The Herald reports:

Michigan State University agreed to pay US$500 million (NZ$724m) to settle claims from more than 300 women and girls who said they were assaulted by sports doctor Larry Nassar in the worst sex-abuse case in sports history, officials announced Wednesday. …

The university and lawyers for 332 victims announced the deal after negotiating privately with the help of a mediator. Under the agreement, US$425 million would be paid to current claimants and US$75 million would be set aside for any future claims. Lawyers will also be compensated out of the US$500 million pool.

Michigan State was accused of ignoring or dismissing complaints about Nassar, some as far back as the 1990s. 

Sickening that he got away with this for over 25 years. His 140 years minimum jail sentence seems inadequate.

From Hansard:

Jenny Marcroft: How can members of the public and Kiwiblog readers track progress towards the 1 billion trees target?

Hon SHANE JONES: We have a new website. That website is being developed in association with one of New Zealand’s most successful businessmen, Sir Stephen Tindall. That is like a tree counter, and, as each tree counts, greater the popularity will be not only for the forest sector and for careers but also for the modest proponent, Matua Shane Jones!

Nice to see NZ First MPs noticing the tree counter.

At the time of writing this post, the Government needs to have planted 57,610,567 trees to be on schedule to make their target of one billion over ten years.

The actual number planted is five.

Marc Thiessen writes:

If you want to understand why Donald Trump is president today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats’ hysterical response to two of Trump’s major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday, the president traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency. The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity.

So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home. The pretext for their outrage was Trump’s comment thanking Kim Jong Un, who he said “really was excellent to these three incredible people” — by which Trump obviously meant releasing them. No matter. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) took the Senate floor to attack Trump for his “troubling” remarks. “Kim Jong Un is a dictator” who “capriciously detained American citizens,” Schumer declared, channeling Captain Obvious, and warned that, by praising Kim, Trump “weakens American foreign policy and puts American citizens at risk around the world.”

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump? Apparently, Trump Derangement Syndrome is so debilitating that Democrats can’t bring themselves to say “Good job, Mr. President,” even when he brings our hostages home. 

A very fair point. There are times when the opposition party should praise th President. When Obama got Osama bin Laden, killed you didn’t have senior Republicans condemning him for it.

Before, Democrats complained that Trump was too belligerent toward Kim; now, they’re upset that he is too effusive. This is absurd. Trump is laying the groundwork for a high-stakes nuclear summit with Kim; of course the president is not going to publicly criticize him. People in Middle America listen to the Democrats’ reactions and think: Can Trump do nothing right in these people’s eyes?

Total opposition is never a great strategy.

The review of the Human Rights Commission is pretty damning. I’ll summarise the findings below, but note for now that I think the issue may be structure as much as people.

Most organisation have part-time governors who sit strategy and policy and full-time staff who do the work.

The HRC has full-time Commissioners who lead the work program but also collectively are meant to govern the organisation. There is also a CEO and a Chief Commissioner. So very blurred accountability in my opinion.

The Commerce Commission is somewhat similar in that the Commissioners are full-time and both govern and manage.

I prefer the traditional models with a clear line between governance and management. Effectively the HRC has multiple bosses as each Commissioner has control over their area, plus a Chief Commission and a CEO.

Anyway the findings include:

• some sexual harassment has occurred within the HRC, but it is not prevalent or endemic
• staff members’ lack of information and trust in management to deal appropriately with their complaints is a potential impediment
• there is a deep divide between some staff and some managers and a lack of trust in the management and the Commissioners among some staff
• strategic leadership by the current Board is compromised by a lack of cooperation and communication between Commissioners and between Commissioners and the Chief Executive
• the structure of the HRC, including the Commissioner/Chief Executive relationship, is problematic
• All Commissioners bear responsibility for the often
  uncooperative and unprofessional dynamics of their relationships
• the dysfunctional relationship between the Chief Executive and some of the Commissioners is a major reputational risk to the HRC
• unresolved personal and professional conflicts between the Chief Executive and the Board or individual Commissioners be proactively addressed using, where necessary, external mediation or facilitation.
• This structural issue is compounded by deep-seated personality clashes.
• Former Commissioners told the Review of their experiences of dysfunction in the HRC Board going back many years while under the leadership of former Chief Commissioners.
• However, the state of the relationship between the Chief Commissioner and the Race Relations Commissioner has deteriorated again. The October incident contributed to this deterioration. Presently, they are barely communicating with each other.
• Commissioners appear to fall into one of two camps: those who more or less support the Chief Commissioner and those who more or less support the Race Relations Commissioner.
• At a personal level, the relationships between the Commissioners and the Chief Executive range from trusting and collaborative to toxic.
• Presently there is a complete breakdown in the formerly good relationship between the Chief Executive and one Commissioner.

