Stuff reports:

A tax expert appointed as an adviser by former British prime minister Tony Blair expects New Zealand’s Tax Working Group will recommend a broad-based capital gains tax, only for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to reject the idea.

Former PwC global tax and governance leader Christopher Wales served as former British chancellor Gordon Brown’s principal adviser on tax after being appointed by Blair to a six-strong team of economic advisers to the British Treasury. 

A capital gains tax would probably mean fewer houses and higher house prices, he said.

If you tax something, you tend to reduce the supply of it. Tax labour more, and less workis done. Tax capital more and people invest less.

Stuff reports:

One of the men heavily criticised over former Waikato District Health Board chief executive’s excessive spending says Dr Nigel Murray led a “double life in the most extreme fashion”.

Former DHB chairman Bob Simcock, who resigned over the debacle on November 28, said the State Services Commission (SSC) was using him as a “scapegoat” and had failed to “properly identify root causes and instead produced a report which is a scattergun of blame”.

“Unfortunately I am being held up as a scapegoat for some of what Dr Murray did, when it is now clear he led a double life in the most extreme fashion,” Simcock said.

Simcock said Dr Murray’s “double-life” included “multiple relationships, in multiple countries with multiple mobile phones”.

Murray sounds like someone who was dedicated to rorting the system. It is unclear if any of his actions were illegal (the SFO is investigating) but regardless a large organisation should have policies and procedures to prevent or minimise such rorting. One example is any significant overseas travel should be approved in advance by the Chair.

Webb praised the staff who blew the whistle on Murray’s unauthorised spending. “I’m really pleased that the report acknowledged the courage of DHB staff, who made repeated efforts to bring the issue of over spending and spending outside policy to Dr Murray’s attention, before escalating their concerns to the chair,” she said.

Good on the staff. I wonder if the Board has an audit committee. It is often best practice to have senior financial staff allowed to raise any issues of concern directly with the chair of the audit committee – bypassing the normal chain of command.

Stuff reports:

A deeply ashamed Australian captain Steve Smith has admitted his team deliberately conspired to cheat on the third day of the third test by having Cameron Bancroft use tape to illegally tamper with the ball.

They’re not ashamed, except at being caught. They’re cowards who didn’t think they could beat South Africa without cheating.

While Bancroft has been charged by match referee Andy Pycroft and faces a one-test suspension the reputation of Smith and the Australian team is in tatters.

Only one test? Should be at least a season.

Smith said he would not be resigning from the captaincy but owned up to devising the plan to try and alter the condition of the ball with other senior members of the team at lunch on Saturday (Sunday NZT)

If the Australian Cricket Board don’t sack Smith, then they condone the cheating.

On a day in which South Africa strengthened their hold on the third test – they lead by 294 runs with two days to play – controversy erupted when Bancroft was shown on television pull a small yellow item from his pocket and use it to work on the ball.

Soon after, when umpires Nigel Llong and Richard Illingworth were made aware of his actions he was seen to hide the object down the front of his underpants before walking over to them.

This makes it worse. Bad enough to cheat and be caught. But to then try and deceive and lie to the umpires should see Bancroft out of the game for an extended period.

The Herald reports:

A teenager with a severe digestive disorder has pleaded for legislation that would force businesses to allow sufferers to use their bathrooms in emergencies.

Wainuiomata girl Nicole Thornton, 14, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, which means she needs to use the toilet without warning, appeared before the health select committee today to speak to MPs.

“I truly cannot imagine anything worse than being out with my friends and having an accident in front of them because some store owner wouldn’t let me use their toilet,” she told MPs.

“Sometimes, you just don’t have time to explain.”

Crohn’s Disease is a chronic inflammation of the bowel which can cause diarrhoea, bleeding and excruciating abdominal pain.

Great to see Nicole advocating on this issue. And one can only have sympathy for her and others with these conditions.

But a law can be a blunt instrument. It imposes regulatory costs on every business as they need to make sure they comply with a law. They often need to get legal advice. Some may have staff toilets that are in a restricted area for safety reasons. What if it is a dairy where the staff toilet is part of your home?

Nicole and Kate received a sympathetic hearing from the committee, which will now consider the request. MBIE officials raised concerns over the cost of compliance for businesses but MPS urged them to consider the needs of a group of people with severe illnesses.

Nicole was inspired by Ally Bain, an Illinois 14-year-old with Crohn’s who fought for legally mandated toilet access in the US. The Restroom Access Act, known as Ally’s Law, passed in her state in 2005. So far 16 states have passed similar laws.

