The Herald reports:

Family First is set to lose its charitable status, the Herald has exclusively learned.

The group was first notified by the Charities Registration Board in 2013 that its charitable status was in danger.

That was because the group advocated a controversial point of view, that was seen as lobbying for a political purpose.

The decision was challenged in court, and in 2015 the High Court ordered the Board to reconsider its decision.

The High Court decision did not rule on whether or not Family First was a charity.

The Herald understands that decision has now been reconsidered, and that the formal notification process is underway to tell Family First it is being deregistered as a charity.

My view has consistently been that lobby groups should not be charities, and that Family First is primarily a lobby group. So this is the right decision in my opinion. However Greenpeace and FIZZ and Alcohol Action should also not be registered charities.

Some lobby groups also do charitable work, but this is not the bulk of what they do. In those cases, they could do what the Sensible Sentencing Trust did and effectively split their organisation into two parts – one that does victim support and one that does advocacy. The former is a charity while the latter is not (off memory).

To my mind one has to look at what the organisation does overall. Take Greenpeace and Forest  & Bird, Both are environmental or conservation groups that are politically aligned to the left and active politically.

However Greenpeace does almost no actual conservation or environmental work. ALmost 100% of what they do is political activism. That is why they should not be a charity.

Forest and Bird however does actual conservation work, as well as their lobbying. They remove weeds, they plant native plants, they help with pest control, they protect water catchment area etc. So I have no issues with Forest and Bird being a charity, but it is outrageous if Greenpeace continue to have charitable status if Family First is not eligible. They should both be eligible or neither be eligible.

Stuff reports:

Fraudster Joanne Harrison tried arranging a night-time “clandestine rendezvous” in her Ministry of Transport office while she was under investigation.

The ministry has also confirmed there were multiple concerns raised about Harrison long before she fled the country last year, in the wake of her $725,000 fraud.

NZ First leader Winston Peters has now called for Harrison’s former ministry boss Martin Matthews – who is currently the auditor-general, to stand down. Other Opposition MPs have also raised concerns.

I hate to say it, but Winston may have a point.

I don’t think you can blame Matthews because fraud happened in his department per se. No agency can be fraud proof. And from all accounts he did the right thing once it was confirmed she was a fraudster,

But the issue is whether warning signals were ignored and good systems were in place, so she would have been detected earlier. And the signs are that they were not. And this is not a good look for someone who is now the Auditor-General.

Matthews, who is overseas, said last night he stood by previous assertions that he had handled the saga decisively, and investigated it thoroughly.

He did. But the issue is whether it should have been detected earlier.  Here’s the stuff I’m concerned about:

• Harrison was able to authorise payments to entities and no internal checks made about services provided
• Concerns about the contracts were raised two years earlier but not acted on
• Staff concerns over her recommending her husband for a role were not followed up properly
• She hired a friend as a staffer who got paid for 10 months and it seems never turned up to the office
• She had been investigated for fraud in Australia and the Australian Federal Police contacted the Ministry in 2014 about her and Matthews just accepted her word that the matter did not directly relate to her
• In 2013 staff raised concerns that she gave out work without contracts

Again Matthews acted properly and well once they were sure she was a fraudster. But it looks like there were multiple missed opportunities to detect her fraud at an earlier stage. If an overseas police department contact you about a manager, you should not just take their word for it that they have done nothing wrong.

If Matthews was simply the CEO of another government agency, I would say this one issue should not blot his record. But the role of Auditor-General is different. This is about systems and checks and robust process. And it is clear that this did not happen on his watch at Transport.

The Washington Post reports:

President Trump asked the FBI to drop its probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn and urged former FBI director James B. Comey instead to pursue reporters in leak cases, according to associates of Comey who have seen private notes he wrote recounting the conversation.

According to the notes written by Comey following a February meeting with the president, Trump brought up the counterintelligence investigation into Flynn and urged Comey to drop the probe in the wake of the national security adviser’s resignation.