Government reviews are normally diplomatically worded. This review is damning in the language used such as toxic, unprofessional etc.

Andrew Little has his work cut out for him with the HRC. The status quo is clearly untenable.

Stuff reviews the eight Northcote candidates. My summary:

• Stephen Berry (ACT) – says will raise the age of superannuation from 65 to 75
• Dan Bidois (National) – scrap the fuel tax, trial a return of Onewa Rd’s T3 lane to T2, supports SkyPath
• Tricia Cheel (Democrats) – anti vaccines, anti fluoride
• Shanan Halbert (Labour) – wants SkyPath, light rail, affordable housing and more mental health funding
• Rebekah Jaung (Greens) – wants climate change action
• Kym Koloni (Independent) – scrap the Treaty
• Jeff Lye (ALCP) – do I need to state the obvious!
• Liam Walsh (NAP) – the new McGillycuddys

The Herald reports:

Gloriavale founder Hopeful Christian has died at the secluded religious community after a battle with cancer – leaving behind a trail of controversy, a sexual abuse charge, and questions over the future of the sect.

Christian, who was formerly known as Neville Cooper, died on Tuesday afternoon. He was aged in his 90s.

Cooper was not a good man. While there are some people at Gloriavale who live very happy and contented lives, Cooper has damaged a lot of people.

Hopefully Gloriavale can evolve into happier place, now he is gone.

The 2018 Register of MPs Interests has just been published. Here’s a few of the more interesting items:

Jacinda Ardern

APEC Gift: Samsung Galaxy J5 Prime handset and S3 Frontier watch (to be
donated) – National Organising Committee for ASEAN

Judith Collins

Tickets to Joseph Parker fight – Sky TV

Bill English

Black men’s satchel – Light Leathers Tannery

Chris Finlayson

An alcohol drinking flask in the form of what seems to be a sheep or a goat (quite difficult to identify the species) made of a form of dark or green-coloured
material, possibly bronze or iron – visiting delegation from the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China

Jacqui Dean

Managed investment schemes: Bonus Bonds (Bonus Bonds!!!)

Shane Jones

Gifts: Qantas Chairman’s Lounge – Qantas (might explain the attacks on Air NZ!)

Melissa Lee

Hospitality and functions, ornamental gifts and congratulatory bouquet of flowers – Embassy of the Republic of Korea in New Zealand (not sure the flowers have to be declared!)

Trevor Mallard

The Moa Revival Project Advisory Board

David Seymour

Employment: Media Works Limited – celebrity dancer (sounds like a posh name for a stripper!)

Megan Woods

Woodsy’s Dreammaker Syndicate – lease of a race horse

Gerard Alexander writes in the NYT:

Many liberals are very smart. But they are not as smart, or as persuasive, as they think.

And a backlash against liberals — a backlash that most liberals don’t seem to realize they’re causing — is going to get President Trump re-elected.

Trump defines himself by what he is against, as much as what he is for.

Within just a few years, many liberals went from starting to talk about microaggressions to suggesting that it is racist even to question whether microaggressions are that important. “Gender identity disorder” was considered a form of mental illness until recently, but today anyone hesitant about transgender women using the ladies’ room is labeled a bigot. Liberals denounce “cultural appropriation” without, in many cases, doing the work of persuading people that there is anything wrong with, say, a teenager not of Chinese descent wearing a Chinese-style dress to prom or eating at a burrito cart run by two non-Latino women.

No more playing cowboys and indians!

Pressing a political view from the Oscar stage, declaring a conservative campus speaker unacceptable, flatly categorizing huge segments of the country as misguided — these reveal a tremendous intellectual and moral self-confidence that smacks of superiority. It’s one thing to police your own language and a very different one to police other people’s. The former can set an example. The latter is domineering.

The bolded part is key.

