The latest One News Colmar Brunton poll is at Curia. It has Labour at 24% which puts them on the verge of having no List MPs at all, including Leader Andrew Little. It is no surpise that Little revealed he had talked to colleagues about whether he should quit.

This is the lowest result for Labour in the One News poll since 1996.

I have little doubt that a major factor in Labour’s decline is the Greens welfare policy and associated defence of welfare fraud. This appeals to hard left voters (so attracted some Labour voters) but puts more centrist voters off Labour as they realise that a Labour/Green government could end up with policies where you can stay on the dole for 15 years and never have to even attend a job interview.

So the Greens went up 4% and Labour down 3%. But it is silly to see this as a win for the left. Labour on 24% simply can’t credibly be seen to lead a Government.

And last election they dropped 4% from late July to the September election. If this happened again they’d end up on 20%.

Is it possible Little will resign in a desperate move to save his seat in Parliament, hoping Jacinda can keep them over 24%? They did this in 1990 with Palmer resigning for Moore six weeks out, and Jacinda is already on the billboards.

National has released it’s 2017 party list. The list above indicates who will come in at which approximate party vote percentage, if electorate seats do not change.

If National got the same vote as in 2014, and electorates do not change, the new MPs will be:

1. Nicola Willis, list
2. Agnes Loheni, list
3. Paulo Garcia, list
4. Matt King, list
5. Simeon Brown, Pakuranga
6. Andrew Falloon, Rangitata
7. Harete Hipango, Whanganui
8. Denise Lee, Maungakiekie
9. Chris Penk, Helensville
10. Erica Stanford, East Coast Bays
11. Tim Van de Molen, Waikato
12. Lawrence Yule, Tukituki
13. TBA, Clutha-Southland

13 new MPs is a decent intake.

The demographic makeup of the likely caucus would be:

• Gender – 34% female, 66% male
• Ethnicity – 76% European, 12% Maori, 8% Asian, 3% Pasifika
• Regions – 40% Northern, 18% Central NI, 18% Canterbury-Westland, 15% Lower NI, 8% Southern
• Age – 20s 2%, 30s 17% 40s 29%, 50s 41% 60s 12%

A reasonably diverse projected caucus. In 2014 only 27% of the caucus was female so an increase to 34% is significant.

The Herald reports:

So-called psychics on Sensing Murder were an “entertainment angle” to boost viewer numbers and detectives should focus on the benefit of prime-time exposure for cold cases, a researcher for the show told police.

The researcher told police “no matter what you think of the value (or otherwise) of psychics, Sensing Murder can be seen as a valuable opportunity to refresh attempts to get answers to some long-held unanswered questions”.

The show, and all those involved in it, prey in misery and suffering and bring false hope to families of victims. They should be ashamed of themselves and for promoting such bullcrap.

Police disagreed with internal emails released through the Official Information Act revealing that not one show in the 39 episodes filmed over more than a decade had provided a single piece of useful information.

Of course not, as psychics are either deluded or con artists.

Managing director of showmakers’ Screentime Philly De Lacey offered another reason for the show – she said it gave comfort and closure to the families of those who had died.

“That came from the researcher. That’s not the general view of the programme. I think the psychics are incredibly accurate.”

That have a 0% success rate. You make money out of people believing they are accurate.

TVNZ’s in-house lawyer Brent McAnulty responded to an OIA request about the show earlier this year, saying the “mediums do receive a fee for their appearance” but it wasn’t paid by TVNZ.

“The mediums all believe that they have a gift that they can assist others with and there is no intention to deceive whatsoever,” he said.

The mediums believe they have an ability to make money.

A TVNZ spokeswoman said the show was “compelling” for viewers and it wasn’t for the broadcaster to tell people what they should believe.

Oh crap. There is a difference between telling people what to believe and giving a weekly show to crooks and cranks.

Would they give a weekly show to neo-nazis to promote holocaust denial and say it isn’t for us to tell people what to believe?

I wonder if there is a scenario where Trump blames the Republican Party for his inability to pass healthcare reform and resigns from the Republican Party and sets up his own part – the MAGA Party.

The downside is that the Republicans in Congress might stop protecting him and he could face impeachment. But just as inpeachment hearings to a degree strengthened Clinton, could the same happen to Trump?

The Herald reports:

Police are investigating the death of a woman who is believed to have smoked synthetic cannabis.

