Radio NZ has their latest campaign story where they think that government should refuse to talk to companies they regulate. Their latest starts off:

Alcohol lobbyists pushed health officials not to raise taxes, curb supply or cut industry sponsorship of sport – despite those measures being endorsed by the World Health Organisation as among the most effective ways to reduce alcohol harm.

This is the typical appeal to authority – because the WHO says something, it must be wrong to disagree.

This is the same WHO that said that all evidence is that Covid-19 had an animal origin.

I prefer to take issues on their merits, not on who advocates for them.

Health Coalition Aotearoa said the industry should have no role in shaping alcohol policy. But the ministry’s deputy director general Andrew Old defended its engagement, insisting companies had no special access.

“They certainly haven’t had any particular special treatment or back door into the ministry. It’s been a deliberate, structured approach. They’ve had quarterly meetings with the team,” Old said.

“I can absolutely and categorically say that there is no veto power. So if the industry says ‘we don’t want to see this’, that has no bearing on the outcome. It is a view that is considered alongside a range of other views.”

Old accepted the alcohol industry was motivated by profit.

“I also would hope that, in doing that, they don’t want to be doing harm,” he said. “There’s clearly a conflict. But, to my mind, it’s not an irreconcilable conflict that would mean that we should just never talk to them.”

Such common sense. HCA are unable to win policy arguments, so what they are now trying to do is say that arguments should be rejected on the basis of who says then, not the quality of the argument.

The MOH DDG is quote right. Of course government should be aware there is a profit motive to arguments from industry. That forms parts of your analysis and decision making. But that is very different to the Stalinist insistence that they must be silenced and not allowed to even meet or e-mail officials.

“The WHO SAFER strategies include measures like restricting availability and raising excise taxes,” a submission from the Brewers Association says.

“These broad based initiatives are generally seen as reducing consumption overall and not targeting harmful consumption.”

This is the terrible stuff the industry says. That interventions should aim to reduce harmful consumption, rather than all consumption. As it happens te data shows that overall consumption has reduced dramatically in the last 30 years, so it seems common sense to say you should target harmful consumption as a priority.

Spirits New Zealand, which represents the likes of Asahi, Bacardi, Diageo, Lion, Moet-Hennessy and Pernod Ricard, warned against launching action on FASD without knowing what the prevalence was.

It took issue with estimates, based on international studies and expert opinion, that 3-5 percent of babies – 1800 to 3000 every year – are born with FASD.

“This is simply not credible and is similar to the situation that existed when the last plan was developed in 2016,” the lobbyists say.

“We cannot see how any FASD-prevention plan can be started without good data as a baseline. We would ask that the Public Health Agency give assurances that work on measurement frameworks occurs prior to other plan elements being launched.”

Oh how terrible – they asked the government to actually gather good data, to be used as a basis for a prevention plan. Why would anyone be against good data?

Leigh Henderson, chair of the advocacy group FASD-CAN, was concerned the alcohol industry doubted the prevalence of FASD.

“Are they saying, ‘Okay, it’s all right for 500 babies to be born, but not 1800,” she asked. “We know it’s not 100 percent preventable, but to try and downplay it in that way is just callous and not recognising the level of the problem.”

This is just hysteria. No-one is saying 500 is good. They are saying that we should know what the prevalence is. This is critical to working out the appropriate interventions because a cost benefit analysis needs to be able to measure both.

In a statement chief executive Robert Brewer said Spirits NZ “categorically denies” downplaying the extent of FASD.

“The government can’t fix a problem if it doesn’t know its true extent, level of occurrence, who is affected and why and to do this you need good data. This is basic public policy.”

Eminently sensible, yet Radio NZ would have you think this is evil, and an example of why government officials should refuse to meet or respond to e-mails from industry.

The spirits industry also took issue with the draft FASD strategy saying New Zealand is a country where “alcohol is highly accessible, use is normalised,” and there are high rates of hazardous drinking.

Brewer said hazardous drinking had declined over the last four years in New Zealand to just 16 percent of adults.

Damn those evil industry people for trying to debate feelings with facts.

