Kris Faafoi announced:

“The introduction of an interest and fees cap on high-cost loans will prevent people from accumulating large debt from a single small loan. For example, if you borrow $500 you will never have to pay back more than $1,000 in total, including all fees and interest.

Overall this seems a good step. Most loan sharks prey on people in difficulty and sign them up to exploitative stuff such as 25% per week interest.

However there is a risk of unintended consequences. The cap may become the default. It might lead to some lenders increasing their rates.

Also there may be no incentive to every pay a loan back once the cap is reached. Let’s say you borrow that $500 and don’t repay it and eventually you owe $1,000. Then you can never be charged any more interest so why repay?

“The changes also lift the level of professionalism across the industry, by requiring directors and chief executives of lenders offering consumer credit contracts to pass a ‘fit and proper person’ test in order to register as a Financial Service Provider.

That seems worthwhile.

The Herald reports:

Asia Bibi has spent almost a decade in prison.

The Christian woman was sentenced to death in Pakistan for insulting the Prophet Muhammad during an argument with a group of field workers. …

Aasiya Noreen “Asia” Bibi is a mother-of-five from Ittan Wali, a small rural village in central Pakistan.

In her biography, Blasphemy: A Memoir, Bibi describes the moment that would radically alter her life forever.

On June 14, 2009, she set out to the fields near her house to take part in a berry-picking harvest, for which she would be paid 250 Pakistani rupees for a day’s work — the equivalent of $3.

She described a climate of open hostility towards her from the women she worked with, because she was part of the country’s Christian minority, which makes up less than 2 per cent of Pakistan.

Around midday, dehydrated and sweltering in the sun, Bibi walked to the nearby well to have a drink of water.

But after she refilled the bucket a second time, a woman screamed: “Don’t drink that water, it’s haram!”

According to Bibi’s account, the shouter then turned to the dozen other women working in the fields and said: “Listen, all of you, this Christian has dirtied the water in the well by drinking from our cup and dipping it back several times. Now the water is unclean and we can’t drink it! Because of her!”

The argument intensified, with the women calling on Bibi to convert and “redeem herself”.

It was one sentence she fired back with that would seal her fate: “What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind?”

After this, Bibi said the women started screaming, spitting at her and physically assaulting her. She ran home in a fright.

Such kindness and tolerance.

Less than a week later, she went fruit-picking in another field when she was confronted by a rioting crowd, led by the woman who had initially shouted at her.

The crowd surrounded her, beat her and took her to the village, screaming: “Death! Death to the Christian!”

The village imam said: “I’ve been told you’ve insulted our Prophet. You know what happens to anyone who attacks the holy Prophet Mohammed. You can redeem yourself only by conversion or death.”

She protested: “I haven’t done anything. Please, I beg you, I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Bibi was taken to the village police station, covered in blood, where police interrogated her and put a report together. She was then put into a police van and taken straight to prison.

She has been in that cell ever since.

She gets beaten up by a mob and is the one arrested.

Bibi, 47, has already received one stay of execution from the Supreme Court, after lower courts rejected her appeals.

If today’s appeal fails, she will become the first woman in Pakistan to be executed for blasphemy.

Bibi’s case has sparked widespread outrage in the international community over Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

“There is overwhelming evidence that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws violate human rights and encourage people to take the law into their own hands,” Amnesty International director of global issues Audrey Gaughran said. “Once a person is accused, they become ensnared in a system that offers them few protections, presumes them guilty and fails to safeguard them against people willing to use violence.”

There should be no criminal sanctions for blasphemy, and especially not a death sentence. It is the polar opposite of freedom of religion.

Would be nice for the NZ Government to speak up on this issue and show as much concern for Asia Bibi as it does for asylum seekers in Nauru. Maybe they could offer asylum in New Zealand to Ms Bibi.

The Herald reports:

Two of four police trainees facing misconduct allegations are the subject of criminal investigations, police have confirmed.

Police Minister Stuart Nash has admitted it’s not a great look but is adamant that standards for recruitment have not dropped as the Government looks to fulfil its promise to recruit 1800 extra police.

The four recruits from the 100-strong Wing 318, which trained at the Police College near Porirua from June to September, have not yet graduated while their behaviour is investigated.

“We do not graduate anyone who does not meet our standards,” Police general manager of training Superintendent Scott Fraser said today.

Fraser confirmed that two of the recruits were the subject of criminal investigations but would not go into detail of the allegations.

“There’s two criminal investigations under way but I can’t talk about the details. What I can say is that if matters are upheld that are criminal or outside our values or standards, people do not get graduated,” Fraser told Radio New Zealand.

Among the allegations against the four recruits are indecent assault, careless driving and intimidation.

Another six recruits involved in a drinking incident at the Royal New Zealand Police College were told off and still graduated earlier this month.

Fraser said today it was a “very, very minor matter”.

“They were noisy in the barracks and were up late at night doing some very silly things.”

The 100 recruits in Wing 318 was the largest intake by the Police College in 12 years.

So 10 out of 100 recruits of 10% are involved in misconduct. Guyon Espiner made the point that a 10% offending rate would be unacceptably high for a journalism course, let alone a Police cadet intake.

National’s police spokesman Chris Bishop said the Government’s plans to introduce 1800 new police officers within three years was to blame for the lower standard of officers.

Recruits were being pushed through even if they were unsuitable and it had resulted in declining behaviour and ethical standards among new recruits, he said.

Other police officers had also raised concerns about the declining standards with him.

“These officers have to serve with the people coming through,” Bishop said. “They are worried that the force’s overall service to the public will decline.”

The old quality vs quantity.

Tom Switzer at CIS wrote:

One of the basic elements of a genuinely liberal society is free speech. That includes the right for people to advance views others disagree with — even views that many might find unpalatable. Alas, many contemporary Western democracies are awash in movements — mainly on the left spectrum of opinion — that seek to shut down debate, suppress opposing views or insist that some groups are more deserving of a ‘platform’ than others. This is especially evident across universities in the US and Britain, where invited scholars have been shouted down by angry mobs clearly unable to mount an intellectual challenge. According to CIS senior fellow Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz, a Knight Foundation poll of 3,000 American students last year found 37% believed it was acceptable to shout down speakers and 10% thought using violence against speakers was sometimes acceptable.

At this stage, and notwithstanding the recent attacks on Bettina Arndt, the attempt to stigmatise opponents into silence has failed to attract widespread support on Australian campuses. How long, though, will our universities remain immune to these illiberal trends? There are some disturbing signs, and in a series of articles in September we recommended how the governors of the universities could protect intellectual freedom with a Chicago University-style charter.

See Prof Schwartz’s piece for The Australian, Dr Jeremy Sammut’s piece that ran across News Corp and my own piece in the Fairfax press. According to Prof Schwartz — a former university vice chancellor and a recent recipient of the CIS McGregor fellowship — Australian universities would avoid the erosion of their public standing and advance liberty by adopting five rules:

• Affirm the value of free speech.
• Forbid administrators from dis-inviting speakers.
• Discipline students or staff who try to silence speakers.
• Remain institutionally neutral on matters of public policy.
• Levy security charges on all speakers, not just those on one side of an issue.

