Stuff reports:

Christchurch MP Ruth Dyson is calling it quits after 27 years in Parliament.
Dyson announced in an email on Sunday she had decided to not seek re-election as the Labour candidate for Port Hills in 2020.
“After what would then be 27 years in Parliament, I have decided to pursue other challenges in my life (but I haven’t yet determined what they will be).”

Dyson will be a big loss to Labour. She is one of their most politically competent MPs. Her politics aren’t mine, but in my dealings with her I’ve found her very professional and effective.

She is a popular local MP. The ratio of her electorate vote to party vote was 137% meaning for every 100 votes Labour got, she got 137. That is the third highest for ratio for a Labour MPm after Ardern and Nash.

Port Hills has a majority of 7,916 which is generally regarded as safe. But National got around 500 more party votes. If Labour doesn’t select a strong candidate, the seat could be competitive.

Stuff reports:

Auckland Mayor Phil Goff will seek re-election in October, chasing a second term. …

Goff has also said that next term he will do rates increases of 3.5% a year, higher than the 2.5% of last time.

And of course even that 2.5% was a porky, as he introduced several targeted rates and a petrol tax, meaning that overall ratepayers had increases of way beyond 2.5%.

Goff has also said he’ll find a billion dollars of efficiencies if re-elected. Off memory his track record in his first term is around $400,000 of true efficiencies so I wouldn’t count on it.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party is urging Justice Minister Andrew Little to adopt a Greens members’ bill which would ban foreign donations to political parties.

They already are banned effectively. There is a de minimis limit of $1,500. Above that they are banned. If you want to ban them for less than that, just consider what that means – you will need proof of residency everytime someone buys a raffle ticket, donates $5, attends a dinner etc.

The amount of foreign donations under $1,500 is trivial – it would be at most 0.01% of total donations. This is a red herring.

You could make a case for a slightly lower de minimis limit such as $500, but a total ban would be impractical.

As well as cracking down on foreign donations, the bill would also overturn a ban on prisoner voting, enable Māori to change roll types at any time and lower the MMP threshold to 4 per cent.

Enabling Maori to change roll types at any time allows gerrymandering of seats. I am surprised the Greens want to introduced gerrymandering to NZ. It would allow people to transfer backwards and forwards between the general and Maori roll, based on which seat they think is most marginal. It would mean seats would be less likely to have the same electoral population.

And lowering the threshold to 4% may have merit, but should only occur either by consensus of parties in Parliament, or a referendum. This looks like the Greens worried they won’t make it back and wanting to change the law to help them.

Personally I’m sick of MPs trying to change the Electoral Act to favour themselves. I think it is time for Nick Smith’s suggestion that we entrench the entire Electoral Act so not a single clause of it can be amended without a 75% super-majority in Parliament. This would stop the US style winner takes all politics, and ensure any future changes were ones that clearly benefits the public, not just one party or one side of politics.

Entrenching the entire Electoral Act would require MPs to work together to do changes.

Stuff reports:

Czech drug smuggler Karel Sroubek has lodged an application for residency in his true identity.
Earlier this month Stuff reported he had obtained a passport in his real name, but had yet to provide it to an Immigration New Zealand (INZ) office with the appropriate paperwork to have residency considered.
INZ officials have confirmed they have since received a copy of Sroubek’s travel document, in his true identity, with the appropriate paperwork. This was now “being considered”.

If Sroubek ends up being able to stay, it will be thanks to ILG.

Stacey Kirk writes:

What’s laden, but never full. Pure, but never clear. Given, but never received?
Why, the Government’s answers to most questions of general accountability, of course. 
Expanded, it may read: What’s laden with hyperbole but never full of any substance, pure of intention but never clear with solutions, and given but never in a way where any real information is received.

A good description of the Government.