The conversation between Trump and Comey took place after a national security meeting. The president asked to speak privately to the FBI director, and the others left the room, according to the Comey associates, who, like other officials, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal internal discussions.

“I hope you can let this go,’’ Trump said, according to the Comey notes, which were described by the associates. Comey’s written account of the meeting is two pages long and highly detailed, the associates said.

I doubt even this will be enough to convince Trump fanatics that he simply does not have the right judgment or temperament to be President. Because Trump is the enemy of their enemy, they will defend him regardless. You wonder what he would have to do for them to actually change their minds.

For those about to defend Trump, imagine this happened in New Zealand. Say Helen Clark’s national security adviser had just resigned for lying about his contacts with (say) China. And that adviser was being investigated by the Police.

Then suddenly Clark sacked the Commissioner of Police, and it transpired that a few weeks earlier she had urged the Commissioner to stop the investigation into her former adviser.

Would you be defending Clark, as you do Trump, and saying she did nothing wrong. That it was all the fault of the Police for investigating a bogus allegation, and that the Prime Minister has every right to ask the Police to stop an investigation and then sack the Commissioner when he carries on? Or would you be demanding Clark resign?

We all have a natural tendency to be softer on the “team” we support. But when that tendency becomes an obsession and you can see no evil and hear no evil, you become what you claim to oppose.

Amy Adams announced:

The Government today has announced a Crown land and building programme that will see tens of thousands of new houses built in Auckland over the next decade.

Social Housing Minister Amy Adams announced that the Government’s Crown Building Project will replace 8300 old, rundown houses in Auckland with 34,000 brand new purpose-built houses over 10 years. 24,300 of these will be built by Housing New Zealand through their Auckland Housing Programme.

Over the next ten years, the Crown Building Project will deliver around:

• 13,500 newly built social houses
• 20,600 new affordable and market homes.

“This is a significant undertaking for the Government, for taxpayers, and for our Social Housing reforms. It’s the equivalent of three and a half new houses on every street across Auckland,” Ms Adams says.

“These houses will be for our most vulnerable families, for first-home buyers, and for the wider market. We are building more social houses for Aucklanders and helping provide a pathway into independent, affordable housing.

“The Crown Building Project is the Government making the most out of the available residential land it owns to meet Auckland’s social housing needs.

“These 34,000 new houses are a substantial redevelopment and construction programme on a scale not seen since the 1950s.

This is a huge development and will basically see houses built on every piece of land available to the Government in Auckland.

It is a credible plan based on actual land available and building plans. Labour’s promise to build 100,000 houses in 10 years is a made up number not based on any actual assessment of land availability. As we saw in Lower Hutt they promised to build 400 homes on 1.7 hectares of land which is one home per 42 square metres!

In Auckland the reality is Labour has opposed almost every major new housing development. They fought against the Tamaki development and voted against the Point England development.

“Our plan to build 34,000 new homes over the next ten years has been carefully scoped and designed, is fully funded, and builders are on site getting on with the programme already.”

Anyone who claims they will do more than that needs to identify how they will build on land they don’t own.

A guest post by David Garrett:

Maori prisons are not the answer

Lately Uncle Tom Cobley and all have opined about the causes of the high rate of Maori criminal recidivism. The Waitangi Tribunal says it’s the government’s fault. The Maori Party says it’s down to “institutional racism”, and of course, a lack of funding – of their pet causes of course. The Labour Party says  it’s all  the fault of the Corrections Department, which is “failing Maori”. The latest brilliant idea is dedicated Maori  prisons run on Maori lines. If they come to pass they will be a dismal failure, just like all the other ideas promoted or at least endorsed by Kim Workman, former head of prisons, who resigned in disgrace after his pet project He Ara Hou failed spectacularly in the 1990’s.

