As most readers will know a restaurant in the US called the Red Hen asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders to leave, because they don’t like Donald Trump’s policies.

Legally of course the owner has the right to refuse service to someone. No question of that.

But they are sorely mistaken if they think doing so is a good thing to do. I imagine they think it will somehow convince people that Trump is so bad. However it will do the opposite – it will solidify his supporters behind him. In fact polls show that Trump now is polling higher approvals than any other recent Republican President, amongst Republicans.

The other thing this will do, is encourage future Democratic staffers and politicians to be refused service in other restaurants. Sure you may believe that Trump is an outlier (and I agree) but the fact is 63 million Americans vote for him, and mainly still support him. So what they read from Sanders being evicted, is that Democrats think they are awful people who also shouldn’t be served.

And how will they respond. Well when there is a Democratic President, then their staff will be harrassed and evicted from restaurants. There are many Americans who think abortion is murder. What if they start refusing to allow pro-choice politicians to dine at their restaurants. Is that what you want in a country?

A Democratic politician has even called on people to harass and confront politicians they don’t like. To form a crowd and push back on them. You can see how that could easily end in violence.

Now Trump himself has contributed to the incivility with his tweets and the like. But responding as the restaurant owners did, actually benefits Trump. It pisses off 63 million Americans and makes them get in behind the President even more.

Newshub reports:

Police have arrested a man over allegations relating to a Labour Party summer camp at Waihi.

The 20-year-old will appear in Auckland District Court on four charges of indecent assault on 5 July.

As charges have been laid, people need to be careful about what they say.

But the fact charges have been laid suggests the incidents were serious enough to warrant criminal prosecution.

It also highlights how miserably the Labour Party failed the complainants. They did nothing for weeks and weeks except try to hush it up. They never offered the option of going to the Police. Even after they asked a Minister to intervene, little happened. They were forced to go public to the media, in order for the right thing to be done.

Radio NZ reports:

Universities New Zealand, which represents eight universities, said official figures from the Tertiary Education Commission showed their student numbers by end of April 2018 were 0.3 percent higher than at same time in 2017. The increase figure covered all domestic tertiary enrolments.

Labour’s free fees policy will cost $1.2 billion a year when fully implemented. It is not leading to any significant increase in enrolments (the stated rationale for it) but instead is a huge wealth transfer to the future wealthy. The average graduate will earn $1.6 million more in their lifetime than a non graduate and Labour is spending $1.2 billion a year on them, rather than on funding the health system or early childhood education or law & order.

The policy would not have encouraged students from poor families to attend university, Prof McCutcheon said.

“If you’re trying to get students from disadvantaged communities into university, what you should do is focus on those students, at least in my view, not reduce the cost of attending university for students who come from relatively well-off parts of New Zealand,” he said.

Exactly. Targeted assistance would be far better than this hugely expensive failed policy.

For the last 15 years or so, I have tended to not delete comments that are overly nasty or abusive, but hand out strikes and eventually suspensions to commenters.

This has had the benefit of publicly showing that I don’t censor comments based on political opinion, but for breaches of my commenting policy. It also has allowed people to see what is and is not acceptable, and for most (not all) infringers it has allowed them to learn and stay within boundaries.

I am not stopping this approach, but I am supplementing it.

The challenge I have is that it takes quite a bit of time to review a comment, edit it accordingly, note a strike on the strikes page, edit a user profile to suspend them, and also note in my calendar when their suspension ends.

Especially since becoming a parent, my time is at a premium. I struggle with finding the time to respond to some complaints in a timely manner.

So in future I am going to more frequently  simply delete comments that I deem are too abusive or trolling etc. They will simply disappear. If this happens to one of your comments, then you should change your commenting style in future.

If I see someone being persistently abusive or trolling, I may still take the time to do a formal strike and suspension.

I think enough people have seen my style the last 15 years they they know (unlike some blogs) I won’t just delete comments because I disagree with them politically. The whole point of comments (for me) is to have debate and disagreement.

General Debate will continue to be more lightly moderated than other threads, but basic standards still apply. And also a reminder that I don’t proactively read most comments. If you think a comment is beyond the pale, e-mail a link to the comment to [email protected] along with a brief statement of why you think the comment is unacceptable. As a general rule only e-mail about fresh comments, not ones that are days old (unless you are personally affected by it).

