Dying Badly, compiled by retired intensive care specialist Dr Jack Havill and writer David Barber, contains relatives’ stories of bad deaths suffered by their loved ones. It illustrates the need for a compassionate change in the criminal law to allow medical assistance to die for those who choose to end their suffering safely and peacefully in a loving environment without risking a jail term for relatives and friends with them at the time.

You can read the book online here. It has multiple formats from Kindle to pdf.

It is very moving. The stories are painful and remind me of why we should insist that there is a better way to this.

NB: Reposted from last November

I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past how great I have found Cherrytree. Each time I’ve mentioned them, they have had several people join up. On the basis there may be more people out there who would benefit from Cherrytree, they have signed up as an advertiser on Kiwiblog. You’ll see the advertisement on the right plus below.

I thought it would be useful to outline how I got into Cherrytree, and how much we spend and save on it. I was actually sceptical at first, and only went along to a promo evening because the brother of a friend worked for them in Hamilton, and she had told me about it.

Cherrytree has been operating for 21 years, and is owned by a New Zealander. By coincidence I knew him as in a previous role he was an auditor in the 1990s for an charity I was the finance person for!

Basically Cherrytree is a club. You pay an annual membership fee and can then buy goods (and some services) off them. They have a whopping 2,200 brands available, and over 500,000 individual products. Everything from batteries, soap powder and toys to lounge suites. You can order this all online through their website. They can deliver it to you, or you can pick it up if you live near a store (like we do).

Due to their number of members they can buy everything at wholesale price and sell it to you at the same price plus an 4% to 11% handling fee. So you pay no more than 11% more than wholesale. On average this is around 36% less than in retail stores.

So anyway I heard about this through Anna N, and in 2011 me and my flatmate Chris went along to an introduction evening. We were both pretty skeptical, thinking it might be an Amway type pyramid scheme. After all how could they afford to sell so cheaply? But we learnt the answer is they don’t have all the overheads of a traditional retailer. No huge shops on prime real estate, no TV adverts, no brochures into every home. They just simply have catalogs and you order from them, and they order from the wholesaler.

So we did the sums. I’m not sure exactly how much membership is now, but in 2011 it was around $1,000 for the first year (can be paid in installments) and $200 each year after that. So would we spent enough to cover the $1,000? I needed some new furniture for the flat so worked out that the savings on a couch and a table would cover the $1,000 by itself. So I went ahead.

Now I did think originally that it might not be a good deal when you don’t have big items to buy. But far from spending less after the big items, I now spend more and more there – to save money. If you have babies or pets, then everything you need can be ordered from there. We even purchased a garden shed. I get sodastream flavours. We get rubbish bags. Fabric for curtains. They have it large and small.

In the last year we spent around $8,000 through Cherrytree. With an average saving of 36% that is around $2,900 we’ve saved in 12 months, which dwarfs the $200 annual fee.

Also Cherrytree membership can get you discounts at other places. We get 10% off at Placemakers when buying timber and a local framing shop also gives us a discount which has saved us a few hundred dollars. There are discounts available for insurance companies, alarm monitoring, petrol etc.

The trick with saving money is to be disciplined. Rather than buy stuff all over the place, we always go and check out the Cherrytree website and buy it there if we can. Sometimes we’ll see stuff advertised elsewhere, and rather than buy it from the advertiser, we order it from Cherrytree. Often we’ll check their website on our mobile to see if they have the item we are after. If so, we order through them. If not, we buy it from a retailer.

So as I said, very pleased to have Cherrytree become an advertiser at Kiwiblog. If others think they can save money through it, then just click on the advertisement.

Newshub reports:

Oxfam’s chief executive says criticism of the charity following a sex abuse scandal had been disproportionate.

In an interview with British newspaper the Guardian, Mark Goldring again apologised over allegations of sexual abuse by Oxfam staff in Haiti, which broke last week and have shaken the whole aid sector.

“[But] the intensity and ferocity of the attacks makes you wonder, what did we do? We murdered babies in their cots?” he was quoted as saying.

“Certainly the scale and intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability.”

At least we didn’t kill any babies isn’t a great line of defence.