Why am I so confident in my pessimism?  For many reasons. Firstly, the proposal is that a Maori prison would essentially be an entire prison run the same way as the Maori focus units which already exist in prisons.  Such units are – apparently – run according to tikanga Maori, and embracing “Maori values”, whatever they might be ( I don’t know – I am not a Maori… Not even a 1/64^th one). The big problem is that not only are Maori focus units ineffective, but the recidivism rate among Maori graduates of may in fact be  HIGHER than the prison population as a whole.

Many readers will, quite understandably, ask for evidence for that claim. My response is that  winkling clear answers  out of Corrections and Justice is proving very difficult, with obfuscation and dissembling regarding my OIA requests. But according to a number of sources within the prison and justice  systems, that is the reality: those who spend time in Maori focus units before release  tend to reoffend at a higher rate than those who have served their sentences in the general population.

So how did we get to the unarguably lamentable situation where Maori are grossly overrepresented, both in offending rates and in the prison population? Was this always the case due to some defect or trait within the Maori people? The answer to that  of course is a resounding NO. Go back to the period  before the 1960’s and Maori offending rates were LOWER than that of pakeha. It was not until the 1960’s, and the Maori drift away from their  tribal areas to the cities that they began to catch up. It was not until the 1980’s and 90’s that the significant overrepresentation of Maori within the prison population really took off. Why was that?

Firstly let’s deal with and dismiss the old canard of racism, both institutional and otherwise, as an explanation. Sadly, until relatively  recently, New Zealand was in fact a very racist country, although much of that racism was hidden and relatively benign and condescending, rather than the overt segregation and  the violence of beatings and lynchings seen in much of the southern USA.

I am old enough to remember To Let ads which read “No dogs; no Maoris”.  Sadly, I am old enough to remember “jokes” like “What’s black and lives up a tree? A Maori waiting for a state house.” I am old enough to remember cringing when a farmer referred, in his presence, to the  “Maori boy” – a man in his thirties – who had come to do some welding on his cowshed.

None of that would happen today,  when the National Anthem is sung in Maori first, where every school has a kapa haka group, and where there are proudly assertive  “Maori” who are as blond and blue eyed as me. To supposedly be Maori is now fashionable, not something to try to hide, as Winston Peters once did, claiming he was Italian rather than Maori. We are as a country, unarguably much less racist than we were 40, 50, or even  25  years ago.

So what’s changed? For a start, as Greg Newbold has pointed out, a large proportion  of Maori in prisons are gang members or associates, and the majority of gang members are Maori. Dame Tariana Turia has said that gangs are “just another form of whanau” –  what she doesn’t acknowledge  of course is that if your “whanau” is the Mongrel Mob, and  if that’s all you’ve got,  that’s a terrible indictment on those who are your real whanau. And therein, in my view, lies a great part of the answer.

Forty years ago, the typical Maori family lived next door to me,  or up the road,  in the predominantly Maori state housing block I grew up in. Mr Tuhaka – whose daughters are now both university educated professionals – drove earthmoving machinery for the Ministry of Works, and spent his weekends either working in his vege  garden – which took up the entire back section of the house, and sometimes also the front lawn – or making and  checking his eel traps, and drying the contents of them  on the clothesline behind the house. Mrs Tuhaka, like my mother, didn’t work outside the home.

The Tuhakas were unusual only in that they had just two children rather than  the six or  seven that their friends the Te Hau’s had. When the Te Hau’s arrived on a Friday night or Saturday morning, we knew we were in for a sleepless weekend as loud partying would ensue for the duration of their visit. But that was only now and again.

Whether the Te Hau’s had been there or not,  on Monday morning, at 6.30, we would hear Mr Tuhaka’s old V8 being started and left to warm up – this was 1971 – while he had his breakfast and went off to work. At 8.15 or so the  Tuhaka girls would emerge, clothes spotlessly clean and frankly, dressed a little better than we were, and we would all go off to school.