Two professors of economics have 10 questions they would have out to former Ministers about Covid-19. Hopefully these have been put by the Royal Commission. They are:

• 1. When did you become aware, if at all, of the evidence that the vaccines did not prevent transmission?  
• 2. Were you at all concerned, especially in light of the limited efficacy of vaccines that making the vaccines mandatory may damage public confidence and in the end result in lower uptake of other vaccines as well?
• 3. In 2020, did you know what the average age of death with covid-19 was and whether this differed from background life expectancy? If you had known that these figures were the same would this have changed your response?
• 4. Were you aware in 2020, that the mortality risk from Covid-19 was highly skewed by age with the risk for young adults or youths being miniscule? How and to what extent did this risk stratification by age issue play a role in your deliberations?
• 5. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act gives individuals the right to refuse medical treatment. It would appear that the vaccine mandates contravened this right. What was the nature of the discussion in balancing this tension between the individual’s right to refuse treatment and the common good of the vaccine mandate? What advice was sought and from whom?
• 6. Is it true that the Election (sic) Commission suggested postponing the 2020 General Elections to November in order to give the opposition time to campaign? If so, then what were the grounds for ignoring this advice?
• 7. Is it true that in September 2021, the Director General of Health suggested that a Level 4 lockdown was no longer required for Auckland? What, then, was the basis for extending this lockdown to December?
• 8. You are on record for stating that a strong health response in the form of lockdowns was the best economic response. Our response was among the most debt-intensive, saw one of the sharpest declines in real GDP growth, and likely incurred large human capital losses from school closures. What kind of economic advice did you seek and what evidence did you rely on? Did those agencies/experts agree with your assessment and response?
• 9. Were you aware of the Productivity Commission report suggesting that the costs of the extra five days of lockdown in April 2020 outweighed the benefits by about 90 to 1? If so, then what role did this evidence play in future deliberations? Did you consider seeking similar feedback from the Productivity Commission regarding the cost-benefit trade-offs of other key policies? If not, why not?
• 10. Do you have any regrets about how you handled the pandemic?

I will be very disappointed if questions like these were not put to the former Ministers.

An interesting story by Chris Lynch. Left wing Councillor and mayoral candidate Sara Templeton said during an interview that under Lianne Dalziel Christchurch was resurfacing 5% of its roading network every year but this had dropped to 1% under the current Mayor.

The unfortunate thing for Templeton is that she was completely wrong. In fact in the last financial year they resurfaced 6.5% of the roading network. So this was not a minor mistake – she was completely and utterly wrong.

As she is an incumbent Councillor, her “mistake” is even worse.

Fellow Councillor Sam MacDonald put out a statement asking her to correct her comments and Templeton’s response is to decry MacDonald as attack style politics.

So Templeton thinks being held to account for grossly misleading statements is bad!

Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche points out:

The PPTA’s current set of claims would cost taxpayers $1.7 billion over four years. That’s equivalent to an extra $67,000 for every full-time secondary teacher. It’s unaffordable, unreasonable and unrealistic. 

I’d like to see the best teachers earning over $120,000 a year. But that would require a pay scale that isn’t automatic progression based on time in job. The sad reality is that the inflexibility in the teacher pay agreements means that any increases for the best teachers are unaffordable because the same pay goes to each and every teacher who has been there long enough.

I use University Entrance as the key indicator for three reasons:

1. It is the highest qualification that covers all schools.
2. It is a very good proxy for the levels below.
3. It includes schools who do IB, Cambridge and NCEA.
   
   

UE for Leavers Ethnicity 2024
Asian 61%
European 43%
Pasifika 24%
Maori 19%

UE for Leavers by School Governance 2024
Private 83%
State Integrated 61%
State 35%

UE for leavers by School Type 2024
Single Sex Girls 63%
Single Sex Boys 48%
Co-Educational 36%

UE for Leavers Gender 2024
Girls 46%
Boys 35%

For the full data set that covers key stats on every high school email: [email protected]

I was sad to see Neil Quigley resign as Reserve Bank Chair, but not surprised. The lack of transparency over Orr’s resignation was sub-standard.

