BBC reports:

An eight-month old Canadian baby has been issued a health card without a gender marker, in what could be the first case in the world.

Parent Kori Doty – a non-binary transgender person who identifies as neither male nor female – aims to allow the child to discover their own gender.

The health card has been issued with a “U” in the space for “sex”, which could be for “undetermined” or “unassigned”.

Kori Doty is fighting to omit the gender from the birth certificate.

The parent gave birth to Searyl Atli in November at a friend’s home in British Columbia. Kori Doty, who prefers to use the pronoun they, argues that a visual inspection at birth is unable to determine what gender that person will have or identify with later in life.

They want to keep Searyl’s sex off all official records.

“I’m raising Searyl in in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are, I’m recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box,” the parent was quoted by CBC as saying.

Seems rather silly. Absolutely some peopel do have a gender identity different to their physical gender but to refuse to recognise what the physical gender is seems over the top.

The Herald editorial:

Metiria Turei must have known she was taking a risk when she confessed to benefit fraud at the Green Party conference last weekend. She appears to have underestimated just how great that risk was.

In releasing the Greens’ family policy, Turei told a sympathetic audience of party members that she lied to Work and Income about her living circumstances in the early 1990s, when she was a solo mother doing her law degree and raising her young daughter while on the Domestic Purposes Benefit. She had flatmates to help her pay the rent in three of the five flats she lived in over a three-year period but did not tell Winz officials because they would have cut her benefit.

So this was not a one off decision. She did it three times. She lied about how much rent she was paying in order to get more money from the taxpayer.

This may make her a hero to her party members, but to most taxpayers it makes her a criminal.

Supporters have argued that this is relatively minor offending, comparable to paying a tradesperson for a cash job or being economical with the truth on an insurance claim.

Many of us have done it, which doesn’t make it right but as – Deputy Prime Minister and former beneficiary Paula Bennett surprisingly suggested – perhaps we should pause before casting the first stone.

Spread over three years however, Turei’s lie of omission starts to look less like a one-off act of dishonesty and more like a systematic attempt to rort the system. Letter writers and talkback callers have voiced their anger over what they see as her sense of entitlement to public money – not helped by the fact that taxpayers are providing her with a huge salary today.

It does indeed look systematic. I don’t think it is the same as paying a tradeperson for a cash job (under law the onus is on the tradesperson to report the income).

There is also considerable public anger over her selective and self-serving morality. Turei has effectively argued that she had a moral right to rip off the system because she had to feed her baby. She is wrong because hardship doesn’t give anyone the right to break the law. Her example encourages others to do the same and is unfair on those who struggle through legally. It is a particularly bad look coming from a party leader on a base salary of $173,000 a year.

Actually her salary is more that that. It is around $178,500 plus $32,000 super contribution, $4,600 of perks and $17,000 of expenses for a total remuneration of over $230,000.

She can afford to pay it back now, and she should.

Stuff reports:

A police officer waged a harassment campaign on a Dunedin businessman for more than two years. 

Jeremy Fraser Buis, 39, was convicted on a raft of charges relating to the harassment of Daniel Pryde after a June 2012 parking dispute escalated. 

Suppression of his occupation was lifted in the High Court at Dunedin on Monday.

His occupation should never have been supressed after he was found guilty. The public had a right to know that the person who harrassed a member of the public for two years was a police officer.

Good to see the suppression lifted finally.

Stuff reports:

The Greens have lost their second co-deputy leader, after Larissa Waters was caught in the same constitutional dual-citizenship muddle as Aus-NZ citizen Scott Ludlam.

The Queensland senator, who was first elected in 2011, said she recently discovered she is a Canadian dual citizen, and, under section 44 of the constitution, is therefore ineligible to stand for the Australian parliament and has been forced to resign from the senate.

To lose one Senator is careless, to lose two is ….

Karl du Fresne writes:

The Left has a problem here. Political violence in the past has often been associated with the far Right, but these days it’s the self-righteous rage of the Left that presents by far the greater threat to democracy.

It manifests itself not just in outright violence, but also in the howling down of any opinions that challenge Leftist orthodoxy. Alarmingly, this intolerance of dissent has taken hold in universities, once regarded as bastions of free speech and critical thought.

This process has been hastened by the rise of identity politics, which aggrieved minority groups use as a platform for demanding special treatment, and by the fashionable dogma of post-modernism, which dismisses reason and truth as artificial constructs that serve the interests of ruling elites. 

And of course if you are a guy and try to discuss or debate something, someone accuses you of mansplaining.