What is the typical Maori family now? Sadly, I suspect it  is a solo mother and her latest “partner”, and half a dozen kids, none of them his biological children. No-one in the household  will work because the state has generously not only supported but arguably encouraged their lifestyle with easily obtained benefits and grants. There will be excessive alcohol and drug use, and the partying will be ubiquitous, rather than now and again, as when the Te Hau’s came to visit our neighbours.

There will be little parental control of or even interest in the kids. There will probably be violence, either visited upon the kids, the mother, or both.  Again as Greg Newbold has pointed out, for every bashed to death Maori child like Moko Rangitoheriri and James Whakaruru, there will be 100  kids who survive the violence to  become the gang members and criminals of tomorrow. Their “values” will be violence as a solution to problems, callousness, cruelty, and lack of respect for societal norms, because that is all they have known. By time Corrections gets hold of them it is far too late to change anything. And herein lies the answer to the problem of Maori recidivism: it has nothing to do with ‘failings’ in the corrections system, the problem lies with failings within the families of modern Maori.

I hasten to add that there are many exceptions to this terrible parody of a whanau. My good friend Northland Wahine, a regular contributor here, lives with her youngest son and her sister, and whatever foster children Wahine has generously taken in from time to time. As I write this, she tells me the foster kids are waiting forlornly for their parents to come and pick them up, while the parents make excuses for why they cannot have them on Mother’s Day.

Both of the  adults at Wahine’s place have jobs. All the children in the house go to school. The children all attend after school activities and play sport on the weekends. Wahine’s son is a delightful well mannered and intelligent  boy whose father plays a big part in his life.  I can say with great confidence that HE will neither end up bashed to death nor will he ever become  a gang member.

So what is the answer to Maori offending, and their dreadful overrepresentation in prisons? The answer lies in the atrocious conditions in which many young Maori spend their early lives – in a Once were Warriors environment, corrupted by chronic neglect, abuse, violence and unemployed, drug-addled, drunken role models. Not all young Maori experience these conditions, but a shockingly large proportion of them do. As Newbold demonstrates in his recent book “Crime, Law and Justice in New Zealand”, the results are clearly visible: in the appalling number of Maori children admitted to hospital with adult-inflicted injuries, or killed by adults before they reach the age of 14.  The only real answers can come from Maori themselves: Maori  offending and  recidivism is a Maori problem, and perhaps only they can fix it.  

One thing is for sure: the problem will not be solved by blaming it on the corrections system and by repeated bleating that the government isn’t doing enough. By the time the criminals – Maori or otherwise –  reach adult prison it is too late to do anything very much, except wait until the offending years have passed, usually by age 45 or so. The answer lies way earlier, in childhood, but changing the future of Maori children  requires making some very hard and very unpopular decisions. Decisions no government is likely to make any time soon.

I blogged yesterday on how Andrew Little’s outrage at his old house increasing in value from $315,000 to $830,000 over 17 years was odd as it was a compound increase of just 5.9% a year.

Also noteworthy was that it increased 81% under Labour and 48% under National.

But I got interested in whether this house would even break even if it had been purchased by some smart property investor who financed it entirely through lending.

Well if you borrowed the $315,000 and paid standard mortgage rates each year from 2000 to 2017, then the amount you would owe the bank would be $936,000 so after you get the $830,000 sale, you are $100,000 down.

Of course in reality you would pay back some principal over that time, but that has an opportunity cost so the fair comparison is total financing vs total increase.

So in reality the average 5.9% increase in house value would not even cover the cost of interest on the initial house if financed through borrowing.  Now you would get rental income from the house for 17 years but as you can see the gain would be from the rental income, not from the increase value.

Stuff reports:

No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Prof Seba’s premise is that people will stop driving altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are 10 times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1m miles.

I’d be surprised if it happens this quickly. I think the future painted is quite likely, but eight years is not that long a time-frame.

Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine. Dealers will disappear by 2024.

Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond. There will be a “mass stranding of existing vehicles”. The value of second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to dispose of your old vehicle.

If this is the future, it is a good one. I will quite happily not own a car if I can order a self-driving vehicle within minutes for a reasonable cost.

It is an existential threat to Ford, General Motors, and the German car industry. They will face a choice between manufacturing EVs in a brutal low-profit market, or reinventing themselves as self-drive service companies, variants of Uber and Lyft.

They are in the wrong business. The next generation of cars will be “computers on wheels”. Google, Apple, and Foxconn have the disruptive edge, and are going in for the kill. Silicon Valley is where the auto action is, not Detroit, Wolfsburg, or Toyota City.

The shift, according to Prof Seba, is driven by technology, not climate policies. Market forces are bringing it about with a speed and ferocity that governments could never hope to achieve.

“We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history,” Prof Seba said. “Internal combustion engine vehicles will enter a vicious cycle of increasing costs.”

The “tipping point” will arrive over the next two to three years as EV battery ranges surpass 200 miles and electric car prices in the US drop to US$30,000 (NZ$43,651). By 2022 the low-end models will be down to US$20,000 (NZ$29,100). After that, the avalanche will sweep all before it.

Market forces are much more powerful that government policies.

Experts will argue over Prof Seba’s claims. His broad point is that multiple technological trends are combining in a perfect storm. The simplicity of the EV model is breath-taking. The Tesla S has 18 moving parts, one hundred times fewer than a combustion engine car. “Maintenance is essentially zero. That is why Tesla is offering infinite-mile warranties. You can drive it to the moon and back and they will still warranty it,” Prof Seba said.

Self-drive “vehicles on demand” will be running at much higher levels of daily use than today’s cars and will last for 500,000 to 1m miles each.

It has long been known that EVs are four times more efficient than petrol or diesel cars, which lose 80pc of their power in heat. What changes the equation is the advent of EV models with the acceleration and performance of a Lamborghini costing five or 10 times less to buy, and at least 10 times less to run.

“The electric drive-train is so much more powerful. The gasoline and diesel cars cannot possibly compete,” Prof Seba said. The parallel is what happened to film cameras – and to Kodak – once digital rivals hit the market. It was swift and brutal. “You can’t compete with zero marginal costs,” he said.

The future is exciting.

The Herald reports:

Labour leader Andrew Little used his first house to highlight how housing had become unaffordable under the National-led Government.

However, analysis shows the value of his “starter home” in Wellington rose at a greater rate under a Labour Government than under National.

In his speech at Labour’s Congress on Sunday, Little said house prices were “out of control” and getting further and further out of reach for Kiwi families.

He spoke about he and his wife Leigh’s first home, a two-storey property in Brooklyn which cost $315,000.

“That wasn’t a small amount of money for us, but it was manageable. It got us a three-bedroom starter home, built on a hillside in Wellington.”

“Now, it would cost around $830,000. It’s gone up by half a million dollars in 17 years.

That is an annual compounding increase of just 5.9% a year. That is around the same as you’d get in other investments such as shares or a managed fund.

CoreLogic’s estimates also show that the property’s value rose at a greater rate under Labour than under National.

Under Labour, it rose by $255,000, or 81 per cent. Since 2008, when National came to power, it has risen by 48 per cent, or $273,000.

Whoops. Should do his homework before he uses his old home as an example.

Stuff reports:

Five years of arrests and court proceedings have recovered less than $230,000 in overdue student loan debt.

Arrest warrants and Australian court cases pursued by Inland Revenue in the last five years have recovered a fraction of student debt, figures released under the Official Information Act show.

Of course few people actually get prosecuted. It would be a very inefficient way to recover debt.

Minister of Revenue Judith Collins said arrests at the border were a “strong deterrent” to anyone seeking to ignore their debt.