It emerged on Thursday that the Treasury advised Jones against giving a $10 million loan to private firm Westland Milk, on the basis the company couldn’t get a bank loan and thus the Government ran the risk of looking like a “lender of last resort”.  …

A spokesman for Jones said: “The PGF, when granting a loan, is able to consider wider benefits than a commercial bank would, such as wider regional development and employment outcome.”
The number of jobs bandied about at the time was 10 and, although there’s an escape clause if the company’s ownership structure was to change, it emerged a little more than a month later that Westland Milk had entered discussions to be sold in part, or wholly, to a Canadian company.

So they did a $10 million loan that no bank would touch, which at best will create 10 jobs but actually looks like it was to allow the company to be sold to Canadians! Go Shane.

Oh, and he was most displeased that services were also slipping for specialist waiting times, elective surgical waiting times, and those for radiology or cancer services. Most displeased indeed.
This is your periodic reminder that he abolished the reporting of those targets.

Yep David Clark abolished public reporting of health targets and then is surprised that DHBs are now failing to meet them. Dumb meet dumber.

Chris Trotter writes:

WHY CAN’T LABOUR take “No” for an answer? When the party first offered voters a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) in 2011 they responded by giving Labour 27 percent of the Party Vote. Undaunted, David Cunliffe and his team doubled-down on the CGT in 2014. Labour’s Party Vote slumped to a risible 24 percent. Point taken?

For a while it looked as though Labour’s ears had started working again. Cunliffe’s successor, Andrew Little, moved swiftly (if unilaterally) to take the twice-rejected CGT off the table. Which should have been the end of the story. But, it wasn’t. Within Labour’s caucus there remained a tight little clutch of CGT supporters who simply refused to let the policy go.

That tight little clutch: led by the current Finance Minister, Grant Robertson; which recoils in horror at the very suggestion that Labour should tax the incomes of the very wealthy without mercy; remains absolutely convinced that taxing the local dairy owner’s capital gains will produce nothing but sweetness and light. They’ve run their blue pencils through Inheritance Tax, Land Tax, Financial Transaction Tax and Carbon Tax: but in spite of its emphatic rejection in two successive elections, they continue to give their CGT the big tick.

Yep a tax on every small business owner in New Zealand is what Dr Cullen has proposed.

Cullen’s aside, properly decoded, offers up just one meaning: “This is a damn fool’s political errand, which I only accepted so that I could deliver these twerps a CGT of such breadth and bite that only a complete idiot would consider implementing it!” If that is not what it means, then we must, reluctantly, conclude that the former Finance Minister has lost his wits.

I’m don’t know the motivation behind it, but it is true that the specific CGT Dr Cullen has recommended is a dog. It will exempt foreigners trading NZ shares and exempt NZers trading foreign shares but tax New Zealanders trading New Zealand shares.

What does it say about the Prime Minister and her Finance Minister that the very first thing they did following Little’s very own “captain’s call” (inspired, presumably, by Captain Oates’ heroic, if unavailing, act of self-sacrifice at the end of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctic Expedition) was to rush outside, pick up the discarded CGT, dust it off, and replace it reverently on Labour’s table? Clearly, Ardern and Robertson are not the sort of Gen-Xers who enjoy being told that they are wrong!

The Greens, however, are much, much worse. Co-leader James Shaw has declared that, if the 2020 General Election arrives and a CGT has not been enacted, then his party does not deserve to be re-elected. The problem which he and his party may be forced to confront is that if the CGT proposed by the Tax Working Group is enacted next year (effective in 2021) then the electorate may feel moved to give the Greens exactly what they deserve!

James Shaw has given people a great quote – if the TWG’s proposal is not implemented, he has said the Government doesn’t deserve to be re-elected.

The Herald reports:

Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw spent the most of any government minister on international travel in the last quarter, according to expenses released today.
Shaw’s $73,771 Cabinet-approved travel between October 1 and December 31 last year eclipsed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s $54,487 and Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ $49,378.
The Greens’ three ministers and under-secretary spent a total of $121,194 on international travel, $22,948 on domestic air travel, and $18,639 on surface travel. That figure includes VIP transport and the travel of their spouses and staff.

Saving the planet requires a huge amount of first class air travel it seems.