However to be fair, Quigley had a very challenging job. It is the first time I can recall that a Reserve Bank Governor had to be effectively removed from office, and I can understand the desire to do it in a way which didn’t result in a public meltdown between the Governor and the Board. So I thought it would be useful to look at what Quigley did right and wrong.

• Appointment as Governor in December 2017, to take effect from March 2018. At the time this was a very uncontroversial appointment. Orr had been a bank chief economist, a Reserve Bank Deputy Governor and a very successful NZ Super Fund CEO.
• Re-appointment as Governor in November 2022, for a further five year term from March 2023. By this stage the Board should have been aware of the many concerns over Orr’s performance. Not just the monetary policy failure which led to inflation over 7%, but his bullying behaviour towards critics. They clearly knew about this because as part of his re-appointment they said “The Governor will also model the highest standards of behaviour in promoting a safe environment for debate and in treating with respect those people with different views from their own”
  • A public sector CEO that needs to be told by his board to treat people with respect should ring warning bells.
  • To be fair, the views of the Minister will have played a big role. The reality is that you don’t put up a CEO for re-appointment if there is any risk the Minister will say no. The Board would have been unofficially told the Minister (Robertson) was happy or even keen for Orr to be re-appointed.
  • The fact that both National and Act opposed Orr being reappointed (I can’t recall any other Governor ever having opposition from a major party) would have been unofficially known to the board and did they consider the damage it would do recommending reappointment, which would expose the Bank politically
• It has been revealed that Quigley had started a process that could lead to Orr leaving. He e-mailed Orr with a list of board concerns. This was the correct thing to do. Any CEO that has a formal e-mail from their board of concerns knows what this means. So Quigley did well to start this process. Of course I suspect all these concerns were known in 2022 when they recommended him for re-appointment.
• Orr was determined not to accept a reduction in funding for the Reserve Bank, despite the rest of the public sector doing so. Quigley led the board to develop a view different to the Governor, that they could perform their statutory functions with reduced funding. This was important, and good leadership. Boards need to know when to back their CEO, and when not to.
• Quigley worked out a managed exit with Orr through an exit agreement. This was good, as a messy fall out between the Board and Governor would not be good.
• Where Quigley fell down is in agreeing (or suggesting) that the resignation was for personal reasons. We don’t know if this was a requirement of any agreement, but if it was then it should not have been agreed to. You can sugar coat a resignation, but you can’t mislead.
  • The sensible thing to do would have been to simply refer to the funding disagreement. This was the primary cause of the resignation, and should have been public. It was also naive to think it would not become widely known (as it did).
  • You could have still agreed to not make any reference to wider concerns over behaviour, as this is pretty common in exit agreements to not wash all the laundry in public.

So there were many things Quigley did do right. But the two things he clearly got wrong was recommending re-appointment in 2022, and hiding that the resignation was about a funding disagreement.

I blogged a year ago on Barbie’s Bill which seeks to implement a national register for standardised medical advance directives, and require them to be followed.

The author has an update:

Two Parliamentary select committees in the last 12 months have now backed a petition calling for a more effective system for advance directives, also known as living wills.

Last Thursday the Health Select Committee reported back to Parliament on the petition of Wairarapa-based Louise Duffy on advance directives and says issues with the current system call for urgent reform.

Ms Duffy began her petition after her mother Barbie suffered a major stroke and had her advance directive ignored by doctors when she was in hospital. Barbie’s directive made it clear her wish was to be allowed to pass in such circumstances.

The Health Select Committee’s report says she died 58 days later after being given medical interventions she had asked not to receive. Louise Duffy told MPs if Barbie’s advance directive had been followed, she would have passed, in comfort, within 7-10 days.

The committee has backed Ms Duffy’s proposals that advance directives be included in an accessible, nationwide medical database with a review system to keep directives updated so care teams are confident about following them. It also asked the Health Quality & Safety Commission change its current complex directive template.

