basically doubling the cost.

An extra $5.2 billion a year on welfare would equate to $3,500 more spending and hence tax per households. So if implemented you’ll pay $70 a week more tax on average (if working) to fund this welfare wishlist (for people not working).

I’m surprised the working group didn’t also recommend free cars under every seat.

The Electoral Commission has published the 2018 donation returns for political parties.

The returns only include donations over $1,500 so this doesn’t include the thousands or tens of thousands of party members that might donate $100 and can total over a million dollars. So it is an incomplete picture. But how much did each party get from donations over $1,500?

1. National $741,915
2. Greens $603,731
3. Labour $173,343
4. ACT $145,072
5. NZ First $87,870 (plus loan of $76,622)
6. TOP $87,843
7. New Conservative $20,028
8. Maori $2,000

And who were the largest individual disclosed donors (over $15,000):

1. Greens: Betty Harris $350,280
2. NZ First: NZ First Foundation $76,622 (loan)
3. ACT: Christopher Reeve $60,000
4. ACT: Dame Jenny Gibbs $56,000
5. TOP: Gareth Morgan $50,000
6. Labour: Robert Smellie $50,000
7. Greens: Julie-Anne Genter $28,427
8. Greens: James Shaw $28,387
9. Greens: Eugenie Sage $28,257
10. National: Graham Drummond $25,500
11. National: RCL Henley Downs Ltd $25,000
12. National: Owen Glenn $25,000
13. Greens: Jan Logie $23,327
14. Greens: Marama Davidson $20,548
15. Greens: Gareth Hughes $20,028
16. Greens: Philip Mills $20,000
17. National: Anurag Rasela $19,909
18. Labour: Jacinda Ardern $18,790
19. Greens: Chloe Swarbrick $18,066
20. Greens: Golriz Ghahraman $17,986

Once again NZ First are hiding their funders. Off memory in 20 years of electoral donation returns they have never ever disclosed the identity of a party donor (at least not in the original returns).

The Herald reports:

A deal has been struck over paid breaks for bus drivers that will avoid the previously anticipated enormous disruption of public transport – and loss of wages for drivers.
It had been predicted that thousands of bus services a day would have been cancelled, but in Auckland that is now understood to be in the low hundreds and mainly off-peak services.
Bus companies, unions, regional councils and the Government have reached a temporary agreement “to achieve the smoothest possible transition” in the first year after changes to the Employment Relations Act come into effect next Monday.
Under the Act bus drivers will become entitled to paid 10-minute rest breaks in the middle of each work period. But a new regulation will temporarily override part of that entitlement.

The Government was warned that legislating “tea” breaks would lead to massive problems because of the lack of flexibility. They just don’t get it that you can’t treat pilots and bus drivers the same as office workers.

Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today the Cabinet had agreed to a new land transport rule that aims to avert thousands of bus services being cancelled and give bus drivers the rest breaks they need to keep passengers safe.
Twyford’s office said in a statement: “The changes to the Employment Relations Act require employers and employees to reach agreement on rest and meal breaks together. If agreement can’t be reached rest breaks are to be taken in the middle of a work period.”
He said the new rule gave flexibility to bus operators when scheduling rest breaks for drivers.

A daft law with no flexibility. Imagine every train and bus stopping for ten minutes halfway through a journey.

He said that without the new rule 25 to 30 per cent of bus services would have been cancelled.

A problem caused by Labour.

Radio NZ reports:

The credibility of the Housing Minister is on the line after a week of shifting stories about a key element of KiwiBuild.

Well the credibility is pretty low already as the promised 1,000 homes by 30 June is currently sitting at just 80.

Ms Collins cited the ministry’s response in Parliament on Wednesday – that the required test was “done verbally with builders and no written record existed”, prompting her to question if officials were playing “fast and loose” and it was all done with a handshake.
Surprised by that, Mr Twyford tried to clarify the situation and said the request had been misinterpreted by the ministry. He gave assurances the process was robust and there were “a number of communications and documents” officials would provide to back that up.
“While there is no specific single assessment document as requested by the National Party research unit, there are other documents and communications that set out the negotiations and record the ministry’s work in this area”, he told Parliament.
In the next hour he was repeating those assurances to reporters.
“I’m satisfied that they [ministry officials] are subjecting these contract negotiations to the kind of scrutiny they need and there is a trail of documentation to support that,” he said.

