by John Stringer. Answers at 5pm tonight.

Damien Grant writes:

One of what I consider to be the most irresponsible pieces of journalism in this country occurred in 2014 when John Campbell led then Minister Peter Dunne around Naenae to witness the harm done by the sale of synthetic cannabis.

And indeed, Campbell was right. Some kids were getting very sick as a result of taking a commercially manufactured product made by competent and regulated providers.

Dunne, who now appears to support cannabis legislation, rushed through a legislative change to ban the manufacture of these products.

Well done to all concerned. The legitimate manufactures left the industry, and the back-yard cooks rushed to fill the vacuum. According to the coroner between 40 and 45 people died in the last year as a result.

Unintended consequences strikes again. And 45 people have died.

Meanwhile, our Prime Minister, basking in the glory of the international media, thumbed her nose at the American plan to expand the decades-long failure that is the War on Drugs, preferring a ‘health approach’ to the issue.

Excellent. Perhaps she can have a chat with her Health Minister David Clark who wants to re-classify synthetic cannabis as a class A drug.

The minister boldly declared; “These drugs are killing people. We have health, police, customs and corrections all working closely on this”.

Nice. Except it will fail because prohibition always fails.

Treating synthetic cannabis as the same as heroin is not a “health approach”.

If a drug is legal, someone like Pfizer will make it. Your children will take it. They will get sick, but in the morning you can collect them from the hospital rather than the morgue.

When they become illegal respectable firms leave the industry, and unscrupulous and incompetent cooks produce batches of illicit poison.

An astute analysis.

The US Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, giving the Supreme Court a clear conservative majority for potentially decades to come.

The brutal confirmation battle has been partisan politics at its worse. I’m glad the NZ judiciary isn’t politicized to this degree and that judicial appointments aren’t subject to parliamentary votes. Otherwise we might end up similar.

The ages of the nine Supreme Court Justices are:

1. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85
2. Stephen Breyer, 80
3. Clarence Thomas, 70
4. Samuel Alito, 68
5. Sonia Sotomayor, 64
6. John Roberts, 63
7. Elena Kagan, 58
8. Brett Kavanaugh, 53
9. Neil Gorsuch, 51

The average age a Supreme Court Justice retires is 83, so on the conservative side Justice Thomas is the only likely retirement in the next 15 years.

The WSJ reports:

Unemployment in September hit the lowest level since the Vietnam War, with little indication it is going to shoot back up in the near term.

The jobless rate fell to 3.7%, the lowest since December 1969, the Labor Department said Friday. Employers added 134,000 jobs to payrolls, a record 96th straight month of gains. Wages rose 2.8% from a year earlier, a solid if still unspectacular rise.

Stuff reported:

The NZ First MP behind a “values” bill which could expel migrants was once judged unfit to run pubs because of his criminal record.

Clayton Mitchell wants new migrants to sign up to a cultural “code of conduct” that includes a commitment not to campaign against the legality of alcohol.

Mitchell is a former publican – but his licence to run a bar was cancelled after a series of incidents. They included a suspended prison sentence for assault – which a judge called an act of serious violence – and a dangerous driving conviction.

An assault which involves serious violence is not a good thing.

Two years later, Mitchell won back his certificate –  supported by a reference from former police officer Brad Shipton, who was subsequently disgraced over a rape conviction.

Brad Shipton as a character reference – yeah, nah.

The second term MP initially didn’t want to be interviewed by Stuff. “Is this one of your dirty little stories? You better get your facts right, because I tell you what, you better get your facts right or you’ll get yourself in a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said.

This is not the recommended response for MPs, when media ask them about their background.

In a subsequent response to emailed questions, however, he acknowledged:

* A conviction of assault with intent to injure in what a judge described as an “act of serious violence on your part.”
* A conviction for dangerous driving.
* A conviction for a “lock-in” at one of his bars – allowing customers to drink outside of the licensed hours.

A pattern?

Mitchell, 46, didn’t attend the 1998 hearing that saw his general manager’s certificate cancelled by the the Liquor Licensing Authority. He was in Australia – and his absence was heavily criticised by the authority.