A spokesman said ministers’ air travel emissions were offset when they flew Air New Zealand or one of its Star Alliance partners.

This means that some tree planting company got some money from Air New Zealand. But you know what, those newly planted trees won’t actually soak up much in the way of carbon emissions for 30 years. And the Greens tell us that we must stop emitting now. So the hypocrisy is huge.

So how much carbon did James Shaw cause? Well according to My Climate, his trip to Poland would have been 25.1 tonnes and San Fran 12.2 tonnes. So that is 37.3 tonnes in just three months.

The average emissions per capita in the world in six, so James Shaw in three months did more emissions than six people did in a year – so his rate of “pollution” was 24 times greater.

And he says that’s all okay because he paid for 600 trees to be planted somewhere and in 30 years time they’ll have soaked it all up. Never mind that James says we’re all doomed if we’re not carbon neutral before then.

Stuff reports:

Tech disruption and the future of work are the focus of a new inquiry. 

Minister of Finance Grant Robertson announced the Productivity Commission on Thursday at the Work in Progress conference  in Wellington.

The commission has a year to work on the report which would  be presented in March 2020, Robertson said.
“This is a really important piece of work … I regard it as one of the most significant areas where the New Zealand Government needs to work on.

But Labour spent three years with its own inquiry into the future of work. So now they are having an inquiry into the findings of their inquiry. Sure beats actually making decisions I guess.

Stuff reports:

Self-identification was the process whereby people could change their gender marker through a statutory declaration.

This process is currently used when changing gender on passports and driver’s licenses, but changing it on birth certificates required an application to, and approval of, the Family Court. Self-identification aimed to streamline that process.

I agree the current process is too intrusive, especially requiring someone to go to court. It should be simpler.

But there is a valid argument that there is a difference between a current document and a historical document. A passport says what your gender currently is. A birth certificate says what gender you were born as.

I personally think one solution is to separate out sex and gender, recognizing them as different things (for some people).

In the statement on Monday, Martin said “significant changes” had been made to the bill regarding gender self-identification and that it had occurred “without adequate public consultation”.
But ActionStation director Laura Rapira O’Connell said further consultation was not required, as the changes were already endorsed by the Human Rights Commission, many LGBTQIA+ groups and the Privacy Commissioner.

“We don’t need consultation with non-trans people on what trans people need. We just need to listen to what trans people tell us they need.”

Wow that is an arrogant statement. It is basically saying no one who isn’t trans should be allowed to be heard on this issue.

If there was a petition on creating more boys only secondary schools, would one argue that no female should be allowed to be heard on that issue?

The Herald reports:

Killer driver Rouxle Le Roux will appear in court next month for allegedly breaching the conditions of her home detention.
The 19-year-old admitted a charge of dangerous driving causing the death of 15-year-old Nathan Kraatskow in May last year.
Le Roux had been drinking wine and smoking cannabis before she got behind the wheel of a Mercedes and hit and killed Nathan at the Oteha Valley Rd offramp in Albany.
Nathan was cycling home when he was killed.

In December Le Roux was sentenced to 11 months’ home detention.
She was also ordered to complete 250 hours of community work and was disqualified from driving for two-and-a-half years.
A condition of her home detention was that Le Roux must answer the door and present herself to authorities at any given time.
On February 20 it is alleged she failed to respond to two visits where probation officers knocked repeatedly on the door of her home.

She was incredibly lucky to get away with home detention. It appears she sees this as voluntary and has been going out with friends, rather than staying in home detention.

Hamish Rutherford reports:

When it comes to unintended consequences, a capital gains tax will create a few.
Consider the impact of the Tax Working Group’s proposals on the local sharemarket, something dissident working group member Robin Oliver, the former deputy commissioner of Inland Revenue, has been warning about for days.
New Zealanders would only see a difference when they buy New Zealand shares.
There would be no change in tax when we buy foreign shares and the tax would not apply to foreigners buying and selling shares in our companies.

To get some idea of how bad the proposed CGT is, consider those two bolded details.

