Stuff reports:

Accountants are complaining they are facing big problems logging on to Inland Revenue’s MyIR tax system, with one saying the department appeared to be in a state of crisis. 

John Cuthbertson, New Zealand tax leader at Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand, said it was aware from a number of sources of widespread problems.

“The issue came up at our national tax liaison meeting last week. We have had accountants call in to us and have logged the issue with Inland Revenue and followed up again today, but haven’t yet had a response.” 

“There have been issues with either slowness or getting on, online. It varies between being very slow to pages breaking up when you go online to look at things.”

Cuthbertson said the problem was serious “in the sense that it is causing delay”.

“I’m not sure it is locking people out completely.”

Wellington accountant Matthew Underwood, who runs his own chartered accountancy firm Matthew Underwood Ltd, said clients were struggling to file GST returns and he believed the integrity of the whole tax system was under threat. 

“We can’t log in; it is telling us that our password and usernames aren’t right. Though occasionally it will let us log in using the same credentials.

“Sometimes when you do get in, all my staff will see is a massive logo. It is totally random. Our clients are having the same problems.” 

I’ve had these problems also. Very slow. Times out. Displays a blank screen. Most annoying of all is when you fill in a page on your tax return, submit it, and it forgets it and you have to start again. It has taken me weeks to do a very simple PTS confirmation and company tax return. I eventually managed.

Accountants tell me the problems started in April after an “upgrade”. It is certainly true that prior to this, the IRD system was pretty great. For quite a few years I have found it user friendly and easy. But a massive degradation in performance this year.

The Public Services Association union described Inland Revenue’s technology projects as “a mess” earlier this week, and said that was having a major impact on staff.

National secretary Erin Polaczuk said Inland Revenue’s systems were not equipped to process the best start tax credit payments, due to start next week, that should give lower income families an extra $60 a week for each child. 

That meant the payments would have to be processed manually, drastically increasing their workload,” he said.

Doing it manually is ridiculous. This is how the problems with Novopay spread.

Simon Wilson takes time off from defending Phil Goff to defend the Government. He reports:

And in a startling revelation, the ministers claim that the wealthier a household is, the more it is likely to pay for petrol. They say the wealthiest 10 per cent of households will pay $7.71 per week more for petrol. Those with the lowest incomes will pay $3.64 a week more.

This is a complete reversal of the most common complaint about fuel taxes, which is that they are “regressive”. That means, the critics say, they affect poor people more than wealthy people.

The data is not a reversal of the complaint about the fuel tax. In fact it proves the complaint.  Let’s look at the definition of regressive:

(of a tax) taking a proportionally greater amount from those on lower incomes.

The argument isn’t that lower income households spend more on petrol than higher income households. The argument is that a greater percentage of their income goes on petrol.

For almost every commodity and service (except tobacco) a higher income household consumes more of it, than lower income households.

In the first year, the average increase for Aucklanders, who will pay both taxes, is $3.80 per week. Decile 1 Aucklanders will pay on average $2.40, for decile 5 the average will be $3.75 and for decile 10 it will be $5.08.

Now let’s look at the average incomes for each decile

• Decile 1 – under $23,900
• Decile 5 – $64,400 to $80,199
• Decile 10 – over $188,900

So the extra fuel tax as a percentage of income is:

• Decile 1: 0.52%
• Decile 5: 0.27%
• Decile 10: 0.14%

So the article proves the exact opposite of what it claims – that the increase in fuel tax is regressive as it hits lower income households more.

Sad to see the Herald regurgitate Government spin without any critical analysis.

Also some good analysis from Econmissive on Twitter where he points out the data released by the Government includes households that don’t even have a car and what matters is how much households with cars pay.

The Dom Post editorial:

Health Minister David Clark is scrapping National Health Targets that publicly address district health boards’ success or failure in achieving, among other things, reasonable treatment times, numbers getting surgery, waiting times in emergency departments, and immunisations. 

Incredibly, the National Patient Flow project, which monitors the number of people turned away from surgery, and which Labour supported while in opposition, also appears to have been sidelined.

Basically anything which allows you to measure how well the Government is doing, has been scrapped. Even the measures they demanded in opposition!

In making these changes, he has criticised the “perverse incentives” created by the previous monitoring regime. Also, Labour has intimated that the DHBs and the previous National government padded the statistics with easier procedures, that they gamed the system. Trouble is, there’s no evidence. Just a “vibe”, it seems.

Who needs evidence. They banned an entire industry without evidence or analysis. Again there is a pattern.

Which makes it at least ironic, and certainly hypocritical, when this Government decides it will ditch publicly verified evidence of the health boards’ progress in delivering essential services.

Labour don’t want us to know what the waiting times in EDs will be under their Government. They don’t want us to know if cancer patients are starting treatment within four weeks.

