Claire Trevett writes:

Jones had also made much of the benefits of the tree planting programme in terms of jobs.

He had his “ne’er do well nephews” lazing about on the sofa in Northland who would be put to work.

He wanted to go so far as something akin to a planting for the dole programme – something Labour baulked at.

Yet it seems those nephews were in short supply when Ngati Hine came knocking.

The officials’ paper observed there would not have been the labour required for planting the trees even had the land been cleared.

So Jones had to admit they would have looked at bringing in overseas labour – likely under the Pacific Island seasonal labour scheme to plant the trees rather than Jones’ much talked about layabout nephews.

So the net impact of the tree planting scheme will be to import workers from overseas and increase immigration to NZ. I look forward to people reminding Winston of this on the campaign trail.

Stuff reports:

It was staff at Bunnings who alerted police after a young man made an unusual purchase in December 2016.

He bought 700 nail gun cartridges packed with gunpowder, that were kept behind a locked counter, and left the hardware superstore without buying anything else.

Staff were so suspicious that one of them trailed the man out into the Broadmeadows store carpark on Pearcedale Parade to take down the registration details of his sedan and raise the alarm.

It turned out federal police were already watching his every move as they began unravelling what could have been one of the most deadly homegrown terror attacks on Australian shores.

The buyer was Ahmed Mohamed. Then aged in his early 20s, he had grown up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs and was living a normal suburban life in Hallam with his wife and a baby boy on the way.

But underneath that veneer of normality, Mohamed and three of his friends were living a secret double life.

On November 2, a Supreme Court jury found Mohamed, 26, Abdullah Chaarani, 28, and Chaarani’s cousin, 23-year-old Hamza Abbas, guilty of planning to carry out a mass bombing attack which was also to have featured knives and guns on or around Christmas Day 2016 in Melbourne’s CBD.

Scores may have died. Tragedy averted thanks to Bunnings, the security services and the Police.

Ibrahim Abbas told the court he was motivated to become a martyr as it offered him a fast-track ticket to “paradise” – a perceived Islamic heaven he said other Muslims only reached when the world ended.

Mohamed and Ibrahim Abbas were also prepared to use their own family members as unwitting weapons and were secretly recorded by police discussing strapping their siblings and wives into suicide vests as they fine-tuned plans for their Islamic State-inspired attack.

Charming.

At the corner of Dandenong and Springvale roads on December 22, 2016, guns were drawn as Victoria Police’s Special Operations Group demanded Mohamed and Chaarani crawl on hands and knees from a red sedan.

Their reign of imminent terror had finally ceased.

“Go ahead martyr me. I welcome death,” Chaarani chanted.

“You [police] will have your day soon. Praise Allah, you can’t stop us all.”

Mohamed, Chaarani and Hamza Abbas are due to be sentenced in coming weeks.

Hopefully a very long sentence.

Mike Lee writes:

Transport Minister Phil Twyford’s defence of his unpopular light rail to the airport plan in the Herald recently was heavy on references to “experts”. He will need to do better than this to convince Aucklanders he is right to exclude the electric train option.

In a Herald online poll of 13,300 readers, 82 per cent indicated they would prefer to take a train to the airport, 9 per cent preferred to drive and park while only 6 per cent opted for “light rail” (trams). This should be giving the Government pause.

Not a scientific poll but still somewhat revealing.

Despite the minister’s airy references to “experts” it is the worrying lack of expert contestable advice that is his scheme’s greatest weakness.

Time was, transport projects of this cost and scale were the subject of widespread public debate and public input. But in recent years the statutory Regional Land Transport Plan and the Regional Public Transport Management Plan with its public input processes, have been marginalised by the top-down and informal ATAP (Auckland Transport Alignment Process).

ATAP has become the means by which the government-of-the-day imposes on Auckland what it wants. Twyford’s tramline to Mangere is the outcome of a “refreshed” ATAP replacing the previous Government’s 2016 ATAP.

But he needs to be reminded we live in a democracy. Unless he stops acting as some sort of transport tzar, trying to impose his will on an increasingly sceptical public, the 94 per cent of Aucklanders opposed to his light rail scheme, are likely to stay opposed.

As with the backlash against the regional fuel tax, now halted nationwide by a “captain’s call” from the Prime Minister, Twyford’s $3.7b light rail scheme is likely to carry political consequences.

At least it isn’t as nuts as the light rail madness in Wellington where the left demand light rail despite A BCR of 0.05.