Roger Partridge writes:

Sunday’s “Save our charter schools march” was a moving experience. It wasn’t just the hundreds of people who turned up in torrential rain to protest. Nor was it ACT leader David Seymour’s impassioned chanting. Nor even the Vanguard school students’ valiant haka.

What was moving was the procession of young students, mostly Māori and Pasifika, who strode forward, proudly, to the microphone. If their eagerness to speak caught the protest organisers by surprise, their words did not. They had only one message: a plea to the prime minister and Minister of Education Chris Hipkins not to close their schools.

One student explained that she had been failing at her state school and that she had nothing to live for after her friend had committed suicide. Another described the self-destructive path he had been following at his old school.

Charter schools are not private schools taking the children of the wealthiest families in society. They are schools that tend to attract those who have been failing in the state system and come from some of the poorest communities.

But if their pride in their schools came through, so did their sense of bewilderment. And of betrayal. As one grandmother said, she thought the new Government wanted to put children first. How could it be in the interests of children for the Government to close their schools – schools that were helping them succeed where their old schools had failed?

Why indeed? They could simply decide not to set up any further charter schools, as they don’t like them. But their decision to terminate all existing charter schools shows a callous indifference to the pupils and their families.

Against this backdrop, it is not obvious why the new education minister is so determined to put an end to New Zealand’s charter schools model and, to quote his January cabinet paper, “close these charter schools in their current form”.

And to do so without having even visited one of them.

Could the answer lie in misplaced loyalties? Teachers at charter schools are not required to be registered and the schools are bulk funded. These arrangements permit the schools to hire teachers on different contracts to those in regular state schools, to pay teachers more (or less), and to hire specialist teachers from outside the regulated profession.

Each of these freedoms is a threat to the teachers’ unions’ collective bargaining powers. As a consequence, the teachers’ unions have been vocal opponents of the charter schools policy. No one can blame them for that. That is their job.

But our state education system does not exist for the benefit of teachers – or their unions – any more than the legal system exists for the benefit of the Law Society, or the health system for doctors.

Instead, our education system exists to serves its students – our children. And their futures depend upon the system being flexible and innovative enough to accommodate their needs.

This strikes at the heart of it. Labour has a choice between the interests of the students at those schools and the interests of the unions.

After all, they are the same children his prime minister has promised to lift out of poverty. Helping them achieve educational success must surely be the best place to start.

Labour would rather pay people more to be on welfare than keep open schools that might help them from going on welfare in the first place.

Well tomorrow the National Party caucus votes for a new leader. It’s been good to see a party can have a vigorous contest without the personal nastiness that we have often seen in Labour contests. It’s good that MPs are remembering that after this is over, they need to be a unified team.

There are two aspects to this. The first is that caucus needs to get behind the new leader, regardless of whether they were their first preference. The person selected tomorrow will be the leader going into the 2020 election, and the party has to build a strategy around that.

The other aspect is the new leader needs to make decisions around the shadow cabinet that will unify the caucus. All five candidates have shown they are credible strong MPs and they should all have senior roles on the front bench.

A guest post by Alexander Sparrow:

We are being silenced.

I am a centre-right comic. Views like mine – and yours, presumably – are censored in theatres in New Zealand. This cannot continue.

We can’t even be portrayed onstage. Political satire at the expense of the left is ‘triggering’.

Here’s one example. It’s a reply to the pitch for my show, DJ Trump, from the programme manager of The Basement, Auckland.

Kia ora Alexander, 

Thank you for getting in touch. Myself and our team member that attended your production had a lengthy conversation about your work and we felt we should pass on some thoughts to consider. 

 Whilst we fully support artists who push artistic boundaries, who create material that maybe deemed controversial, who challenge the audience and provoke them, DJ Trump, sat somewhat uncomfortably with us. We read through the reviews for the work following this, and fully agree that your performance as Trump is detailed, sharp, precise and showcases your craft, and the audience on the night that Basement came along seemed to really enjoy Trump’s company. 