This Government has set aside an extra $31.5 million for elective surgery; Clark insists that will mean more operations and that the performance of the Ministry of Health in delivering those will be monitored.

But we just won’t have the regular, public updates to help verify that.

What we do have is the minister’s assurances that more operations will be done, at lower cost, with more beneficial outcomes.

He appears to be asking us to simply trust him.

Based on his interactions with Middlemore, trusting him would be rather unwise.

As widely expected Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. He has been the swing vote for the last couple of decades and this decision allows Trump the ability to give a reliable 5-4 majority for the next 20 years or so.

The ages of the existing eight Justices are:

1. Neil Gorsuch 50
2. Elena Kagan 58
3. John Roberts 63
4. Sonia Sotomayor 64
5. Samuel Alito 68
6. Clarence Thomas 70
7. Stephen Breyer 79
8. Ruth Bader Ginsburg 85

Justices often keep going to age 85 or so, so a conservative justice could see that 5 – 4 majority for at least 15 years. Also it is not impossible there will be other vacancies in Trump’s term/s.

Going to be fascinating to see who Trump nominates. Hopefully someone of the calibre of Gorsuch. This nomination will be opposed at all cost by the Democrats but by their own earlier use of the nuclear option, there are no more judicial filibusters so they have made themselves impotent.

Claire Trevett looks at Winston’s week so far. Not impressive:

1. Missed his slot on the AM show for the second week in a row
2. Confused over the winter payments for superannuitants being opt out
3. Accidentally pledged that in future people on the living wage will be able to afford to buy a house

And tried to plead poverty:

It remains unclear whether Peters will or will not opt out – despite his $335,000 salary, his superannuation payments, and the taxpayer footing the power bills for his ministerial house in Wellington Peters insisted the cost of power (and possibly his legal bills) was so high he had to think twice before turning on a heater.

Yep Winston is going to claim his winter power payment because his salary is so low he thinks twice before turning on a heater.

The heater did go on at Question Time when Peters was asked by National leader Simon Bridges about the ever-increasing number of strikes either underway or being threatened by different worker groups.

After some to-ing and fro-ing, there was another game of “Grant Says” again in which Grant Robertson provides handy hints on how Peters might answer a question.

Confronted with questions from National’s Simon Bridges, Robertson was seen saying “bus” to Peters and Peters stood and reprised his bus analogy from the day before.

That analogy likened workers to passengers turning up at the bus stop for the bus of pay increases under the Labour-led Government because they knew the bus would turn up. By comparison, none had bothered to do so under National because they knew the bus was not coming.

Bridges had already worked out an effective analogy-queller: “How will the bus turn up at the bus stop when all the drivers are on strike?”

Having been outwitted, all Peters could respond with was that Bridges had come to “a duel of wits” unarmed.

The Peters of 2018 is not the Peters of old. How embarrassing to have to have Grant Robertson whisper answers to you.

Wesley Yang writes in the NYT:

At the time that she was deposed, Ms. Pedrick did not know that the Harvard admissions office consistently gave Asian-American applicants low personality ratings — the lowest assigned collectively to any racial group. She did not know that Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research had found that if the university selected its students on academic criteria alone, the Asian share of the Harvard student body would leap from 19 percent to 43 percent. She did not know that though Asians were consistently the highest academically performing group among Harvard applicants, they earned admission at a rate lower than any other racial group between 2000 and 2019.

This is quite extraordinary. Asians would make up 43% of Harvard if admittance was done just on academic criteria. But instead Harvard positively discriminates against Asians so there aren’t too many of them.

Earlier this month, we learned that a review of more than 160,000 individual student files contained in six years of Harvard’s admissions data found that Asians outperformed all other racial groups on every measure of academic achievement: grades, SAT scores and the most AP exams passed. They had more extracurricular activities than their white counterparts. They were rated by interviewers who had met them as virtually on par with their white counterparts in their personal qualities. Yet Harvard admissions officers, many of whom had never met these applicants, scored them collectively as the worst of all groups in the one area — personality — that was subjective enough to be readily manipulable to serve Harvard’s institutional interests.

So they mark Asian students down on personality grounds to stop so many of them attending Harvard. Imagine the outcry if they did this to other minorities.

“Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”

Even if the very worst stereotypes about Asians were true on average, it beggars belief that one could arrive at divergences as dramatic as the ones Mr. Arcidiacono documents by means of unbiased evaluation.

Absolutely.

Mr. Arcidiacono found that an otherwise identical applicant bearing an Asian-American male identity with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 32 percent chance of admission if he were white, a 77 percent chance of admission if he were Hispanic, and a 95 percent chance of admission if he were black. 

Now even if you believe in positive discrimination in favour of ethnic minorities against white privileged students, how do you justify Asian minority students being treated even worse than white students?

Harvard has been here before. “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way, which is at the same time straightforward and effective,” wrote A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the 1920s, “and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities, based upon the probable value to the candidate, to the College and to the community of his admissions.”