In an upcoming Policy Paper, Jeremy will have more to say about university freedom charters. Let’s hope Canberra takes note. 

These would be welcome in NZ – especially forbidding administrators from dis-inviting speakers.

The Herald reports:

Sitting in a car in the dead of night, a woman had a gun put to her head.

When she couldn’t give David Aaron Stephenson the information he wanted, he fired the pistol at the windscreen.

Then back at her head.

Just five months out of jail after being sentenced to a near three-year jail term, 31-year-old Stephenson was after vengeance on those who testified against him and he wanted the victim to tell him where they lived.

He has been offending for a long time. At age 18 he assaulted a taxi driver dropping off three children.

Stephenson, a Filthy Few gang member who has “HEIL” tattooed across his face, was in the High Court at Hamilton today when he was sentenced to six years and five months’ prison on a raft of charges including kidnapping, indecent assault, assaulting a female, unlawful possession of a firearm and several methamphetamine charges.

With “HEIL” tattooed on his face I am sure he will get a job once released!

Justice Katz also issued a second strike warning for the kidnapping and indecent assault charges which are qualifying violence offences.

That means no parole. It means he must serve all 77 months, not be eligible for parole after 26 months.

And beyond doubt he will go on and get a third strike and then be locked away for a long time. If three strikes had been in place earlier this would be at least his third strike and instead of six years five months he would be serving 14 years without parole which would mean 14 years where the community is safe from him.

A guest post by David White:

Are turtles lives more important than peoples? 

The implied reason for banning plastic bags is due to their polluting nature in the marine environment. The assumption seems to be that marine animals turning up dead with plastic in their stomachs in other places, means that the same thing must be occurring in NZ. However it seemed a stretch to me, to assume that sea life say in the mediterranean was (a) the same that occurs in NZ waters and (b) they are exposed to the same plastic debris in NZ waters. 

I attempt to keep an open mind on things, since until the data is reviewed, one cannot make any conclusions. Hence I set out to review the literature on NZ animals. 

Anecdotal evidence 

Anecdotal evidence, is obviously not perfectly reliable, but may indicate trends. I regularly pick up litter by our roadside areas which boarders onto the Waikato river. And also remove litter from the riverside. What I have observed is the litter is dominated by drink containers. Glass beer bottles, aluminium RTD’s and plastic water bottles. The second group is fast food litter. It is said that most plastic in the ocean comes from land users, incorrect disposal of rubbish. Thus I would conclude that the plastic flowing down the Waikato and out to sea is PET drink bottles. Thus plastic bags are not thee dominante polluter.

But in stating this on facebook, two friends who live by the sea and regularly walk the beaches stated that the most common thing they find are plastic bags.

Thus we can tentatively conclude that plastic bags are making it into the marine environment and staying suspended such they wash up / blow onto beaches. So they could be a significant source of pollution in the sea, even if they don’t make up the largest plastic by say volume, or weight. 

Scientific studies 

The next stop, was to find scientific studies looking at stomach contents of marine animals. Given save the whales has an emotive ring, I started with whales.

Turns out common dolphins don’t have plastic bags in their stomachs, 53 dolphins from 1997 to 2006 where studied. There is zero mention of any plastic in their stomachs. This study was looking at what these dolphins preyed upon for food. So it is possible they ignored plastic in their stomachs. But find it very hard to believe that nature lovers who are passionate about dolphins (otherwise why would you study them) would ignore plastic debris in the stomachs if they were present.

How about sperm whales? Of the 19 sperm whales beached between mid 90’s and 2004, no mention of plastics again occurs. 

Long‐finned pilot whales? Ditto, no mention of plastics in the five whales that beached themselves on Farewell Spit in 2005. 

There did not appear to be other studies of sea mammals stomach contents in NZ. From this data I would conclude that sea mammals are either not interested in eating plastics, or if they do, the plastic is small enough to pass through the digestive track without difficulty. 

A doctoral student investigated the stomach contents of 35 green turtle (Chelonia mydas) 2007 and 2013. The green turtle was thought to prefer warmer waters than NZ, so it was surprising to find that these turtles are feeding in NZ waters throughout the year including winter, when the sea temperatures are below 14 degrees, and it was assumed that the turtles would migrate out of NZ waters at this time. However they did not appear to do so. 

The green turtle is found throughout the world in tropical seas, with genetically distinct populations in the pacific and atlantic oceans. The range of the pacific turtle stretches throughout the pacific ocean, from the West coast of the America’s through to the asian coasts, and obviously includes the pacific islands. It also is found through the Indian ocean and the East coast of Africa. The green turtle is considered endangered, which is category half way between no concern and extinct. 

The population in NZ was found to be made up of turtles from the West coast of Mexico / South America and also turtles from East coast and easterly islands from Australia and up to Guam. One expects the connection with seas north of NZ, but was a surprising result to see animals from East of the Americas coming to NZ. 

Plastic was only found in approximate a third of the turtles (12 of 35). Which surprised me, as I would have assumed that given the media beat up around turtles and plastic, that nearly all turtles would have been affected. 

It should be note that these turtles are all juveniles. They take 20 – 30 years to become sexual mature. So given they have migrated from regions with poorer rubbish disposal than NZ, it could be argued that at least some, if not a significant proportion of the plastic may have come from waters outside of NZ. There was a piece of plastic found in one stomach that had a wellington business address printed on it, which implies that at least some of the plastic originated in NZ. 

The plastic was broken down by type, and by color. These are shown in Table 1 and Table 2 respectively. What is interesting is that if you remove all soft plastic, which plastic bags are that the turtles would still have plastic or human created debris in their stomachs. Thus the reduction of turtles with plastics and human waste in them would not significantly reduce (that is an intelligent guess that it wouldn’t be statistically significant, since it would only reduce by 1 turtle). On the other hand, soft plastic did make up 50% of the total plastic waste. So there would be a large reduction in the total volume of plastic in these turtles stomachs. 

Table 2 shows that the soft plastic is dominated by clear or white plastics. These two make up 70% of the soft plastic debris. 

Included in the thesis is a photo showing the plastic found in turtles. Visual observation shows that this plastic does look like plastic bags. As I can’t think of any other source of this type of pollution. If you look closely on the left hand side, at the top of the second blue square, you can see a turquoise plastic fragment. I strongly suspect that this is from silage wrap.  

So we can conclude that of the green turtles that migrate to our shores, consume plastics in the oceans around NZ. And this plastic consumed is dominated by plastic bags. 

It is considered common knowledge that turtles eat the soft plastic bags because it either looks like sea lettuce that they feed on, or look like jellyfish that they see as food. 

Thus it would be a reasonable assumption that other marine animals that feed on sea lettuce or jellyfish may be impacted by the plastic bags. However 

Impact on humans. 

Banning recyclable plastic bags, are likely to have an impact on humans. For example we gift away a lot of produce from our orchard….. all in plastic bags. Others use them to pick up dog poo. These types of applications can be replaced by purchasing packets of paper bags, or other plastic bags like lunch bags. So these behaviour changes involve costs, but not much risk to human health. 