Stuff reports:

New Zealand has one of the most unequal education systems in the world, according to Unicef, and OECD research indicates students from low-decile communities perform better than their higher-decile peers if they attend advantaged schools.

To counteract such biases, some Western education systems have turned to value-added (VA) models of assessment that measure students’ improvement throughout a year, rather than simply recording an end grade, like NCEA.

Yep the VA model is the most useful – how much gain has there been.

While VA models established in New South Wales and Tennessee provide a blueprint for efforts here, critics say they promote a one-size-fits-all approach that could narrow the curriculum and institute performance-based pay for teachers.

What’s more, without complex data on students’ backgrounds, they may not highlight the effect social advantage has.

Joel Hernandez thinks he can fix that.

The researcher at the New Zealand Institute, a public policy think tank, is about half way through a year-long project to build New Zealand’s first “contextualised” VA model.

Using integrated data from the ministries of education and social development, corrections and immigration, and weighted NCEA results from the country’s 500 secondary schools, the model aims to adjust for socio-economic factors and determine what effect individual schools have on students’ achievement – if any at all.

The unreleased preliminary results, Hernandez says, are significant.

By Christmas, the model should be able to profile students’ likelihood of success based on older students with similar backgrounds; how well they do in NCEA, whether they’re likely to take on tertiary study, “whether they end up in a Corrections facility, [or] their potential to go on a benefit”.

That looks like fantastic research. Can’t wait for the results.

The data available here is more sophisticated than that on which other jurisdictions base their VA models.

 Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure includes household income, internet access, parents’ education, and children’s health when they start school.

“Other countries are just using things like a free lunch as a proxy for lower socio-economic [status]”, Hernandez says.

Yeah the IDI rocks.

However, privacy laws limit what the New Zealand Initiative can do with that information. In accessing the data, it has agreed not to identify which schools are the most and least effective.

“At the moment, we’re arguing it’s impossible to identify a single school from a single dot [on a graph],” Hernandez says.

Crampton will instead offer the results to the Ministry of Education in the hope it will relay them to schools – especially if it turns out the variability between and within schools is higher than expected. 

Hopefully the Government will use this info.

Stuff reports:

The governor of the US state of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, is forthright about what he believes are the root causes of mass shootings.

A few months ago, the Republican blamed gun violence on children’s access to smartphones, video games and psychotropic drugs.

Most recently, he blamed society’s obsession with a specific genre of violent entertainment.

“Seriously, what’s the most important topic that seems to be in every cable television network for example? Television shows are all about what? Zombies,” he said in an interview with conservative Kentucky radio host Leland Conway.

Well it is true zombie TV shows often show zombies getting shot.

But if this was the cause of gun violence in the US, then surely Buffy would have led to a outbreak of stakings.

Stuff reports:

Long-awaited plans to extend Wellington’s Island Bay cycleway north to the Basin Reserve have been revealed.

Wellington City Council has released three design options for the cycleway  which will run through Newtown and Berhampore, and possibly Mt Cook.

The proposed routes would all result in a loss of car parking, with the most direct route potentially wiping out up to 605 spaces.

Which no doubt will also wipe out scores of businesses that will die because no one can park by their business.

Cycleways should be built off-road. I’m all for cycleways such as the proposed Hutt Road one which will be between the train tracks and the sea.

But fellow cyclist and Newtown resident Graeme Tuckett said cycleway infrastructure was not an issue because he used back roads to avoid traffic.

Rather than use Kent/Cambridge Terrace, he used Home St and Hania St to get to the Basin Reserve, and rather than Adelaide Rd, he often used the adjacent Hanson St.

Those routes could be sign-posted by the council as suggested cycle routes, Tuckett said.

“I definitely approve of cycleways, but they can be done simply and inexpensively. They don’t need to be over-engineered, over-complicated, and over-expensive.”

Yes!

The Stuff reports:

A man with intellectual limitations has been given a suspended sentence after admitting voting 11 times in last year’s General Election.

The police’s details on the case do not disclose which party Michael Shane Turner voted for.

Christchurch District Court Judge John Strettell said the 45-year-old did know the difference between right and wrong but he had “a more limited understanding of the implications of this than one would expect of the general public”. …

On election day, September 23, he cast four special votes at various locations.

The police summary of facts lists all the locations and dates.

All the votes were for the same party and candidate.

Turner told police he voted multiple times to boost the vote numbers for his chosen party, but said he did not know it was wrong to vote more than once.

I have some sympathy for him, but I’m not sure I believe him. He knew enough to go to different voting places for each vote, which would have been deliberate. If he had tried to vote more than once at the one place, he would have been told he can’t.