Those who want to discriminate usually find a way to do so. Lowell managed to reduce the Jewish population of Harvard from 28% to 10%.

Harvard’s lawyers will soon tell the highest court in the land that Casey Pedrick’s Asian students are less respected because they are less likable, less courageous, and less kind than all other applicants. The university has decided that this is necessary for the greater good. The reality is that it is a carefully considered act of slander.

Harvard are in a bind. They can’t admit they try to reduce the number of Asian students, which forces them to then argue that Asian applicants have much worse personalities.

Hamish Rutherford reports:

The problem is, business confidence can be self-fulfilling, as can pessimism. While the new Government has focused on more positive signals from each business about their own expected activity, it knows eventually, if confidence falls far enough, investment and hiring will decline.

Businesses won’t invest in new facilities and take on more staff if they are not confident in the future.

For Robertson, the shoe is now firmly on the other foot compared with barely nine months ago, when he was undermining National’s track record on the economy.

In August and September 2017, Robertson was telling New Zealanders that the economy was in a “productivity recession”, where economic output was growing more slowly than the population was increasing. Kiwis, in effect, were working harder to produce less.

As it would turn out, a few weeks after Labour formed the new Government, Statistics New Zealand announced a major revision to its economic growth figures, which showed that in 2015 and 2016 the economy grew much faster than it had previously thought.

Last Thursday new figures showed that, in the first three months of the year, the economy grew, but at a slightly slower clip than the population.

So actually the economy was growing faster than the population under National, and is no longer doing so.

Initially, Robertson said the slowing was because of a transition from an economy based on speculation in housing to one based on more productive things. By Sunday he was saying the period was too early for the new Government realistically to be held responsible for it.

Robertson has a point with his second defence. I always think that changes in economic indicators in the first year of a Government are more a shared accountability than solely the province of the new Government.

His first defence though is a meaningless soundbite. What is this more productive economy he claims NZ is transitioning to? If it was more productive, then economic growth would be increasing, not decreasing.

On Tuesday he played down the degree to which the abrupt decision to end offering offshore oil permits has dented investment confidence, saying it was hardly ever raised with him.

If that really was the case, that seems likely to be a sign that business has not yet become comfortable being candid with the finance minister.

I’m amazed at this statement. I talk a lot to various business leaders and the way the Government acted to ban future exploration without consultation is almost all they can talk about. It has sent a major shock through the business community. Not so much the decision, but the fact it was done with no analysis or consultation.

Previously he has said he has not been given feedback that the decision to give free fees for a year of tertiary education was poorly targeted.

Grant really needs to get out more. He must be in a very insular bubble if this is the case. Even most of my leftie mates think the free tertiary fees policy is badly targeted.

Stuff reports:

When New Zealander Troy Skinner showed up at a 14-year-old girl’s US house, he allegedly claimed he was a hitchhiker who needed help. …

“His arrival here was totally unexpected by anyone.

“He had been told in the past that the daughter no longer wished to communicate with him.”

The Goochland County sheriff said Skinner bought a knife and duct tape from Walmart after arriving in the US. 

This could have been very nasty for the 14 year old. I think he had pepper spray also. Potentially he was going to kill or rape her.

The girl’s mother saw a man trying to enter her home, warned him several times she had a gun, then fired after he broke the glass on the second door he tried to open. 

Skinner was struck in the neck and remains hospitalised, authorities say.

I bet you the mother is a fan of the 2nd amendment. If she wasn’t armed, who knows what the outcome would have been.

That isn’t an argument against sensible gun laws. But it is hard for us in NZ to realise how much comfort many Americans have in being able to possess and use guns for self defence.

Stuff reports:

Public reporting of District Health Boards’ (DHB) performance of procedures including elective surgeries, cancer treatment times and Emergency Department wait times, has been axed. 

This is such an awful decision. We have a Government that seems determined to not actually have any measurable outcomes in health and education. They want to spend more to do less.

These DHB targets have led to massive improvements for patients. More operations done, cancer patients treated quicker, more children immunised etc. And they have also saved lives as the Herald reported:

Thousands of lives are believed to have been saved by a six-hour wait time target for hospital emergency departments, which researchers say has helped halve the number of ED patient deaths.

People should be really angry that Labour are doing this. I wouldn’t mind if they had different targets to National. But they are having none.

So a target which saw a 57% reduction in ED deaths and 28% reduction in ED crowding is gone.

And while there has been no announcement, the National Patient Flow project – which measured the number of patients being turned away from the operating table – has not released any updated figures since September last year. That project was launched following intense political pressure from Labour, over surgical unmet need. 

This one is so hypocritical. National set up a project to measure unmet surgical demand after Labour complained just publishing completed procedures did not give a full picture. And what does Labour do – scrap the very project they demanded Labour do.