Last October, Parliament’s Petitions Committee, also considered Ms Duffy’s petition, and found that training was needed to ensure health professionals understood the legal requirements of advance directives and followed them consistently.

Louise Duffy says now two Parliamentary committees have supported her position, the Government needs to act.

“More than a dozen MPs from all parties have looked at the current system and said that it needs to be improved so that the informed consent of patients is followed.

“I’m grateful they’ve recognised that what happened to my mum, and is happening at times to other New Zealanders, is not right. Mum had a painful, prolonged death despite having an advance directive signed by her GP, her lawyer and her partner, and me as her legal representative telling the doctors to follow her wishes.”

Louise Duffy says she would like a response from Health Minister Simeon Brown that he will implement the recommendations of the two Select Committees – and matching commitments from other parties’ health spokespeople to support it.

“When people have made clear in an advance directive that they want to be allowed to pass in circumstances they choose, such as after a major stroke, their choices about dying well should be the focus.”

The Herald reports:

A German neo-Nazi will be allowed to start serving an 18-month sentence in a women’s prison after he used a new government policy to register a change in gender.

Sven Liebich, who has been photographed at far-right rallies wearing a Nazi-style uniform, will be sent to the Chemnitz women’s prison in Saxony, according to FAZ, a German newspaper.

In July 2023, the far-right extremist was sentenced for several offences including slander and incitement to hatred, with German courts rejecting his final appeal earlier this year.

German prison officials have said the decision to incarcerate him at a women’s prison was based on his registered gender, not his biological sex.

Many neo-nazis are very stupid. This one obviously has a dash of cunning.

This is Sven in his usual garb.

This is Marla-Svenja ready for prison.

The Taxpayer’s Union has published the 2025 update of its list of local govt CEO salaries. As with last year, I group councils by size to get better comparisons.

They range from $1,027,696 to $228,120. Note that more than one CEO may have been employe during the period so this represents the total amount paid by ratepayers for the CEO role.

The BOP RC seems to pay a lot for its population, as does Northland and Taranaki.

Large Councils

Christchurch has paid a huge amount – possibly including a departure package. Tauranga appears overpaid. Hamilton is paid less than others of its size.

Medium Councils

The Rotorua CEO salary seems very high – above some councils twice their size.

Small Councils

The top few small councils have very high salaries for their CEOs.

Very small councils

I don;’t think you need to pay over $300,000 for CEOs of councils with just 10,000 to 15,000 residents. Those South Island salaries are damn high.

The NY Post report:

A new documentary about the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas has been booted from the Toronto International Film Festival — because organizers insist the filmmakers need the rights from the terrorist group to use their horrific footage of the massacre.

The festival claims the movie, called “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” did not meet certain requirements to screen at the prestigious September event, widely attended by Hollywood stars and bigwigs, including not securing so-called “legal clearance” to use Hamas’ livestreamed video of the rape, murder and kidnapping of Jews.

I think we all know this is a pretext. They just don’t want to show something that shows the horror of what happened.

Kerre Woodham hosted Minister Stanford on Newstalk ZB during the week. There were positive aspects and responses to questions from callers.

However, it came massively unstuck towards the end when Kerre asked what parents can do for their children re education.

It is a truism to state that parents are far more important/influential than teachers/schools.

As a parent – when my children were growing up – their mother and I were responsible for their education … not their school. They went to good schools – Cornwall Park District School, Mt Hobson Middle School, Auckland Grammar, Epsom Girls … but, if were living in a place like Whanganui our expectations would have been the same.

As a career teacher I have always seen my role as doing my best for the child and family and ALWAYS holding them in high esteem.

Kerre Woodham asked the question and Stanford’s only response was “talk to your children” and then a false assertion that “research shows that this is the most important thing …”

The role of parents is so much greater:

– care for yourself during pregnancy – no alcohol, no drugs, exercise, sleep well, eat well avoid stress, inform yourself about great parenting.

– create a physical space for the children before they are born and engage with your family and community (“it takes a village …”).

