The Herald reports:

The European Union’s parliament has taken a decisive step towards unilaterally reducing New Zealand’s rights to export specified quantities of tariff-free sheepmeat, beef and dairy products to the trading bloc if and when Brexit occurs.
The move has been slammed as “outrageous” by former trade negotiator Charles Finny in a Tweet and “disappointing” by the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the proposed moves risk compounding “growing international economic uncertainty and rising trade tensions”. …

Splitting the quotas would be “hotly contested” by New Zealand and other affected nations, who would seek dispute settlement through the World Trade Organisation if the move went ahead unilaterally.

Obviously the recent trip to the EU was a huge success.

The latest employment data from Stats NZ isn’t good news for the Government. However I wouldn’t place too much reliance on just one quarter. Key data is:

• Unemployment up 10,000
• Employment up 2,000
• Unemployment rate up from 4.0% to 4.3%
• 15 – 19 year old unemployment rate up from 15.2% to 21.2%
• 20 – 24 year old unemployment rate up from 6.3% to 8.3%
• 15 – 19 year old NEET rate up from 7.6% to 11.4%
• OECD rank for unemployment drops from 9th= to 14th=

Also embarrassing for the Government is the gender pay gap has increased, which shows rhetoric is cheap.

The ratio of average female to male pay in December 2017 was 88.2% and in December 2018 was 87.8%

Diego Zambrano writes at Lawfare:

The U.S., along with dozens of other states, recently recognized Juan Guaidó, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Discussion of international recognition of Guaidó’s presidency has focused largely on the political implications of the move as a rejection of Nicolás Maduro’s corrupt dictatorship. While recognition typically focuses on a ruler’s de facto control over a territory, Guaidó’s de jure status under the Venezuelan Constitution is also crucial. If Guaidó is clearly president under Venezuelan law, then recognition seems warranted here. Even setting aside the fact that Maduro’s kleptocratic rule has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, I believe that the best and most sensible reading of the Venezuelan Constitution leads to the conclusion that Juan Guaidó is now the interim president of Venezuela.

What is the argument for this:

In 2018, the unconstitutional assembly called for, and organized, a presidential election—in direct violation of the constitution. The alternate assembly sidelined the actual National Assembly’s role, staffed the National Electoral Council with Maduro loyalists, and ensured another “election” that would keep Maduro in power.
All of that unconstitutional procedure means that the so-called presidential election of 2018 was de jure null and void.

And what does that mean:

Because of these violations, and others, there simply was no election under any reading of the Venezuelan Constitution. The National Assembly declared that the process did not constitute an election; the international community overwhelmingly rejected it as a sham; and opposition Venezuelan political parties boycotted the process. The U.N. human rights chief noted that the 2018 process did not “in any way fulfill minimal conditions for free and credible elections.”
The key to understanding Guaidó and the National Assembly’s argument is that, when Maduro’s presidential term concluded on Jan. 10, there was no elected president to assume the presidency. Maduro’s claims to the contrary are irrelevant, null and void.
In a situation with no president, Article 233 of the constitution regulates the presidential line of succession. In this case, that article is best read to mean that the president of the National Assembly should temporarily assume the presidency.

So Maduro’s term expired on 10 January, and hence Guaido becomes interim President. The exact clause is:

[W]hen an elected President becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic. 

This is why almost every Western country in the world, except New Zealand has recognised Guaido as the interim President.

A reader writes in:

On the HUD website it list one of the Kiwibuild sites as High Street, Lower Hutt with 20 apartments ‘under construction’. I thought your readers might appreciate this photo of that building which has no obvious work being undertaken and is an Earthquake prone building needing major strengthening before if can be fitted out.
The recent history of the building is rather potted. BNZ sold the building some time ago but occupied the Ground and First floors until 5 years ago. Since then it was largely empty, with short term leases. The Council bought the building with a view of refurbishing it and selling it to a commercial property operator, but instead sold at a large loss due to the high strengthening costs to the developer who has signed up for a Kiwibuild project.
If anyone believes this building will be completed by 30 June please let me know – I just happen to have a bridge for sale.

The photo is below.

I’m sure they will be ready to be lived in, in 145 days. Yeah, right.

Newshub reports:

Newshub can reveal the Government’s Provincial Growth Fund (PGF), designed to create jobs and boost the regions, has only created 54 jobs and spent just $26.6 million of its $3 billion.
Even with just 3.4 percent of the funding paid out, each job is costing the Government about $484,000.