He ordered that Turner “come up for sentence within six months if called upon”, which means that if he offends again he can be recalled on this charge and sentenced on it. But otherwise there is no penalty.

Which means if he does the same next election, then there are no consequences for what he did this election.

The Electoral Commission obviously detected the multiple voting when they did the scrutiny of the rolls after the election. I do wonder whether we should be not just scrutinising them after the election, but during the voting period.

It would be simple for each advance polling place and polling place to have a tablet where names of those voting and recorded and transmitted to the central office. The database could instantly detect if the same name has voted more than once, and be investigated straight away.

The Herald reports:

The Government has scrapped plans to establish a School of Rural Medicine.

The previous Government, before last year’s election, promised to create the school in a bid to attract more doctors to the regions.

But Health Minister David Clark this morning announced he had scrapped plans for the school. …

The University of Waikato and the Waikato DHB put forward the idea to the Government and Otago and Auckland Medical Schools also had played a part in its proposal.

Basically this was about Waikato trying to set up a third medical school. This always seemed a bad idea as they had no particular expertise in this area.

Auckland and Otago were strongly against this, and then a compromise was done where they would all work together on it.

But it seems to me it was more a solution looking for a problem, and that any issues around rural health could be done through the two existing medical schools.

So on this issue I think David Clark has made the right call. There’s better things to spend $250 million on in health.

Dear God, please, yes. https://t.co/bmfWokusJj

— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 12, 2018

The perfect response.

Stuff reports:

Year 13 students are worried they might fail their history exam because they didn’t know what the word “trivial” meant. 

The senior students have launched a petition asking for the essay to be marked based on students’ own definition of the “unfamiliar” word. It has so far received more than 1300 signatures.

Students sitting the NZQA Level 3 History causes and consequences paper on Wednesday were confronted with the word in a quote from Julius Caesar: “Events of importance are the result of trivial causes.”

Students were asked to analyse the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with Caesar, with reference to the causes and consequences of a historical event. 

Oh dear.

You’re 18 years old and you don’t know what trivial means, so you launch a petition complaining a nasty exam used the word.

Even if the word wasn’t known, one should be able to deduce its meaning from the context.

Taieri College student Logan Stadnyk is one of those who sat the paper and signed the petition.

He said he was “lucky” to understand the word, but at least half of his class didn’t. 

Now the students were worried they could be penalised.  

Some of his peers thought trivial meant “significant”, he said.

“Trivial isn’t a word that you hear too frequently, especially not if you’re in Year 13,” he said. 

Trivial is a pretty common word.

Chairman of the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association, Graeme Ball, agreed. 

He called the exam a “little bit of a snafu” on the part of NZQA, and said the language used in questions should be “accessible to all”.

The exam was not testing comprehension, so it was “unfair” to make that part of the assessment, he said. 

But should Year 13 students know the word “trivial”?

It was “debatable”, he said. “I don’t think we can make assumptions about what students should and shouldn’t know at that level,” he said. 

I would hope we could make assumptions.

NewstalkZB reports:

Michael Avenatti, who skyrocketed to fame as a critic of President Donald Trump and the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels, was arrested Wednesday and booked on a felony domestic violence charge, Los Angeles police said.

The alleged victim in the case had visible injuries, according to Officer Tony Im, a police spokesman. But Avenatti slammed the allegation as “completely bogus” and “fabricated and meant to do harm to my reputation” in a statement released by his law firm.

Avenatti, who has said he’s mulling a 2020 presidential run, posted $50,000 bail and was released about four hours after he was arrested Wednesday on the same block where he lives in a skyscraper apartment.

Police declined to provide any details about the alleged victim, including that person’s relationship to Avenatti.

As he left the police station Wednesday, Avenatti said he had never hit a woman and said he’s been an advocate for women’s rights his entire career.

Isn’t that what Harvey Weinstein said also?

Avenatti was already pretty unpopular with many Democrats for his actions during the Kavanaugh hearings. The story of his accuser fell apart and turned it into a circus allowing the Republicans to energise their base because of it.

Silverdale Primary School newsletter:

There has been a lot of talk about the cancellation of the end of year prizegiving. Just to clarify some misconceptions about cancellation of the end of year prizegiving.
1. Sports teams will still be based on skill and a selection process.
2. There will still be placings at school events such as cross country, athletics, swimming, speech competitions. Some of these events have trophies and these will be handed out on the day or at the next assembly.
The end of year prizegiving was used to award children in each class:
– Most improved
– Commitment to Learning

– Classroom Citizen
– Excellence in Literacy and Mathematics
Out of a class of 20 to 30 children how does a teacher choose one child for each award?
Don’t we want all our children to improve, have commitment to learning, show citizenship and to have excellence in literacy and mathematics. By rewarding a few we find that it discourages the others

My God. They’re so wet it could be a monsoon.