Our concern around the production and why we differ from the opinions of the reviewer is that we feel that the work could be seen as endorsing Trump’s behaviour. It was also interesting that two gentlemen who were pro Trump supporters attended the same night that Basement came along and were not laughing at him, but with him. This made our staff member feel vulnerable and to be honest genuinely uncomfortable as all of Trumps jibes, insults and attacks towards women and minorities were being supported by these members of the audience. Perhaps they were playing along, but it made us question what the show was trying to achieve. 

In summary, our fear in programming this work at Basement is that the intended irony/humour has the danger of getting lost in performance. 

 Very best,
G

That was a sold-out show.

Here is a second example. This is from the programme manager at BATS Theatre, Wellington.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your response. The reason I was asking was I didn’t want to make you go to the trouble of filling out a pitch form for the DJ Trump show when you already sent that to me.

I have to be really honest with you and I hope there is no offence taken.  I’m not really interested in representing Donald Trump at BATS.  I personally find him an incredibly offensive individual and I just think his politics are far from the kaupapa of BATS, especially in the midst of #metoo. When I programmed Trump in 2016, it was to align with the election coverage and of course I, like most people had no expectation, that he would be victorious so it was operating very much for me in the realm of satire.  The reality is much more depressing. I personally would not feel comfortable putting on a show that gives him any more attention.

This is difficult for me for me, because this has nothing to do with you as a performer or the theatre you are making, but I just feel like there are other venues in town that would be more suited to this kind of work at this time. 

 Happy to chat with you further on the phone.

 Thanks,

H

My last three Trump performances at BATS (in 2016’s The President) sold out.

I’m not a Trump supporter, I’m a satirist. I can portray Trump in political satire without representing/pushing his beliefs, in the same way that Robert Carlyle can play Hitler without actually being anti-Semitic. It’s called acting.

God forbid theatre managers actually entertaining and engaging in meaningful discussion with the audience members they disagree with, i.e. doing their job.  If you aren’t hard left, you’re left out.

You can fix this.

Demand representative theatre and comedy. And if you don’t get it, refuse to support those acts, venues, and performers who deem you fit for constant ridicule, and will not allow you the chance to laugh back.

If you are always the butt of the joke, and your jokes are not allowed to be heard, you are not being entertained. You are being bullied.

If you refuse to stage critically acclaimed work because you disagree with the opinions portrayed, you are not a theatre manager. You are a bigot.

No matter what your political affiliation, you owe it to yourself to demand high quality work that offers you a wide range of viewpoints – including those you disagree with. Whether left or right-wing, force theatres to review their judgemental standards, and open yourself to listening to the other side.

Theatre that takes everyone into account?

Now we’re talking.
Alexander Sparrow is an award-winning character comic. 
Website: alexandersparrow.com

InternetNZ has an excellent paper on copyright, in anticipation of the Government review in this area.

They propose five principles:

1. Protect and respect New Zealanders’ creative works
2. Encourage new creativity
3. Allow people to add new value to copyrighted works
4. Make copyright usable by everyone
5. Protect New Zealanders’ ability to use and access creative works

And also want Internet users to benefit by:

1. Allow cloud services for backups and personal copying of legitimate copies of works
2. Permit text and data mining as a resource for new research and business insights
3. Maintain safe-harbour principles as a shield for Internet-based innovation
4. Create a broad, open-ended exception to allow our law to adapt as technology changes,
   and to recognise the potential of local creativity to add new value
5. Align our permitted acts and exceptions with the more innovation-compatible rules in
   Israel, Singapore, and the United States

Many will be surprised to find that much of what we take for granted such as cloud backups is in breach of current copyright laws.

HDPA writes:

It’s what seems to have happened to the Minister for Women, whose reaction betrayed her own gender. Julie Anne Genter described the incident as a “really tricky area” because, while she firmly believes in equal rights for women, she also wants to “respect people’s cultural practices”.

Really? She wants to respect a Muslim man’s refusal to touch a woman.

That’s a fail on the KPIs of the job of Minister for Women, don’t you think?

Sometimes tolerance is a cop out. Sometimes it’s just an excuse for not wanting to deal with the fall out of making someone angry. Sometimes it goes too far. There’s no excuse for being tolerant of ISIS dropping homosexuals off buildings. Nor is there any excuse for historic tolerance of South African Apartheid. Nor is there any excuse for tolerating misogyny.