– surround the child with great experiences from day 1. Music, positive talk (the Minister is partially right ….. lots of words), extensive, activity, a bright room, play groups, …

– as soon as they can sit still – read to the child – complex picture books, Dr Suess, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, A. A. Milne, etc. I read The Lord of the Rings to my oldest when he was 2 – 3 years old. You can read well above their skill level – to their cognitive level.

– make Maths natural – with cooking, normal discussion, fun on puzzles. We had a guest in our home one day when one of our kids said; “is 89squared 7,921?” The capacity of young children is well beyond adult expectation.

– engage with all external learning situations and understand them. ECE, Primary School, High School …. Parents should be fully interested and involved.

While the Minister – let alone the Ministry – think that they have the solutions – it matches Ronald Regan’s great quote: that they worst nine words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The solutions to our problematic education system involve elevating and empowering parents – not with an overwhelmingly boring set of English texts (from Elizabeth Rata who does not seem to know that books have been written since 1950), not with pre-categorizing students as “vocational” in the face of all counter evidence from neuro-science in the last 25 years.

Stanford is positive and highly motivated. She is also often deeply wrong and poorly advised by those in her “tent”. She might be better than Hipkins and Tinetti but that is a VERY low bar.

[email protected]

Roger Partridge writes:

The Greens’ coronation of Chlöe Swarbrick at last weekend’s AGM delivered a manifesto for economic transformation that would make Soviet economists nostalgic for their glory days.

Swarbrick delivered a speech that was part meditation retreat, part political rally. She declared her party “leading the Opposition,” positioned herself as Finance Minister-in-waiting, and announced her intention to overhaul capitalism.

Why only Finance Minister? Surely Prime Minister. How about a Green dominated Cabinet. If they hadn’t lost so many MPs we could have Justice Minister Golriz Ghahraman, Small Business Minister Phillida Bunkle, Immigration Minister Darlene Tana, Welfare Minister Metiria Turei and Workplace Relations Minister Elizabeth Kerekere.

Finance Minister Swarbrick’s credentials rest on the Greens’ Alternative Budget – a document that reads like a socialist handbook. It promises to fund utopia for just $89 billion in new taxes.

Universal dental care, guaranteed incomes, free lunches, and 35,000 new homes – it’s the most expensive wish list since a child’s letter to Santa, except Santa doesn’t have to worry about capital flight.

At least Santa believes in targeting on the basis of behaviour!

The wealth tax at the heart of this relies on economic amnesia – Sweden abandoned theirs after watching its tennis stars serve from Monaco, France got capital flight, Germany got bureaucratic nightmares. But the Greens have cracked the code: New Zealand is apparently surrounded by a magical forcefield that prevents the wealthy from fleeing to Australia.

Most people can tolerate being taxed a portion of their income. But when the Greens say they want to take a portion of your assets every year, of course people would flee.

The crown jewel of this socialist revival would be the Ministry of Green Works – a bureaucratic behemoth that would make Muldoon weep with joy. Picture it: former KiwiBuild managers quadrupling housing targets, overseen by Three Waters consultants designing the governance arrangements.

You think $50 million to talk about a bridge was costly. Much better to come.

The Herald reports:

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has described the departure of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern from politics as “devastating for women around the world”.

Oh nonsense. The left always try and make it about them. You don’t hear people say the departure of NZ’s 1st female Prime Minister in 1999 was devastating for women around the world – or of Margaret Thatcher, or Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir etc.

In an interview with the Herald she said women in politics need to develop strong networks to withstand abusive sexism amplified by in an age of social media.

Ardern herself has said multiple times she did not resign because of comments on social media.

She said the environment where Ardern and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin exited politics was hostile to them, and those who direct that abuse should consider the impact it would have if it was aimed at the women in their lives.

I thought Sanna Marin was great. But she left politics because she lost an election. Likewise Ardern left politics because she knew Labour was toast at the next election.

I was listening to a TRIP interview with Nicola Sturgeon and she spoke about how the miners strike against Thatcher was influential on her growing up. It made me wonder about the union leader Arthur Scargill, so I checked and found to my surprise he is still alive. He is 87.