Liberals can act as if they’re not so certain — and maybe actually not be so certain — that bigotry motivates people who disagree with them on issues like immigration. Without sacrificing their principles, liberals can come across as more respectful of others. Self-righteousness is rarely attractive, and even more rarely rewarded.

I’m liberal on many social issues, but I have profound respect for those with different views.

Marian Tupy at Human Progress writes:

Today, Nicholas Kristof of the NYT wrote an op-ed entitled, “The Most Important Thing, and It’s Almost a Secret.” According to Kristof, “The most important thing going on in the world today is something we almost never cover: a rapid decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.” 

Kristof makes a powerful case for the improving state of humanity and rightly bemoans the fact that the media all too often focus on war, hunger and despair. And that gives most readers the wrong impression that the world is falling apart. 

But, where did all the progress that Kristof talks about come from? 

The Homo sapiens has been on this earth for 200,000 years. For 99.9 percent of that time, we lived in ignorance, poverty and misery. What has changed? Reading the NYT, the reader is left with the impression that “good stuff,” like manna from heaven, suddenly was conjured up out of thin air. 

Not so. The key to the improvements in the lives of ordinary people over the last 200 years were industrialization and trade, which generated historically unprecedented rates of growth. And the importance of growth cannot be overemphasized. There is not a single example of a country emerging from widespread poverty without sustained economic growth. As University of Oxford Professor Paul Collier writes, “Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.” 

So Governments that want to reverse industrialisation and put up trade barriers rail against the things that rescued humanity from poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Simon Wilson interviewed Labour’s Shanan Halbert. This line stood out:

Back with teachers, he said, “I don’t support paying good teachers more.”

Yep, the best teacher in a school should be paid exactly the same as the worst teacher in a school according to Labour.

As I predicted, Winston Peters will have the title of Acting Prime Minister, but no real power. He will just be the frontperson for the Government, which Grant Robertson will run behind the scenes.

The Herald reports on a document released by the PM, detailing Peters’ role during her leave. Some extracts:

“As Acting Prime Minister, you will exercise the functions and powers of the Prime Minister, in consultation with me where appropriate, particularly where matters of significant political, strategic or public interest, or national security arise,” the letter from Ardern to Peters says.

So Winston doesn’t get to decide anything.

“I will continue to receive Cabinet and Cabinet committee papers. 

This is key. Ardern will still be Prime Minister. She won’t be in Wellington but will be receiving all the papers she normally does and deciding which ones proceed.

Chairing cabinet and the cabinet committees usually chaired by me (Appointments and Honours Committee, Cabinet Business Committee and Cabinet Priorities Committee). Agendas for the meetings will be managed between my office and the Cabinet Office in the usual way;

This is also key. Her office will decide the agendas, not Peters. He just chairs the meetings, but has no role in deciding the agenda.

Peters, who is Foreign Minister, has not scheduled any overseas trips while Acting Prime Minister.

In the unlikely event of him having to take one, then Labour’s deputy leader, Kelvin Davis, would be Acting Prime Minister.

There’s no way that will be allowed to happen.

For the first time since Ben was born I got to go out to a play, having accepted tickets for the opening night of Problems at Circa.

Circa One has been transformed into a hall of red, appropriate for a play loosely inspired by the Death of Stalin.

Two massive doors dominate the stage and after the lights go off and back on you see two suited men standing alertly at guard.

Stephan, played by Andrew Paterson, is a true believer in the revolution and the system. The other guard Boris, played by Simon Leary, is less of a true believer and more focused on his golf game. They grate each other at the best of times, let alone at this time when the Great Leader has over slept and is late for his speech to the party congress. Waking him is risky, both in terms of his displeasure but also by the fact he sleeps with a loaded gun in case of counter revolutionaries.

Exacerbating the tension is they each have a different top official they are close to. Stephan is close to Madam Great Leader while Boris gets on well with General Kleb who oversees the security services.

Problems is a very physical almost slapstick comedy. It aims to highlight the sense of paranoia and ridiculousness in a regime where there is no truth, and people who know too much get deleted.

The two actors are vigorous and produce many comic moments. It will appeal to people who like easy laughs.

For me though it didn’t meet its potential in terms of black humour. The overt physicality got somewhat in the way of the Orwellian state which is such a contradiction.