And this handshake nonsense is out and out misogyny. Some may tell you it’s not. They’ll say it’s a sign of respect by the men, who instead place their hand over their hearts to greet a woman. Rubbish. The fact is that Islam has a major problem with the way it regards and treats women, right down to Saudi Arabia banning women from driving until very recently.

Equality is equality. No excuses. No tolerance of anything else.

What annoys me with this, is that those who plead tolerance ignore that it is all one way.

I’m all for respecting other cultures, but that should apply to respecting our culture also.

If you travel to say Saudia Arabia, you respect the local laws and cultures. You don’t walk around in shorts and t-shirts. I recall going to Singapore in the 1980s and being told (it is less strict now) not to wear shorts.

But the same should apply for people visiting New Zealand. Here men and women do shake hands. And yes it is rude and offensive in NZ to refuse to shake someone’s hand.

What’s more, tolerance cuts both ways. Those diplomats should’ve done their research and figured out that, in New Zealand, it’s bloody rude if someone extends their hand and you don’t take it.

It’s beautiful serendipity that this all happened in the year New Zealand is celebrating 125 years of women being allowed to vote in New Zealand. The vote thing’s ticked off. Next, we can start prioritising the expectations of our women over those of foreign, rude and intolerant men.

Well said.

Stuff reports:

A 12-year-old girl who dropped out of school for a year says a charter school turned her life around.

Luciana Wheeler, who at one time hated school, said Middle School West Auckland helped her fall in love with learning again. 

The school was one of 11 charter schools which contract would be terminated under a Government bill to scrap charter schools.

Government officials have told the schools to establish themselves as another form of school, such as a designated school, if they wanted to remain open.

None of the other options have the flexibility that charter schools do with funding to spend it in the areas they deem most useful.

Luciana’s mother Ange Wheeler said normal school was a disaster for her daughter – she felt out of her depth and fell behind in her work. 

“She struggled with learning to read and maths,” Wheeler said.

“Luciana learns a little differently than other students and most teachers don’t have time to deal with that.

“She thought she wasn’t smart, that she wouldn’t have a future and that she was not good enough.”

After joining Middle School West Auckland, Luciana’s view on school and learning improved.

The classes were smaller and teachers had time to work on individual students learning capabilities, Wheeler said.

“It was a miracle. It wasn’t an overnight thing and it took a lot of work but her teachers were great.

“It’s so different from mainstream schools, there’s a wonderful community of learning and a great sense of belonging here.”

Yet this is what Labour is closing down.

The Herald reports:

Immigration NZ has completed an investigation into whether Kim Dotcom can be deported from New Zealand for failing to declare a dangerous driving conviction – but it’s refusing to say what the outcome is.

The department has not even told its new minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, the inquiry is complete although legal experts say it almost certainly would recommend Dotcom be deported.

But that won’t happen without the report going to Lees-Galloway – it’s his job to make the decision.

Immigration NZ won’t say what the outcome is and instead aims to wait for the end of the legal fight to extradite Dotcom to the United States to stand trial for alleged copyright breaches.

 

The NZ Herald broke the story that led to the investigation in 2014, revealing Dotcom applied for residency without declaring a dangerous driving conviction from 2009.

I’m no Dotcom fan. I think he should be extradited to the US to face trial on the charges against him.

But repealing his residency on the basis of an undeclared driving conviction would be an over-reaction.

A guest post by David Garrett:

Andrew Little has said  he is utterly committed to creating a safer New Zealand – a laudable  goal, but one which he simply cannot achieve given Labour’s present assumptions about offending and penal policy. His colleague Kelvin Davis wants to  reduce the prison population by 30% – impossible unless we release those convicted of violent offences. Some leftie claimed  on National Radio the other day that the jails are “full of people convicted of cannabis offences”. This is a myth.  In fact, only 12% of the prison population are there for drug offences, the vast majority of them for manufacturing, distributing  or importing P. None  are in jail for possession of cannabis.

The first thing Labour needs to change is the common leftie perception that most prisoners are hapless boys who have had  one lamentable lapse – a sudden mad or drugged urge to commit an aggravated robbery perhaps. The reality is very different. The average prisoner has 46 convictions – yes you read that right – forty six , and has served the gamut of non-custodial sentences before finally being incarcerated. Of the 5% who have less than five convictions, they will invariably be in prison for murder or a very serious assault.