Acting Detective Inspector Peter Florence said police were investigating the death of a 31-year-old woman who was found dead at an address in Kelston last night.

Police believe the woman may have been smoking synthetic cannabis a short time before her death, however, there may have been other contributing factors, he said.

The death has been referred to the Coroner who will ultimately determine the cause.

It is the ninth death linked to synthetic cannabis in Auckland this month.

So as I understand it:

• Synthetic cannabis: 9 dead in one city in one month
• Actual cannabis: 0 dead in all of New Zealand in 30 years

So that prohibition is working well eh.

The Herald report:

Several media organisations have withdrawn from the annual EY business journalism awards after an entry about one of the consultancy firm’s clients was removed.

The entry by journalist Karyn Scherer at NBR was an investigation published last year into alleged accounting irregularities at photocopier and printing company Fuji Xerox.

Following Scherer’s coverage, Japanese parent company Fujifilm last month released an independent report which found “inappropriate accounting” in operations in New Zealand and Australia between 2011 and 2016

Fuji Xerox was one of EY’s audit clients

EY withdrew the entry from this year’s awards, resulting in independent judge and journalist Rebecca Macfie’s resignation from the judging panel.

NBR today announced it would be withdrawing from the EY Business Journalism Awards entirely.

The Herald has also decided to withdraw its entries from the awards. …

Following NZME’s withdrawal, Fairfax has also decided to withdraw from the awards.

The awardsare basically now a joke, with three major media companies pulled out. EY need to have a very good explanation for their actions or there will be reputational damage.
​

A guest post by Michael Littlewood:

Superannuation has been a messy political issue for much of the last 40 years.  When the government announced in March that the state pension age would increase from 65 to 67 in about 20 years, no-one seriously thought that would park the issue politically in this election year.  The government effectively admitted as much when it said that legislation to make the change (and also the change to the residency period) would have to wait until 2018.  According to Steven Joyce, “Scheduling the legislation in this way gives all political parties the opportunity to discuss their position with the public before it comes before Parliament.” (see here)

For me, that’s code for ‘Here’s a policy that we can give way on in any discussions we have with New Zealand First once the election numbers are in.’  Because, unsurprisingly, Labour has said that the pension will stay as it is but, more importantly (for pension policy), New Zealand First says the age will be 65, presumably forever.  This will probably be one of its ‘bottom lines’.

This is all very predictable.  It’s also an unsatisfactory way of dealing with the issues associated with pension, retirement and saving issues.

The triennial review of retirement income policies by the Retirement Commissioner isn’t working and needs to change.  The 2016 Review (published in December as a jokey on-line cartoon presentation) was so unsatisfactory that Michael Chamberlain and I decided to write The Missing 2016 Review – building trust for life beyond work (accessible at www.alt-Review.com.  We released that last Monday.

We described the Retirement Commissioner’s report as an evidence-free zone for her 34 recommendations/observations.  Our own report tries to set down everything that is known and that might be relevant to a needed national debate on all the issues associated with both public and private provision for retirement.  We cite 136 external reports and data sources with 250 footnotes and 265 URLs to take readers directly to online resources and reports.

All this means that we know quite a lot but not nearly enough for the kind of national debate we think is needed.  We posed 125 questions under 21 headings that New Zealand must answer.  A lot of those can’t be discussed without more, better data, some of which will take years to gather.

We identified the nine key issues or reforms that we see as essential to a sustainable, flexible, inclusive retirement income framework.  We listed them here in order of significance to us, starting with greater economic growth.  None of these key issues rated a mention in the Retirement Commissioner’s 2016 Review.

We suggest that the political parties could start with agreeing on the need for better data before we start the national discussion New Zealand now needs.  That discussion needs to be led by a group that gains everyone’s confidence by assembling impeccable evidence on things that matter.  We cite the Dunedin Multi-Disciplinary Health and Development Study as a model of what’s possible.

Once we have that impeccable evidence, the political parties can decide what’s important to them, policy-wise.  Our experience is that, once we know what’s really happening, the answers are usually clear.

Taxpayers currently spend a net $11 bn on New Zealand Superannuation and at least another $800 million on KiwiSaver tax breaks.  New Zealand should be at least curious whether taxpayers are getting good value today for that spending.

We think New Zealand has the best state pension in the developed world but our retirement income arrangements can certainly be made better, more flexible and more resilient.