In a technical sense the play was well done – the light and sound effects were dramatic and there was a sense of tension as the time past the scheduled wake up kept getting longer. It was a fun production, but it didn’t quite connect on the emotional level.

Rating: ***1/2

Eugenie Sage released:

Possums, rats and stoats are the big losers in Budget 2018 and our forests, birds and other wildlife the winners, Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage announced today.

 “We need to invest in comprehensive predator control in order to save special wildlife like kiwi. We have a biodiversity crisis, where 82 per cent of native birds are threatened with or at risk of extinction,” says Eugenie Sage.

 An extra $81.3 million in operating funds for predator control over four years is part of a major boost in conservation funding in Budget 2018.

Maybe there is more to come but this is pretty small stuff for a party that said it would double DOC funding.

$80 million over four years is basically $8 million more per year cumulative. The cumulative impact is:

• Year 1: $8 million
• Year 2: $16 million
• Year 3: $24 million
• Year 4: $32 million

Now how much did Vote Conservation increase last year? It increased $36 million. So the Greens big triumph is a funding boost that is less than one quarter of what National did last Budget.

Vote Conservation is $467 million so this funding increase is a 1.7% annual increase. Wow go Greens. That’s like really close to double eh.

Now maybe there are more funding increases to be announced. But if this is it, the Greens have shown us how powerless they are compared to Winston. He gets a 30% increase for diplomacy and they get 1.7% for conservation!

Israel, as a modern state, was founded on the 14th of May 1948 – 70 years ago. The next day they were attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria. It took 13 months for Israel to win the War of Independence.

In 1950 they enacted the Law of Return granting automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish matrilineal descent. This is later extended to spouses, children and grandchildren of Jews. Under this law, I could move to Israel and become a citizen.

In 70 years, Israel has become one of the world’s leading scientific and technological companies. 45 of their top inventions are listed here.

12 Israelis have won Nobel Prizes – one literature, three peace, two economics, six chemistry. (Note a further 155 Jews in other countries have won a Nobel Prize, comprising 22% of all nobel prizes since 1901 despite being just 0.25% of the world’s population).

A few of their inventions are:

• cellphones
• Intel chips
• ICQ
• Polio vaccine
• antivirus software
• ingestible video cameras for cancer detection
• USB flash drives

Stuff reports:

Accusing other countries of “free-loading”, US President Donald Trump has announced plans to make countries like New Zealand pay more for drugs.

Speaking at the White House this weekend, Trump accused foreign countries of extorting  “unreasonably low prices from US drug makers” and forcing Americans to pay more to subsidise the research and development costs. “America will not be cheated by foreign countries.” 

Trump had directed his trade representative Bob Lighthizer to “make fixing this injustice a top priority with every trading partner” by negotiating with other countries to pay more.

New Zealand, like the UK and Australia, has a national agency that negotiates with pharmaceutical companies to bulk-buy drugs. That agency, Pharmac, has successfully managed down prices by playing one drug company off against another.

Long may that continue.

But drug pricing is very complex. The reality often is that the second and subsequent new drug may costs less than 10 cents to manufacture but the first new drug costs over $1 billion in research, development and testing.

So what is the fair price for a new drug?

Auckland University professor of law Jane Kelsey said if the US re-entered the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) deal it would demand extensions on patent periods as it was currently doing in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. 

She said the US was already demanding 12 years of exclusivity for biologic medicines, like Keytruda, up from five years in the TPPA.

And that would be a price too high to pay. Plus the US has shown it will ignore aspects of trade deals it finds inconvenient so a trade deal with the US at the moment looks far too risky.

Stuff reports:

The Electoral Commission is advocating for the Minister of Justice to allow Māori to switch freely between the Māori and General Rolls.

At last year’s election year 19,000 people tried to switch between the two, and were frustrated to find out it’s only once every five or six years they can do it.

The reason it is every five years is because the boundaries are set every five years. If you allow people to swap more frequently you could well end up with electorates of significantly different populations. At present the law requires them to be no more than 5% different from the mean electoral population.

Such a change will incentivise a form of gerrymandering. If for example you have a close race in say Northland, then parties would campaign for people to swap from the Maori roll to the general roll just before the election.

This would greatly advantage those of Maori descent who can decide which roll to go on. It goes against all voters being equal.