The NZ Peoples Party has just done late declarations of almost $260,000 of donations from Roshan Lal Nauhria last year.

They got a total of 1,890 votes so that’s $137 donated per vote. Not a great investment!

Not good that they did not disclose these donations at the time. They did include it in their annual return in April 2018 but they should have been disclosed within ten days of being made.

Stuff reports:

Inland Revenue officials have warned against tax breaks for the racing industry, saying they could cost the Crown up to $40 million in lost revenue – but the Government is proceeding regardless

NZ First and its leader Winston Peters had been backed at the election by prominent racing industry figures, who demanded those bloodstock tax breaks, as well as an all-weather track and control of the NZ Racing Board.

Now one of Peters’ backers – top breeder Sir Patrick Hogan –  has been ticked off by the Electoral Commission for breaking election funding rules with a pro-NZ First advertisement. “I didn’t understand the rules.” Hogan said.

It was effectively an undeclared donation. When you spend thousands of dollars running an advertisement urging people to vote for a party, that is hugely beneficial to the party. It is why Hogan should have got authorisation for the ads, so they could be declared.

This week’s slap on the hand came the same day that Peters stepped up to the office of acting Prime Minister. As Racing Minister, Peters last month announced tax deductions for the buyers of “good looking” horses.  It was notable as the only tax cut in the Government’s first Budget.

Humans get nothing unless they own a good looking horse.

Details of Peters’ new policy are vague. But a strikingly similar proposal was advanced by the Racing Board last year. Officials cautioned against it because the deductions could be claimed even if a breeding business never eventuated.  The Racing Board believed the policy would cost around $5 million a year.

IRD didn’t accept that figure and put the cost at around $40 million a year because it had the potential to apply to an extra 7000 horses a year. 

Nurses are on strike over their wages, but the Government can afford to give 7,000 horses a tax break.

Sir Patrick said it was a “last minute decision” to place the ad. “I did it to assist in letting the industry know that at least the NZ First party had the best racing policies out there before the elections. All I was doing was saying that’s what people should consider. The last three elections they have had the best racing policies of any party. Any of the other parties don’t support racing at all.”

He refused to say if he had donated to NZ First’s election campaign. 

Which suggests he did. He also donated in 2008.

NewstalkZB reports:

One of the Bay of Plenty’s worst repeat drink-drivers has clocked up his 20th conviction.

Phillip Noble, 53, who appeared in the Tauranga District Court yesterday pleaded guilty to two driving charges – one charge each of drink driving and driving while disqualified.

He had 19 prior drink-driving convictions and eight previous convictions for driving while disqualified.

If he has 20 drink-driving convictions he has probably driven drunk a couple of thousand times as you get breath tested well under 1% of the times you drive.

His drink-driving offending began in 1981. From that time until October 2, 2006, Noble was caught 17 times.

His 18th and 19th drink-driving offences were committed in June 2011 and August 2016.

Noble was caught drink driving and driving while disqualified for the ninth time on April 4 this year, after police clocked him driving at 176 km/h on State Highway 1 in Tokoroa.

Driving drunk is bad enough. To be driving drunk at 180 km/hr is going to be lethal.

Lawyer Michael Toner urged Judge Christopher Harding to grant his client bail until sentencing, despite Noble’s two recent breaches of district court bail.

Toner said those failures to attend court were due to Noble’s decision to got out of town to visit his elderly mother, who was “very ill”.

Noble was keen to be sentenced immediately, he said.

But Judge Harding said he was not prepared to do so without a probation report and wanted to see if anything could be done to help Noble stop offending in this way.

The judge remanded Noble in custody for sentencing on July 31.

This is a good example of why reducing the prison population isn’t so easy.

Most people would agree that normally you should not go to prison for drink driving.

Most people would also agree that if someone is a repeat drink driver they should be given treatment for alcoholism and you do what you can to stop them reoffending.

But what do you do when it simply doesn’t work?

If you never ever send someone like Noble to prison, he will probably end up killing an innocent motorist or pedestrian. Public safety becomes paramount at some stage.