Being a generally moderate society, New Zealand has yet to be exposed to the worst excesses of Leftist fundamentalism, such as the incidents in Hamburg or Caracas. But that’s not to say it can’t happen here. …

We see it too in the use of language designed to demonise opponents and de-legitimise dissent. On a recent Facebook post, Maori activist Joe Trinder described the lobby group Hobson’s Pledge as a “hate group” – the far Left’s standard term of denunciation for any group that threatens to stand in the way of the identity politics agenda. 

Hobson’s Pledge is the group founded by Brash to promote the concept of equality before the law, regardless of ethnicity. This is hardly a novel or dangerous idea; on the contrary, it’s in line with basic democratic principles.  

But it makes Brash the enemy of people like Trinder, who advocates special treatment for Maori. So he calls Hobson’s Pledge a “hate group”, thereby putting it on the same level as the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party.

This is a gross and offensive distortion of what Hobson’s Pledge stands for, but that’s unlikely to worry Trinder. It also implies that Brash is some sort of reincarnated Joseph Goebbels, although there’s no evidence to indicate there’s a racist bone in his body.

Trinder’s Facebook post gave his followers licence to unleash a torrent of abusive obscenities against Brash. Some threatened violence; others called for Hobson’s Pledge billboards to be torn down. So much for free speech and diversity.

There’s room in the political system for both Trinder and Brash. The difference is that Brash doesn’t try to bully his opponents into silence, threaten them or subject them to vile personal abuse. So why do Trinder and his followers think it’s acceptable?

A good question.

The Herald reports:

NZ First leader Winston Peters has dismissed suggestions of a revolt in his ranks over the Maori seats, but said he will reveal soon whether his proposed referendum on the future of the seats would be for all voters or for Maori.

Peters announced plans to hold a binding referendum on the future of the seats at his party’s annual conference – a shift from the 2014 position which favoured abolishing the seats but leaving it to Maori themselves to decide when.

That was assumed to be a referendum of all voters – but Peters is now hinting that may not be the case.

Asked about recent comments by both candidate Shane Jones and NZ First MP Pita Paraone about leaving the fate of the seats to Maori voters, Peters said he believed it should be up to Maori.

 However, as well as Maori on the Maori roll, there were also Maori on the general roll and those who were not enrolled at all to consider.

So Winston conned everyone into thinking it would be a referendum in which all adult New Zealanders could vote on, but actually there may be fine print that it would be a referendum of Maori New Zealanders only.

Peters said Maori voters were leaving the Maori seats in their droves and the majority of Maori were on the general roll rather than Maori roll.

However, Electoral Commission statistics show 55 per cent are on the Maori roll and 45 per cent on the general roll.

They also show that in each Maori electoral option far more Maori have switched from the general to the Maori roll than vice versa – and new enrolments also favour the Maori roll by a significant margin.

How shocking – Winston as usual made up a fact and got it wrong.

Stuff reports:

The dollar in your pocket is worth just as much as it was three months ago, even if it may not seem like it because of rising prices for basics such as food and rent.

Statistics NZ reported the consumer price index didn’t increase at all in the three months to June, bringing the annual inflation rate down from 2.2 per cent to 1.7 per cent.

Good. Low inflation helps families and also means interest rates should stay low for longer, which is huge for those with mortgages.

The Reserve Bank had forecast in May that today’s annual rate would come in at 2.1 per cent.

Even though the official range for targeting is 1% to 3%, I regard inflation of over 2% as too high so good to see it under 2%.

The Labour candidate for New Lynn retweeted this self professed rant. Sadly for them both they ignored those little things called facts.

Let’s even ignore where the other parent is and why they are not contributing to their children’s upbringing. Maybe they died. So we’ll leave that to one side.

A sole parent with two children on $40,000 get $137 a week family tax credit and $72 a week in-work tax credit.  They would also get $103 a week accomodation supplement so that is $312 a week in taxpayer support so their $177 a week for expenses is actually $489 a week!

But it gets even better with the changes made in the Budget. That person will benefit by the following from 1 April 2018:

• $11 less tax a week
• $28 more family tax credit
• $111 a week more accomodation supplement

So that is $150 a week more in the hand for that family after 1 April. Their $489 a week after rent will be $639 a week or around four times as much as the ranter said.

Oh the family is also eligible for childcare subsidies of $5.06.

So thanks to the Labour candidate for highlighting the rant so I could explain all this.

Note I am not saying that life will be easy for a sole parent on $40,000 a year. But their $677 net wages gets topped up by taxpayers with another $450 a week, which is I suspect more generous than most OECD countries. And childcare subsidies could be as much as another $200 a week.