However grocery shopping is a different kettle of fish. It would be easy to see how a bag could be contaminated with meat product. And this could be transferred onto fruit or vegetables that are not cooked before consumption, or contaminate surfaces of packaged goods, which go onto contaminate kitchen surfaces. 

Thus you would expect to see a rise in disease with recycling of grocery bags. This is indeed what you see. Data mining to extract the impact of the San Francisco County ban on plastic supermarket bags, there was a 32% increase in E. Coli, 27% increase in Campylobacter, 6% increase in Salmonella, but not increase in Toxoplasmosis. Disturbingly there was a 46% increase in deaths from  foodborne diseases. 

It is well known that NZ has very high Campylobacter rates. Using readily accessible 2012 data 7031 cases were reported, which gives an 159 per 100 000 people, which is the highest in the developed world.

Another grim fact, is that for every campylobacter case reported, 9 go unreported. Thus infect rates across NZ are approximately 1% of NZ’ers get campylobacter every year!

So an increase in infection by 30%, is going to effect approximately 20 000 people.

In 2016, there was 712 hospitalizations due to campylobacter, (fortunately no deaths), so a 30% increase would results in an additional 214 hospitizations. 

Given that NZ health system is already stretched, an additional 20 000 illnesses and 214 hospizations is going to put additional stress, on an already overstressed system. 

Conclusion

The only NZ sea animal that is known to be negatively affected by plastic bags are sea turtles. These are not unique to NZ, and only 30% seem to be affected by eating plastic bags. Also NZ culture does not value these turtles as unique indigenous animals, like for example a tui.  Removing plastic bags will reduce the plastic ingestion, but not eliminate it. Although other sea animals may feed on the plastic mistaking them for sea lettuce or jellyfish, this is conjecture at this stage. 

There are important health effects for humans, with an additional 20 000 people getting infected with campylobacter, and an additional 214 hospitizations. That isn’t counting any other foodborne diseases increasing. 

So do the benefits to sea life outway the negatives to humans? Well to save a handful of animals not unique to NZ, while creating 10’s of thousand illnesses every year, to me is not a wise choice, and one that I cannot describe as ethical. 

David Whyte is a speaker, researcher and author

The Government’s financial statements for 2017/18 show a very healthy set of accounts.

It is worth emphasizing that these largely reflect the decisions of the last National Government that passed the 2017 Budget. Most changes since then by the new Government didn’t come into force until after this financial year.

Also the impact of public sector pay increases are yet to be recognised.

So Grant Robertson has been gifted almost the strongest set of Government books in the OECD. Some key data:

• Tax revenue up 6.1% and expenditure up 5.5%
• Average wages up 3.0%
• Jobs up 3.7%
• OBEGAL surplus of $5.5 billion
• Total surplus of $8.4 billion after accounting for investment gains
• Net debt down $2 billion, decreasing from 21.7% to 19.9% of GDP

Tax revenue has increased by almost one third since 2014. This partly reflects the strong economic growth we have had, but also the effect of fiscal drag.

These accounts show there is absolutely no need for tax increases, and if the Tax Working Group proposes anything that isn’t fiscally neutral, it should be rejected.

An interesting read of the Court of Appeal decision dismissing the appeal by Mark Lundy over the murder of his wife and daughter.

Lundy lost on every ground raised, bar one. They found the mRNA evidence should not have been admitted. But they concluded that even without that the evidence was overwhelming.

Also of interest is that a journalist who covered the trial for North & South, Michael White, gave an affidavit in support of the appeal!

On the DNA evidence, the expert witness said:

So by that I mean that this DNA evidence is one million, million, million times more likely to occur if the DNA in these two samples from the polo shirt originated from Ms Christine Lundy, rather than from someone else unrelated to her and chosen at random from the general New Zealand population.

And the fact there was central nervous system tissue on the shirt was undisputed. The court found:

The conclusion that it was Mrs Lundy’s CNS tissue can then quite easily be reached in two small steps. First, on the night that the appellant was wearing the shirt, Mrs Lundy was murdered by having her head attacked with an axe with the consequence established in Dr Pang’s evidence that a significant portion of her brain was exposed and indeed missing from the skull cavity. Second, the only human DNA found in association with the CNS tissue was that of Mrs Lundy. It was of good quality and found in substantial amounts.

And the random burglar theory holds little weight:

The notion that the deceased were the victims of a random burglar was unlikely, for a combination of reasons. First, the savagery of the attack on both Mrs Lundy and her daughter. There were in each case a high number of very hard blows to the head. In the case of Mrs Lundy they had the effect of destroying much of her face and head. Further, Amber Lundy could not have been regarded as any kind of threat to a random burglar, as opposed to somebody she recognised in the course of the attack on her mother.

So Lundy remains in jail. His non-parole minimum was 20 years so he may get released after 2022.

Hamish Rutherford writes:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is convinced that Kiwis are being “fleeced” when they pay for petrol.

“As a moral stance, I think New Zealanders are paying too much,” Ardern said.

With motorists paying close to $2.50 a litre for petrol in many parts of the country, it is understandable that the issue is back in the headlines, and that the Government wants to be seen to be taking action.

The problem is, the action being taken is to ask the Commerce Commission – effectively the referee on whether consumers are being ripped off – to investigate. These studies tend to take around a year.

If Ardern is already convinced that a rort is taking place and Energy Minister Megan Woods believes the market is “broken” as she said in May, why are they bothering to investigate?

Not only is the Government is putting immense pressure on the independent competition regulator to give it the answer it wants, Ardern may be stalling for time because her Government does not know what it will do to fix the problem.

Of course they don’t know what it will do to fix the problem. They’ve not had a working group yet!

But the Government’s urgency has a rich irony. Ardern has described climate change as New Zealand’s “nuclear free moment”.

Her Government seen fit to crack down on the oil exploration industry, ending new offshore permits, purportedly as a means to take action.

But the reason the climate is warming is not because fossil fuels are being extracted, it is because people are burning them.

If Ardern was really serious about tackling the issue, surely she would do something about demand.

Leaving aside whether the petrol companies are making too much profit, the best way to get Kiwis to drive less is by ensuring they pay more.

But on Monday, Ardern’s “moral stance” was that Kiwis are paying too much to do the very thing she surely believes threatens the planet.

If Ardern had the courage of her convictions she would be welcoming the higher petrol prices and tell New Zealanders to give up their cars for the greater good.

The Taxpayers’ Union is about to launch its latest report and present the inaugural “Jonesie Awards” for government waste at Parliament.  The steam below will go live in the next few minutes.

Update: Winners announced

The winners are:

Local Government Jonesie: Auckland Council’s “vegan-approved goat hunt”.  The Council spent $91,742 on a Hunua Ranges goat cull in 2016/17 that killed zero goats.

Central Government Jonesie: The New Zealand Film Commission’s $1.6 million “Power Rangers pavlova”. The Commission paid American producers of the children’s TV show “Power Rangers” $1.6 million to include references to New Zealand in its script, such as a plot involving a pavlova.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Hon Shane Jones, Minister for Regional Economic Development, Infrastructure, and Forestry, receives this award in recognition of the scale of pork-barrelling achieved via his $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund – of which so far only 10 per cent has been allocated.