The Missing 2016 Review recommends that New Zealand should aim for a 2020 equivalent of the 1993 Superannuation Accord, supported by a permanent research group.  That sounds like a ‘big, hairy, audacious goal’ but, signing up to that idea shouldn’t be too hard for the political parties.  Who could possibly object to finding out what’s really happening?

The review/reform process we have at the moment is unsatisfactory and needs to change.

Ryan Lizza writes:

The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ”

This is the White House Communications Director talkibng about the White House Chief of Staff.

I can’t recall an administration, in any country, that is so incompetent and divided. They couldn’t even organise a piss up in a brewery let alone run the country. Despute having a majority in the House and the Senate they’ve been unable to pass any laws of significance, and their significant executive orders were done so badly they have been struck down in court.

I have worked in a Government, and for a Prime Minister. The stuff that is happening in the White House is impossible to conceive of having happened in a NZ PM’s Office. Sure you have office politics, but to have the Director of Communications refer to the Chief of Staff as a paranoid schizo *on the record* is just bizarre.

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. 

Must be such a happy place to work. Imagine you had a colleague say that about you to the media.

Minutes later, he tweeted, “In light of the leak of my financial info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45.” With the addition of Priebus’s Twitter handle, he was making public what he had just told me: that he believed Priebus was leaking information about him. The tweet quickly went viral.

And he tweeted that he is calling the FBI in to investigate the White House Chief of Staff – and again this is from the White House Director of Communications.

Tim Beveridge writes:

Turei is no Jean Valjean, stealing a loaf of bread to feed her child. She is someone who, while studying for a law degree no less, has admitted defrauding the taxpayer over a period of three years, by failing to tell social welfare officials of the flatmates helping her to pay the rent in three of the five flats she lived in.

It wasn’t a case of lying to get through a couple of tough months. It spanned several years. Three different flats. As the Herald editorial wrote, it looks more “like a systematic attempt to rort the system”.

 

There must have been many occasions when the fraud was renewed, when a declaration had to be made. One can only wonder how many times a false declaration was made, or how many opportunities Turei would have had to set the record straight. And yet the fraud was either repeated, or persisted.

So how often did she lie on an official form? At least three times, but it might be at often as a dozen or more.

She is now attempting to cash in again on this dishonesty by turning it into political capital. It makes the Green’s welfare policy, in removing sanctions and investigations, look almost like an attempt to excuse her poor behaviour.

Most people on a benefit do not lie about their income.

But now some are seeing Turei as some sort of hero, and that her dishonesty is ok. That is, surely, an insult to all the honest people who don’t set their standards at that level, and those beneficiaries who struggle through difficult times without breaking the law. Not to mention the hard-working New Zealanders of all political stripes, who struggle to pay their mortgage, their rent, their power bills, their tax, and support their families, without breaking the law.

Yep.

Sure, no one is perfect. But a hardly-remorseful Turei is now asking for our vote. And her platform now is tainted by the message that it is okay to be a fraud. That dishonesty is okay. The ends justify the means. That the taxpayer is there to be ripped off if when it suits. That the law means nothing. Take what you think you need.

My response would be different if Turei was unequivocal in saying what she did was wrong, but she was desperate. But she is the opposite. She thinks she did nothing wrong. She thinks taxpayers wronged her by not giving her enough money to be a mother, study law and stand for Parliament at the same time.

Mike Hosking also writes:

Having confessed to lying and cheating a government department, she’s now decided to play co-conspirator to those who have come forward and told her they’re ripping off the system just like she did.

It would be easy to ignore this sort of behaviour if it wasn’t for the fact this woman wants to run the country. She’s not some attention seeking activist, she’s potentially a senior cabinet minister.

You can say all you want about politics and its ability to sink to various lows. But in general, those who participate in the practice have a broad code of conduct – and deception, dishonesty, fraud and general illegality aren’t part of it.

Being angry or frustrated about a system or finding things hard under a series of rules or regulations have never been, and please let them never become, acceptable reasons to become a crook.

This is now the brand of the Greens thanks To Metiria – fraud, dishonest, crook.

Rosemary McLeod chimes in:

​We now know that Turei, as a 22-year-old solo mother, received the DPB and a grant to study for a law degree – which sounds pretty generous to me – while not admitting she lived with people who were sharing the rent, which means she conceivably got an accommodation allowance on top of her basic benefit.