The Herald reported:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is among those paying tribute to former Māori Affairs and Labour MP Koro Wētere, who has died aged 83.

Sad news. a very nice man.

Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters said, on behalf of the Government, he wanted to acknowledge the contribution Wētere had made to the country and his remarkable service as an MP for more than quarter of a century.

“Koro was highly respected across the divide of politics for his sincerity and integrity. Our deepest condolences are extended to his family and to Ngāti Maniapoto for their loss,” Peters said.

Somewhat ironic as Peters pursued Wetere in the 1980s over the Maori loan affair, and kept calling on him (rightfully) to resign.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote on Twitter that Wētere was a much-valued colleague for many years and a Labour stalwart, Tainui elder and had dedicated his life to public service.

Condolences to his family and friends.

Steve Kilgallon at Stuff reports:

It’s been nearly four weeks since the story broke about a baby being abandoned outside a Northland pub while its mother played the pokies – but no-one can say who the baby was.

No official agency has conducted a formal investigation into the baby’s welfare, and the pokie machine trust involved said there’s no evidence to say the baby ever existed.

Glen Dick, the landlord of Rawene’s Masonic Hotel, had told media got rid of his pokies after discovering the baby on the footpath outside his pub while the mother was inside his pokie room.

I recall that story. It got a lot of publicity.

But Pub Charity chief executive Martin Cheer said a report commissioned from a specialist CCTV analytics company showed those events never happened.

Fascinating.

Cheer has forwarded a report from Pinnacle Security Consultants, analysing a month’s work of CCTV footage from the pub in Rawene, in the Far North, to the Department of Internal Affairs asking them to investigate further. The DIA have declined.

He added that the Pinnacle report studied every interaction between Dick and any female customer who appeared to be under the age of 50 on four cameras which between them cover the main bar and the poker machine room.

The report stated there was no vision of an incident involving a baby, but also that there was no footage of Dick going into the pokie room and cashing out a female client in the way he had described in a series of interviews across various media.

Cheer said Dick’s original story changed to say he left the baby outside – beyond the range of the cameras – but that the poker machine cameras showed the rest of his story was untrue.

So if the story is invented, why? Was there some other reason he wanted to remove the pokie machines?

Absolutely up to a pub owner whether or not they have pokies. But why invent a story justifying their removal?

Stuff reports:

Labour’s Andrew Kirton who came under fire in the wake of the Labour Party youth camp allegations is understood to be leaving his job as general secretary to join Air New Zealand.

This is a blow to Labour, as Kirton was one of their more competent General Secretaries. He absolutely mishandled the youth camp issue, but overall has been a good performer for Labour.

It is a bit unusual to leave such a role when the party is finally in Government.

The Air NZ role is a good one for him though, as previously he was head of public affairs for Heathrow Airport.

The Herald reports:

Labour MP Stuart Nash pulled the pin on his own fundraiser at the Northern Club today, saying it would be inappropriate to attend because of the involvement of right-wing lobbyist Matthew Hooton.

Hooton is an old friend of Nash’s and had been involved in organising the fundraiser of about 20 of Nash’s friends since 2014.

Fascinating that Matthew has been doing fundraisers for Labour for the last four years.

Nash said his decision to pull out was because Hooton had criticised Labour and his fellow Labour Minister David Parker in recent days over the ban on foreign buyers in New Zealand – criticism Parker has said was unwarranted.

“In light of Matthew’s attacks on the Government, in particular David Parker, I’ve decided it is no longer appropriate to attend the fundraiser with Matthew so I have pulled out.”

Matthew has criticised Ministers and MPs from all parties for many years.

Hooton said the fundraiser went ahead without Nash. “It was a very successful fundraiser for the Napier Labour Party with one empty seat – although that did not make too much difference.”

A very unusual situation.

I blogged on Thursday about how Labour tried to pass a law which would exempt just one company from their law to ban foreign house buyers.

Now regardless of motivation, this is an extraordinary thing to do. You don’t pass laws that say it is a crime to assault someone except for Fred Jones or that you need to pay GST except if your company is Fred Jones Ltd.

This is why the Speaker properly ruled the amendment out or order. But who made the decision to try and favour just one company, and why?