He’d been running Straight Shooters bar, on Tauranga’s Wharf Street. Local police – unhappy after a string of late-night incidents – asked the authority to cancel his general manager’s certificate on the grounds: “That the conduct of the manager is such as to show that he is not a suitable person to hold the certificate.”

The bar sounded rather interesting. A previous story reported:

Before entering politics, Mitchell made local headlines in December 2009 when his Hamilton bar, the Bahama Hut, was forced to close for a week because of two promotions – Funtastic Fridays and Super Saturdays – that gave punters unlimited drinks for a six-hour period for as little as $39.

There was also some controversy over leprechaun-curling competitions at another of his pubs, the Mount Mellick, where a vegetable oil-covered dwarf would be propelled along a 6m polythene sheet.

Very insensitive of him to label a dwarf a leprechaun. They’re very different species.

The Manawatu Standard editorial:

It would seem the Palmerston North City Council doesn’t really have a position on what sorts of events its venues should be associated with.

That might seem remiss, but it is also better than having a restrictive policy.

Councillors should be wary of imposing an unwelcome moral code on the city or smuggling political posturing into places where it does not belong.

Venues should be politically neutral.

Unless an event is going to break the law, it should be able to be held at a Government owned venue.

The way venues are used in the city is to be reviewed. That’s fine, but if councillors wish to politicise what venues are used for, we ought to know who wants to sneak in some control-freakery and who generally favours freedom.

I find that when people can’t win debates, they try to ban the other side from speaking.

There are also hints that the council should support censorship, for this is presumably what is meant by “respond appropriately” to allowing speakers “whose views are demonstrably incompatible with the Human Rights Act”.

If a speaker breaches the Human Rights Act, they can be prosecuted. But what some politicians want is for anyone whose views they dislike to be painted as ***ist and banned from holding public meetings.

Beware the slippery slope.

Should a city council venue host a Defence Force industry forum?

Should the Railway Land be used to host a gathering of trucks reliant on fossil fuels?

Should a chocolate fair be held at the Palmerston North Conference and Function Centre or should the city be clear about its opposition to sugary diets?

Is rugby non-violent enough to be staged at the Central Energy Trust Arena?

Yes ban the chocolate fair!

The threshold for turning away events should be set high. These are community facilities and we deserve better than to have our venues turned into the latest battleground for political points-scoring. 

The message from residents to councillors must be unequivocal – these venues are ours, not yours.

A good editorial.

Andres Velasco writes:

In the last couple of years, the decline has accelerated to dizzying speeds. Now that the printing press is the only available financing tool, the International Monetary Fund is forecasting 1,000,000% inflation in 2018; the contraction in GDP dwarfs those of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the recent Greek crisis; 87% of Venezuelans live in poverty; and untold millions have left their country.

A larger contraction that the Great Depression takes some effort.

Restoring property rights and reforming this web of controls and regulations will be a colossal legal and political task, more akin to the transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union than to previous episodes of Latin American stabilization-cum-reform. Yet one lesson of the region’s market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s seems relevant: privatization must be accompanied by genuine competition. Otherwise, the result may be economic stagnation (monopolies can make fat profits while failing to innovate) and political backlash (voters who see that happening get very upset, quickly).

Likewise, the crony capitalism typical of many post-communist economies must be avoided.

Best way to avoid crony capitalism is issue shares to every citizen.

Another priority for the leaders of post-Maduro Venezuela will be to ensure that the state does what it is supposed to do. The Venezuelan state has nearly three million employees and, by one count, more than 4,200 institutions, yet government fails miserably at its most basic tasks, such as providing education, health, and security.

Three million employees providing basically no public services,

Take health: public hospitals and clinics are crumbling and largely devoid of medicines (imports of which are barely one-third the level in 2012). One survey found that 79% of facilities did not even have running water. These precarious conditions have allowed the reemergence of long-dormant diseases such as malaria, diphtheria, measles, and tuberculosis.

Or consider security, which has collapsed, placing Venezuela on the verge of becoming a failed state. Vast swaths of territory are so lawless that the police – and in some cases even the army – dare not enter. In large urban centers, the murder rate has shot up, putting Venezuela at the top of the world homicide tables, behind only El Salvador and Honduras and far ahead of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

In 1998 their murder rate was 19 per 100,000. Today it is 56. And that was in 2016. They may be top of the world by now.