So the Ministry said there was no written record of a test for whether a development would increase the number of houses, but Twyford said there was.

But that was not the case.
Housing Ministry chief executive Andrew Crisp declined to speak to media, but issued a written statement saying “no such documentation exists as there is not a standalone additionality test”.
The story then shifted to a statement there was written evidence developers had to prove their case for a Crown underwrite, but that was buried in commercially sensitive contracts the ministry is refusing to make public – even in redacted form.
‘Additionality’ is the officials’ way of describing the criteria for the underwrite. The ministry said “additionality is assessed as core part of the business case for a KiwiBuild underwrite”, rather than by a standalone test.
Again, this is contrary to past statements by the minister, who speaking in Parliament in March referred repeatedly to the additionality “test”.
As recently as Wednesday, Mr Twyford talked about the ministry advising him “they apply an additionality test”.

So it is a non existent test.

NewstalkZB reports:

National’s deputy leader Paula Bennett says she found comments made by a minister in the House yesterday, questioning her Māori heritage, racist. …

Jackson’s comments were slammed by Bennett who today called them “without a doubt” racist.
“It’s kind of like saying if we’re not like you, and fully entrenched and able to speak the language, then in your mind, we’re lesser Māori – I don’t think that’s necessary,” she told media after question time.

And not just Willie:

MP for Tāmaki Makaurau and Whānau Ora and Youth Minister Peeni Henare backed Jackson this afternoon.
In his view “blood quantum simply isn’t enough” when it comes to being Māori.
“I’ve always felt that you have to reach a threshold of need, participation and contribution in Māori Kūpapa. If you don’t, of course, questions are going to be raised.”
He said he was “more than happy” for those questions to be raised of anybody who claims to be Māori who does not meet that threshold.
Henare said he had not seen Bennett’s contribution to the community or to Māori Kūpapa.
“I haven’t seen her [Bennett] on the marae; I haven’t seen her dry dishes, I haven’t seen her do a karanga – therefore, it should be raised as a question.”

I don’t think those Labour MPs realise the own goal they are setting themselves up for.

If they are claiming merely having some Maori ancestry is not enough to qualify to be a proper Maori, then the number of Maori on the electoral roll would have to dramatically reduce, and hence the number of Maori seats.

One News reports:

While the specifics are not yet known, 1 NEWS understands the referendum will be broadly in-line with what the Green Party campaigned on at the 2017 election.
It campaigned on legalising possession and cultivation, or growing of plants, for personal use of cannabis and introducing a legal age limit for personal use.

If this is what is proposed in the referendum, that is untidy. It is saying it is legal to possess cannabis but presumably still illegal to buy it or sell it. It won’t get rid of the black market, but make it worse.

It is also understood the Government will not pass legislation before the referendum – but will instead prepare a Bill that could be introduced to Parliament afterwards if people do vote to legalise marijuana.  

Also unhelpful as if the bill has gone through select committee process etc, it will be more likely to be acceptable.

I’m in favour of legalisation, but am worried the referendum could end up being a no vote, because not enough thought has gone into how legalisation would work.

Peter Dunne writes:

MMP is a system ready-made for effective local representation, and it is hard to understand why so many electorate MPs often overlook that. There are exceptions – but they are few and far between. Those who come readily to mind are Damian O’Connor and his staunch advocacy for the West Coast, regardless of his party’s position on an issue, and Nick Smith and Nikki Kaye who are always seen to be working assiduously in their electorates. For most of the rest, however, the electorate seat they hold is but the vehicle that gives them a seat in Parliament.

Every now and then, an issue arises which is critical to a particular electorate or group of electorates, and cries out for effective advocacy by the local MP. NZTA’s recent decisions to effectively can the proposed Petone to Grenada link road and delay almost indefinitely the development of the Melling Interchange are two such examples. Both affect the Hutt Valley and northern Wellington electorates, particularly, and the Wellington region generally.