It is worth reflecting in what a hard core communist he was. In recent years he become active in the Stalin society and said he is sick of people who criticise Stalin (hey he only killed a million or so workers). He was also an enemy of Poland’s solidarity movement as it was seeking to overthrow a socialist state.

His party membership was:

• Young Communist League 1955 – 1962
• Labour 1962 – 1996
• Socialist Labour Party, Leader 1996 – 2024 and Deputy Leader since

His stance during the famous strike was that no mine ever should close – even if it ran out of coal!!

It later transpired that he received one million pounds from the Soviet Union and also money from Libya. It was meant to go to help the strikers but it was found some of the money went on improvements to his bungalow. He also demanded the NUM fund a London flat for him until he died, and then to pay for it for his widow.

Such a lovely fellow.

YouGov do a large regular favourability series, which I find interesting. Their latest net favourability scores are:

1. Volodymyr Zelenskyy +49%
2. Ed Davey -3%
3. Nigel Farage -29%
4. Kemi Badenoch -31%
5. Jeremy Corbyn -35%
6. Keir Starmer -44%
7. Donald Trump -61%
8. Vladimir Putin -86%

Starmer gets just a +4% rating from those who voted Labour in 2024 – only slightly more than Corbyn who is at -8% with those voters.

The Free Press reports:

For the past several weeks, critics have fumed at The New York Timesover a misleading photo of an 18-month-old boy in Gaza on its front page. It turns out that Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, who was a symbol for a story about widespread hunger in Gaza, wasn’t simply suffering from malnutrition. He had preexisting health issues “affecting his brain and his muscle development,” according to an updated version of the story. But that detail didn’t find its way into print.

I blogged on this previously. But it turns out this was not an isolated incident.

An investigation by The Free Press reveals that at least a dozen other viral images of starvation in Gaza also lacked important context: The subjects of those photos have significant health problems. Those appeared all over social media, in the reports of leading international aid organizations, and on some of the most prestigious news outlets in the United States, including CNN, NPR, and the Times—without disclosing the complicated medical histories that help explain their stark appearances. …

The children in all of the images reviewed by The Free Press were either sick or facing death at the time their images circulated online, according to local reports in Arabic. Their situations were dire. But in every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action.

The article goes into details of all these cases.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t hunger or starvation in Gaza. There is. But the media reporting of these misleading photos are being used to mislead.

Radio NZ reports:

E tū members at media company Stuff are striking on Thursday afternoon. …

Wellington-based journalist and E tū delegate Tom Hunt said the company seemed to be showing contempt for staff.

“Stuff journalists have taken hit after hit to get Sinead Boucher’s companythrough hard times. We accepted no increases during Covid and effectively nothing last year, because we believed the company when it told us times were tough.

“To now be offered an insulting pay rise, and to see the company trying to split us into different collective agreements, is disgraceful. It shows they plan to keep screwing us for years to come.

That’s strong words. Stuff fires back:

“The statement from E tū contains a number of deliberate untruths. Since Covid, we have given our staff pay rises every year which are in line with the market, there has been no ‘secret payday’ and no one has been ‘screwed’. It is disappointing to see two journalists mischaracterise the issues in this manner.”

So Stuff is saying two of their own journalists are saying things that are untrue and are mischaracterising events. This is not a good way to sell the quality of your journalism!

Stuff reports:

Tamihere made the remark on Martyn Bradbury’s The Bradbury Group podcast this week. He said the Government had a “bully-boy mentality”, and said academics suggesting alternative economic opinions were “beat up”.

“This is worse than Nazi Germany, this is a fascist regime that has to be removed,” Tamihere said.

This is again not some random anonymous troll on the Internet. This is the party president of a parliamentary party saying that the government that got elected by a majority of voters is a fascist regime that is worse than a regime that murdered six million of its own citizens.

This shows again that Te Pati Maori is unfit for office. It is inevitable that repeated rhetoric like this from senior politicians will lead to violence. I mean if you actually did think the government was worse than Nazi Germany, then violence would be absolutely justified.