NZers and NZ companies (and KiwiSaver funds) will pay CGT on NZ shares but not on foreign shares. So what is that going to incentivise? NZers will buy fewer shares in NZ companies and more shares in overseas companies. And the big KiwiSaver funds could do the same. This could be a disaster for the local equity markets.

But now consider the fact that foreigners will not pay CGT on NZ shares. So what will that incentivise? Foreigners buying more NZ shares.

Combine the two together and the net result is that the proposed CGT will result in New Zealanders buying more foreign shares, and foreigners buying more NZ shares. I look forward to Winston campaigning on this achievement.

It may get even worse than that. If a NZ company ends up with most shareholders being foreign, it may delist off the NZX and instead go on say the Singapore Stock Exchange. And once that happens, corporate functions start to transfer overseas also. End result – fewer companies in NZ.

The Herald reports:

The Labour Party has refused to renew the party membership of Auckland mayoral candidate and former Cabinet minister John Tamihere.
Tamihere said he is considering a legal challenge to the decision because he had been given no just cause for it.
He sent in his application from the Labour Party website in December with a $100 donation.
It was returned to him this week after a decision by the party’s ruling New Zealand Council at the weekend to reject his membership.

“I’ve been ex-communicated,” said Tamihere. “I feel like I have been thrown out of my church.”
“I haven’t been a member of any other political movement in my life.”
Labour Party president Nigel Haworth declined to make any comment, saying a process was in train.

I presume it is because he is standing against Phil Goff for Auckland Mayor. A good reminder that Goff is not independent, despite his nominal status.

The Prime Minister on Mike Hosking’s show said:

“Again, well again I would speak to my… you know, to my own experience. Yes, I haven’t been an owner/operator I have um… I have run a small NGO, um… I have worked in small businesses and I have been a small business spokesperson, I even worked in a small business in the UK.”

One of my readers sent the following OIA to the PM’s Office:

1. What was the business you have claimed to run that was not an NGO?
2. What were the small businesses you worked in?
3. What was the business you were a spokesperson for?
4. What was the small business you worked in while in the UK?

The response has to be seen to be believed:

1. The Prime Minister was the President of international political youth organisation IUSY.

So yes the Prime Minister told Mike Hosking she understood small business due to her having been the president of the international union of socialist youth!!!

2. The small businesses the Prime Minister worked at were a fish and chip shop in Morrinsville and a gift shop. She has also worked at a supermarket.

Oh dear. The best job experience you can claim of small business, is your after school jobs from 20 years ago.

3. The Prime Minister was referring to the fact that in Opposition she was Labour’s spokesperson for Small Business from 2014-2017.

A spokesperson for small business who has never worked in one, apart from after school jobs.

4. In the UK the Prime Minister was an assistant director in the Department for Business and Enterprise which involved working with small businesses.

With respect working for our equivalent of MBIE is not the same as actual business experience.

Ardern is far from the only politician not to have had small business experience. But what is cringeworthy is how she tries and pretend she does by claiming her role as head of the global young socialists gave her experience of small businesses.

Justin Trudeau’s former Attorney-General has given devastating testimony that shows Trudeau and his officials repeatedly tried to get her to interfere with an independent prosecution, for political reasons.

The Globe and Mail reported:

Jody Wilson-Raybould says she faced “consistent and sustained” political pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and top officials, including “veiled threats,” on the need to shelve the criminal prosecution of Montreal’s SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
In dramatic televised testimony before the House of Commons justice committee spanning 3½ hours, the former justice minister and attorney-general outlined detailed conversations at the highest levels of the Trudeau government about helping the Quebec engineering and construction giant out of its legal difficulties.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the intense, behind-the-scenes campaign to press her to intervene in the justice system involved about 10 phone calls and 10 meetings that she characterized as inappropriate between September and December, 2018.
“I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney-general of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin,” Ms. Wilson-Raybould told MPs.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer later called on Mr. Trudeau to resign, saying he has “lost the moral authority to govern,” and said the RCMP should investigate. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called for a public inquiry.