Well what is interesting is the company involved, didn’t ask to be exempted from the law. They (Te Arai) appears to have acted very properly with their formal submission. Nowhere do they say “Hey we want a special law that looks after us, and no one else”. Their submission recommended stuff such as exempting rural land of less than five hectares.

So this raises the fascinating question of who decided to give this company a special exemption. The Office of the Clerk told the select committee what they were seeking to do was improper, but the Government MPs had been told the Government wanted this exemption, so they stuck it in.

Now who in Government decided this. Well the Herald reports:

Parker said the Government wouldn’t try to put the exemption back into the bill via another route, but he confirmed it was his own office that put the exemption in.

“That was my office’s decision.

His office’s decision???

I’ve worked in a (prime) ministerial office. I have never known an office to have decision making authority.

So when Parker says it was a decision of his office, what does he mean? Did the receptionist decide? Was it the press secretary? Or did they have a staff meeting and vote to give a legislative waiver to this one company?

Or is this weasel words by Parker to distance himself? Surely he was the sole decision maker who decided to tell the select committee to ignore the official advise and try to legislate an exemption for this one company.

“We saw this and it was described in the papers as an iwi development. I’ve never met them, there was some sympathy for the position, within Government, that they were in so we proposed that exemption that’s been ruled out of order so we’re not pursuing it.”

Who is the “we”. Is this his office? Is this other Ministers? And if the decision maker wasn’t solely Parker, did he disclose his previous relationship with developer John Darby?

CNN reports:

An image that appears in this week’s Time magazine cover became a rallying cry for an end to the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents after they are apprehended at the US border.

The cover features an image of a crying toddler taken by Getty photographer John Moore superimposed next to President Trump, who is towering over the child. The text next to the illustration reads, “Welcome to America.”

But as details about the little girl emerged this week, critics claim the cover is misleading because she is not one of the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents at the border. …

Time issued a correction on one of its articles in which Moore’s photo appeared. “The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she taken from the scene. The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together,” the correction reads. 

This is a huge blunder by Time, made worse by their refusal to apologise.

The girl was screaming because her mum put her down for two minutes while she was searched by US border patrol. It wasn’t a girl screaming because her parents were being taken away. She was just upset because she was standing next to her mum for a couple of minutes. I sometimes get that reaction at supermarkets when I have to put the sprog down when I pay.

The US policy of separating parents and children is or was inhumane and deserved all the criticism and scrutiny. But for Time Magazine to use as its cover photo an image which is misleading at best and fake news at worse is wrong.

Stuff reports:

ACT leader David Seymour’s latest policy-on-the-fly comments turned into what closely resembled a scene from How the Grinch Stole Christmas,when he voiced his preference for axing almost all public holidays.

On Wednesday, the MP was asked to share his thoughts on whether Matariki should become a public holiday.

Earlier this month, Wellington Mayor Justin Lester said he supported Queen’s Birthday being ditched in favour of a national Matariki holiday.

Seymour said he wasn’t keen on including another public holiday in New Zealand’s calendar.

“If people want to use some of their annual leave for Matariki, they can.”

In fact, he wasn’t really a fan of public holidays at all.

What came next was eerily similar to the part of the Jim Carrey film where the Grinch ransacks the houses of Whoville: “Clearance Sale! Everything must go”.

Reporters listed public holidays, as Seymour listed the reasons why they should not be part of New Zealand’s set calendar.

People should be able to decide when they wanted to go on holiday, Seymour said. 

“I’m not into the Government telling people how to use their annual leave. What is this? A fascist state?”

One reporter asked whether New Zealand scrap all public holidays. “I’m open to it,” Seymour replied.

Actually Seymour has a point.

He is not proposing (as I understand it) cancelling all public holidays without “compensation”, more that people should choose for themselves what days they take off.

All employees currently get at least four weeks annual leave and 11 public holidays, so that is 31 days of paid leave.

Rather than have the state dictate you mustn’t work on Queen’s Birthday or Labour Day, people could choose for themselves when they take their holidays.

Imagine how great it would be if you could take six whole weeks off in January and February (when the weather is great) rather than be forced to take days off in April, June and October when the weather is lousy.

Why do we force Buddhists and Muslims to take off Easter and Christmas?