What an absolute waste of money.

Of course the PGF is about creating votes, not jobs. Every NZ household is paying around $1,500 just to help NZ First win an electorate seat.

New Zealand is looking more and more isolated in being one of the very few Western countries that has not recognised Juan Guaido as the interim President of Venezuela.

Countries that have recognised Guadio include”

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Chile
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• France
• Finland
• Germany
• Honduras
• Iceland
• Netherlands
• Peru
• Poland
• Spain
• Sweden
• UK
• US

So close to every Western democracy. But who is on the other side, backing Madura:

• Belarus
• Cambodia
• China
• Cuba
• Iran
• North Korea
• Russia
• South Africa
• Syria
• Turkey

The Ardern Government can’t decide which side is right. I wouldn’t have thought it is that hard.

The Taxpayers Union points out:

The Government annually takes $120 million more from Māori via tobacco excise than it gives in Treaty Settlements and Māori Development funding.

The excise tax has proven effective in encouraging Europeans and Asians to not smoke, but less so for Maori and Pacific Islanders.

The drop in smoking prevalance between 2007 and 2017 for each group was:

• Asians 27%
• Europeans 24%
• Maori 16%
• Pasifika 10%

You still have 35% of Maori as current smokers and 32% as daily smokers.

The PM has said 2019 is the year of delivery for Labour. The reality is that no Government has ever delivered so little for so much money.

The $2 billion Kiwibuild project has built 47 homes.

The $3 billion Provincial Development Fund has created 54 jobs.

The free tertiary fees program saw a minuscule 0.3% increase in university enrollments, or 430 more students. And other tertiary providers have had a drop in enrollments.

So for over $6 billion, the actual delivery has been 47 houses, 54 jobs and 430 more students.

The Herald reports:

New Zealand First MP and Cabinet Minister Tracey Martin says she personally witnessed a National Party MP instructing online “trolls” to attack a political opponent.
Martin will not name the MP, but says she watched him direct a group of supporters on Facebook to personally attack then-Labour leader Andrew Little while they were sharing a domestic flight during the election campaign.
The Internal Affairs Minister recalled the story at an event hosted by Netsafe in Auckland yesterday, saying that she was concerned about the role of social media in manipulating politics here and overseas. Addressing an audience of about 40 people, she said she had never spoken about it publicly.
“During the 2017 election I was on a plane and there was another Member of Parliament sitting in front of me.”

She said she stood up and witnessed the incident.
“… I watched this person in front of me, who was running a group of 15 trolls on Facebook, give them the messages that they needed to start bombarding the other party that they were trying to have an effect on.
“The messages they sent changed the outcome of the election. It wasn’t the outcome they were hoping for, but that was what they were attempting to do.
“They personalised the messages to try and get one individual to feel so uncomfortable about their position that they removed themselves from it.”

Amazing. It wasn’t the plummeting polls that caused Andrew Little to resign. It was some Facebook comments from National Party supporters.

If Tracey is really worried about MPs manipulating media, I’d love to know what she thinks about this e-mail sent out in 2011:

DO YOU LISTEN TO TALKBACK RADIO?
Would you like to be part of the New Zealand First Talkback Army?
A select group of New Zealand First members will be continually updated by email with policy positions and topical information that they can use to keep the Radio Listening public of New Zealand well informed.
 
Play your part in the 2011 Election Campaign.
Join our Talkback Army

Organising an army of what she calls trolls (I call them supporters) to manipulate radio listeners seems to be what she is railing against.

So who was the 2011 organiser of this Talkback Army:

Contact person: Tracey Martin

I wonder if they are related?

One News reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was caught off guard when asked at Waitangi today what the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi actually say.
Fronting media ahead of Waitangi Day on Wednesday which commemorates the signing of the Treaty in 1840, Ms Ardern was asked by 1 NEWS political reporter Maika Sherman what Article One of the Treaty says.
“Oh, Article One? On the spot?” Ms Ardern replied.
“Kawanatanga, sorry, excuse me,” she added when prompted by Willie Jackson and other ministers standing behind her. 

The story here isn’t that the PM didn’t know what Article One says, and needed Willie to help her out.

The story is the media doing a “gotcha” story where they treat politics as a quiz night. You ask an MP a question with the hope they can’t answer it on the spot, and then have a story about how ignorant or out of touch they are.

The classic is how much is a loaf of bread. Others are what is the current inflation rate. Who is the best selling NZ musician etc etc.