The full list of nominations (and the report) are on the Taxpayers’ Union website.

David Seymour spoke at Massey last week. Some great points worth highlighting:

Thank you to the Massey Politics Society for inviting me here today. You folks have weathered a storm for a very important cause, the right to be a thinking and valuing individual who can express their thoughts without intimidation by thugs and bullies.

The Problems at Massey

I have said several times in public that your University Council should be looking for a new Vice Chancellor. I stand by that assessment, because any institution is bigger than one person. If an individual undermines an institution then the institution must save itself, not that individual.

But why does Freedom of Speech matter? I think the best answer comes from the Sir Karl Popper. Sir Karl was Jewish and lost 16 members of his family to the Nazi regime. He was lucky to be in New Zealand during World War II, and it was at a New Zealand University that he wrote the Open Society and its Enemies.As Michael King wrote in the Penguin History of New Zealand, this was ‘probably the most important book to come out of New Zealand.’

Sadly, Sir Karl left New Zealand at the end of the war because he was treated abominably by the University of Canterbury. New Zealand lost one of the greatest 20^thcentury philosophers because we treated him terribly. He writes about all of this in a foreword to later editions of the book. That’s the choice our Universities face, they can either be centres of intellectual enquiry with global appeal, open societies; or closed-minded backwaters.

That is the choice that Massey especially faces.

Sir Karl Popper’s Open Society

Popper went on to describe the difference between thinking and valuing individuals and primitive life forms. He started with bacteria and Amoeba, extremely simple creatures that have no ability to hold an idea, let alone generate new ones. They simply do what they’re genetically programmed to do, and if the conditions change they die.

Animals, of course, are a bit more sophisticated, but they have the same basic problem as micro-organisms. They live or die based on the instinctive behaviours they are born with. They don’t have intelligence, the ability to assess and reason for themselves.

Humans obviously do have that ability but whether we use it depends on the kind of rules we have in our society. In a closed society, we must follow the leader. The leader tells us what the course of history will deliver us, and we must obey. If the leaders get it wrong, our society fails just as a badly adapted species of amoeba dies out when the conditions change.

On the other hand, an open society has the ability to think and value for itself. An open society is able to absorb new ideas, roll them around on its members’ tongues, and decide whether they fit. An open society never dies, because when its ideas go out of date, it has new ones to choose from.

Our very survival depends on the ability to have an open culture of ideas. We are not going to solve poverty, inequality, environmental challenges, transport, housing, remain competitive in the world economy, or even get a better quality of craft beer if we are not able to try new ideas on for size, discard those that don’t work, then relentlessly look for better ones.

Sadly many don’t want an open culture of ideas. They only want their ideas. They want other ideas silenced because someone may be offended by them.

A guest post by Elliott Ikilei, Deputy Leader of the New Conservative Party:

The below ad has been sponsored heavily, repeating constantly on FB; I was happy to let it go, but it was repeated so often that I really felt to put in a balance viewpoint.

A politically incorrect response:

This ad is not about monogamous relationships.

It is specifically about men having sex with other random men.

The ad requests promiscuous, homosexual men to get tested every three months for HIV as per male homosexual activity with multiple men and inconsistent, little or no condom usage being high risk.

Ok, some information from the ad, the website and a couple of reports I perused:

– it is estimated that there are 3500 people living with HIV in NZ (0.07% of the population).

– since 1985, the vast majority of HIV diagnoses are from within the homosexual community

Under “Here’s three reasons why nearly 80 percent of HIV diagnoses in New Zealand are among gay and bi guys:” the three points given are:

1. It’s much easier to get HIV from anal sex
2. There’s already a lot of gay and bi Kiwis living with HIV.
3. We’re more closely connected than you might think.

Apart from free condoms, free lube, free testing, we now also fund a drug called Truvada, or PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis). It is effective for high-risk activity, cutting down HIV transference by around 99%.

If not taxpayer-funded, this pill would cost around 1000 dollars per month, every month, for every year of engaging in high-risk activity.

So…last year the Labour party promised to pay for the promiscuity that you now fund. The funding was from March this year…

According to Pharmac, the criteria to receive this taxpayer-funded ‘magic pill’ includes:

Patient is male or transgender; and

Patient has sex with men; and

Patient is likely to have multiple episodes of condomless anal intercourse in the next 3 months;

“likely to have multiple episodes of condomless anal intercourse in the next 3 months”

Let that sink in for a moment…

We have a horrific disease that is spread almost entirely from promiscuity, that is, sleeping around.

The vast majority of those with HIV are within the male homosexual/bisexual community, meaning this horrific disease is spread mostly by men sleeping around with different men who can’t be stuffed to protect themselves with condoms.

We see nothing about promoting one man being with one man only. Indeed, Auckland ratepayers also help fund fisting events and other sex-based activities.

You do fund the pill that is used to confidently sleep around with no condom or commitment.

At a cost of 12K per person, per year, for every year they want to hook up with multiple partners.

You fund this high-risk activity.

In the meantime, cancer rates grow, people with terminal illnesses crowdfund for life-saving medication, operation waiting lists extend out…but at least men sleeping with random men because they want to, is funded…

Want to stop HIV?

Stop sleeping around. Stop forcing us to fund irresponsibility, avoidance of accountability and the further degradation of commitment.

FYI we would not fund a pill that encourages promiscuous male sex…we would use for life-saving treatments, needed operations, supporting commitment over condom-less convenience…

#WhyAreWeForcedToFundThis

#NewConservative #Family #Democracy #Justice

At around 4 pm EDT last Saturday October 6^th, against a background of hysterical shrieks of activists in the gallery, the United States Senate voted to conform Brett Kavanaugh by a vote of 50 – 48. With the announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy would be retiring from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) taking effect in the final session of 2018 commencing at the end of October, given he was appointed by a Republican President (Ford in 1975) and was often a swing vote on key issues (in favour of gay marriage in 2015 and against gun control in Heller in 2008), the opportunity for a Republican President to permanently give the court an almost guaranteed 5 – 4 vote in favour of conservative issues set the scene for an almighty confirmation battle for whoever Donald Trump nominated.

Background

The US Constitution grants the incumbent President the power to appoint Justices to the SCOTUS subject to the “advice and consent” of the US Senate. A politicised judiciary is a feature of the US judicial system at the Federal, State, County and City level since the inception of the Republic and there has been no notable movement to change this unlike the non-partisan method of appointment used in the Westminster style democracies of the Anglophile world. Prior to the 2016 Presidential election, primarily to allay conservative fears that Trump would be too liberal in office, he published a list of 25 conservative judges endorsed by the Federalist Society (a prominent conservative think tank) and promised to only nominate anyone to the SCOTUS from this list. Neil Gorsuch (who replaced the vacancy left by the February 2016 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia) was from this list and he was confirmed by the Senate on 7 April 2017. When the Kennedy vacancy arose, Trump was true to his word and nominated Brett Kavanaugh who was often considered in the top three of judges a Republican President ought to consider. As soon as Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced, he was denounced by liberals and Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer announced that the Senate Democrats would do all within their power to ensure that Kavanaugh would fall short of the 51 votes needed to be confirmed. This statement is crucial to understanding what came next because the Democrats were true to their word.