So under Labour we won’t know how many surgical procedures are being done, and how many people are waiting for one.

The Government allocated an extra $31.5 million for elective surgeries, but one of the National Health Targets – to increase the volume of elective surgery by an average of 4000 discharges per year – was no longer being publicly measured. 

So just trust them.

The health targets worked. From 2008 to 2014 we saw:

• Those getting cancer treatment within four weeks going from 65% to 100%
• A 33% increase in elective surgery
• Those treated within six hours in ED went from 70% to 94%
• Immunisation rates for two year olds from 76% to 93%

Why do we have a Government that rather than embraces accountability by pledging actual outcomes, is doing everything they can to avoid it?

Stuff reports:

Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters says houses should be affordable even to those on a living wage.

Peters said on Tuesday that “a long-term target” of getting median house prices to drop to five times the annual living wage was desirable and “should be achievable before too long”. …

Currently Living Wage Aotearoa puts the living wage at $20.55 an hour – or $42,744 a year while working a 40-hour week.

A house at five times that annual income would be $213,720. New Zealand’s current median house price is $562,000 nationally, or 13 times the living wage annual income.

So Winston says “before too long” the median house price will be $214,000 or lower. This isn’t just another planet, but another solar system.

Can we have a Government that actually is serious about things, not just a sad joke.

Stuff reports:

Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s assertion that he swiftly “removed” a staff member for leaking information, doesn’t match the former employee’s version.

The ex-employee told Stuff they had not leaked, not been accused of leaking, and left amicably in Goff’s second week to take up another job as previously arranged.

Goff claimed that he “removed a staff member within days of being made mayor” during an interview with Stuff on Thursday.

This is weird. Goff is saying he removed or pushed out this staffer, but the staffer says he knows nothing about it, was never accused of anything, and was leaving anyway.

The worker’s contract in the office of the outgoing mayor Len Brown ended with Goff’s inauguration.

The employee said there was an agreement to stay on for 10 days without additional pay, to help with the transition, before taking up a new role outside the council.

They said the question of how a mayoral letter, listing his choice of councillors to chair committees came to be leaked, had never been mentioned.

Goff last week said: “I needed to talk to my councillors before it was in the public arena and a staff member managed to leak that, and that was the end of their prospects of continuing in employment in my office.”

On Monday, the mayor, through a spokesperson, said he stood by his statement that he “removed a staff member”, but declined to comment further.

Many people will know who this staffer is. It seems rather unfair to accuse him in the media of having been a leaker, when it seems like there was never any accusation put to him or her. It is even potentially defamatory.

The Herald reports:

Auckland drivers are likely to pay about 15c a litre more at the petrol pump in the coming weeks with a double whammy from Auckland Council and the Government.

The council’s regional fuel tax of 11.5 cents a litre is due to come into effect on July 1.

Weeks later, the Government looks set to increase the fuel excise tax nationwide by between 3c a litre and 4c.

It’s 15 cents a litre more for now but will reach 25 cents a litre. You have

1. Regional Fuel Tax 2018 10c
2. National Fuel Tax Increase 2018 4c
3. National Fuel Tax Increase 2019 4c
4. National Fuel Tax Increase 2020 4c
5. GST on 22c = 3.3c

Total = 25.3c

If you fill up the car every week with 50 litres then the extra cost will be around $650 a year.

Jacobin Mag reports:

It has been the riskiest of President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business reforms to date. By proposing to abolish the employment advantages of tens of thousands of rail workers and to eliminate the French National Railway Company (SNCF)’s legal status as a public company — in critics’ view, the first step toward full-scale privatization — his government chose to pick a fight with the most militant section of the French working class.

The perks for the French rail workers are amazing. They have led to the rail operator having a 47 billion euro debt. Their perks include:

• A job for life – no redundancies
• A pension based on their salary for the last months of their job, rather than the average salary over 25 years like other pensions
• A 10% bonus pension if they have three or more children
• Average rail pension is equal to 85% of average wage
• A retirement age of 50 to 55
• An automatic salary promotion up a grade every three years
• Up to 11 weeks a year of paid holidays
• Subsidised housing
• Free healthcare
• Free rail travel and 90% subsidy for family including parents and grandparents (85% of subsided travel is done by family, not staff)

Amazed they have lost only 55 billion euros!

Yet more than two months after rail unions launched disruptive rolling strikes across the country, vowing a life-or-death struggle, the government has solidly maintained the upper hand. The Senate approved the reform package on June 14 by a 245-82 vote, authorizing the reforms to take effect in January 2020. Labor unions promise to keep striking two days out of five until at least the end of June. After that point, the two most combative rail unions promise to continue strikes in the hopes of swaying contract negotiations with the SNCF. But barring a spectacular turn of events, Macron is poised, yet again, to have his way.

Excellent.

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.