Why are Republicans forced to take a day off for the Queen’s official birthday.

I suspect most families would still choose to take off the current public holidays, but it should be their choice.

Katherine Rich writes:

In February 2018, a University of Waikato study published in Public Health Nutrition about sugary drinks from Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand was shopped to the media no doubt with great excitement about its shocking findings. New Zealand drinks were possibly “the most unhealthy in the world”.

It was a big story covered by most media here and the news that New Zealand drinks were higher in sugar than other countries went global. The paper announced that “NZ had the highest percentage of beverages with sugar added to them (52%), whilst the UK had the lowest (9%, p<0.001). Sugar tax campaigners latched onto the low UK figure and used it to amplify their calls for sugar taxes and regulation making inflammatory comments about the food industry like, “Don’t trust them. Just regulate them”.

At the New Zealand Food & Grocery Council we couldn’t understand the big gap between countries. Major volume ranges were similar and major producers in each country had been on a reformulation journey for many years (in some cases decades). It didn’t make sense based on our global knowledge of the food industry.

What stood out the most when so many brands are global and the same in terms of sugar content, was the extremely low 9% of beverages with sugar added attributed to the United Kingdom.

The extremely low UK figure was used by pro-sugar tax campaigners in New Zealand to claim that the UK sugar tax on beverages had already been a resounding success even before it had come into force, and to pressure the New Zealand government to implement a similar tax regime here.

A lot about the paper and its findings didn’t add up. So we fact-checked the paper and found our instincts were correct.

Indeed, the maths did not add up. The most glaring error was so simple a high school student would be embarrassed.

Rather than the level in the UK being 9% it was 39%. Somehow the ‘3’ in 39 had been left off and not one of the seven highly educated authors had caught the error. So much for peer review.

None of the authors caught on, let alone the peer reviewers.

So you had all these shock horror stories based on a total fallacy.

When we dug deeper we found other flaws in the paper that were equally concerning and went a long way to explain the remaining gap between countries. Mistakes were made about all sorts of things: UK sugar tax rates, the way Australia and New Zealand define fruit juices and drinks, Ministry of Health nutrition guidelines, product labels, water differences. The authors also appeared not to recognise the difference between pack sizes and serving sizes. Some of the paper’s references did not support bold claims made in the paper or were merely published opinions, not research.

Yet again this paper got through peer review and was published.

Politik reports:

The Government’s much vaunted overseas house buying ban legislation has emerged from a Select Committee with a whole heap of exemptions and loopholes.

Ironically the Committee originally proposed an exemption which has now been ruled out by the Speaker  for a company associated with a Queenstown businessman who has been behind some of the biggest and most expensive real estate developments aimed at overseas investors.

So the Government tried to legislate an exemption for one businessman. This is of course what they campaigned on.

Singapore has been entirely exempted from the legislation for reasons that the Minister in charge of the Bill, David Parker is unable (or unwilling) to elaborate on.

They Government claimed they were confident Singapore would agree to change their FTA with NZ. They were wrong.

But perhaps the most surprising thing about the Bill is that it now contains powers for the Government to exempt whole classes of proposed sales from the legislation.

So, for example, a Government could exempt all urban houses.

And it also contains a power for the Minister to exempt any “transaction, person, interest, right or assets from the requirement for consent or from the definition of overseas person or associate or associated land. “

So what we’re going to see is crony capitalism, where the Minister will decide who will and will not be exempt.

But one Queenstown developer told POLITIK that the likely consequence of this would be that it would provide a field day for lawyers seeking exemptions for their clients.

The law is a nonsense. Official stats have shown the impact on house prices of foreign buyers is minimal.

What had the potential to be even more controversial was a proposed clause which has now been ruled out on procedural grounds by the Speaker which would have given an exemption to a development involving an American billionaire, Queenstown developer and a northern hapu and iwi for an upmarket beachfront subdivision north of Auckland being marketed overseas.

Ironically the 106 sites beachfront subdivision at Te Arai which was the subject of the exemption was strongly criticised last year by the-then local MP, Winston Peters.

“Why do Kiwis, going about their lives as best they can, have to fight every step of the way to preserve what is their right against a billionaire developer from another country and a complicit government? “Peters said.