A taste of liberal opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination came at the opening of the confirmation hearings in the Senate Judicial Committee room in the Hart Building on Capitol Hill. The public gallery was packed with progressive activists who took it in turns to interrupt and disrupt the proceedings until ejected from the room by Capitol Police. The Democrat members of the Judicial Committee themselves attempted to stymie the Chairman Chuck Grassley from commencing the hearings with a series of aggressive procedural attempts to delay or defer the hearings. An already ominous trend of left wing activists, urged on by hard left Congresswoman Maxine Waters, that saw conservative law makers or Trump Administration appointees harassed in restaurants and even at their homes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao (who also happens to be Trump’s Transport Secretary) was heckled and assailed by protesters at their Washington DC home and Texas Senator Ted Cruz was driven from a DC area restaurant by aggressive activists aggrieved by the Kavanaugh nomination.

The hearings proceeded, and the questioning of Kavanaugh was on mostly predictable partisan lines; the GOP pushing his stellar record, the Democrats questioning whether he’d repeal Roe v Wade (the 1973 landmark ruling effectively legalising abortion nationwide) and his role in the Starr Special Counsel investigation of President Clinton. There was some notable grandstanding by potential Democrat candidates for President in 2020 (New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and his now in-famous Spartacus moment and former prosecutor California Senator Kamala Harris). The Democrats’ tactics soon became obvious: delay the hearings until past the mid-term elections (all of the House and a third of the Senate are up for re-election on November 6th, win the Senate (unlikely), deny Trump his ninth SCOTUS seat leaving the Court locked at 4 – 4  so unable to rule in favour of conservative issues and vote down more liberal Federal Appeal Courts rulings until a hopeful Democrat White House win in 2020 and then that new President could appoint a liberal judge thus tilting the Court to the left for a generation.

The Ranking Member (the title of the most senior Democrat member of the Minority) of the Judicial Committee Dianne Feinstein waited for the formal hearings to wrap up before dropping the Blasey – Ford (for simplicity’s sake hereafter referred to as Ford) sexual assault bombshell. Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually molested her with violence at a high school party sometime in the 1980’s. The accusation soon erupted into a vicious partisan street fight with Democrats and the MSM saying the victim must be believed and the GOP saying Kavanaugh was ambushed and a good man with a stellar record as a senior Judge was having his good name dragged through the mud. The Democrats key aim with this tactic was to get a delay in the vote. Given the explosive nature of the accusation, Chairman Grassley called a one week pause on the vote, so the Judicial Committee could arrange a time to hear both Ford and Kavanaugh. This of course gave the Democrats more time for new accusers to come forward thus creating what they hoped would be a narrative of a pattern of sexually abusive conduct hoping enough Republicans would get cold feet, abandon the Kavanaugh nomination forcing Trump to nominate another candidate thus preventing the current Senate from confirming his replacement for Kennedy.

The trouble was that the two additional accusers’ allegations proved to be even more shaky than the Ford allegation ended up being, so I will deal with these two least credible accusers first. Firstly, Deborah Ramirez said that Kavanaugh exposed himself at a party, but she cannot confirm if she was actually at the party because she says she was too drunk. Her story, as told to the New Yorker magazine, quickly falls apart when the New York Times (a newspaper that is very anti Trump) tried to corroborate the story with the supposed ten people at the party but could find none of them who could corroborate this allegation and they refused to run the story.

Also jumping into the vacuum left by the delayed hearings was Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who defended Trump’s former porn star mistress Stormy Daniels who himself is a Trump hater and who says he wants to run against Trump. His client, Julie Swetnick, claimed to have seen Kavanaugh waiting his turn in a line of young men waiting to gang rape a girl at a frat house party at Yale. Swetnick’s story fell apart on camera under intense questioning by NBC’s Megyn Kelly where Swetnick walked back the core of her claims and was unclear as to whether Kavanaugh was even there. These were supposedly parties at an undergraduate Fraternity house but by the time of the alleged gang rape incidents, Kavanaugh was already at Yale Law School away from the undergraduate frat scene.  Of the four people Swetnick cited as being at the party, NBC News couldn’t contact two of them, one denied ever being at the party and the last one denied ever knowing Kavanaugh. Swetnick said she called her parents from a cell phone two years before cell phones were commercially available and it turns out that Swetnick’s ex-boyfriend said she laid a false complaint of sexual harassment, engaged in credit card fraud and has a history of unstable and hysterical behaviour. Both accusations died a quick death despite the best efforts of the media to keep them alive meaning all eyes fell on Ford and whether she would testify.

Problems with Ford’s testimony

After many days of negotiations with Ford’s lawyers, she came to DC and testified before the Judicial Committee and seemed genuinely to be a victim of something. In Kavanaugh’s testimony he emphatically denied the charges and was visibly upset and went on the offensive against some of his Democrat questioners on the Committee. Over time various problems cast a pall over the veracity of Ford’s testimony including:

1. She had no memory of the actual year, day and location of the alleged attack nor of how she got there or got home.
2. She said she went to a Safeway nearby afterwards but the only Safeway now in the suburb of the alleged incident didn’t open until 1986, well after the range of dates given.
3. The hearings were delayed for days to allow Ford enough time to drive to Washington DC due to her supposed fear of flying and yet evidence was presented that she flew frequently, did post-graduate studies in Hawaii and had made several overseas flights.
4. Ford said she passed a lie detector test and yet would not offer to the Committee any transcript or video recording of the test nor would Ford confirm who paid for the test. Polygraphs are notoriously easy to beat and in order for results to be credible, the conditions surrounding the test, the manner in which it was administered and the types of questions asked must be known as they can all influence the veracity of the result. The Committee was deliberately prevented from any of this scrutiny.
5. Questions over who paid for her travel and for her lawyers were never answered. It has been alleged that either Feinstein’s office or other Democrat operatives footed these bills.
6. Ford’s lawyer never disclosed various prior partisan connections that compromised her neutrality and impartiality in terms of representations made. The conduct of Ford’s lawyers came under attack when it became obvious that Grassley had offered to fly the Committee to California whereas Ford claims no knowledge of this. When Grassley produced proof of the letter to her lawyers, this has opened the way to formal complaints of unprofessional conduct to be made to the DC Bar because not passing on a material offer to a client is unethical.
7. Ford’s time frame as to the date of the alleged assault was loose and woolly back in July when Ford first made the allegation via her letter to Feinstein and then progressively the time frame got more and more precise the more she talked to the lawyers the Democrats introduced her to.
8. Ford said the allegations against Kavanaugh were made in a therapy session years later and yet she wouldn’t authorise the release of the therapist notes to the Committee despite repeated requests but yet seemed happy to give seemingly the most damaging excerpts to the Washington Post.
9. Ford named four witnesses to the incident and yet got the boy/girl mix wrong and all four either deny the allegation including her supposed lifelong friend Leland Keyser who denied she was even at the party whilst the other supposed witnesses denied they ever knew Kavanaugh. It emerged from the FBI investigation that Keyser felt she was pressured by a retired FBI agent friend of Ford’s to change her testimony.
10. Ford claimed to have been so traumatised that she had to have a second door built to her Palo Alto, California home and yet it was revealed by former roommates and boyfriends that she lived in plenty of single front door apartments with no trauma and that the additional door build into the Palo Alto property was more to increase the rent obtainable or market price of the property as a second entrance straight into a room made the property more valuable in the white hot Bay Area real estate market and that it was built years before she first disclosed the assault in therapy.