Do-gooders like Workman like to mock people like me by suggesting that we have an unreasoning and irrational  fear of a mythical  “Other”; that those in jail are really pretty much ordinary people, just like the rest of us. While this picture may have been at least partly true 50 years ago, it is emphatically not so today. By and large, prison inmates are  fundamentally different from the rest of us. They are people who  have not only utterly  rejected, but laugh at the principles by which most of the rest of us try to live: not to steal from or beat up our fellows; not to take advantage of the weak; to try and help the vulnerable, or at least not to do them further harm. They are indeed “The Other”, and we justifiably fear them.

How did we get here?  By two main routes in my view: firstly by abandoning the idea of a universal moral code to which all decent members of society should subscribe, evidenced by the decline both  of organized religion, and the  ideal of service above self.  All the members of Bomber Command in WW II – of whom 30% never returned – were volunteers. Does anyone really imagine that would happen today?

We declared two generations ago that the “ordinary” nuclear family of Mum Dad and the kids was no better than any other family – or whanau, as it is now. We declared that society had no business criticising a solo mum with five kids to three different fathers – a whanau that may have utterly different values to the mainstream. And we have reaped the consequences of that foolishness.

At the same time, far from becoming more punitive, as the Workmans and their supporters claim, our justice system has, with a few notable exceptions, become softer and softer over the past sixty or seventy years. As recently as 1974 a common assault on a woman would inevitably  attract a jail sentence. It is now very difficult to  be sent to jail unless one has committed a much more serious violent offence.

Consider for example, the punishment for murder. When capital punishment was first abolished by Labour  in 1941 – it was restored by National  in 1950 – it was replaced with hard labour for life.  Even the Labour party then  recognized that the price for taking a life must be a harsh and lengthy one. When capital punishment was finally abolished in 1961, it was replaced with life imprisonment – without the  hard labour. A lifer in 1962 was eligible for parole after ten years, shortened to seven years in 1975. So in 15  years, the punishment for murder went from paying with your life, to possibly being out after seven years. The minimum non parole period was restored to ten years in 1987.

The next really significant change – again largely a softening of penal policy – was the Sentencing Act 2002. Although it provided for a minimum NPP of 17 years for “aggravated” murder, the rest of the Act was largely concerned with lessening the burden on the criminal. All sentences of two years or less are now automatically cut in half. Judges are directed that they must give “the least restrictive sentence possible”, plus discounts of up to 25% of whatever the sentence would have been for early guilty pleas. There has never been a definition of “early”, and in practice, any guilty plea entered before a trial has actually begun attracts a discount.

So, far from becoming a more punitive society, we have become softer and softer. The one thing we haven’t tried in that period is a return to the penal policies of the past: hard labour for life for murder, and incarceration in harsh conditions for even minor assaults.

In my view there are  only two ways to achieve the safer society that Little says he wants. First and best would be to stop pretending that every form of  whanau is equal, and admit  that a stable two parent family is best for society. To acknowledge that there is in fact a universal moral code to which all civil societies subscribe – the ten commandments contain the main elements of it: not stealing from ones fellows; not bashing or killing them; recognizing that  parents are in a better position than some 14 year old punk to decide what is and isn’t  good  for that young person. Sadly, despite the efforts of groups like Family First, such a change is most unlikely.

The second alternative is to allow or at least accept the licence of modern life – but to severely  punish those who break the few basic rules; to once again routinely  lock up those who bash and steal from  others; to once again make the focus on paying a price for wrongdoing rather than the illusory holy grail of rehabilitation.

Labour refuses to accept  that rehabilitation of adult prisoners is and always will be rare, and only comes from within the individual. No matter how firmly you lead a horse to water, you cannot make him drink. Those “Other” who now fill our jails will mostly  keep on offending until age tires them of being locked up. Unless, perhaps, if  we make jail truly the kind of hell hole that has only existed in lefties’ imaginations for the last 60 years or so. Such a policy shift would  be as radical as Labour’s  welfare state in 1938. What do we have to lose by giving it a try? Heaven forbid, it might just work.