This is basically corruption. The Prime Minister, his officials, his Ministers all tried repeatedly to get the Attorney-General to interfere in a prosecution decision, because they were worried about the political impact of a successful prosecution in Quebec, Trudeau’s home state.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould said Mr. Trudeau and other senior officials pressed her to overrule the director of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, Kathleen Roussel, and negotiate an out-of-court settlement with SNC-Lavalin – a move that they said would also help the Quebec Liberal Party in last fall’s provincial election.
“After I had made my decision as the attorney-general not to issue a directive, the successive and sustained comments around jobs became inappropriate because I had made my decision and everybody was fully aware that I had made my decision,” she said in response to questions from MPs. “The Quebec election, any partisan considerations before or after, are entirely inappropriate, not relevant to me at the time wearing my judicial hat as the attorney-general.”

This should be unthinkable behaviour. If in NZ a ministerial staffer had gone to Chris Finlayson and tried to bully him into interfering with a prosecution, there would be nothing but a few entrails left of his or her remains.

In a meeting on Sept. 17 last fall that included Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Mr. Wernick, the Prime Minister said he wanted a solution to SNC-Lavalin’s legal troubles, the former attorney-general said.
“The Prime Minister asked me to help out, to find a solution to SNC, citing that if there was no DPA, there would be many jobs lost and that SNC would move from Montreal,” she said. “In response, I explained to him the law … and I told him that I had done my due diligence and made up my mind on SNC and that I was not going to interfere with the decision of the DPP [director of public prosecutions].”
Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the Prime Minister once again cited the potential loss of jobs and then “to my surprise, the clerk started to make the case for the need to have a DPA” in which he noted SNC had a board meeting on Sept. 20 with stockholders and might move its headquarters from Montreal to Britain.

Mr. Trudeau even cited his own political base in Quebec.
“At that point the Prime Minister jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that ‘I am an MP in Quebec — the member for Papineau,’” she recalled.

If the Liberal Party of Canada had any integrity they’d roll Trudeau immediately.

There is an election later this year. Trudeau was highly likely to be re-elected but the latest poll has the Liberals 7% behind the Conservatives. And that was taken before this explosive hearing.

Trudeau now has a -20% net approval rating. Again that was before this hearing. The election is on the 21st of October, so will be an interesting seven months.

Stuff reports:

The man who killed teenager Eli Holtz​ after the youth shot at him with a water pistol in central Auckland has been jailed for seven years.
Myron Robert Alf Felise​, 30, pleaded guilty to one charge of manslaughter in November, a few days ahead of his trial. 
On Thursday, Felise, from Bulls but originally from Otara, was sentenced to seven years in jail by Justice Gerard van Bohemen in the Auckland High Court.

Felise will have to serve at least half his sentence in jail.  

So may be out in three and a half years.

Dickey stated Felise’s previous conviction for aggravated robbery and inability to manage alcohol and failure to address that in the past meant he remained a real risk to the public.

So not a one off.

The 31-year-old grew up in Otara and associated with the Bloods gangs from as young as 13.
“You have been involved in 40 incidents involving serious violence in a gang context. That is truly appalling,” the judge said. 

This is what is crazy. He’s got 40, yes 40, violent offences to his name. He finally kills someone, and he gets such a light sentence.

Felise was one of the men charged with the murder of Manurewa liquor store owner Navtej Singh in 2008.
Six south Auckland men, including Felise, were on trial for the murder and aggravated robbery of Navtej Singh, 30, who was shot on June 7, 2008 while working in his store, Riverton Liquor, in Auckland’s Manurewa East. He died the next day.
Felise was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter and was convicted of aggravated robbery. 

This happened before three strikes. If three strikes had already been in place he would not be eligible for parole.

Does anyone think he is going to come out and not commit more violent acts?

Mike Hosking writes:

The Capital Gains Tax train wreck is all the evidence you need this is a Government that didn’t have a plan.
Why are we here? Because they’d tried this before, got burned twice – and still didn’t learn the lesson.
Jacinda Ardern personally overrode her party and ran this policy last election to be enacted by now. But she got dragged kicking and screaming into a cupboard and was subdued to the point where she acquiesced, and promised nothing before 2020, then flick it off to a working group.

