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!

Radio NZ reports:

The government has ruled out putting a tax on red meat despite earlier fears that it might do so later.

It blamed what it called a “stupid figure of speech” for confusion about the matter.

When a Minister says we are not doing a meat tax at this stage, of course people correctly read between the lines and see “But we’d like to do it later”.

After the article about meat tax appeared in The Lancet, media in New Zealand quoted the Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter as not ruling out a red meat tax in New Zealand, saying simply that it was not under consideration “at this stage”.
That led the National Party to accuse the Labour government of possibly bringing one in later, which could also jeopardise New Zealand’s rural economy, the party said.
The minister’s office later said the phrase “at this stage” was a “stupid figure of speech” issued while the office was still in holiday mood.

So does this mean we can’t trust anything put out by a Government Minister in January?

Stuff reports:

The lawyer for a group of Indian students deported from New Zealand over fake visas has slammed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for her silence after she promised to help them should Labour win the 2017 election.
In February 2017, 150 Indian students were issued deportation notices after an Indian immigration agency used fraudulent supporting documents in their visas, unbeknownst to the students.
Immigration New Zealand said the students were responsible for the fake documents and issued deportation notices due to adverse character. The Ombudsman upheld the decision in 2018. 

Ardern and then-Labour leader Andrew Little posed for photos with the students during a visit to the Auckland Unitarian Church, where the students were staying. 

Oh oh oh. The poor students. They thought Jacinda and Andrew doing a photo op with them, meant they actually cared about them and would do something to help them. No, no, no. It was about the publicity.

Ardern slammed the National-led government for its decision and promised to help the students should Labour gain power, Alastair McClymont, a specialist immigration lawyer for a group of the students, said.

18 months in and what has been done?

Despite winning the election and being sworn in as Prime Minister, McClymont said Ardern then went silent on her promise.

He sounds surprised.

The Press editorial:

Is it time to tear up the plans and start again? Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered a masterclass in political sophistry and dissembling on Wednesday when she claimed, with a straight face, that the KiwiBuild goal of 100,000 homes built over 10 years remains in place. The line was repeated a few more times, as if we were watching one of those dry parodies of political interviews by Bryan Dawe and the late John Clarke. 

That is a great comparison.

Those “interim targets” were to have 1000 homes built by July, another 5000 by mid-2020 and another 10,000 by 2021. As it stands, only 47 have been completed and 236 more are being built according to the KiwiBuild website’s dismal “Follow our progress” page. That translates as 30 finished houses in Papakura, 10 in Otahuhu and seven in Wanaka. Rather than 1000 homes by July, KiwiBuild will be lucky to get to fewer than 300.  

It may be worse than that. Of the 236 “under construction” only 80 are known. 156 are “yet to be announced” which suggests they are not finalised.

Viewers of Netflix will be familiar with the Fyre Festival, at which some tech entrepreneurs promised to deliver the world’s most glamorous and exclusive music festival. The reality proved to be very different. It is not much of a stretch to say that KiwiBuild is turning into this Government’s Fyre Festival.

The Government’s flagship programme has just been compared to the world’s most well known global scam. Ouch.

I thought a couple of examples of how the stealth increases in income tax due to inflation make families worse off would be helpful.

Let’s assume inflation is 2% a year and to make it simple (won’t compound) is 6% over a three year term.

If you are on a wage of around $50,000 then you pay tax of $8,020 and have a net income of $41,980.

If your wages rise by 6% to compensate for inflation then your income is $53,000, your tax increases to $8,920 and you net income to $44,080.

What is the resulting change for each:

• Gross income up 6% (0% in real terms)
• Tax up 11.2% (4.0% in real terms)
• Net income up 5% (down 0.9% in real terms)

So over one term, you end up 1% worse off and paying 5% more tax in real terms.

And what about the change over three terms?

If your wages rise by 18% to compensate for inflation then your income is $59,000, your tax increases to $10,720 and you net income to $48,280.

What is the resulting change for each:

• Gross income up 18% (0% in real terms)
• Tax up 33.7% (13.3% in real terms)
• Net income up 15% (down 2.5% in real terms)

So over three terms term, you end up 2.5% worse off and paying 13% more tax in real terms.

This also means the higher inflation is, the more extra tax you end up paying, and the worse off you are in real terms.