The Business Insider reports:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, normally a darling of Western media, has been roundly, and sometimes savagely, mocked for a trip to India that included cultural, fashion, and political blunders at every turn.

Trudeau’s trip began to go awry right off the bat. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, known for his social-media savvy, did not make any posts welcoming Trudeau, who was greeted off the plane by a low-level agricultural minister.

On Tuesday, Trudeau’s wife, Sophie, posed for a photo with Jaspal Atwal, a Sikh separatist who was once convicted of trying to assassinate an Indian politician.

Ouch.

Back in Canada, Trudeau’s liberal party has ties to the country’s Sikh community, some of whom support the Khalistan movement, which backs a new Sikh state in India’s Punjab region. When Outlook India magazine pointed this out, it found itself disinvited from a dinner with Trudeau.

“Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau feted the world over as the new face of ‘liberalism’ seem to find it difficult to accommodate critical media coverage,” the magazine wrote.

Though Trudeau assured India’s government that he didn’t back the separatist movement, Canada’s diplomatic mission had also sent a dinner invitation to Atwal – which it later rescinded.

They invited a convicted wannabee assassin!

But the political blunders paled in comparison with the more visible cultural missteps. On several occasions Trudeau and his family appeared dressed in traditional Indian clothing, something other Western politicians don’t usually attempt with such vigour.

Prominent Indian personalities expressed their distaste for Trudeau’s dress, with India Today calling it “tacky.” Trudeau showed up at an event full of Bollywood stars in full traditional dress, while the movie stars themselves simply wore black suits.

Hilarious.

Trudeau’s hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen, compared Trudeau’s India trip to George H.W. Bush’s 1992 trip to Tokyo, where Bush vomited on Japan’s prime minister.

“As for what ‘the work, achievements and objectives’ of this cavalcade of embarrassment might amount to, it would have been better, in hindsight, if Trudeau had gone to India alone, invited himself to dinner with Modi, and thrown up in his lap,” the Citizen wrote.

Harsh.

Vice points out:

Try imagining Indian PM Narendra Modi hanging out in Ottawa for a week alternately dressed like a cowboy or a Mountie or a French Canadian biker, and you’ll have some idea of how obnoxious it was to watch Justin Trudeau traipse around the subcontinent playing ethnic dress up.

If he visits NZ will he wear Maori haka outfits everywhere?

The Herald reports:

The woman who accused Barnaby Joyce of sexual harassment has been named as a former recipient of the West Australian Rural Woman of the year award.

The Weekend Australian has named the woman as Catherine Marriott, after her lawyer, Emma Salerno, told the newspaper she wants the complaint followed through to its conclusion.

The revelation comes as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Mr Joyce had made the “right decision” in resigning as deputy prime minister and Nationals leader yesterday.

“The judgement that he’s made in resigning was the right one for himself and his family,” Mr Turnbull told reporters in Washington, DC.

I’m surprised it took so long for him to resign.

I suspect the next round of opinion polls in Australia will show Labor with a 10% or greater lead on the two party preferred vote.

The 2017 Corruption Index found NZ least corrupt:

1. New Zealand 89
2. Denmark 88
3. Finland 85
4. Norway 85
5. Switzerland 85
6. Singapore 84
7. Sweden 84
8. Canada 82
9. Luxembourg 82
10. Netherlands 82

Other interesting scores were:

• Australia 77 (13th)
• US 75 (16th)
• China 41 (77th)
• Russia 29 (135th)
• Somalia 9 (180th)

The Herald reports:

University of Auckland vice-chancellor Stuart McCutcheon wrote to Hipkins in December, in his capacity as chair of Universities NZ, the body that represents all eight universities, to warn of “a most unfortunate and no doubt unintended anomaly” of the fees-free policy.

Foundation courses are designed to help disadvantaged students, including Māori and Pacific New Zealanders, into degree programmes, and as such had much lower fees, McCutcheon wrote.

 

“Students who take a university foundation course will enjoy a fees remittance of as little as $700 in their first year of tertiary study … by contrast, those entering directly into degree programmes will enjoy the benefit of up to $12,000 in remitted fees.