It’s a very worthwhile issue. But can the outcome be achieved without a law, such as an education campaign. Would a law achieve what they want? If there is no time to explain why you need to use a toilet urgently, is there time to explain that the business is legally obliged to allow access.

Again great to see the issue raised. I’m supportive of a solution – just not sure if the best solution is a new law. But it may be.

A reader e-mails:

The problems that Labour has over telling or not telling parents about sexual assaults is really an extension of its attitude to charter schools. 

Labour relies on ‘experts’ to tell it whether it should advise parents that their children have been assaulted and it relies on ‘experts’ and unionists to determine if charter schools are worthwhile. 

The views of parents and children don’t count. Too bad if the parents are responsible for their kids and know them best and too bad if kids failed in the mainstream system and too bad if they think their charter school is great. The experts and unions think otherwise, so that’s who has Labour’s ear.

Labour claiming it was following best practice in not informing the parents is conflating two different situations.

If you are a doctor, counselor, support agency and a young person comes to you – then of course you can’t go to their parents without their permission.

But if you are the organiser of an activity where four youths complain they were sexually assaulted, then you are in a different situation. As the organiser you have a duty to tell all parents what happened – not the names, but that such a serious thing happened at an event you were responsible for.

Stuff reports:

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has tabled a bill that would ban landlords from charging the letting fees to tenants.

He was previously considering doing this as part of a wider overhaul of the renting system, but has decided to do it as a stand-alone bill instead.

Landlords can currently charge new tenants for letting the property to them, nominally to cover fees they have paid letting agents. There is no maximum.

Landlords can also charge whatever rent they want. And if they ask for too much, they don’t get tenants.

“Letting fees are an unjustifiable tax on renters” Twyford said, describing them as a method of “gouging renters”.

“I don’t know of any other area of the law where two parties can contract for a provision of services but then charge a third party.”

I’m no fan of letting fees. I agree it seems like a gouge, but how big a problem is it? What percentage of tenancies have a letting fee?

Also is there anything to stop landlords who can’t charge letting fees, just factoring the fee into the weekly rental to compensate? Tenants may even end up paying more – you often have unexpected consequences. In fact MBIE even warns of this in the RIS.

The Age reports:

Victorians have a right to feel disappointed and angry that the ALP siphoned almost $400,000 of taxpayers’ money to help secure its unexpected victory in the 2014 state election, and then spent a further $1 million on a legal tilt to block the Victorian Ombudsman from investigating.

Her probe into the egregious breach of parliamentary regulations by the ALP was triggered by whistleblowers. They were upset by Labor MPs wrongly signing off on payments based on falsified timesheets that billed taxpayers for ALP campaigning by workers employed by the Parliament to help constituents, not parties.

As it turned out, almost two dozen Labor politicians were – some of them perhaps unwittingly, Ombudsman Deborah Glass found – part of a scam to game the system.

Stuff reports:

A wide-reaching review into the Labour Party’s handling of sexual assault allegations is expected to take up to three months and every member of the party will be contacted in the process.

Three months eh? Who wants to bet it is released once Ardern is on leave.

The review will consider whether policies and procedures were applied correctly in respect of the summer camp and whether they met the party’s objective of providing a safe environment for members and participants.

It will also look into whether complaints were handled properly and whether policies and procedures reflect best practice.

Will make for an interesting read no doubt, once done.

NewstalkZB reports:

Veteran Auckland activist Penny Bright will refuse to leave her house, despite losing a court battle to keep it over unpaid rates.

The High Court has confirmed Auckland Council can sell her Kingsland home to recover unpaid rates and penalties dating back more than 10 years.

The sale date is the 24th of April, but Bright says she’s not going anywhere.  

“I am fighter, I am scrapper, and that what I’m fighting for is not just for me. I’m fighting for the lawful transparency in public spending.”

And the Council is fighting for its lawful revenue.

Bright stopped paying rates in 2007 and as of June 2015, owed the council just over $34,000 in unpaid rates and penalties.

Just because you disagree with how a Government behaves, doesn’t mean you can refuse to pay taxes or rates.

Andrew Geddis writes:

Air New Zealand is a company, governed by the Companies Act 1993. Despite the Crown’s bare majority shareholding, Air New Zealand is not a SOE or even a MOM. As such, the board of Air New Zealand – its directors – have legal duties under the Companies Act. Primary amongst these are that “when exercising powers or performing duties, [they] must act in good faith and in what the director believes to be the best interests of the company.”

Note that their duty is to the best interests of the company. Not to the nation. Not to the provinces. Not even to the shareholders directly – even where the majority shareholder is an elected minister of the Crown. (Just to be clear, however – Air New Zealand’s shareholding minister is the minister of finance, Grant Robertson. It isn’t Shane Jones.)