I think the best summation of Ford’s weak, inconsistent and questionable testimony can be found in the memo Rachel Mitchell wrote to the GOP Senators summarising her findings after her questioning. She is the renowned sex crimes prosecutor from the Maricopa County District Attorney’s office who has prosecuted hundreds of sex crimes. Mitchell said she couldn’t even get a search warrant let alone an indictment (formal charge brought by prosecutors) on Ford’s testimony and that there was nothing that would stand up in any court.

How and why Republicans win this fight

• Canny use of the Maricopa County prosecutor to question Ford. Rachel Mitchell used a gentle, careful questioning technique that was not aggressive and avoided the bad optics of old white men forcibly questioning a plausible looking/sounding female victim.
• Chairman Chuck Grassley bent over backwards to accommodate Ford and her lawyers came across as petty and shifty.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell remained adamant throughout the circus that a vote would be taken despite the histrionics. He was unperturbed by the screaming and yelling of protesters.
• Key GOP Senators, who have wavered in the past, almost all remained solid behind Kavanaugh including centrist Maine Senator Susan Collins (who was subjected to massive liberal abuse and gave a thorough and rousing speech debunking Ford and the other accusers) and Trump haters who are not standing for re-election and had nothing to lose (Bob Corker from Tennessee and Jeff Flake from Arizona).
• The one defection (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) was cancelled out by the one Democrat defection (Joe Manchin from West Virginia).
• Manchin’s defection gave the vote a patina of bipartisanship.
• The Republican base is now furious and seems far more motivated than ever it was prior to the confirmation hearings.
• The Democrats kept shifting the goal posts. When the Ford, Ramirez and Swetnick accusations were falling apart, they switched their attacks to Kavanaugh’s temperament during questioning of the Ford allegations (what man falsely accused of rape would not be testy under questioning in public) and then all focus switched to his teenage and early university student heavy drinking sessions. Their eventual retreat from the core sexual assault allegations was a sure sign of defeat.
• Trump backed Kavanaugh in press conferences, campaign rallies and Tweets and never ever looked like backing down which is difficult to say for any other Republican that might have won in 2016. Can anyone image Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney withstanding the #MeToo frenzy? Maybe Ted Cruz but it’s doubtful.
• Trump forced the media to focus on the holes in Ford’s testimony when he took specific shots at Ford’s inconsistencies at a campaign rally in Mississippi. The chattering classes (and some in his own party) denounced Trump’s comments but suddenly CNN, the NTY and WaPo were reporting on the testimony discrepancies because Trump highlighted them.
• GOP candidates fighting for House and Senate seats now can nationalise the mid-term election over the Kavanaugh nomination.
• Democrats in Congress (and their supporters and media water carriers) overplayed their hand with rhetorical excesses, shonky delay tactics, shrieking protests and paying astroturf protesters to intimidate Republican Senators in the halls all culminating in surreal almost unhinged scenes at the SCOTUS today of activists screaming and clawing at the huge copper doors.
• The MSM went all in against Kavanaugh and supported his accusers until it was obvious all three stories were full of holes thus reinforcing Trump’s narrative that the mainstream media are his enemies and purveyors of “fake news”.
• Feinstein’s hiding of the letter until after the hearings were finished showed this for what it really was – a planned political hit job.
• Ford wanted anonymity but was denied it because a Feinstein staffer leaked the letter. Grassley rightly said that Ford’s claims could’ve confidentially been examined by the Committee (and even the FBI) earlier in the summer. This didn’t play into the Democrat’s strategy to create a media firestorm to sway centrist GOP Senators into backing away hence the need for the leak.
• Jeff Flake’s last-minute compromise on the FBI investigation almost guaranteed the swing votes would fall to Kavanaugh. The FBI handle federal crimes whereas sexual assaults are handled by local District Attorneys (the Montgomery County DA said no complaint had ever been laid and the type of assault was subject to the statute of limitations so they couldn’t act on a complaint today). Knowing Kavanaugh had passed six prior FBI background checks meant the GOP could look magnanimous to the incessant Democrat demands for the FBI to investigate again and in essence they called their bluff knowing the seventh investigation would mirror the findings of the Judicial Committee’s questioning, that there was no corroborating evidence of any kind for any of the alleged sexual incidents.
• Once the accuser’s stories start to fall apart, shifting the goal posts to Kavanaugh’s admitted youthful heavy drinking made them look plain stupid. As if drinking too much at high school and college parties made him unsuitable to be a senior judge. By that standard probably 75% of Congress and half the current Federal judiciary would have to resign if Kavanaugh was to be voted down on that ridiculous standard.
• The whole legal system is built upon a presumption that anyone accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. The Democrats (and their apologists) in their #MeToo fervour, believe that any female accuser must be right and that centuries of legal precedent can now be turned on its head to a presumption of guilt. The negative consequences of such a change on wider society cannot be contemplated.
• For many decades, the comity and collegiality of the Senate meant certain norms were adhered to and one of these was that when a President wins an election, it is his right to appoint his Supreme Court Justices. It was not just constitutional, but it was recognised as the ‘spoils of war’. When Republicans controlled the Senate (as they rarely have in the last 100 years) they have always acceded to the confirmation of the nominees of Democrat Presidents. Obama’s two nominees (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) were confirmed by enough Republicans Senators to avoid filibusters. Democrats have not been so kind to Republican Presidents and the blocking of Robert Bork by Senator Edward Kennedy in 1987 and the accusations leveled at Clarence Thomas in 1991 were up until now, seen as black moments in Senate relations. What happened to Kavanaugh can be seen as a new low in the partisan tenor of the Senate and the rancour expressed during this process is as bad as any ever seen in this chamber.

Conclusion

Some of you may be wondering why Democrats (and the left in general) would go to such incredible lengths to defeat Trump’s nominee. Let’s be clear, whoever Trump nominated from the list of 25 would’ve been subjected to a version of what happened to Kavanaugh. Democrats know deep down that their left-wing liberal policy proscriptions (e.g. full gun control, high taxes) are not popular and if they were to run for Congress and the Senate on a platform of the kind of proper gun control they really want (essentially a version of repealing the 2^nd Amendment), they would never get elected to office. So, the Democrats electoral strategy has been to disguise its candidates in swing seats and States as moderate centrists and then they toe the party line once in power. But you can only go so far with this tactic because you can only legislatively nibble at the edges of a progressive agenda. Progressive Democrats have long relied on the two other arms of government to achieve their policy objectives: that of the Presidential power of regulation by Executive Order and stacking the Federal Courts with progressive left leaning judges who will create new civil rights out of whole cloth and abrogate the interpretation of existing rights. An example is that, back in the 1970’s, abortion was only made legal in the very liberal states. There was no way Congress was going to ever have liberal enough Representatives and Senators back then to make abortion legal nationwide and so it was legal in places like Massachusetts and illegal in places like the deep South. Now this is not a debate about abortion, I am only using this to illustrate the point. Progressives got nationwide legal abortion only after Presidents Kennedy and Johnson stacked the SCOTUS with liberal judges who would eventually rule favourably on a case on abortion that made its way its way to SCOTUS (in this case Rose v Wade).