MPs should refuse to play these games. If a journalist asks a question along these lines, the best responses are:

• I’m a Member of Parliament, not a quiz show participant.
• If you don’t know the answer, go Google it
• This is silly gotcha politics and I’m not playing along

The Press editorial:

We could all do with talking less and listening more. That is a good rule in life generally, but it is especially true in politics and the noisy subset of political thought and activism that occurs online. 
The most encouraging thing that former National Party leader Don Brash said during an interview with RNZ’s Guyon Espiner​ on Monday was that he was going to Waitangi to listen. Espiner was of course talking to Brash about his decision to speak at Te Tii Marae at Waitangi on Tuesday. 
Brash was invited by Ngāpuhi member Reuben Taipari, who explained that Brash will be one of a group of speakers at a forum. You could expect that most of the speakers will have quite different views on Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi to Brash, whose infamous visit to Waitangi in 2004 led to mudslinging when protesters hurled dirt at him.  …

It is of course fiercely ironic that Brash is permitted to relate views that some see as anti-Māori on a marae at Waitangi but was not allowed to speak to students at a New Zealand university, which should be a site for open discussion.

Good on Ngapuhi for being open to debate. Talking to each other about our different views is far better for society than deplatforming people because snowflakes claim views they disagree with make them unsafe.

The Herald reports:

A Ukrainian family facing deportation once their work visa expires in July have received an influx of support from MPs and the public.

Nataliya Shchetkova, her husband Alex Derecha, and their five children, face an uncertain future after Immigration New Zealand’s decision to deny the family residency because it does not believe their business adds significant benefit to New Zealand.

The family run Auckland restaurant La Vista which had a turnover of $1.6 million last year and employs 26 staff – 17 of whom are full-time.

Since the Herald shared their story this time last week, the family have received an influx of support from members of the public, MPs and Act Party leader David Seymour.

A petition has been launched and backed by Seymour, asking Parliament to urge the Minister of Immigration Iain Lees-Galloway and Associate Minister of Immigration Kris Faafoi to grant them residency by special direction.

The petition has received almost 10,000 signatures of support in two days.

Silly Ukrainians. They set up a legal business that employs 26 New Zealanders. No wonder they are being deported. They should have set up a drug importing business, and then not only would they not be deported, but the Minister would give them residency also.

Stacey Kirk writes:

The housing shortage is a big and tangible problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of Kiwis, and there were countless times on the campaign trail when Labour leader Jacinda Ardern and her MPs literally said “we will fix the housing crisis”.
With the admission the Government would only be able to build 300 by houses by July 1, Housing Minister Phil Twyford has all but confirmed the rest of their deadlines are likely to blow out too. 
And as much as Ardern tries to claim the longer deadline to build 100,000 houses in 10 years is still on, no one’s kidding themselves. Their flagship policy is six months in and already a dead duck. 

Rather convenient that they have scrapped every target they could be held accountable against. Having a 10 year target and no interim targets is just a mechanism to avoid accountability.

The Herald reports:

Air New Zealand is pulling its controversial safety rap video from planes and replacing it with a previous version after heavy criticism.
The video, which features local musicians Kings, Randa and Theia rapping about plane safety over beats from Run DMC and Sisters Underground, is being removed from flights at the end of today.
In its place, a previously released safety clip called Summer of Safety starring Rachel Hunter and used in 2016 would screen in its place.
Air New Zealand says its decision is based on a new campaign to stimulate domestic travel and promote tourism to Northland.

That safety video was terrible. I’ve liked or even loved most of the Air NZ ones but the rap one was unwatchable it was so bad.

May it never be seen again.

Audrey Young lists the eight problems or headache’s the PM faces this year. They are:

1. Capital Gains Tax – will they really fight the next election on taxing everyone who dies with assets, everyone with a lifestyle block, and everyone who owns a small business?
2. Kiwibuild – need more be said
3. Fair Pay Agreements – the back to the 70s national awards that will allow 10% of workers to force an entire industry into a compulsory award.
4. Mental Health Report – they have set such huge expectations for massive change, can they possibly match the expectations?
5. Tomorrow’s Schools – will they try and grab power away from parents and place all schools under the direct control of Ministerial appointees instead of parents?
6. Social welfare review – will their “kinder” policies do anything except lead to more people on welfare – it’s already started
7. Prison reform – will they get the numbers for a catch and release justice system?
8. Karel Sroubek – everytime some other family gets deported, the public get reminded of how the Minister intervened to let the gang associate drug dealer stay

Stuff reports:

Have you heard the one about New Zealand’s booming migration?
Turns out, we might not have quite as many people heading to our shores as we thought.
Statistics NZ has switched to using outcomes data to measure migration, instead of the old intentions-based measure. It says this is a more accurate way of showing what’s really happening.
The data now comes from information from border crossings, showing how long people actually spend in or out of New Zealand rather than what they said they were going to do on their passenger cards.