Compliance initiatives enacted in 2010 helped Inland Revenue recoup $400 million “it would not have otherwise collected”.

Exactly. It only takes a few arrests for many students who were non compliant to decide they don’t want to risk the same happening to them.

In fact the policy has been a huge success – $400 million for half a dozen prosecutions.

Stuff reports:

Uber’s relationship with New Zealand’s major airport appears to be deteriorating, making it harder for users to access the ride-sharing app.

Wellington Airport has blocked Uber from its wifi network while Christchurch Airport said the company had stopped communicating with it.

Disgraceful behaviour from Wellington Airport. If they had competition, they would be doing everything they can to provide a great experience to travellers. Instead they sabotage their own WIFI system to make it harder for travellers to use the transport mode they want.

While Uber drivers are still allowed to drop off passengers, Wellington Airport has threatened to trespass drivers who pick up passengers from the airport.

Passengers tend to walk to the nearby Z Energy station, however Wellington Airport has warned drivers the service station is also on land it owns.

So they will ban cars from even using the service station!

The Guardian reports:

The Labour party has hinted that it will pledge to abolish university tuition fees, with Jeremy Corbyn saying he has “some stuff in his pocket” for higher education, but that it would not be revealed before the manifesto launch next week.

Speaking at Leeds community college on Wednesday, the Labour leader and the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, refused to rule out honouring a commitment made by Corbyn in his 2015 leadership race to scrap tuition fees.

Asked about the party’s plans for university fees, the Labour leader said: “You’ll have to wait for the manifesto. I know you’re desperate for it and I’ve got some stuff in my pocket, but, sorry, I’m not allowed to give it to you. Is that alright? Do you mind? Can you cope with the excitement?”

His comments came as a recording emerged of the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, telling an audience in Mansfield that Labour would abolish university tuition fees. “[We] want to introduce – just as the Attlee government with Nye Bevan introduced the National Health Service – we want to introduce a national education service,” McDonnell said.

“Free at the point of need throughout life. And that means ending the cuts in the schools at primary and secondary level. It means free childcare. It means free school training when you need it throughout life. And yes it means scrapping tuition fees once and for all so we don’t burden our kids with debt for the future.”

When your policy is adopted by the far left mad Marxists of UK Labour, it is a good sign how daft it is.

Stuff reports:

The US is expected to broaden its ban on in-flight laptops and tablets to include planes from the European Union, a move that would create logistical chaos on the world’s busiest corridor of air travel.

Alarmed at the proposal, which airline officials say is merely a matter of timing, European governments held urgent talks on Friday with the US Department of Homeland Security.

The ban would affect trans-Atlantic routes that carry as many as 65 million people a year on over 400 daily flights, many of them business travellers who rely on their electronics to work during the flight.

Banning laptops and tables on flights is just insane. Will ensure that people avoid the US as much as possible.

The head of the International Air Transport Association said recently that the electronics ban was not an acceptable or effective long-term solution to security threats, and said the commercial impact was severe.

An industry-backed group, the Airline Passenger Experience Association, said the US government should consider alternatives. That could include routinely testing laptops for chemical residues associated with bombs, requiring owners to turn on their devices, and letting frequent travellers keep their electronics with them.

A ban should be the last last resort.

Stuff reports:

Labour is lining up property speculators by clamping down on tax loopholes to even the playing field in favour of first home buyers.

In a hard hitting speech to Labour’s election year congress, leader Andrew Little said the loophole that let property speculators offset losses from their rentals against other income for tax purposes would be closed.

“Labour will close the tax loophole that allows speculators to claim taxpayer subsidies for their property portfolio,” Little said.

This is not a loophole or a subsidy. It is standard taxation policy that a loss in one area can be offset against a profit in another area. What Little is proposing is that losses on property investment be treated differently to all other losses.

It will make little difference to house prices and will in fact increase rental prices. The profit from property investment comes from the increase in capital value.  Until land supply is increased dramatically, this will continue to fuel house prices.