Martin Lally has done an analysis of some of the Covid statistics we all heard about, and I am publishing some extracts from it below with some comments from me.

One of the most dramatic piece of information in the early stages of the pandemic was the widely-cited figure of 80,000 deaths if we did not lockdown.  This came from Table 2 of Prof Shaun Hendy’s March 2020 paper, which provides a figure of 83,000 under a “No Control” situation.   

https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/d/75/files/2017/01/Supression-and-Mitigation-New-Zealand-TPM-006.pdf

At the right hand end of the “No Control” row, the figure of 1.67% appears in brackets, which means the death rate and 1.67% of NZ’s population then (about 5 million) was 83,000.  Since the other rows of the table are control strategies by government, a reasonable interpretation of the phrase “No Control” by a person not acquainted with the technical details of the paper but fluent in English (such as a journalist) would be “no government controls”.  However, in a recent book (“The Covid Response”), Hendy explains that it actually meant no government imposed controls and people behaving “as if covid was just a regular flu”, i.e., people not reacting to the spread of covid (page 87).  The latter is inconceivable because a covid death toll reaching even a few thousand would have triggered people to take protective actions, especially with government and the media giving such attention to the matter.  At the time, I understood the 83,000 figure to be deaths if there were no government controls and no reaction by the populace, and therefore thought Hendy’s presentation of the figure without the crucial additional premise was a mistake.  It was rather like him predicting how many people would die in a tall building if it were hit in the upper floors by an aircraft and nobody reacted by vacating the building, with each person going about their work until the smoke and flames engulfed them or the top stories collapsed onto them.  In his recent book, Hendy could have just conceded that the omission of the additional premise led the media to draw the wrong conclusion, and therefore it was a mistake by him to fail to add the additional premise, but he doesn’t.  Instead, he blames the media for misunderstanding the figure (page 87).  It is rather like opening the floodgates and then blaming the water for obeying the law of gravity.

This is quite stunning. I suspect we all thought the 80,000 figure was based on no action by the government. But in fact it was based on the population acting like zombies and not making any personal behavioural changes.

Hendy (pages 123 and 146 of his book) expresses the widely-expressed view that the Maori and Pasifika communities suffered disproportionately from covid.  The plain English meaning of this claim is that the covid death rate for these two communities was higher than for the country in toto.  However, this is not true.  Ministry of Health data on the deaths from covid by ethnicity and age group are presented at the below weblink.  

https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/for-health-professionals/data-and-statistics/covid-19-data/covid-19-case-demographics#details-of-covid-19-deaths

The last table at this link reports 2,982 covid deaths to date, including 235 Maori and 131 Pasifika.  At the 2023 census, the population in toto was 4,994,000 including 887,000 Maori and 443,000 Pasifika: see Table 9 at

https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/2023-census-population-counts-by-ethnic-group-age-and-maori-descent-and-dwelling-counts

So the overall covid death rate was 0.06%, that for Maori was 0.026%, and that for Pasifika 0.03%.  So, overall Maori and Pasifika covid death rates were only half or less than the rate for the whole population.  The reason for this seems clear: most of the covid deaths were in the 80+ group and Maori and Pasifika had relatively low percentages of their populations in this 80+ group (1.1% for Maori and 0.9% for Pasifika versus 4.0% in the whole population).  By analogy, if covid death rates were particularly high in people with blue eyes, Maori and Pasifika would also suffer much less than proportionately.

Perhaps those who claim Maori and Pasifika suffered disproportionately actually mean that they suffered so within each age group rather than in toto.  However, even this is not true for Maori in the 80+ group (which contains over 70% of the total covid deaths).  In this 80+ group, there were 2,111 covid deaths including 88 Maori (data source as above).  In addition, the 80+ population in the 2023 census was 199,023 including 9,333 Maori (data source as above)  So, for this 80+ age group, the overall covid death rate was 1.06% versus 0.94% for Maori.  So, for this age group, the Maori rate is again below the overall rate. 

So it seems very clear that fewer Maori died proportionally than non-Maori.

Martin was interviewed on RCR about his analysis, which has links to all the papers.