The working group was specifically tasked with finding a way to make a CGT work, they couldn’t. They told the Government they couldn’t, they were then told to go away and try harder. All the while the Government stalled, pretending they hadn’t made up their mind.
They’re still stalling, pretending they haven’t made up their mind and in that is the naivety, they’re taking their issue, and making a complete and utter hash of it. The Prime Minister, at her post-Cabinet press conference, lectured the media on how to cover this subject, and offered up an olive branch to small businesses and farmers that they’ll be at the top of her mind.

The PM claims she knows small business because she once ran a NGO, which is of course a non-profit organisation. Rather different. Also her CV doesn’t list any NGO she managed except of course when she was President of the International Union of Socialist Youth.

So her reassurance to business owners is she has them top of mind as she once ran the global socialist youth NGO. So reassuring.

If you’re taking farms and businesses out, you open the Pandora’s Box of the fast burgeoning industry that is tax avoidance. Not to mention the fact the more you exempt, the less you actually raise. And the less you raise, the more questions are asked about the cost of compliance and chasing the returns.

The compliance costs are huge. Experts in this area say it will definitely be in the billions of dollars. not just hundreds of millions.

Politico has a copy of the prepared statement of Trump’s former lawyer and fixer to Congress. There’s so much in there it is hard to know what is the most potent, and will his base even care?

The big takeaways are:

1. Trump knew from Roger Stone that Wikileaks was going to dump the DNC e-mails hacked by Russia. He may not have known Russia gave them to Wikileaks, but still significant.
2. Trump wrote personal cheques to reimburse Cohen, while President for the pay off of Stormy Daniels – very likely a felony offence.
3. Trump paid for a portrait of himself from his charitable foundation
4. Trump threatened his high schools and colleges to never release his grades, which implies they were pretty shit or at least well below what he boasted
5. Trump was briefed on the Moscow Tower project regularly while denying any business dealings in Russia, and Trump’s other lawyers approved the Cohen statement perjuring Cohen before Congress last time
6. Trump never expected to win the primary – he saw it as the best free infomercial ever for his brand.
7. Trump is not as wealthy as he claims (no surprise there)

No 2 may be the most problematic as it is a clear crime. He can’t be prosecuted for it though as he is President.

Circa’s production of Side by Side by Sondheim was a fantastically fun evening of entertainment.

Stephen Sondheim is one of the world’s greatest composers and lyricist. He has won eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

The revue came about in 1976 when a cast member of A Little Night Music was asked to help do a revue for a small theatre and he suggested
a revue of Sondheim material. Sondheim was asked for permission and said “By all means try, but I can’t think of anything more boring except possibly the Book of Kells”.

Sondheim was wrong and Side by Side became a major hit around the world. It first played at Circa in 1979 and returns 40 years later.

The three singers are all top performers – highly charismatic, strong voices and animated acting. Combined with Michael Nicholas Williams and Colin Taylor on the pianos, they give you a two hour festival of music. You learn about Sondheim and his successes and failures while you laugh and giggle at the songs.

The cast obviously enjoy the production immensely and it rubs off on the audience. The combination is a superb experience. I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying the show.

There were a couple of glitches. Sarah Lineham’s microphone gave some intermittent static for the first half hour or so, which got annoying. Possibly as a result of that Lineham was slightly difficult to hear in a couple of solo parts. Later on there were no problems, so I suspect it was just a teething issue.

Julie O’Brien had the most fun parts, and her facial expressions combined so well with her singing. Matthew Pike rounded off the top trio with great verve and ability.

I don’t get out to the theatre as much as I used to, since becoming a parent. But I’m glad I managed to make this production as it was such great fun. It’s also inspired me to see some more Sondheim musicals when I am next overseas.

Rating: ****1/2

Cactus Kate returns to the blogosphere just in time to kick the crap out of the Tax Working Group.

The balance in the universe has now been restored 🙂