A plan that enables Venezuela to import and function more or less as a normal economy again should have at least three components. First, the international community should recognize upfront the need for large debt reduction, rather than kicking the can down the road for years, as it did with Greece. Second, the International Monetary Fund will have to provide emergency balance-of-payments, through a program not too different in size from the one that Argentina just signed. And, third, a grant component, estimated by Venezuelan experts at around $20 billion, will be needed both to meet emergency humanitarian needs and to avoid Argentina’s mistake of allowing foreign debt to accumulate too quickly just after debt reduction.

Developed countries will have to bail them out with loans and grants. Otherwise they will become a failed state which destabilises the region. But this can only happen once there is a different Government with different policies.

Venezuela’s government has been waging war on its own people. The least the world can do is to stand generously on the victims’ side. In doing so, it would help prevent full-scale state failure, thereby minimizing the impact of the country’s humanitarian crisis and massive refugee outflows – not to mention rampant drug trafficking and money laundering – on regional and global stability.

NZ should help, once there is a Government capable of being helped.

Stuff reports:

Another round of petrol price increases has motorists paying almost $2.50 in main centres, prompting calls for the Government to signal how it could intervene in the market.

Overnight on Thursday the major petrol companies added 4c a litre to petrol, taking 91 octane or “regular” petrol to $2.489 in many parts of the country.

In Auckland, where the Government has introduced a regional fuel tax, at least two stations are charging $2.499 a litre, according to crowd sourced price monitoring company Gaspy.

The Government has intervened in the market. It has introduced a new regional fuel tax and also increased the national fuel tax. That is part of the problem.

The MBIE data show how much prices have increased in the last year. They were at $1.85 and now have exceeded $2.40.

That extra 65 cents a litre hits families hard. The average medium size car does 1,250 litres a year so that’s a huge $800 more a year.

Stuff reports:

Former Rongotai MP and Labour deputy leader Dame Annette King has put her Hataitai home up for sale, amid expectations she is headed overseas for a top diplomatic posting.

King, who served as an MP for 10 Parliamentary terms, including holding the seat of Rongotai since 1996, stepped down at the 2017 election. In May she was made a Dame, after being named in the New Year’s honours.

Having recently announced she is stepping down as interim chair of EQC, the former health minister is expected to be named as the next High Commissioner to Australia, although there has been no official confirmation.

Speaking from Thailand, where she is holidaying with family, King said the house was simply larger than she needed. It should not be inferred that it was a step towards a move to Canberra.

I first heard around four years ago that Annette would be made High Commissioner to Australia once there was a Labour Government. So it will be absolutely no surprise once her appointment is confirmed.

She’ll be a good pick for the job as she has a direct line to the PM and will need to smooth things overs with the Aussies as several Ministers are peeved off with the current Government here.

The Herald reports:

One of Australia’s most hated taxes is finally going to be scrapped.

At a pivotal meeting in Melbourne today, the states and territories backed Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s push to remove the 10 per cent GST from sanitary items — known colloquially as the “tampon tax” — from January 1 next year.

The move will lower the price of feminine hygiene products, news.com.au reports.

Mr Frydenberg said there was “strong agreement” among the states and territories, even though it will collectively cost them $30 million in lost revenue.

Many other health items are already exempt from the GST, including nicotine patches, sunscreen and even Viagra.

This is what happens when you exempt one thing – you end up having to exempt more and more. Once politicians suceed in saying “A is good so don’t tax it” or “B is bad, tax it more” you end up with a hideous system.

In NZ GST applies to almost every good and service. We are almost alone in the world with this.

In Australia food is exempt but not takeaways! Condoms but not tampons.

Flavoured yogurt is exempt but frozen yoghurt has GST.

Sashimi is exempt but beef jerky has GST

Vegetable seedlings pay GST but not pickled vegetables

Flavoured milk attracts GST but not soy milk

Pizzas and pizza rolls have different GST treatment

So if anyone you know ever proposes we should follow Australia and start exempting certain items from GST, you should get a very large baseball bat and use it to pound them into the same misshaped monstrosity that they want to turn our GST into.