Angela Cumming at The Spinoff has a very good piece on Hamilton City Councillor Siggy Henry. Here’s a summary of her beliefs and statements:

• flu jabs are a waste of money
• babies don’t die from whooping cough
• there is no measles virus
• there may not be a polio virus
• The medical fraternity is run by the pharmaceutical industry.
• Major food corporations used tissues from aborted babies as flavour additives
• Vitamin K shots given to babies linked to early childhood leukemia
• Vaccinating your dogs can cause the dogs to get autoimmune diseases
• There’s ”strong link” between fluoridated water and ADHD
• Adults can cure their polio in just three days by taking vitamin C
• Tampons have carcinogens in them.
• Mammograms ”plant seeds of radiation-induced cancer”.

The Greens policy on welfare is truly terrible. It reverses policies which have sucessfully dropped the numbers on welfare to record lows. We have a abundance of data that shows kids growing up in a household where no parents work do far far worse in terms of life outcomes. And this is taking into accoung relative income levels.

So how bad is the Greens policy. It would mean:

• no more work testing – benefits for life
• no investigations into relationships – can claim a benefit while living with a wealthy person
• no appointment attendance requirements – don’t need to even turn up to WINZ, and you still get paid the benefit
• No budget requirements – you can just keep claiming hardship grants for ever
• No repeated proof of sickness – sickness benefit for life!
• No need to name the father – father’s escape all liability for their children, leaving taxpayers to pay on their behalf
• The in work tax credit will be given to those not in work

Basically the Greens want to abolish welfare fraud by gettind rid of all the requirements around honesty and looking for work! This is like abolishing crime by getting rid of the Crimes Act!

We have one of the most generous welfare systems in the world. But it is based on there being both rights and responsibilities. The Greens want to abolish all responsibilies such as looking for a job and make welfare a lifetime entitlement.

Am here for a week with family. Blogging will be at a reduced rate.

Stuff reports:

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will visit New Zealand this month.

Sources have confirmed the trip, although there an official announcement is yet to be made.

Johnson is one of Britain’s most flamboyant politicians and is emerging as one of the main contenders to roll Theresa May as prime minister after she nearly cost the Conservative Party an unlosable election.

The former London mayor, was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs after being one of the leading champions of the so-called Brexit vote withdrawing Britain from the European Union.

Boris is one of my favourite politicians. Imagine if he does become Prime Minister – Trump and Boris in charge!

National Review reports:

The study, commissioned by the city government of Seattle and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that Seattle’s law incrementally raising its minimum wage — to $13 an hour last year, en route to $15 — resulted in low-wage workers’ earning less money rather than more. 

Yep they ended up poorer. How?

The short version is: You can pass a law saying you have to pay low-wage workers more, but you cannot pass a law that says you have to hire them in the first place, or that you cannot cut back on hours when the price of hourly labor goes up.

Modest increases in the minimum wage have been shown to avoid these effects but large increases get this response.

As businesses responded to the new higher labor costs by reorganizing their processes in less labor-intensive ways (the classic examples here are the replacement of wait staff with computer screens in restaurants and the replacement of bank clerks with more sophisticated ATMs), the law that was supposed to increase low-wage workers’ incomes actually reduced them — substantially, by an average of $125 a month.

That’s a big drop in income. The key findings are:

• Hours worked by low income workers dropped 9.4%
• Low-wage jobs declined by 6.8%
• 5,000 jobs lost
• 3.5 million fewer hours worked
• Wages shrunk 6.6%

The Herald reports:

Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei has admitted she once lied to authorities to keep her benefit.

In her biggest speech of the year, Turei made the extraordinary confession while announcing her party’s plans to dramatically reform New Zealand’s welfare system.

Speaking at the Green Party AGM in Auckland, she said that while she was receiving the domestic purposes benefit as solo mum in her 20s she had extra flatmates who paid rent but she did not tell WINZ.

“I knew that if I told the truth about how many people were living in the house my benefit would be cut,” she told an audience of around 250 Green members at the Auckland University of Technology.

So Turei’s message is it is all right to lie to the Government if you think you need or deserve more money.

By her rationale it is fine for struggling business owners to lie to the IRD about their tax liability if they think they need more income.

“And I knew that my baby and I could not get by on what was left.

“This is what being on the benefit did to me – it made me poor and it made me lie.”

No the benefit did not make you lie. You chose to.

This is the future co-Deputy Prime Minister. Someone who endorses welfare fraud and thinks that taxpayers are a bottomless pit.

Is there a statute of limitations on fraud? If someone complained to the Police and they prosecuted, then Turei would be expelled from Parliament if found guilty.

Stuff reports:

Winston Peters wants a fair go leading into the election and says it would be “anti-democratic” for any media to host leader debates without NZ First.

Peters, the anti-establishment politician, says not having his party represented in election campaign debates would be “blind political prejudice” or the media “deliberately” trying to protect National and Labour – the “establishment parties”.

He said in the past state-funded broadcasters, Radio New Zealand and TVNZ, had been “dominated” by National and Labour not to include other parties and had so far got away with it.