So, if the directors of Air New Zealand are of the opinion that the company’s best interests are served by closing particular routes and opening others, then that’s what they legally are required to do. They simply cannot say “we believe it would be best for Air New Zealand to stop flying to Kāpiti, but we should do right by it and its people so we’ll keep on doing it.”

In fact, if they were to say that, then they’d potentially be committing an offence that is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to $200,000. Not that I think they’d be prosecuted for making one such route decision, but the existence of this offence provision shows just how important these fundamental director’s duties are.

So Shane Jones is huffing and puffing by demanding Air NZ directors break the law and if they don’t agree with Shane, he wants them sacked. Wonderful leadership from the Government.

Hamish Rutherford writes at Stuff:

Jacinda Ardern’s decision to take a walk down the steps of Parliament on Monday was well intentioned, but is symbolic of the Government’s confusion around managing an economy.

In what may be a first, the prime minister personally went to greet representatives of Greenpeace and receive a petition calling for the end of oil exploration.

Few seriously doubt that oil and gas is a sunset industry. But there still is genuine debate about whether New Zealand has the gas reserves in operational fields to manage the transition away from fossil fuels.

Much of New Zealand’s industry relies on gas, as does the electricity sector. Most of our electricity generation is renewable, but it is gas that gives the system security.

Few would rather see their granny sitting in the cold than burn gas if parts of the transmission network fell over.

Slogans are easy. Having a balanced secure supply of electricity is less easy.

Unlike the other controversies of recent weeks, where Ardern has been justifying the positions of her colleagues, this was a storm entirely of her own making.

The prime minister, who labelled climate change as her generation’s nuclear free moment, is now in an almost impossible position, for little political gain.

She has to either call a permanent end to oil exploration in New Zealand, whether the economy is ready or not, or face accusations of hypocrisy.

Or she’ll set up a committee!

For the industry this creates major uncertainty, the significance of which Labour seems to struggle to appreciate.

Businesses, by and large, are better at coping with bad news than they are at coping with uncertainty. You cannot plan for it or adapt to it.

This is why the UK economy is now starting to flatten – the uncertainty.

The Herald reports:

Greenpeace has been declined charity status – and the tax-free benefits that go with that.

The independent Charities Registration Board says the organisation does not exclusively advance charitable purposes, bur rather promotes its own particular views about the environment and other issues.

Greenpeace has 20 working days to appeal the board’s decision to the High Court.

It has won a similar battle in the past.

Not quite. The court did not rule Greenpeace was a charity. It said the ICRB had to reconsider the application using the criteria laid down by the court.

It has now done so, and decided Greenpeace is still ineligible.

This is of course a win for common sense. Greenpeace is not a charity. It is an aggressive political lobbying organisation. It doesn’t actually help people, or provide services. It just pushes a point of view.

Stuff reports:

Women’s Minister Julie Anne Genter says old white men need to “move on” from company boards to help close the gender pay gap.

What a terrible thing to say.

One can and should advocate for company boards being more diverse. But you do it by promoting the virtues of diversity, not by denigrating existing directors as old, white men who should move on.

“Some of them need to move on and allow for diversity and new talent,” she said, later clarifying she had “no problem with old white men” on company boards generally.

Genter makes the mistake of treating this as a zero sum game.

Stuff reports:

It was Mileka Hamilton’s dying wish to meet her uncle from South Africa for the first time.

But now that special meeting won’t happen leaving a nine-year-old girl, with a rare bone cancer, shattered

Fifteen years ago Mileka’s uncle Kyle Peverett​ was caught smuggling one-kilogram of cocaine into Switzerland. He was jailed for seven months, pled guilty, served a three year suspended sentence and was deported. He was 17.

Thanks to a generous donor, Peverett’s ticket was booked for a month-long visit to New Zealand to see his niece. But the night before he was due to leave, his visa application was denied by Immigration New Zealand.

Mileka’s health is deteriorating and she wasn’t up to talking on Monday. Her arm was amputated due to a tumour and the cancer has spread to her heart and lungs. 

Of course he normally would not be eligible for a visa. But his niece is dying. If that is not grounds for a compassionate waiver, what is.

Documents obtained from Immigration New Zealand state his application was denied because he had been deported from another country for transporting drugs and they were not satisfied he had “strong employment” in South Africa.

Immigration NZ acknowledged his reason to visit was “genuine and very unfortunate” but said he did not provide enough sufficient evidence to show he was genuinely only intending to temporarily stay in New Zealand.