The Petone to Grenada link road (effectively linking the Hutt Valley directly to State Highway One north of Wellington) has been on the books for over a decade, and has always rated highly in terms of the cost benefit analysis. While there have been issues regarding the constantly shifting designated route of the road and its likely impact on affected property owners, and some of the engineering issues arising from some of NZTA’s earlier indicative designs for the road, none of these were insoluble, and progress was being made towards the development of what most people regarded as a necessary road link. Lives had already been disrupted with properties already purchased and people compensated, but now it seems all that counts for nothing, as it is back to square one.

The Melling Interchange idea has been around for almost as long, and is seen as a necessary solution to a significant and unsafe bottleneck on State Highway Two. Even NZTA agrees that the Interchange is worthwhile, but it is now saying it will be at least ten years before any funding can be set aside for it.

Both decisions have come as a major surprise to people in the Wellington region, but what is perhaps more surprising is the complete silence of the region’s Labour MPs and Labour aligned Mayor of Wellington on the issue. The Mayor of Lower Hutt and the local National MPs, and even the Speaker of the House from whom one would normally a measure of impartiality, have weighed in opposing these decisions, but to date, they have been lone voices. Yet, if ever there was an occasion where local MPs, regardless of party, could come together to advocate for their region and its infrastructural interests, this is it.

Wellington is constantly concerned about its future focus and development, always with a rival’s eye to its competitive sister of the North, the rapidly growing power-house of Auckland. The concern is understandable, although Wellington will never compete effectively with a properly governed and organised Auckland nearly five times its size. But for it to have any sort of worthwhile future, Wellington needs effective leaders and representatives, committed to getting the best sustainable, social and physical infrastructure for the region. For Wellington now, all politics has to be local, across the five cities comprising the region, the six electorate MPs, and the list MPs living in the area, with everyone equally committed to pushing the region’s future.

So, the local Labour MPs need to take Sir John’s advice to heart, and put the needs and wishes of their local constituents front and centre of their considerations, rather than just continue their focus on being loyal, unquestioning servants of their party.

The local Labour MPs and Councillors are not serving Wellington well. Basically every significant road improvement planned has been cancelled or delayed indefinitely.

And to make matters worse the Labour/Green dominated Regional Council has crippled the previously reliable public transport system.

Stuff reported:

The biggest names in flat earth circles have flown across the globe to speak at the Flat Earth Expo in Auckland.
The stars of Netflix’s 2018 flat earth documentary Behind the Curve, YouTubers Mark Sargent and Patricia Steere, were in New Zealand this weekend to speak to local Flat Earthers.
Flat earth believers think the earth, rather than being the planetary sphere we have come to know, is actually a flat plane. Different factions within the flat earth community have competing ideas as to what the earth looks like and who controls it.

I believe Britney Spears is sane and stable. Which shows beliefs often clash with reality.

Some flat earth theories reckon huge ice walls, up to 45-metres high, surround the earth. The walls, located in what we know as Antarctica, are likely patrolled by an army to stop people climbing over and falling off the edge of the world.

Cool – the Game of Thrones version.

I may be wrong but I’d guess 75% of those who attended are not vaccinated and hate fluoride also.

The NZ Initiative report:

A comprehensive and year-long econometric analysis of data for 400,000 students undertaken by The New Zealand Initiative reveals there are no significant differences in school performance between schools of different deciles.
 
Adjusted for the different student populations they serve, the vast majority of New Zealand’s secondary schools create the education outcomes we would expect from them.
 
This finding calls into question the assertion of the Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce, led by Bali Haque, which claimed that “quality of our schools varies significantly”. There is no evidence for this statement in the data provided by Statistics New Zealand’s via its Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI).
 
Commenting on the research, the Initiative’s Executive Director Dr Oliver Hartwich said: “The Tomorrow’s Schools taskforce has recommended broad-sweeping changes to our schools. But such changes need to be based on solid analysis, not just anecdotal evidence.

If the Government proceeds, it will be clear ideology is driving this, not student performance.

The Initiative research is quite ground breaking. They find the difference in outcomes between different schools is due to family background, not what the school does.