She admits she was helped by her own family as well as her child’s father’s family, but says she couldn’t get by on that. So Turei took money from working people, through their taxes, who were probably no better off than she was. I can’t detect heroism in that.

No feminist solidarity from Rosemary!

Barry Soper also writes:

The twitterati has become apoplectic, fuming at the audacity of anyone posing a provocative question to the patron saint of the poor Metiria Turei.

Why would be want to know whether the father of the child Turei gave birth to in any way contributed to her upbringing?

It’s pertinent because if you’ve admitted to ripping off the taxpayer funded welfare system, as the Green co-leader has, then sources of income at a time she was claiming the benefit should be known.

The question though got short shrift from the MP who refused to speak about personal relationships, adding that she doesn’t believe women should be interrogated about those relationships.

It was a curious response, given that anyone claiming any benefit should declare their financial status before it’s paid to them.

Yep the Greens think that taxpayers, not fathers, should pay for children.

In fact she took the argument further, telling journalists they were being unfair, asking the kind of interrogative questions that beneficiaries are subjected to all the time.

The same sort of interrogation isn’t applied to people getting working for families, she contends, nor is it applied to pensioners.

Well the latter’s universal, your are paid it regardless of your financial standing and the former is always paid depending on the financial status of the recipient and the number of kids in the household.

Almost all state assistance is based on family or household income, not personal income. If you earn $30,000 a year and your partner earns $200,000 a year then you don’t get WFF. And if you do claim WFF on the basis of your $30,000 without declaring you live with your partner on $200,000 a year you are also a fraudster.

It’s a pity Turei wasn’t interrogated a little more closely when she was defrauding the system.

That interrogation will finally come next week when she meets a fraud investigator from the Social Development Ministry, more than 20 years too late.

When she admitted to fraud she must have known the blowtorch was about to be applied, given that she spent the best part of six years on the old domestic purposes benefit.

If MSD do a thorough job, they will not just be looking at her lies over how much rent she was paying. Other factors they should examine are:

• Was she ever living with the father of the child during her six years on the DPB, in which case she may have been ineligible to be on the DPB at all
• Did she have care of her child for the entire time she was on the DPB, or did the child spend some of that time in the care of grandparents
• Was she living with another partner while still claiming the DPB and claiming to be single

The worst case scenario for Turei isn’t that she has to pay the money back, but if MSD decide her fraud wasn’t a one off decision of desperation but part of a pattern of deliberate offending. For if they decide to prosecute, then depending on what charges are laid a conviction would remove her from Parliament.

The Herald reports:

US President Donald Trump has banned transgender people from serving in the military “in any capacity”.

Trump shot off three tweets Wednesday morning, US time, to make the surprise announcement.

“After consultation with my generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military,” he tweeted.

I’d be grateful to any citizen who volunteers to risk their life serving the country and wouldn’t get a shit about whether their gender identity is the same as their birth gender.

Richard Harman writes at Politik:

Gluckman suggested to Skilling that we set up some form of think tank.

The next question was to ask how it would be different.

“What we are doing in the policy community is that all the time we are comparing ourselves to these big anglo phone countries.

“Maybe it’s time we started getting ideas from other small successful economies.”

So Gluckman went and saw then Prime Minister John Key who was quickly enthusiastic about the idea.

The next question was who to invited to join the group.

Gluckman and Skilling decided that a “small” country would be one with under 10 million population.

That meant that outside Europe only three who fitted that bill could be considered advanced — New Zealand, Singapore and Israel.

They then somewhat arbitrarily decided to include Denmark, Finland and Ireland and after a couple of years, Switzerland asked if it could join.

In essence what they had founded was a sort of G7 for small countries

Sounds like a very good idea.

There are three work streams; science and innovation, economics and foreign affairs.

There are two meetings a year.

“Everybody says they are some of the best meetings in the world because there are no country positions taken.

“It’s all in confidence like ‘we stuffed this up, this is how we should have done it’ .

“There’s a lot of very frank sharing of what works and what doesn’t.”

And so, for example, the meetings have recently been looking at how digitisation impacts on small countries.

Here the talk has focussed on the impact of digital disruption and its costs and benefits.

The meetings heard how Denmark had established a Disruption Council to enable open and frank conversations on the pros and cons of digitalization.