There has been a vicious attack on gay men. Who is behind this vicious attack? Is it a religious conservative? No. It’s a member of the Auckland Pride Board.

Gay Express reports:

Haka’s comments come after Pride Board member Phylesha Brown-Acton has gone on an expletive-laden rant about “gay male privilege.”
Brown-Acton took to Facebook to denounce those who oppose the activist group People Against Prisons Aoteroa, who initiated the ban on uniformed police participating in the Pride Parade. Speaking about the opponents of the ban, she said, “your gay white male privilege has been disruptive, extremist and abusive to the lives of trans people’s way before PAPA came along and started addressing the inequities of your abuse.”
She went on to say that gay male opponents should, “take your moral compass and shove it up the hole that you can’t seem to keep closed.”

Could you imagine if anyone else had said this about a gay man, or gay men? There would be an Action Station petition demanding they be sacked, and multiple complaints to the Human Rights Commission.

And imagine if one referred to a woman as unable to keep something closed. You’d be tarred and feathered.

The irony is Brown-Action is on the board that is meant to be arranging an inclusive festival. Her hatred for white gay men who disagree with her seems rather against the inclusivity.

Brown Acton goes on to say that, “gay white men,” have excluded Maori and Pacific voices from previous festivals and that is the root cause of the currently divided LGBT community in Auckland.

Poor white gay men. Being gay doesn’t overcome their privilege of being white and male so they’re still evil oppressors.

That is being called into question however by Maori, who point out that the current festival does not include a single Maori event, something noted not only by Mika Haka but others online also, with community member John Kingi taking to Facebook to ask if Maori were even consulted, writing, “Did no Maori want to organise an event? Were Maori approached? If not, why? Did the organisers seek to engage throughout the Takataapui community to seek help in regards to this?”

So she is blaming white gay men for marginalising queer Maori, yet her own board hasn’t arranged a single Maori event, or even consulted Maori.

What a great example of identity politics as an excuse for incompetence.

Matthew Hooton writes:

Simon Bridges has set aside one of the standard rules of opposition politics.
Conventional wisdom says an opposition should hold back policy until just a few weeks before an election. The idea is to avoid scrutiny by interest groups, adoption by the government or boredom among voters.
Instead, with the next election as many as 94 weeks away, Bridges confirmed in his State of the Nation speech on Wednesday that National would repeal the Auckland petrol tax, freeze other petrol taxes, repeal any new capital gains tax (CGT) and not introduce any other new taxes.

Yeah good to see National actually coming up with policy early on. I hope it continues. I understand there will be a number of policy discussion drafts in major areas out in the first half of this year.

As a move to protect the real value of family incomes, the promise is almost impossible to oppose, although Finance Minister Grant Robertson tried valiantly, saying it was “reckless”, “empty” and would create a “fiscal hole” requiring cuts to social services.
Aside from making Robertson defend automatically increasing families’ real tax burden, the political value of Bridges’ very specific promise is that it contrasts with a Government certain to get on the wrong side of the tax debate and already trying to hide its lack of policy clarity with bureaucratic waffle.

There is a difference between a tax cut, and preventing stealth tax increases. Labour will look very bad if they campaign on continuing to increase tax takes by stealth. Why should hard working wage earners get taxed more just because of inflation?

The Prime Minister will soon regret declaring 2019 “the year of delivery”. …

Ardern’s problem is that on anything measurable, “delivery” is going backwards.
There will not be 30,000 new houses by the next election, nor 300 million trees, nor even $3 billion of handouts under Shane Jones’ Provincial Growth Fund.
Student numbers have fallen despite the $325m Education Minister Chris Hipkins calculated his fees-free tertiary education policy would cost in 2018/19.
The method by which inequality statistics are calculated means Ardern is unlikely to be able to report any material progress over the next 94 weeks.

I agree that labelling this the year of delivery will backfire. They will deliver change but not results or better outcomes.

Just as waffly is Ardern and Robertson’s promise to base this and future Budgets around “wellbeing” — a term doomed to be for this current regime what “innovation” and “sustainability” were for the previous two.
If Ardern and Robertson’s use of “wellbeing” is meant to imply previous governments were entirely preoccupied with headline economic growth over such things as social cohesion, strong families and individuals achieving their potential, then they are wrong.
Of the nearly $100b Parliament appropriates each year, almost all is spent on programmes originally intended to promote wellbeing rather than growth.