If property owners faced effectively increased costs on a property, then rents are likely to increase. So Labour’s policy will increase rents and have almost no impact on house prices.

Under the proposed change so-called “mum and dad” investors who bought rentals as a long term investment would not be affected as most of them did not use the loophole, Little said.

To the contrary they are the ones who will be most affected. The professional investors will have companies that will offset profitable and unprofitable houses. The mum and dad investors will not.

And who are the most common owners. Jim Rose has an OIA on this:

So only around 3,500 landlords have more than five properties while 23,000 have two to five properties and a massive 105,000 have just one. They are the ones who will be most affected. If the interest on their mortgage is more than their rental income (always the case at first) then they are deducting the loss off their other income.

Those with six or more will run it all through companies and be unaffected.

The Herald reports:

A junior government minister has apologised to his senior colleagues for “crossing the line” after implying people who bagged the Government would lose their taxpayer funding.

Associate Housing Minister Alfred Ngaro reportedly told a National Party conference in Auckland Labour list candidate Willie Jackson could lose Government support for his charter school if he criticised National on the campaign trail.

“We are not happy about people taking with one hand and throwing with the other,” he told a National Party conference in Auckland, according to Newsroom.

“If you get up on the campaign trail and start bagging us, then all the things you are doing are off the table. They will not happen.”

National’s campaign manager and Finance Minister Steven Joyce said Ngaro realised he had crossed the line with his comments and apologised.

“He apologised to the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and myself as campaign chair. He got carried away…he crossed the line.”

Joyce said Ngaro’s comments were “not the way we operate”.

“We work with providers of all types all the time; people have their political views separate to work they do with the Government. The Government doesn’t take a view on people’s political views.”

If National stopped funding organisations that criticise them, then there would almost be funding at all. Ngaro was wrong to say what he said.

NGOs that provide valuable services such as the Salvation Army should be funded for those services, and that should not be impacted by the fact they sometimes criticise the Government.

However there is a breed of NGO that doesn’t provide valuable services. They are in fact just lobby groups for their points of view, and those lobby groups should not be funded by the taxpayer just so they can lobby Parliament and the Government. Funding should be reserved for the actual provision of useful services.

This is nuts. Already 45,000 ppl living in inner city Akl. Schools there will be needed soon. https://t.co/5k2nooHvQC

— Simon Wilson (@simonbwilson) May 13, 2017

Simon Wilson is referring to the news that Labour has opposed the idea of metro schools, being schools in built up areas that might use community playing grounds rather than have their own.

It shows how reflectively knee-jerk Labour is to any change from their 1970s views of schooling. They are against metro schools, against online teaching schools, they are against charter schools. If National proposed kura kaupapa schools they would probably be against those also.

As it happens we already have a couple of metro schools, and as Wilson points out it is nuts to oppose them with such huge population growth forecast in our CBDs. Sure not everyone will want to go to a metro schools, but it is about choice and having schools built near where people live.

Labour really are dismal when it comes to education. They have no vision for it beyond opposing change.

Curia’s monthly polling newsletter is out. The summary is:

Curia’s Polling Newsletter – Issue 108, April 2017

There was only one political voting poll in April – a Roy Morgan. Hence the average represents just that one poll.

The average of the public polls sees National 13% ahead of Labour in April, down 3% from March.

The current seat projection is centre-right 55 seats, centre-left 52 which would see NZ First hold the balance of power.

We show the current New Zealand poll averages for party vote, country direction and preferred PM compared to three months ago, a year ago, three years ago and nine years ago. This allows easy comparisons between terms and Governments.

In the United States with the House passing a healthcare bill, Trump’s approval rating rose in April.

 In the UK since calling a snap election the Conservatives have gone from a 18% lead to a 22% lead and are currently projected to win 413 out of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

In Australia, the Coalition has closed the gap on Labor over the last two months.