Mike Hosking writes:

If you ever want a lesson in the simple reality of spending other people’s money, have a listen to our interview with the Prime Minister yesterday over her hiring of an ad agency in New York to follow her around and film her and take photos.

A few things are at play here: One, this has not got the sort of coverage in wider media you would expect, why not? Is the media in general still enamoured with Jacinda Ardern and therefore failing to do their job as diligently as they might?

Two, she doesn’t know what the bill is. Why not? It’s being paid for by her budget, the leader’s budget.

So she claims not to know the cost.

Five, the advertising agency they hired might or might not have been a donor to the party. I say donor because it could be a straight out donation, or work done in lieu of a donation at a cut rate – Ardern didn’t know that either.

Knows nothing about their donation to her campaign.

Could this be another scenario, a Whaitiri, a Curran, a Handley whereby we are about to get, whether through further questioning on shows like this, questions in Parliament, a level of detail we should have got yesterday.

In other words yesterday was her chance to clear the decks, explain fully and come clean. Because what this looks like is self-aggrandisement at our expense.

It’s a political glamour shoot, it’s style over substance with us footing the bill. It’s electioneering, especially if it turns up in the election.

It’s a lot of questions, all of which could have been, should have been sorted but haven’t, why?

Watch this space.

There will be more to come out on this.

Stuff reports:

It seems 13 is a lucky number for the team behind TVNZ 2’s hit show Wellington Paranormal.

New Zealand on Air has announced there will be a second season of the capital-set show, which investigates supernatural goings-on.

$5.09 million will be pumped into the next season of the acclaimed mockumentary comedy horror series.

I watched every episode of Season 1 and loved it. Is so very Kiwi, and is a great mocking of Police reality shows and Kiwi culture.

But despite being a huge fan, I have to say that $5 million for 13 episodes seems excessive.  That $17,035 per minute of screen time

For comparison Mystic got $1,000,000 for 13 episodes that are five minutes longer. That’s $2,750 per minute of screen time.

Looks like someone will get very wealthy from this.

Stuff reports:

Activists and academics are not typical bedfellows, but Sue Bradford is making sure the two parties can learn from each other.

The well-known activist and former Green Party MP is the activist in residence at Massey University in Palmerston North for a week.

Bradford was asked about a month ago by professor Mohan Dutta​, who is the dean’s chair of communication for the new Centre for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation, to take the position.

The two are producing a paper on the partnership between academics and activists in struggles of the oppressed.

This is an excellent idea to have an activist in residence. They should continue with it. Here’s some future activists which I am sure we will see in residence at Massey:

• Jordan Williams on behalf of oppressed taxpayers
• Don Brash on behalf of oppressed voters
• Simon Lusk on behalf of oppressed hunters
• Matthew Hooton on behalf of oppressed Iwi
• Garth McVicar on behalf of oppressed victims of crime

Stuff reports:

The Government has looked at ditching vehicle regos, and one option to replace it is another hike to the fuel tax.

While in opposition, MP Phil Twyford called the annual vehicle licensing system and its 235,000 fines each year a “giant revenue gathering device”.

Now the Minister of Transport, Twyford took official advice on other ways to raise the money, but doesn’t plan to pursue changes at the moment.

That’s a pity. He condemned it in opposition.

Twyford said he was concerned the current vehicle licensing system, which raised $469 million last year, cost taxpayers $50m to administer.

“I’m also concerned about the 235,000 people a year who don’t pay their rego fees on time and then end up getting dragged through the courts, clogging up our justice system and costing people a disproportionate amount of time and money for a minor offence.”

So scrap it. 10% of the revenue goes on admin and 235,000 people get hit with penalty fees plus some Councils use it as a huge revenue opportunity with their wardens giving you a $200 fine for being late.

Petrol tax is not perfect, but it has much lower compliance costs and is automatically paid.

Councils also issue $200 fines – and get to keep half the money collected.

Auckland dished out 54,644 warnings and 56,112 infringements for the 2017 financial year, with 20,188 of them going to court.

Christchurch issued 995 infringement notices in 2017. Wellington issued no infringements but gave out 353 warnings.

So Auckland Council have made $5.6 million from pinging late payers.