Other ideas came from Singapore and Ireland who both focus on developing skills for the digital economy.

We have tended to look to the UK in the past for policy ideas, but they are 20 times our size. Working with six other advanced small countries to discuss policies that do and do not work is laudable.

Other work deals with how to handle trade negotiations and how small countries can deal with the monopolies created by companies like Google or Apple.

The upshot of all this work is that the Small Advanced Economies Initiative has started to gain considerable global credibility.

It is run from Gluckman’s Auckland office, and he is in regular touch with the OECD and EU on work that the initiative is doing, and even the White House(under Obama) has asked for briefings.

Currently, thanks to the Inititatiove,  the EU has staff in Wellington looking at how StatsNZ produces the big data that forms the basis of the social investment programme.

Gluckman believes that already the initiative has produced a cultural shift within Government in Wellington.

“What it has done is change the perspective of New Zealand officials.

“It has made us outward looking.”

Prime Minister Bill English says the grouping is starting to turn into “quite an effective” multi-national policy focussed discussion.

I had never heard of it until reading this article. Good to learn about it.

Dave Hasnford writes at Newsroom:

Prosser — and Peters — continue to insist that “aerial (1080) costs well over $100 million every year”.

This isn’t just wrong; it’s wrong by an order of magnitude. In fact, outside of a mast year (when synchronous mass-seeding in the bush drives predator numbers through the roof) DOC, Ospri and regional councils spend less than $15m a year on aerial 1080.

So they lie over the cost of 1080.

Prosser has been publicly corrected on this more than once, yet continues to make the claim, adding that “Some of that money should have gone into research, and it simply hasn’t.” Wrong again.

More than $14m has been spent on research into pest control technology over recent years.

And they lie that there is no research into alternatives

Prosser has been very busy on Facebook, assuring the anti-1080 crowd that, should New Zealand First gain power, 1080 will be gone by lunchtime, or at least in “a few weeks”. He has put DOC, OSPRI and regional councils “on notice”, that the option of 1080 will be denied them.

“We believe ground control can be as effective as aerial drops,” he told a gathering in December 2016.

Really? Let’s do a few sums: take Kahurangi National Park, large tracts of which received aerial 1080 in Battle for Our Birds operations in 2014, and again earlier this year, when nearly 300,000 ha — roughly half the park —were treated at a conservative cost, says DOC, of between $22 and $27 a hectare.

Let’s go with the higher figure and call it $8.1 million.

Now let’s do that with traps instead. DOC’s best trapping practice for rats calls for between two and three traps in each hectare. Let’s split the difference and say 2.5.

So, over 300,000 ha, we’ll need 750,000 traps for rats (we’d need way fewer for stoats — only 60,000 — but presently, no lure exists that will attract both pests at the same time, so we’d need to either add more traps, or swap out the lures every now and then). Now we need another 300,000 separate traps for possums. I paid $210 each for my Goodnature traps, but the company has said it would discount them for such a large order. In the past, it’s charged DOC $124 a trap, so let’s use that, which leaves us a bill for a shade over $130m.

Now we need to buy the lures, then pay staff or contractors to carry the whole lot into the bush. In a North Island trial, in relatively easy country, installation costs came to $15.20/ha, so for our example, that would add at least another $4.5m. Then the traps need to be serviced at least every six months. DOC has said that it would need to cut kilometres of tracks and build extra huts. Then there’s helicopter time, health and safety compliance, consumables… you’re looking at a minimum of $150m — pretty much DOC’s entire annual natural heritage budget — to tackle just two pest species in one half of a single National Park.

So NZ First is proposing to replace 1080 with ground trapping, which is 2000% more expensive.

The Standing Orders Committee has just published its review of Standing Orders. These are the rules Parliament operate under and are a critical piece of democracy. They are why our Parliament works so well and why some others do not. They basically protect the minority by ensuring that the Government can’t just do whatever it likes – the Government has to follow the rules also.