In Canada Trudeau’s net approval is now at -5%, down from +19% a year ago.

We also carry details of polls on pornography and the normal business and consumer confidence polls.

This newsletter is normally only available by e-mail.  If you would like to receive future issues, please go to http://curia.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=e9168e04adbaaaf75e062779e&id=8507431512 to subscribe yourself.

 

The ODT reports:

Invercargill’s deputy Mayor Darren Ludlow has told the city council he will consider taking legal action if the reasons he stood down from the role are made public and are considered defamatory, Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt says.

His intention to take legal action was communicated to the council’s chief executive Richard King via email on Monday night.

Last week, the Southland Express reported Cr Ludlow had resigned from the position because he was overcommitted.

It has since been revealed all but one councillor had signed a requisition seeking his removal from the role. Mr Shadbolt said he initiated a ”round-table discussion” on April 21 to discuss ”issues” he had with Cr Ludlow, and nearly every councillor who spoke also raised concerns.

It’s pretty outrageous and contemptuous of the public to sack the Deputy Mayor in a secret meeting and refuse to give any reasons for doing so.

The Herald reports:

Seymour also slammed the $130 million taxpayer subsidies through NZ on Air for programmes such as The X Factor ($800,000), Mastermind ($685,000), Jono and Ben ($1.7 million) and Find me a Maori Bride ($590,000).

He said the $56 million-a-year Marsden Fund, which funds academic research, had even more ridiculous examples.

“What do taxpayers really gain from funding research on ‘Cultivating chamber music in Beethoven’s Vienna: a study in socio-musicology,’ ($580,000); or anti-trade activist Jane Kelsey’s ‘Transcending embedded neoliberalism in international economic regulation’ ($600,000); or ‘Missing narratives of modern Chinese intellectual history: modernity and writings on art, 1900-1930’ ($495,000)?”

All good examples of taxpayer funding spending we could do without.

Seymour said he had identified $1.1 billion in waste and corporate welfare that he would cut immediately to help fund his proposed tax cuts.

The current four tax rates (10.5 per cent, 17.5 per cent, 30 per cent and 33 per cent) would be simplified to three rates: 10 per cent, 15 per cent and 25 per cent.

That would mean a tax cut for every worker: $1516 more a year for the average wage earner on $59,920, $2020 a year for someone on $70,000 and $4124 a year from someone on $96,300.

I’d rather have the tax cut than be funding Jane Kelsey and The X Factor.

Stuff reports:

Labour has moved to distance its promise to slash immigration from any racist overtones, saying it is about the number of people coming in, not the migrants or their race.

Speaking at the party’s election-year congress in Wellington, finance spokesman Grant Robertson said the immigration debate “is a debate about policy. It is not a debate about immigrants”.

“And anyone who makes it about immigrants, or indeed about their race, must be called out for what they are doing as being wrong and against the values of Labour and of New Zealanders.”

What hypocrisy.

This is the party that basically said the reason house prices in Auckland were rising was because of people with Chinese sounding surnames.

The Guardian reports:

Jeremy Corbyn has said his top priority is to build more council houses and introduce tougher regulation of the private rental sector – and insisted he was not downhearted after difficult local election results for his party last week.

Speaking to the Guardian as he was campaigning in the West Midlands, the Labour leader said the UK needed a serious national initiative to tackle the housing crisis, aimed in particular at helping younger and less well-off voters.

The party wants at least a million new homes built over the next five years, with half of them council houses, as part of a programme of borrowing for public investment.

So Jeremy Corbyn is promising his Government will build one million houses in five years which is 550 houses a day while Andrew Little is promising 100,000 houses in ten years or 27 houses a day (including weekends).

I have not so fond memories of the bad old days of the Ministry of Works which would take years to do a project the private sector would do in a few months.

Corbyn also said that whatever happened in the 8 June vote he would be “carrying on” as Labour leader.

Oh excellent.