Danyl McL writes:

New Zealand First used to have this guy called Peter Brown as their deputy leader. Brown was (a) fiercely anti-immigration and (b) a migrant, having been born in the UK. It was useful for Winston Peters, I think, to have a white migrant deputy thundering that “the wrong sort of people were coming into the country”, spelling out to his elderly and easily bewildered constituency exactly what “the wrong sort” meant.

But here’s the thing about Peters’ perennial race-baiting – given airing most recently following a remit at the party’s 25th birthday over the weekend. He campaigns on the immigration issue every election, but Peters has been in the powerbroker position in government three times now, and each of those governments has seen very high levels of net migration of what his supporters and voters consider “the wrong sort” of people.

There are a few reasons for this. Most populist, anti-migrant politicians believe what they say about “our values” and “preserving our way of life”, and at least attempt to reduce migration when they get into office. Trump has his Muslim-ban; the conservatives have Brexit. But Peters’ statements about migrants appear to be as meaningful as so much else he says, ie nothing. It is useful for him to race-bait by grandstanding about immigration but never useful for him to ever do anything about the issue.

A very astute analysis. Winston doesn’t believe most of what he says. He says it to get support.

Another example was monetary policy. In 1996 he campaigned on radical change to monetary policy. He became Treasurer. The Reserve Bank said it could meet him to talk through the changes he had campaigned on. He told them not to bother, as that was just for the campaign.

We saw this also with the Maori seats. It was a “bottom line” in the 2017 campaign yet according to Labour he didn’t even raise it during the coalition negotiations.

There’s this theory that Winston Peters, despite his many terrible flaws, represents a lesser evil; that it’s better to have him out there grifting the elderly racists, using their votes as currency to gratify his own malevolent ego than having some genuine ethno-nationalist form a new party and rise to power. “You’ll miss him when he’s gone,” people warn me. They might be right. But I’m an optimist; I have faith in MMP’s 5% threshold (which I used to oppose as undemocratic, but now see the wisdom of) to wipe Peters out in the next election and to protect us from his successors. New Zealand First is 25 years old, but it would, I think, be a great shame for our country if it lives to 30.

It is a party that in the future historians will say achieved nothing except giving out money to various groups.

Stuff reports:

Veteran activist Penny Bright has died. She was 64 years old.

Bright died just before 10pm on Thursday night, her partner of 13 years, Julian said.

Her last word was: “Thanks.”

Her former nemesis, John Banks, also paid tribute to the woman who kept democracy “on the right track”.

“Her heart was always in the right place and she stood up with courage for what she believed in.”

While the pair had their battles while Banks was mayor of Auckland, he said he only has good memories of Bright and the pair had made peace.

“I visited her in hospital last month and she was pleased to see me. Today she deserves a lot of credit, we often did agree to disagree.”

Bright was often front and centre during the years Banks was in office.

“She was an interesting protester and she always cut a dash, always had her bright red lipstick on and some amazing hats. …

Bright campaigned against successive Auckland local bodies and said her first campaign was when she was at high school in the 7th form.

If there is an afterlife I suspect Penny is being a pain in the arse to the powers that be and demanding greater transparency from them. May she rest in peace.

Quillette reports:

For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” 

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

This is superb. They got a feminist journal to publish Mein Kampf in the language of intersectionality theory.

The three academics (who describe themselves as left leaning liberals) are fighting back over the grievance studies takeover of academia. They wrote 20 hoax papers and got seven published. They include:

• a paper claiming dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’ ” and issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.”
• a paper in a fat studies journal that claimed bodybuilding is “fat-exclusionary”
• a paper for the Journal of Poetry Therapy describing monthly feminist spirituality meetings with a “womb room” and six poems, which Mr. Lindsay generated by algorithm and lightly edited

The WSJ further report:

One hoax paper, submitted to Hypatia, proposed a teaching method centered on “experiential reparations.” It suggested that professors rate students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories. Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and “invited” to “sit on the floor” or “to wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course.” Students who complained would be told that this “educational tool” helps them confront “privileged fragility.”

And what was the response to this insanity?

Hypatia’s two unnamed peer reviewers did not object that the proposed teaching method was abusive. “I like this project very much,” one commented. One wondered how to make privileged students “feel genuinely uncomfortable in ways that are humbling and productive,” but not “so uncomfortable (shame) that they resist with renewed vigor.” 