The proposed changes are usually adopted without dissent by the House, and I expect this will be the same this year. The major changes are:

• Merge Justice & Electoral and Law & Order committees together
• Select committees strongly encouraged to meet in weeks when the House is in recess so more time can be spent considering business
• A small reduction in size of most select committees so MPs are on no more than two select committees
• lifts the ban on using coverage of Parliament for satirical purposes
• clarification that the ban on strangers in the lobbies of the House does not apply to infant children of MPs

The proposed select committees for the next Parliament are:

• Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee: business development,tourism, Crown minerals, commerce, consumer protection and trading standards, research,science, innovation, intellectual property, broadcasting, communications, information technology
• Education and Workforce Committee: education, training, employment, immigration, industrial relations, health and safety, accident compensation
• Environment Committee: conservation, environment, climate change
• Finance and Expenditure Committee: economic and fiscal policy, taxation, revenue, banking and finance, superannuation, insurance, Government expenditure and financial performance, public audit
• Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee: customs, defence, disarmament and arms control, foreign affairs, trade, veterans’ affairs
• Governance and Administration Committee: parliamentary and legislative services, Prime Minister and Cabinet, State services, statistics, internal affairs, civil defence and emergency management, local government
• Health Committee: health
• Justice Committee: constitutional and electoral matters, human rights, justice, courts, crime and criminal law, police, corrections, Crown legal services
• Māori Affairs Committee: Māori affairs, Treaty of Waitangi negotiations
• Primary Production Committee: agriculture, biosecurity, racing, fisheries, productive forestry, lands, land information
• Social Services and Community Committee: social development, social housing, income support, women, children, young people, seniors, Pacific peoples, ethnic communities, arts, culture and heritage, sport and recreation, voluntary sector
• Transport and Infrastructure Committee: transport, transport safety, infrastructure, energy, building and construction

• You should be able to be on the unemployment benefit for 15+ years and never ever be required to turn up to a job interview or even look for a job
• If like Metiria you have lied in order to get more money from the taxpayer, you should not be required to pay the money back or face any sanctions for lying in order to get more money
• The in-work tax credit for working parents should be given to parents not working
• Welfare fraud is noble and should not be condemned or even discouraged by MPs but all other sorts of fraud are bad.
• Fathers should be able to not be named on birth certificates without sanction, and escape paying even a cent to their children’s upbringing, leaving the entire bill to taxpayers
• You should get a benefit even if your partner is a millionaire so long as you have been living together for less than three years
• If you are diagnised with a sickness you can claim a sickness benefit for life without ever needing to get a follow up medical certificate to prove you are still sick

Makes you realise what is at stake if there is a change of Government.

Bill English announced:

Prime Minister Bill English today signalled National’s intention to work with support partners – United Future and ACT – in this year’s General Election. …

“We are encouraging National supporters to give their electorate vote to ACT candidate, David Seymour, in Epsom, and United Future candidate, Peter Dunne, in Ohariu – and their party vote to National.

“To be clear, we want to increase our party votes in those electorates and that’s what our National Party candidates will be working hard to do.

Marks for being upfront. Voters still have a choice of course. National is standing candidates. National supporters can vote for the National candidate if they so wish, or vote for the candidate of a coalition partner.

Metiria Turei wrote in Stuff:

Section 70A requires single parents to name the father of their child, or risk losing their benefit.

This particular sanction is currently being handed down to 14,000 single parents, almost all of whom are mums. They are having up to $28 per week per child taken off them. The victims of this punitive and nasty law are the more than 17,000 kids who are then being deprived of that money – money that could be spent on food, or school books, or for paying the power bill so they can keep the heater on in their bedroom this winter.

Turei assumes they get less money by not naming the father. In most cases they get more money. The deadbeat Dads want the taxpayers to pay for theie children instead of then. So they pay the mothers say $50 a week to not name them (meaning they end up say $22 a week better off) and that means IRD can’t deduct child support from their wages, which can be well over $100 a week.

Why anyone believes that children should be punished for their parents’ choices is beyond me.

They are not being punished. The Dads are just trying to avoid any responsibility for their own children. That is not something we should encourage.

And why is taking money from a mother and her kids the only option if the state wants to track down the father? 

Because the mother is the ionly person who can name the father, unless Turei is suggesting every male adult in NZ should be DNA tested to determine paternity.

Aside from that, the reasons women may choose not to name the father of their child are myriad and complex.

For many, it’s because that person was physically violent or emotionally abusive towards them. They have made the decision to cut contact with that person, for their own safety and that of their baby’s.

This is where Turei basically lies. The policy has exemptions for situations where the father is violent or abusive, or rape is involved etc. She knows this. There is no sanction for not naming the father if it is a safety issue. The sanction is for the cases where the father is just trying to have the taxpayer pay all the costs of his children.