Normally you have two types of debates – the two person debates with the PM and Opposition Leader and the larger debates with pretty much the leader of every party that has a reasonable chance of making Parliament. Last time the National and Labour leaders only took part in the former debates.

The more people involved in a debate is inversely proportional to the usefulness of the debate. You could make a case for including the leaders of the seven parties currently in Parliament plus TOP, Mana and the Conservatives. So ten leaders who in a 90 minutes debate would get around 400 seconds each.

But does Winston have a point that Andrew Little should not be assumed to be the only alternative PM to Bill English? If Labour drop 5% more and Peters gains 5% more he will be aiming for the top job.

Maybe one way you could do it is have the PM debate anyone who scores over 5% as Preferred Prime Minister. That would currently mean a three way debate between Bill English, Winston Peters and Jacinda Ardern!

The Financial Post reports:

Greenpeace, after repeated attacks against Canada’s biggest forest products company for “destroying,” Canada’s boreal forests, now says that it was merely stating an opinion about the logging activity, not a fact.

After years of weathering attacks on its forestry practices, Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products Inc. last year sued Greenpeace in United States District Court in Georgia under racketeering statutes, alleging that Greenpeace’s repeated attacks on Resolute, to raise money for Greenpeace, amount to criminal activity.

In its claim, Resolute noted that Greenpeace has lobbied big Resolute paper customers, such as the Rite-Aid pharmacy chain (which printed its flyers on Resolute newsprint), encouraging them to switch suppliers, because, said Greenpeace, Resolute is a “forest destroyer.”

But now Greenpeace says it never intended people to take its words about Resolute’s logging practices as literal truth.

Sounds like they are in trouble.

But Resolute has trained its legal firepower squarely on Greenpeace. In 2013 Resolute extracted an apology from Greenpeace for falsely alleging that Resolute had cut trees in an area it promised to spare. That same year, Resolute sued Greenpeace for libel in Thunder Bay, Ont., alleging that the global environmental group was spreading lies about the forest harvesting operations.

So Greenpeace has a history of being wrong.

The Dom Post editorial:

The Greens’ attack on Winston Peters’ “racism” has an air of desperation. The Green Party is haunted by the possibility that once again Peters will shut it out of a left-of-centre coalition, just as he did in 2005.  

After 18 years of opposition, another three years of beign locked out of Government mustnt appeal.

The bad blood between Peters and the Greens is based on profound ideological differences, and Turei’s attack will give Peters even more reason to go with National. That’s probably what he wants to do anyway.

Please no. I’d much rather Winston goes with Labour and Greens.

Labour, meanwhile, desperately fights against reality. Its polls are a disastrous 30 per cent and Andrew Little’s personal polls are catastrophic. A politician reduced to saying the polls don’t match what people tell him in the street is whistling in the dark.

They’re not 30%. The last three polls are 25.5%, 26.4% and 27.0%.

Peters will go his own way for his own reasons, as he has always done. It is truly dreadful that this erratic and unreliable politician, so skilled in politicking and yet so incoherent in serious policy argument, should once again be the lynch-pin in the MMP system.

Yay MMP!

Stuff reports:

National and Labour have come out of their respective blue and red corners to back the proposed Waimea dam in the face of Green criticism.

Long-time Nelson MP Nick Smith, of National, said the dam was the “only practical prospect of improving minimum flows and water quality in the [Waimea] river without a devastating cut in the horticultural industry on which Nelson depends”.

His Labour Party rival in Nelson, Rachel Boyack, said the project stacked up economically and environmentally, and Labour in government would honour any existing Crown commitment to the scheme.

Good to see Labour not automatically opposing something.

Smith said he was disappointed but not surprised by the Green Party’s opposition.

“The Greens’ criticism is ill-informed, shows they haven’t done any homework on the specifics of the proposal and have just reverted to their anti-agriculture, anti-infrastructure rhetoric,” Smith said. “The claim by Mr Lawrey that the dam will increase nitrates in the catchment is just plain wrong. He seems ignorant of the fact that irrigated apples produce fewer nitrates than the existing dryland farming. He also overlooks that the dam will enable substantial increases in minimum flows and the potential for fresh flows in summer to eliminate the algae that currently causes problems.”

Inconvienent facts. The reality is that the Greens oppose pretty much all dams anywhere. Which is ironic as dams are why we have so much renewable energy.

Smith hit back at suggestions by Lawrey of alternative measures to the dam, including on-farm storage, urban rainwater collection systems and grey water recycling.

“The alternative suggestions of household grey water storage tanks show how disconnected the Greens are from the practical costs,” Smith said. “Grey water storage tanks cost $250 per cubic metre as compared to the cost of the Waimea Community Dam of $5 per cubic metre.”

That’s only 5000% more cost.