But by this metric, in the year to October 2018, estimated migration was 45,200 people – not the 61,800 it would have been with the old data.
“Not only is net migration lower than we previously thought, but it’s heading down slightly faster. The gap between the old and new data has widened from around a 2500 person difference in the year to September 2014 to an over 17,000 person difference in the year to September 2018,” said Infometrics economist Brad Olsen.

This is a quite significant difference. And Steven Joyce shares on Twitter interesting background to how it came about:

If you read the entire thread a lot of it came about because overseas students would be counted as a long-term arrival (intending to stay a year or more) but leave just before the 12 months were up and then would be counted as a short-term departure and hence inflate the net migration figures.

Officials were somewhat resistant to the change saying any impact would be minor, but Ministers persisted and in fact the data showed a very significant change.

The Herald reports:

Security was called to the parliamentary gym last week to quell a “loud and uncouth” confrontation between Police Minister Stuart Nash and another gym-goer, according to Speaker Trevor Mallard.

Nash is a frequent user of the gym and has previously bragged about his weight-lifting exploits on social media.
On Wednesday last week, a man who works in the parliamentary complex wanted to use weight-lifting gym equipment that Nash had been using for some time, the Weekend Herald understands.

When he told Nash he wanted to use the same equipment, an argument ensued.

Speaker Trevor Mallard, who along with the Parliamentary Service general manager is responsible for the welfare of those working in the complex, said he was aware of the incident.
“It was over gym etiquette on machine use,” Mallard told the Weekend Herald.
“It’s not serious enough for security to report up to me. I only know about it because Nash told me earlier this week.”

This is basically a non story. Two gym bunnies exchanged words over who had dibs on a machine.

What I find interesting is how this story hit the media? Who leaked it?

Tracy Watkins writes:

From being feted as the Davos darling by the world’s media, Jacinda Ardern’s return to New Zealand must have felt like a bucket of cold water in her face.
Ardern arrived back to a KiwiBuild shambles,  an unsettled back office, cancer waiting times, cost of living gripes, state sector strikes, (another) employer backlash over industrial relations reforms, fresh NZ First rumblings, tensions with China, and a bunch of political headaches that are about to land on her desk – chief among them how to sell a capital gains tax, but also a raft of reports and inquiries on problems that Labour kicked down the road after getting into office.
No wonder Ardern looked like she’d rather be anywhere but here when she fronted her first Beehive press conference after Cabinet on Tuesday.

A number of media commented on how irritable the PM was at that press conference. One said it was the sort of behaviour you normally get from a PM after seven or eight year, not one.

There are now serious questions within her Government over whether the policy is still fit for purpose.  There are even more serious questions about whether Housing Minister Phil Twyford is the person who can fix it.

To be fair to Twyford he inherited the draft policy. Some of what he wants to do such as abolish the Auckland rural boundary is very sensible. He should get on with it.

Some immediate tweaks will help.  It seems that only now are the scheme’s architects planning on surveying the tens of thousands of people who registered for KiwiBuild to find out what they want. The big question is why that never happened in the first place.

Hmmn, basic market research.

Her back office is in a state of flux, with a number of key staff leaving and others forced to reapply for their jobs as a result of restructuring.

I’ve never heard of a PMs office restructure where people reapply for their jobs. That is so 1980s. Restructures are quite common, but you basically just decide who is and is not working out, and implement it. Forcing press secretaries to reapply for their jobs is the worst thing you can do, as it tells them you think you can do better than them.

The New York Times reports:

New Zealand Vowed 100,000 New Homes to Ease Crunch. So Far It Has Built 47.

That’s the headline. The first paras:

When New Zealand’s housing crisis became so bad that one study found only Hong Kong less affordable, the country’s prime minister came up with a solution: An ambitious plan to prompt the construction of 100,000 new homes over the next decade to help ease prices.
But on Wednesday, the government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said it would scrap its initial targets after failing to meet them, with just 47 of the 1,000 homes it had promised by July built so far.

Nice to have a policy fiasco go global!