“We believe that this outcome is grossly inequitable

Labour’s free fees policy is a huge transfer of wealth to those who will be the wealthiest in society. A graduate has lifetime earnings of $1.6 million more than non graduates. And as McCutcheon points out the vast bulk of Labour’s spending will go on the future uber wealthy instead of those who are disadvantaged.

The Herald reports:

Minister of Justice Andrew Little has laid out a vision for criminal justice reform which sees sentencing law relaxed and a rejection of “tough on crime”-style politics.

His comments during an interview with the NZ Herald have been likened by one leading academic as the boldest political move in criminal justice since former Minister of Justice Ralph Hanan, who saw the death penalty abolished in 1961.

Little said “so-called law-and-order” policies have been a 30-year failure and locking up more people with longer sentences hasn’t made New Zealand safer.

Actually NZ has become much safer over the last 30 years and if Little thinks letting out recividist rapists and bashers early will make NZ safer he is going to get a nasty shock.

“One of the major challenges is to turn around public attitudes – to say that what we have been doing for the last 30 years in criminal justice reform actually isn’t working. Our violent criminal offending is going up.”

Only in the last two years. It is still much lower than the high of 2009. The trend has been down.

The proposed upgrade of Waikeria Prison is due to be decided next months by Cabinet and poses a huge challenge when it came in promising to reduce prison numbers by 30 per cent in 15 years.

There are two ways to reduce prison numbers – a very good way and a very bad way.

The very good way is to reduce offending and reoffending. Every Government tries to do this, and some programmes do work to reduce reoffending. However some criminals are recividist and nothing works.

The very bad way to reduce prison numbers is to simply let the recividist criminals out early so they can keep offending and bash and rape more New Zealanders. If that is your policy then it is very easy to reduce prison numbers.

He said other possible changes being considered were to the Parole Act 2002 and the Bail Amendment Act 2013 – considered two of the main drivers behind the prison population boom.

Changes to bail laws rapidly inflated the prison population by locking more people up to await trial, while the parole changes 15 years ago kept people inside longer.

A huge number of criminals commit further offences on bail. Those without a history of breaching bail conditions still tend to get bail. But giving bail to people with a history of offending on bail will again lead to more killings, bashings and rapes.

And the parole changes stopped serious violent and sexual offenders from getting parole after just one third of their sentence.

If anything will cause this Government to be a one term Government, it would be changing the bail and parole laws so convicted recividist criminals get to commit more crimes and create more victims.

The Herald reports:

NZME, owner of the New Zealand Herald, plans to put up a paywall around premium journalism on its website, says chief executive Michael Boggs.

Speaking to investors and analysts today after NZME announced its latest financial results, Boggs said a subscription model for “premium content” would be in the market this year.

The company was focusing on improving premium journalism on nzherald.co.nz and nurturing audiences over the coming months.

User registration would then follow – with “monetisation” the last step in the process.

It will be interesting to see what they regard as premium content!

Billy Graham has died aged 99. Arguably the most famous preacher in the world.

They estimate over 215 million people have attended his meetings around the world. On top of that his broadcasts are thought to have been seen by two billion people making him the most listened to preacher in the 2,000 year history of Christianity.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — President Donald Trump‘s first full year in charge of the budget.

That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.

Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to a documents released Wednesday. It’s the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.

So that is borrowing almost $3,000 per citizen.

The belief in Washington and on Wall Street has long been that the U.S. government could just keep issuing debt because people around the world are eager to buy up this safe-haven asset. But there may be a limit to how much the market wants, especially if inflation starts rising and investors prefer to ditch bonds for higher-returning stocks.

If that belief is false, there will be one massive correction.

Politik reports:

The NZ First MP who is probably closest to Winston Peters looks likely to depose Ron Mark and become the party’s deputy leader.

Fletcher Tabuteau was yesterday refusing to comment on speculation that he was standing for deputy leader, but well-placed party sources say he will run.

That was given more force by Shane Jones also refusing to comment publicly but privately indicating that he is unlikely to run.

Peters is of course behind this. Loyalty is a one way street with him. Ron Mark has stayed loyal to Winston for over 25 years but he be tossed aside.