If you are not of Maori descent, you can’t enrol in a more marginal or competitive electorate unless you are willing to actually move house (which of course no one is). The decision on which roll you enrol on should not be one made just before an election.

Duncan Garner writes:

Seriously, what has Labour and its MPs been doing these last nine years? Eating their lunch?

We’d been led to believe its flagship Kiwibuild idea was this amazing, smart and innovative housing policy. …

And I assumed KiwiBuild meant just that;  as Housing Minister Phil Twyford said, 100,000 homes would be built.

Now we learn, um no, that’s not the case. It’s Kiwibuy, that house, your house, any house will do.

Labour has simply thrown its arms up in the air and put up a classified advertisement the size of a house that calls for all houses to be bought and sold as Kiwibuild dwellings. Labour wants the biggest shortcut to success possible.

It wants to buy current homes under construction or off the plans and call them Kiwibuild’s own. It’s a total hoax.

Yep their flagship promise is a hoax. And they’re also said some houses will cost more than the $600,000 maximum they promised. A double hoax.

Sure, Labour and the 100,000 homes promise was impressive and is ambitious, but just how many new homes will it really provide on top of what was being built anyway.

It may be just marketing and a bit of spit and polish when someone else did the hard work.

To me, it looks like Labour and Twyford have made this all up on the back of a moving envelope.

As far as I can tell so far Labour hasn’t led to a single home being built that wasn’t already planned or consented.

Rich Lowry writes:

His exit from the agreement is another instance of the Trump paradox: The president who says more outlandish and untrue things than anyone who has ever occupied the office of the presidency is also extraordinarily determined to deliver on his big promises.

Trump often doesn’t mean what he says, but when he says what he means — watch out. The combined forces of international pressure, polite opinion, outraged New York Times editorials, resistant advisers and sheer inertia aren’t an obstacle.

This is insightful. Trump doesn’t have much of a grasp on reality or facts but he does have a strong focus on keeping his big promises.

Many of Trump’s loose promises in the campaign weren’t remotely deliverable. He wasn’t really going to forswear vacations as president. He’s not going to give us 6 percent GDP growth. He was never going to bring back waterboarding or kill the relatives of terrorists, or for that matter, drop Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane over Afghanistan with no parachute.

Heh that last one was so typically Trumpian.

But on his signature pledges, he’s been committed, usually more than anyone around him. He’s been particularly stalwart on those promises that require blasting through entrenched conventional wisdom and elite resistance. In the areas run-of-the-mill politicians would shrink from — ditching or delaying their pledges indefinitely—he has gladly grasped the nettle.

What was most remarkable about Trump’s promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. Embassy there wasn’t that he said it—every recent president made similar sounds—but that he actually did it.

Yep and the world did not end when he made the decision. In fact the reaction was muted. A few days of protests.

But it’s not at all clear that another GOP president, even if he was on record favoring these moves, would have pulled out of the Paris climate accord and withstood the howls about imperiling the planet; or ended DACA despite all the media pressure to keep it; or exited the Iran deal with the Europeans waging an intense lobbying campaign in its favor.

It wasn’t simply that these decision had opponents. Their opponents were over-represented in (allegedly) sophisticated circles with disproportionate cultural clout. Even conservatives who disdain the elite feel this cultural pull. Whereas Trump, who has never been house-trained as a politician, is more immune to it. He may, at one level, crave the approval of respectable opinion, but on another, he is perfectly content to defy and outrage it.

So he is following through where others might equivocate or back off.

It’s a problem for those who believe a promise was a bad promise. What is worse – breaking a promise, or implementing a bad promise. Trump obviously thinks they were good promises.

He’s not telling the truth about the Stormy Daniels controversy and is unlikely to unless his hand is somehow forced.

His problem is not cheating on his wife with porn stars. Everyone knows he did, and few are surprised he would and did. But the cover up may bring him down, as it almost did with Clinton.

When Trump was elected, it seemed he might be endlessly flexible and up for grabs. He certainly is willing to say anything at any time, as he demonstrated in televised congressional meetings on immigration and gun policy. But he hasn’t shifted or shrunk from the core commitments that defined his candidacy.

So far, “he said he would do this,” has been a remarkably reliable guide to the Trump agenda. 

So will he get his wall?