Peverett, now 32, has just started his own IT business in Johannesburg.  He declared his monthly income was approximately $350 – $580 NZD a month.

Immigration NZ were not satisfied that he had provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate strong employment commitment in South Africa. He had money in his account, but they noted the funds were newly deposited without “any evidence to demonstrate the source or history”.

“They maybe thought he hasn’t got enough money and there’s no reason for him to want to go back to South Africa,” his mother, Julie Rossouw, said. “Which is nonsense because he’s just started up a business… It’s still early days.”

Yes there is a risk he might try to overstay, but then you just find him and deport him. The relatively small possibility of his overstaying is dwarfed by the total probability his nine year old niece is going to die.

It’s a no brainer. The Minister should intervene.

TVNZ report:

Stuff reports:

Uber is halting autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in the US in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.

The 49 year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver, struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department.

She was transferred to a local hospital where she died from her injuries. “Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation,” Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

Very sad for the family of the dead person, as all road fatalities are.

It is not clear if the vehicle was at fault. A vehicle can’t always stop in time if someone steps out in front of it. In no way saying that is what happened here, just that we don’t know.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has delayed attending a state visit to personally receive a Greenpeace petition calling for the end of oil exploration.

Standing in front of a series of posters of Labour leaders which had made high profile environmental decisions, Ardern said her Government was “actively considering” the issue.

Although her statement was light on details and Ardern has previously refused to rule out ending offering new exploration blocks, the decision to walk to the front of Parliament was highly symbolic.

So much for regional development. Ban oil exploration and Taranaki will get hit hard.

But hey never mind if all those people in Taranaki lose their jobs – Labour will give them free tertiary degrees to compensate!

Ardern told the crowd she was supposed to be attending a state visit but had elected to receive the petition because of its importance. Behind her the Parliament flagpole was flying the Indonesian flag to mark the visit of President Joko Widodo.

By 4pm Ardern appeared to walk back the comments, saying consideration of what to do with the process under which areas are offered for oil exploration was something that “every government does around this time of year”.

National leader Simon Bridges said there was nothing in the announcement.

“I think this is a quickly-invented publicity stunt by the Prime Minister to distract from her week from hell,” Bridges said, accusing Ardern of giving different messages to different audiences.

“By all accounts it seems the Prime Minister was trying to give an impression of high symbolism, of leaving a foreign leader waiting because this was such a pressing issue,” Bridges said.

So it was virtue signalling.

“If we are to transition to a low carbon economy, we will continue to need fossil fuels and particularly gas, just to keep the lights on.”

If the Government plans to ban oil exploration within NZ, will they also ban oil imports? Otherwise all that would happen is we import more.

TVNZ reports:

National Party Northcote MP Jonathan Coleman is quitting politics.

It’s understood Mr Coleman said today he will step down and take on a new role as CEO of Acurity Health Group.

Stuff reports:

The father of a 22-year-old who died from synthetic cannabis use says harsher penalties are just one of the steps needed to stop the drugs killing Kiwis.

A private member’s bill from National MP Simeon Brown, which calls for an increase in the maximum penalty for suppliers from two years’ imprisonment to eight years, passed its first reading on Wednesday.

While Labour and the Greens opposed it, NZ First has agreed to support it through the first reading, which gets it to the select committee stage. National’s 56 votes and NZ First’s nine gave it a clear majority in the House, of 65 to 55.

I don’t think it is a bad thing the bill has gone to select committee so the public can have their say. The status quo is not working, with people dying from synthetic cannabis. This bill will allow those affected to be heard and have a say.

However while the intentions behind it are laudable, I don’t see it as a step in the right direction.

The so called war on drugs has failed miserably for the last few decades. I do support a tough approach to drugs such as P which cause people to go into psychosis and do terrible stuff to others.

But the approach to drugs which mainly impact the user, should be health based.

The best way to reduce the prevalence of synthetic cannabis would be to legalise normal cannabis – a substance far less harmful.

Stuff reports:

Shane Jones is being accused of hypocrisy for accepting a free ticket to Air NZ’s Obama dinner while slating the company in public.

Big tough strong Shane Jones. He is demanding the Chair, the board and the CEO all resign because they won’t do what he demands.

And he is such a champion for his beliefs that he’ll condemn then in a press release, and then head to a free dinner hosted by them.

What a champion of the people.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has told Jones that calling for a chairman to resign is going too far.

“I have certainly explained to him that he is absolutely entitled to an opinion that he has shared but suggesting someone should be sacked is too far,” Ardern said.

Another rogue Minister.