Wait until they leave school and discover things such as you can apply for a job and not get it.

Audrey Young writes:

For several days her officials had been telling New Zealand media that she would be sitting next to Pence at his request.

She began answering questions about it in Cairns, on the way to Singapore for the East Asia Summit. It was considered a diplomatic coup to get several hours of quality time with such a prominent figure in the Trump Administration.

She continued to answer questions about it when she arrived, in terms of what issues she would expect to raise with him during the dinner.

At no point did she say she would be sitting near him, not next to him. But when it became clear someone had mucked up, and she was sitting with Mrs Pence, not Mr Pence, Ardern insisted that that had been the plan all along.

Oh this is hilarious. For days they boasted and spun this as a huge achievement – Jacinda had been personally selected to sit next to the Vice-President of the United States.

But the reality was that actually she was not being seated next to the VP. Not next to any head of state at all. She was next to the wife of the VP. Her several hours of quality time was actually a couple of minutes. Rather than being the top of the pecking order, more down the bottom. Which reflects the fact we have been totally unsuccessful in getting an exemption to the steel tariffs.

It meant treating the news media as though it had been at fault in misinterpreting the dinner invitation to sit next to Mr Pence as an invitation to sit next to Mr Pence.

The old blame the media because their spin was inaccurate.

Stuff reported:

Police will not be taking part in Auckland’s Pride Parade in February – because they say they have been banned from wearing their uniforms.

Instead, the Pride Festival board told officers they must wear T-shirts instead of their uniforms, says Inspector Tracy Phillips.

“It’s really, really sad, “says Phillips, the self-appointed coordinator of the New Zealand Police’s diversity liaison officer (DLO) service.

“We’re really proud of what we do for a job, who we are and the work that we’ve done – so if we’re not welcome, we’re certainly not going to force our way in, and we’ve taken that message as we are not welcome.”

So the Auckland Pride Board believe in inclusion and diversity – except for gay and lesbian police officers.

The problem here will be activist take over.  I suspect the vast majority of gay Aucklanders love seeing the Police take part in the Pride Festival. It’s actually a very powerful symbol. The comments on the article show there is a lot of upset.

The problem will be those on the board will not be representative of the community. They’ll be dominated by a few hard core activists who will use jargon such as:

A spokesperson for the Auckland Pride Board said there was “goodwill towards the NZ Police” but that they did not “currently meet the degree of safety and awareness of intersectionality required by our rainbow communities”. 

What gobbledygook.

According to Phillips, the NZ Police had reached out to the board to find out what the force could improve on.

“We had said to the organisers, come to us and tell us what we can do better – but no one’s come back to us.”

She says the news is a huge blow, but that they’re staying positive.

“Our entire police band was going to come this year, our police horses, or police dogs, our rainbow scarf and rainbow car – so I’m really disappointed. But we’ll just keep doing the mahi in the background, and doing things because it’s the right thing to do.”

A real own goal by the Auckland Pride Board. And very insulting to the gay and lesbian police officers who have effectively been told they are viewed as second class citizens who shouldn’t be proud of the job they do.

UPDATE: Mika is not happy:

The decision to ban police from wearing their uniforms during Auckland’s Pride Parade by the festival’s board, has been described as “fascist” and “elitist” by Mika, a gay icon and parade veteran.

“These things are about inclusion, and we’ve got our community within the police force who want to represent us,” said Mika.

“We are talking about the inclusion of a community, dressed in their own drag, supporting the kaupapa (subject). I don’t understand the Pride Board’s decision. It’s fascist and elitist.”

It is the opposite of inclusive.

Mika, who has been a parade grand marshall and involved in Pride festivals around the world, said the board’s decision was treading on dangerous territory.

“As soon as we start not allowing some groups, where do we stop? You start with the police, then it can lead to lesbian groups who don’t like transgender. The list can go on.”

Let’s not even start on the pregnant man in Dunedin!

Stuff reports:

A Southland woman sentenced for doing indecent acts on a child tried to persuade a court where her home detention should be served.

The woman was sentenced to seven-and-a-half months’ home detention for three charges of an indecent act on a child.