Yes they liked the idea of privileged students being unable to speak and wearing chains in class.

Mr. Boghossian doesn’t have tenure and expects the university will fire or otherwise punish him. Ms. Pluckrose predicts she’ll have a hard time getting accepted to a doctoral program. Mr. Lindsay said he expects to become “an academic pariah,” barred from professorships or publications.

Yet Mr. Lindsay says the project is worth it: “For us, the risk of letting biased research continue to influence education, media, policy and culture is far greater than anything that will happen to us for having done this.”

Brave people who have done us a service. You can read their own article on how and why they did it here.

An acquaintance did an OIA asking how many people have been deported for criminal offending over the last five years, and their nationality.

The top 10 nationalities are:

1. India 226
2. China 178
3. Samoa 146
4. Tonga 120
5. Fiji 114
6. UK 54
7. Vietnam 37
8. Malaysia 36
9. South Africa 28
10. US 24

In total 1,242 deported in five years. A lot less than Australia (and we have deported only 12 Aussies) but not an insignificant number.

The vast majority of migrants are law abiding. But it is interesting to look at which nationalities have been deported the most, compared to their share of the population.

The rates per 10,000 population are

1. Malaysia 75
2. Vietnam 56
3. South Africa 35
4. Fiji 45
5. Tonga 20
6. US 19
7. India 16
8. China 11
9. Samoa 10
10. UK 7

Interesting to have Malaysia so high for their share of the population.

Newshub reports:

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage dropped the word Kiwis think is the most offensive of all during an early-morning TV appearance on Thursday.

Ms Sage was talking to Breakfast host Daniel Faitaua about the controversial tahr cullwhen she appeared to use the slur in place of the word “hunters”.

“There will be control work done between now and mid-November. Further meetings of the tahr liaison group and the c**ters too have committed to doing a big educational effort so that they shoot the female tahr, not just the bulls, which have got this magnificent mane, which they like to hunt.”

Neither she nor Mr Faitaua reacted visibly to the phrase, but some hunters think it was no mistake.

“Wow! That was no slip of the tongue. Purposely said. Not acceptable,” one wrote on the forum at nzhuntingandshooting.co.nz.

“She [knew] what she was saying alright,” suggested another. “She pauses beforehand and afterwards.”

A Freudian slip or is she support her co-leader’s campaign to reclaim the C word?

To be fair she won’t be the first MP to use the word. Many years ago then Northland MP John Carter in the House meant to refer to Labour pulling a cunning stunt, but well he didn’t. It took several minutes for the House and even the Speaker to stop laughing.

The Herald reports:

The High Court has overturned the Human Rights Review Tribunal’s finding of a breach of privacy in the Dotcom case.

Kim Dotcom made a request in 2015 under the Privacy Act for “every record mentioning him by name held by every government agency and every then-government minister, plus each agency contracted to work with any of those entities”.

The internet mogul claimed the total of 52 requests should be dealt with under urgency because the information was necessary for his upcoming extradition eligibility hearing.

Most of the requests were transferred to the Attorney-General, and were declined on the basis they were “vexatious” and included “trivial” information. Dotcom filed a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner, which was rejected.

He then complained to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, which found it was wrong for the Crown to transfer the requests to the Attorney-General and to refuse the requests.

It awarded Dotcom $90,000 damages, $60,000 for injury to feelings, and $30,000 for loss of a benefit – that being the information that he sought.

But the High Court has found the HRRT was completely wrong. They made several errors including basing the determination of vexatious on the subjective feelings of Dotcom rather than a objective test.

“We find that there was a proper and lawful purpose for the transfer of the requests and that, because of the insistence that all 52 requests were required to be responded to urgently, on the ground that the information sought was relevant to the eligibility proceedings, they were vexatious,” it states.

It also said it would not have upheld the awards of damages for lost benefit and loss of dignity or injury to feelings.

The HRRT decision seemed to be some form of activism. The Privacy Commissioner rejected the complaint, yet the HRRT upheld it and gave a staggering amount of money. Even worse it took them ten days of hearings!

The full judgement is a good read. The HRRT really got it wrong big time.