It is almost Orwellian nonsense. As Hooton says, almost all Government spending is already targeted at wellbeing, rather than economic growth. That is partly because it is business not government that creates economic growth. The Government can slow growth down, but generally not create it.

Clive Williams, a former director of security intelligence for the Australian Defence Force writes:

Much of the recent media reporting about the potential security threat posed by Huawei telecommunications and networking equipment, and Huawei consumer electronics products, is poorly informed and smacks of hysteria.

Fuelled by the US.

Huawei is now a multinational company and the world’s largest producer of electronic products. It has cooperative arrangements with 80 percent of the world’s telecom companies so it’s very common for its products to be integrated into all types of telecommunications systems.
Huawei invests more than any of its competitors on research and development – an estimated US$15 billion in 2018. It has research institutes in 21 countries – including the US, UK and Canada, and has international programs to identify and employ the best and brightest technical graduates from universities.
Huawei has a workforce of 170,000 and in 2017 its revenue was US$92.5 billion. 76,000 of its workforce are engaged in research and development.

Which is why they produce such good products used by almost every telco in the world.

In 2014 The New York Times reported (based on documents leaked by defector Edward Snowden) that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had since 2007 been operating a covert program against Huawei. This had involved breaking into Huawei’s internal networks, including its headquarters’ networks and founder Ren Zhengfei’s communications.

Good when NSA does it. Bad when Russia does it.

The main security concern is that Huawei could be used by the Chinese government to engage in espionage and information warfare. (There is no available evidence that it has done so to date.) This is unfortunate for Huawei because the company seems focussed on being commercially successful – not on espionage or cyber warfare.

The irony of what is happening, is it provides greater incentives to China to pressure Huawei to do bad things. Huawei is worth much more to China as a successful company, at present. But if the US manage to cripple Huawei, then that may change.

As long as advanced telecommunications products (including 5G) are installed in Australia by competent security-vetted Australian technicians who understand the technology, there should not be a security problem from using foreign products.
The likely alternative to adopting Huawei’s 5G technology is to use a lesser American or European product that may also be compromisable – and probably more expensive.

Banning Huawei means we all pay more.

Jo Black writes in The Listener:

New Zealand has no shortage of people ready to take offence at any hint of racism or gender bias, or able to detect any trace of political correctness or the nanny state. Former National Party leader Don Brash was “disinvited” to speak at Massey University by Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas. She cited “security concerns” but an email trail showed that she didn’t like his anti-Treaty rhetoric.

But Haidt and Lukianoff say that in the US, the new morality has reached its apogee in prestigious universities, particularly in residential colleges.
In these institutions, they say, student demands have escalated for “safe spaces” where students can be protected from speakers, language or ideas that offend them – if they have been unsuccessful in getting invitations to such speakers withdrawn in the first place. Some students demand that lecturers give “trigger warnings” if a lecture might contain language or ideas that might upset them, and sometimes such language can be considered aggression, or even violence.
There are shame circles, denunciations and ritualised apologies as during the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. “We have data showing students are afraid, mostly of each other, and the professors are afraid, mostly of the students.”

Ironic that the biggest threat to students, is other students.

The great majority of students today want to learn and want to be exposed to different views. So I would never tell a story about a generation that has lost its mind; that has not happened. But what has happened is that we have a big increase in the small minority that embrace this call-out culture and their power to intimidate people has been multiplied at least tenfold by social media.

The social media lynch mob.

The Washington Post reports:

E-cigarettes are almost twice as effective at helping smokers quit as nicotine replacement therapies such as lozenges and patches, according to a new study that immediately stoked the debate over whether e-cigarettes are an important smoking-cessation tool or a health menace.
The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first randomized trial to test the effectiveness of modern e-cigarettes vs. nicotine-replacement products, said Peter Hajek, a psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, who led the trial. The researchers found that 18 percent of the e-cigarette users were smoke-free after a year, compared with 9.9 percent of those in the nicotine-replacement group. The participants also received behavioral support to stop smoking.
For years, physicians have been reluctant to recommend e-cigarettes for smoking cessation because of a lack of clinical trial data, Hajek said. “This is now likely to change,” he added in a statement.

A randomised trial is very robust, and that is a huge finding.