The maximum sentence is ten years. Home detention is a very light sentence.

Judge McIlraith said there were aggravating factors at the time of the offending, including the abuse of trust involved, the number of incidences that took place and and the nature of the acts performed.

Yet still got home detention.

The woman’s parents appeared in court in support of their daughter, who has permanent name suppression.

This is the really appalling part. Unless the name suppression is to protect the victims (and there is no indication it is), then why has she not been named?

Stuff reports:

Letting fees are back, now being levied on investors rather than tenants.

A law change was passed at the start of this month to ban the fees, which are usually equal to a week’s rent plus GST. …

But now property managers are introducing a fee to replace it, which will be charged to owners.

It has led landlords to warn that rents might rise to cover the cost.

Of course rents will rise to cover the cost. Once again the Government is surprised by unexpected consequences. This one though was easy to anticipate.

Stuff reports:

Police Commissioner Mike Bush is not ruling out the possibility of manslaughter charges over the Pike River mine explosion, which claimed the lives of 29 men.

The Police never rule out any charges, so this is not significant.

His comments come after the Government gave the all-clear to re-enter Pike River mine.

Police are part of the re-entry operation and will conduct their own forensic investigation, alongside mining and recovery experts who hope to retrieve what remains of the men.

“Our case is open, and everything will be based on evidence,” Bush said.

“The purpose of us being involved here is, if it’s safe, to ensure that we take advantage of any opportunities to examine forensic evidence.”

If they find forensic evidence, that’s great. But I’d be very surprised if there is anything that will illuminate any further what went wrong.

Little has had the plan for the past two weeks. The agency had put forward three options for a manned re-entry and has a budget of $23 million, although it has said it would need more.

All options required additional funding, and Cabinet approve an additional $14m for the single entry option, this week.

$37 million then and possibly more. I wonder how many of the families would rather that was spent on supporting them directly, rather than re-entering the mine.

Mike Hosking writes:

So the key question here, is just how spectacularly bad does it have to get before Lees-Galloway falls on his sword? Or just how spectacularly bad does it have to get before Jacinda Ardern realises she simply has to do the right thing by all of us and get rid of him?

Having been told a week and a half ago by Ardern to “read between the lines”, and having done so, it’s done nothing to provide light as to why a catastrophically bad decision was made, but everything as to why it was the cock-up it looked like from day one.

Even worse for ILG is the news that he may not be able to reverse his decision, so the Czech gangster may be here for good.

And now to end the week, the admission, perhaps the most damning admission of all from the minister himself. He made the decision within an hour and didn’t read the whole file. Having spent the past week trying to pin this on officials, we now know another piece of the truth.

He not only didn’t join the dots, didn’t have the wherewithal to see the potential political carnage of doing what he was about to do, but he didn’t even do his job, even if he read all he had in front of him, he didn’t get the stuff we’ve got.

That seals without a shred of doubt now the fact that so much of this is was just never supposed to happen, if it had been in the hands of anyone who was competent, or even slightly alert.

Maybe he just doesn’t think drug dealers are a problem?

So in summation what do we have? A false passport, drug smuggling, fear of death that wasn’t, trips to the republic despite fear of death, a protection order, the parole board that thinks he’s a liar, the extradition order from the republic, the Immigration Department trying to boot him out.

And now, the decision within an hour, and the admission even the stuff the department had provided wasn’t fully read.

I repeat just how spectacularly bad and blatantly wanting do you need this to be to have the self respect of mea culpa-ing this and falling on your sword?

Or perhaps more importantly, if the Prime Minister is to shake her image of being hopelessly soft in these matters, just what is it she needs to see before she sorts this the way it should have been sorted now two weeks back?

The PM says she thinks he made the right decision, so she can hardly sack him for that.

Stuff reports:

Auckland Council plans to reduce the speed limit for Lime e-scooters.

The council says it has spent about $3500 on posters, bus stop signs and social media posts as part of its Scoot Safe campaign.

Auckland Mayor Phil Goff called for an urgent council report to look at the safety concerns surrounding e-scooters in the region after a councillor was almost hit, late last month.

Goff will be making a submission to the Transport Minister Phil Twyford later this week where he will also outline other changes for the safety of riding e-scooters including reducing the speed limit to 10kmh on footpaths, the use of helmets and police using enforcement for reckless behaviour.

This is bonkers.

I can run faster than 10 km/hr. Goff is saying helmets should be mandatory for e-scooters and they shouldn’t be able to go more than 10 km/hr.

Why stop there? Let’s make helmets compulsory for joggers.