With the election of Trump and his aggressive rollback of many of Obama’s progressive policies by Executive fiat (e.g. trying to implement an effective carbon tax that Congress could never pass even when the Democrats controlled it in favour of using excessive regulations under the Clean Air Act to effectively regulate the coal industry out of existence and then stymie oil exploration via not granting any Federal permits) has outraged liberals. Trump has reversed all of Obama’s efforts. Progressives last hopes of advancing their agenda and checking Trump and a conservative Congress was a 5 – 4 liberal leaning SCOTUS and because it is easier for them to legislate from the bench than to try and get liberal policies enacted via the Legislature. This playbook has worked for the Democrats for decades and thus they were prepared to do almost anything to block a 5 – 4 split in favour of conservatives until such time as they hoped to regain the power of SCOTUS appointment and confirmation.

They did not bank on the resolve of Trump, McConnell, the GOP Senators and Kavanaugh weathering the media storm in favour of the allegations and so the tactic has blown up their faces. It is hard to measure the blow-back but some polling data on the enraged and invigorated Republican base is showing up in the evaporation of the lead in what is called the generic Congressional ballot, in the disappearance of the enthusiasm gap that for so many months favoured Democrats and the numbers of tight Congressional and Senate races that had Democrat candidates ahead and now some polls in crucial races show the Republican candidate inching ahead.

The media and pundits have been predicting a Democrat pickup of the House citing prior polls and history (the first mid-term elections after a party takes control of the White House normally sees reversals and in the case of Obama in 2010, he faced a massive wipe out in the House after the Obamacare debacle). Will the Kavanaugh effect save the House for the GOP? It’s too early to tell. Overblown commentary before this confirmation circus flirted with the Democrats taking control of the Senate – that was always highly unlikely given the number of vulnerable Democrat Senators from states Trump won in 2016 that were up for re-election. All but one of those vulnerable so-called red state Democrat Senators voted against Kavanaugh and various recent polls show a majority of this group now behind their challengers. Talk of a new Democrat controlled House moving to try and impeach Kavanaugh is the kind of awful optics that will have Republican strategists scrambling to get Democrat House candidates in Districts they must win to take the House to go on the record as to their views on a Kavanaugh impeachment.

Anecdotally, various anti Trumpers both those publicly known (e.g. Bret Stevens a conservative New York Times columnist and a founder ‘Never Trumper’ has come out in support of Trump and will vote Republican in November when before he planned to stay home) and in my own conservative community, apathy about voting in the mid-terms was a big issue but everyone I know who was ambivalent about voting are so fired up by the political hit job orchestrated by the Democrats on Kavanaugh that they will 100% be at the polls to ensure the Republicans hold both Houses of Congress. It’s too early to tell if this energising of the GOP base and its anger over the Kavanaugh slurs will last another month to the election. It is also not sure whether the booming economy and historically low unemployment rate will be more compelling factors ensuring sufficient Republicans win to retain control.

Many women I know are very worried that the careers of the respectful and well raised men in their lives could be undone after decades of moral rectitude by one high profile false rape allegation. As a friend of mine put it, an allegation of sexual assault is much worse than an allegation of murder or physical assault. There are a number of scenarios that people can envisage of a person lashing out and beating someone up or even killing someone in a fit of rage – a violent burglary or coming in on someone raping your daughter and in those few instances, many people would forgive or at least understand the homicide but there is literally no type or form of rape or sexual assault that is ever right and to accuse an upright man who has been faithful to his wife or partner for decades, was a known defender of her honour and having raised daughters with care and has never strayed in any way from marital vows of fidelity, to be accused of such a heinous crime as rape, even if you have been seen for decades for your upstanding and caring behaviour and attitudes to women, such a false allegation has the power to destroy any good man’s life. For millions of American women, they say “there but for the grace of God goes my husband, father, grandfather, brother, nephew, son or grandson” and the outrage at the damage that has been done to Brett Kavanaugh’s good name is real and palpable. I do not think that the Democrats have realised what punishment may be in store from the electorate by them going this far to achieve their partisan political ends.

Renown 30+ year veteran of the Washington DC press corps Fox News’ Brit Hume described the Kavanaugh hearings as the worse thing he has seen in all his years reporting on Beltway political issues. In 29 days, we’ll know what, if any, impact all this will have electorally.

Peter Newman writes:

I began my life as an activist academic in 1979 when the Western Australian government closed the Fremantle railway, saying buses would be better. Patronage immediately fell by 30% and I ran a four-year campaign to save the railway. We won. I have been writing books and running campaigns ever since on why trains and trams are better than buses. But I have changed my mind. The technology has changed, and I think it will end the need for new light rail.

So a light rail champion says it is a technology of the past, not the future.

“Trackless trams” are based on technology created in Europe and Chinaby taking innovations from high-speed rail and putting them in a bus.

I went to China to check out the CRRC trackless tram (they call it autonomous rail transit, or ART). I came back convinced it’s a transformative transit technology. …

Trackless trams are neither a tram nor a bus, though they have rubber wheels and run on streets. The high-speed rail innovations have transformed a bus into something with all the best features of light rail and none of its worst features.

Sounds great.

It replaces the noise and emissions of buses with electric traction from batteries recharged at stations in 30 seconds or at the end of the line in 10 minutes. That could just be an electric bus, but the ART is much more than that. It has all the speed (70kph), capacity and ride quality of light rail with its autonomous optical guidance system, train-like bogies with double axles and special hydraulics and tyres. …

Similar disruption has happened in the Gold Coast, Canberra and elsewhere, but ultimately light rail systems have been highly successful in attracting patronage and land development. This will happen in Sydney too when the project is complete.

However, the cost has been far beyond original expectations. Sydney is costing over $120 million per kilometre. The Gold Coast was similar. Canberra and Newcastle are over $80 million per kilometre, as was the cancelled light rail in Perth.

The trackless tram costs around $6-$8 million per kilometre. And it can be put into a road system over a weekend.

So 10% of the cost and can be installed in a weekend!

A week ago I blogged:

So the National Secretary of the NZRDA gets paid almost $1 million a year for her services. Great work if you can get it.

Unions often rail against business chief executives being paid huge salaries. And government chief executives also get criticised for some of their salaries.

Now if the members of NZRDA think Deborah Powell is worth $927,000 a year then good on her for convincing them to pay it. It’s their money. But it is weird that the highest paid person in the public health system isn’t a DHB Chief Executive, or a consultant or specialist or the Director-General of Health. It is the National Secretary of the junior doctors’ association.