The Minister in Charge of the Bill, David Parker has a fringe association with one of the developers, John Darby. Both were involved with the late rich-lister and Otago businessman, Howard Patterson.

So a billionaire developer was to be exempted.

But that was opposed by Parliament’s Clerk on procedural grounds in that a public act cannot apply to “a select group of people”.

Nevertheless, the Government used its majority on the Select Committee to disregard that advice and maintain the exemption in the Bill when it was returned to Parliament.

Speaker Trevor Mallard, however, stopped it there and removed the exemption from the Bill.

Thank goodness for this. But let’s remember the Government tried to legislate these exemptions.

Stuff reports:

New Zealand Post won’t be allowed to reduce the number of outlets that provide postal services from the current total of 880, Communications Minister Clare Curran has signalled.

However, that would not necessarily rule out NZ Post closing more of its dedicated post shops – which have often doubled as Kiwibank branches – in favour of outsourcing its retail operations to agents such as bookshops, dairies and petrol stations.

So in fact the Government has agreed that NZ Post doesn’t have to keep any dedicated post shops open.

Personally I’m all in favour of that. If post shops are uneconomic, then they should close. But Labour supporters might be less keen on mass closures.

NZ Post general manager of channels Janet Selwood couldn’t forecast whether NZ Post would still operate any post shops of its own in five years.

“I couldn’t say in a five-year timeframe whether that is likely to be the case. All I can say is that the agency model – the hosted model – works well for us,” she said.

I suspect only the busiest ones will remain in five years. There’s 95 today so maybe 20 then?

She told a select committee she had written to fellow ministers in her capacity as Dunedin South’s MP to express concern about Kiwibank closures in the city impacting NZ Post.

So as an MP she complains about the closures yet as a Minister she will sign a document allowing them. Hilarious.

Idiot/Savant blogs:

Faced with the opposition filibustering two time-sensitive bills, the government moved urgency, then attempted to amend the instruction to the committee to prevent any debate on what was being voted on. The urgency isn’t problematic …  but the motion to forbid debate was an affront to our democracy. While it was withdrawn this morning – saner heads having prevailed – the fact that it was moved at all is obscene.

Oppositions exist to oppose. This will be inconvenient to the government, and that’s the point. The way governments respond under this pressure illustrates their character. And Labour has exposed itself as authoritarian and intolerant of dissent (who’d have thunk it) – not values I want to see in a government. Chris Hipkins’ childish tantrum actively undermined our democracy and the stature of our Parliament. And someone who does that is not fit to be Leader of the House.

If a National Leader of the House had done what Hipkins tried to do, there would probably be an open letter from 20 public law academics decrying the totalitarian Government.

Mike Hosking writes:

Looks like we are heading for a winter of discontent.

Nurses, IRD, MBIE, Burger King, Events Cinema, teachers, principals – have I missed anyone yet?

Thousands upon thousands are currently spending their hard earned time and energy working out whether they want to take some form of industrial action. It has been many a year since we have seen this sort of pending disruption in our workforce.

In 2016 there were three strikes involving 430 people, those are latest numbers, and if you go back over the past bunch of years it varies year to year – but the indisputable statistic that smacks you between the eyes is the simple truth that we got on with life and turned up to work.

Yep we were almost strike free for many years.

Not that there aren’t a few who probably deserve a better deal. But here’s your cold hard truth: Unions don’t get it for you.

I have never once seen an offer of 2 per cent rejected by a union, a strike to follow, and the employer brought to their knees and a new offer of 9 per cent. It doesn’t happen.

That would be an interesting area to study. When there has been a strike has there been a settlement significantly more generous than what was on offer before the strike?

Stuff reports:

Parents are concerned after 10 NZ charter schools received contract termination letters.

Middle School West Auckland (MSWA) and nine other charter schools received contract termination letters on June 7 – even before finding out if their applications to remain open as a special character school for next year was approved.

Ministry of Education said it would have a decision by July 31 but that’s meant Trinity and more than 1000 students enrolled in charter schools were left in limbo about their future.

What a kind caring Government. They do the termination letters before making a decision on whether to accept them as special character schools. So students and their families have to go through months of worry.