Surely, the sheer numbers of people who are being punished under 70A – and countless other sanctions – shows that the system that was designed to help people is failing miserably and is in need of an overhaul.

Nope. It shows the sanction is not high enough to make it worthwhile to name the father. It means the father just has to offer more than $28 a week to avoid being named.

Single mums on benefits should be no more required to name the father of their child than those women who work – that is, they shouldn’t.

Turei thinks that welfare shiuld be a lifetime entitlement with no responsibilities. I disagree. If you want the taxpayer to pay the cost of your children, the least you can do is tell us (unless a safety issue) who the father is so that he can pay some of the costs also. It is called responsibility.

The Greens are against there being any responsibilities if you are on welfare. They want to abolish work testing so peiople can remain on welfare for life. It is an appalling

MSD has released their annual income report based on Stats NZ and other data. The findings are very different to what many would have you believe. A summary:

• median household incomes rose 3% in real terms last year
• median household incomes have risen 3% (real) on average every year since 2011
• New Zealand’s net gains from HES 2009 to HES 2016 are better overall than for many OECD countries (we had better income growth than most)
• The share of income received by the top 1% has declined slightly from a peak of 9% in the mid 1990s and is lower than most OECD countries
• There is no evidence of any sustained rise or fall in BHC household income inequality in the last 10-15 years (90:10 ratio) or the last 20 years (Gini for 99% plus top 1% share) or the last 25 years (top 1% share from tax records).
• in 2015 households in the top decile paid one third (35%) of all income tax collected, and received 5% of all transfers
• single-earner families with two children can earn up to around $60,000 pa before they pay any net tax
• Around half of all households with children receive more in welfare benefits and tax credits than they pay in income tax
• the total income tax paid by each of the bottom four deciles is less than the total transfers received
• On average over HES 2015 and 2016 29% of households had high OTIs – that is, housing costs of more than 30% of their disposable (after tax) income. There has been little change in this rate since HES 2009.
• There is no evidence of any rise in recent years in low-income (income poverty) trends using anchored line measures, either BHC or AHC. The trends are either flat or falling, depending on the start point or measure used.
• For the standard or less severe hardship measure, the impacts of the GFC and the recovery are very clear, with the rate first rising to 13% in HES 2011 then falling to 7-8% over the last two surveys, lower than before the GFC (10%).
• There is no evidence of any increasing depth of relative income poverty over the last two decades

The report has a wealth of data about which NZers are doing okay and which ones are struggling. And few would dispute that some families are struggling. But it is very clear that overall incomes are increasing in real terms, and inequality is at best static and even dropping according to some measures.

Stuff reports:

Labour’s Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis has promised he’ll resign before the two charter schools in his Northland electorate are closed. He says it’s an easy promise to make because the schools will only change in name.

So Davis is saying Labour’s policy is merely to rename them.  That’s what he tells the many parents in his electorate who are benefiting from them. But is that what Labour’s policy really is?

Under a Labour-led government charter schools will be repealed and the party’s education spokesman Chris Hipkins said the options on the table for those schools would be anything from “closure to integration into the state school system”.

It is the charter school model that allowed these schools to open. If they could operate as an integrated school they would have opened years ago. So behind the spin Hipkins is saying they will close.

A commitment to keep charter schools open was also made in May by Labour list candidate Willie Jackson, who was heavily involved with Te Kura Maori o Waatea, a charter school based in South Auckland.

At the time Labour leader Andrew Little made it clear those schools would close under Labour and there was no hint of changes to the special character school model – nor was it mentioned in the party’s education manifesto released on Friday.

So Davis and Jackson say one thing and Hipkins and Little another. Can you trust them?

On Monday, responding to Davis’ pledge to resign over them, Hipkins said “tweaks” would be made so there weren’t any “unnecessary barriers” for new special character schools.

That could include allowing schools to have more than one special character, which would make it easier for some Maori and Pacifica-targeted schools, he said.

Asked whether those changes were needed for some charter schools to be able to stay open, Hipkins said: “quite possibly, but that wouldn’t be the driver of the change”.

Tinkering is not the issue. What is special about the charter school model is it allows the schools to receive all their funds in one pool, and decide for themselves how much to spending on buildings, on IT, on teachers, on equipment etc. Labour will never ever agree to this.