I assumed a job which pays $927,000 a year would be a full-time job. But it isn’t. The enterprising Ms Powell is also the National Secretary of the Apex Union. And they also pay the company 99.9% owned by Powell $608,000 for contract negotiation services.

So that’s a combined $1,535,000 for contract negotiation services. Now we don’t know if that is 100% salary for Powell, but even if you have a couple of staff to assist you, you’d be doing better than any other person in the public health system.

There was an interesting profile in 2001 in the Herald, showing this is not a recent development:

Radiation therapists walked away from treating cancer patients last night and, for the second time this year, went on strike. Surely a tough decision.

Throughout the dispute, one person is regularly quoted on behalf of “her” members as though she, too, feels the pain of being paid a pittance for a vital role in saving people’s lives. She is articulate, passionate and stroppy. She is Dr Deborah Powell. …

So to be, well, um, direct, the Weekend Herald would like to talk to her about “the impression that you and [husband and business partner] Terry have done extremely well financially out of your relationship with the medical unions”.

So even 18 years ago people had noticed.

“This isn’t silk,” she smiles, fingering the collar of her emerald-green shirt.

No, but the people who mutter disapprovingly about Deborah and Terry Powells’ asset-backing do point to their avocado farm near Whangarei, valued in 1998 at $1.2 million.

“We have an avocado orchard. So what?” she replies. “It’s where we live.”

The median house price in 1998 was $165,000 so the farm was valued at around eight times the median house. Today the median house value is $550,000 so I imagine the orchard is worth a lot more today.

Come the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, the entrepreneurial Powells saw the opportunity to sell their employment contract negotiation skills beyond the young doctors.

Among those they added to their stable was the Sales Representatives Guild. But that led to considerable trouble when, in 1993, they were both convicted of fraud for rigging the guild’s ballot in favour of compulsory membership.

Pair stood to gain $92,000 if compulsory unionism was carried and another $2500 for every 50 members beyond 1000. It would also be paid an annual $80,000 base payment.

The Powells continue to deny their guilt. Anecdotally there are doctors who remain unhappy about the Powells and refuse to join the RDA because of their presence. 

Yes and quite a few of those doctors have been e-mailing me. They have this old fashioned belief that a conviction for fraud for vote rigging in a union makes you a bad choice to run a union.

But anyway let’s not begrudge someone bringing capitalism to a union and making great money out of it. I’d say NBR should look at having a union category for their next NBR richlist!

Got sent this news snippet:

The single state of North Dakota is now producing as much oil as Venezuela, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. While Venezuela continues to falter under its socialist regime, North Dakota continues its historic rise in crude oil production. The sparsely populated midwestern state churned out 1.27 million barrels a day in July, according to data reported by Bloomberg. This is approximately the same level of production seen in Venezuela during the same month. The numbers provide a snapshot of how much the industry landscape has evolved in the two places. Much like other regions in the United States, North Dakota has experienced a shale oil boom in recent years. The advent of hydraulic fracturing has allowed North Dakota — home of the Bakken shale play — to produce oil at rates four times greater than its previous peak set in the 1980s. The state is now second only to Texas in oil production and enjoys the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

Yet here our Government bans future exploration meaning we will be importing oil from North Dakota.

Interesting the comparison between Venezuela and North Dakota. Venezuela has a population of 32 million and North Dakota a population of 750,000 – smaller than Auckland.

Venezuela was producing 3.5 million barrels a day before the socialists took over and is now down to under 1.5 million barrels a day.

North Dakota has the lowest unemployment in the US, and per capita GDP 29% above the US average plus a billion dollar surplus.

A guest post by New Conservative Leader Leighton Baker:

From the news we are fed by mainstream media and our leadership, the UN has been so emasculated by the use of Vetoes that it actually struggles to achieve any worthwhile goals, particularly when it comes to protecting citizens from their own authorities. Chemical warfare, mass executions, and suppressing political discord all seem to go unchallenged as various powers exercise their Right of Veto to stagnate the action of the UN, hence the reasoning behind removing the Right of Veto.

Here’s the flip side.

At the moment no figure or group controls more than 20% of the world’s population. This means  80% can resist, and give some hope to those suffering under a callous regime. What removing the Veto would do would be to empower the UN to such a degree that no one country could stand against this entity.

The UN’s power, authority, and rule would be unrivalled in all of the world.

True world control.

An all powerful UN would be an elixir without comparison to those individuals who have wreaked havoc and cruelty throughout history, often using state control.

Instead of control by the state, imagine control by the UN.…

For the sake of humanity all nations need to retain their sovereignty and their right to self determination, and we demand that our elected representatives recognise this patriotic duty to New Zealanders and New Zealand.

Yes the UN is often insipid and the Vetoes are occasionally frustrating, but the alternative is dark, Orwellian, and follows what is popular, not necessarily right.

“Herein lies the great irony of the United Nations: While it’s the Mos Eisley of international politics — a hive of scum and villainy — and it votes repeatedly to condemn the United States and Israel, the tyrannies that constitute the body continue to oppress their own peoples.”

Ben Shapiro
The veto is an anachronism. It would be nice to have a world where China and Russia can’t veto stuff. But that will also mean a world where the US, UK and France have no veto.  Democratic liberal countries are the minority at the UN and I’m not sure we’d enjoy a UN Security Council with no vetoes.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has launched a scathing attack on fuel companies, telling reporters she thinks “consumers are being fleeced” at the petrol pump.

“I am hugely disappointed in the level of price that consumers are currently paying at the pump for fuel,” she said at her weekly post-cabinet press conference today.

National Leader Simon Bridges has been critical of the Government and its fuel taxes which he said is pushing the price of petrol up.

“Unlike petrol, talk is cheap. And the Government is a big part of the reason why petrol prices are so high.”

Petrol prices are creeping up to $2.50 in some parts of the county.

Ardern came out swinging, pointing the finger at fuel importers – such as Z Energy, BP, Mobil and Gull – and their margins.

Margins have increased, but so have taxes. And taxes are under the control of the Government.

Here’s the various taxes the Government imposes:

• National Land Transport Fund 63.02c
• GST 32.61c (on a $2.50 retail price)
• Regional Fuel Tax (in Auckland) 10.0c
• ACC Levy 6.0c
• Local Authorities Fuel Tax 0.66c
• Engine Fuel Monitoring Levy 0.3c

That is a total of 112.6 cents on every litre (in Auckland) going to the Government in direct taxes.

And even worse the Government is going to spend less of it on actual roads.

The latest ISP survey from Stats NZ shows what huge changes there have been in the last seven years (when it started). Changes are:

• Fibre connections – from 3,700 to 598,000
• Monthly data use from 13 petabytes to 292 petebaytes
• 29% now have download speeds of over 100 Mb/s and 48% of over 50 Mb/s
• 28% have upload speeds of over 20 Mb/s and 77% of over 10 Mb/s
• No of households with no data cap gone from 75,000 to 1,072,000 (over two thirds)
• Dialup connections dropped from 208,000 to just 18,000

The fibre rollout has seen a huge increase in both download and upload speeds, which combined with data caps disappearing has made a huge difference to Internet use in NZ.