Lloyd Burr at Newshub writes:

Labour and the Greens are in la-la land if they think they can use $20 billion earmarked for a long-needed Defence Force upgrade as a slush fund for their election policies.

The Defence Force has been on the bones of its backside for long enough, and another round of austerity would see it lose many of its key capabilities.

The 15-year $20b plan will see a whole range of old and expired ships and planes and other gear replaced with new ones that are fit-for-purpose, reliable, and more efficient.

Labour leader Andrew Little says there’s no point in having state-of-the-art defence equipment if there are people living on the streets, or if there’s underfunding in schools.

Well Mr Little, there’s no point having an Air Force if it doesn’t have planes to fly, or a Navy that doesn’t have the right ships, or an Army that doesn’t have the latest digital battlefield equipment.

Greens co-leader James Shaw is also sceptical about the planned spend, and would like to see it re-prioritised.

Well, Mr Shaw, here’s the reality: The C-130 Hercules fleet is 52 years old. The P-3 Orion fleet is 51 years old. The Boeing 757 fleet is 35 years old. The HMNZS Endeavour is 29 years old. The HMNZS Manawanui is 37 years old.

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Nick Cohen writes:

On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote. Imagine, though, how the Labour party will fare in an election campaign when its leaders are Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Diane Abbott, and its second XI consists of Clive Lewis, Angela Rayner, Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey. The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.

In an election, they would tear them to pieces. They will expose the far left’s record of excusing the imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s gangster state , the oppressors of women and murderers of gays in Iran, the IRA, and every variety of inquisitorial and homicidal Islamist movement, while presenting itself with hypocritical piety as a moral force. Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.

One senior Labour figure told me he thought Corbyn was endangering British democracy. It depends on the opposition being a government-in-waiting. Labour looks now as if it will never be in government again. The 60% of the population who do not want Conservative rule are faced with Conservative rule without end, with the only pressure for change coming from an ever-more audacious right.

On current polling Labour would drop from 232 seats to 186. And that is before you take account of the new boundaries and how Corbyn would do in an actual campaign.

Here’s how many seats Labour has won in recent elections:

• 1997 – 418
• 2001 – 413
• 2005 – 355
• 2010 – 258
• 2015 – 232

My pick is Labour will get reduced to around 150.

Phil McCaw of Movac writes on NZ Innovation:

• Innovation A+ – We’re world class innovators and there’s plenty of evidence to support this:  Rocket Labs, LanzaTech, Xero, PowerByProxi, Weta Studios, 8i, Aroa Biosurgery, Pushpay, Vista to name a few
• Execution B+ – This is where we face several significant challenges.  But, let’s be realistic, the leap from a great start to a great ($100m+ revenue) business is huge, there will be lots of fallout and that’s natural.  There is a shortage of capital in New Zealand but my experience is the best business do get funded.

His solutions:

1. Fewer, better Accelerators
2. Continue to grow Angel Investment
3. Realign the balance between taxpayer supported research vs development funding
4. Continue to build and support a domestic Venture Capital industry
5. Don’t constrain New Zealand funds to New Zealand only investment
6. Establish a public/private partnership to help develop our Great Founders into Great Leaders

Stuff reports:

New Zealand bars are joining in a boycott of Coopers beer, after it featured in an Australian Bible Society video about marriage equality.

The family behind the brand has been donors to the Bible Society for many years and the brewery put out a commemorative beer marking its 200th anniversary.

The society said it had teamed up with Coopers Premium Light for a new campaign to help “reach even more Australians with God’s word”. 

Accompanying this was a video of a conversation between Australian MPs Tim Wilson and Andrew Hastie in which they outlined their positions on marriage equality. WIlson is for it while Hastie is not.

That sparked a social media backlash.

Several bars in Australia announced a boycott of the beer brand.

In New Zealand, Auckland’s The Wine Cellar said it would no longer stock its products.

It was reported on thewireless.co.nz that five bars in Wellington –  Bad Grannies, Vinyl, Eva Beva, The Fat Angel and Ivy –  had also decided to stop selling Coopers beer and would donate 50c from every sale of the remaining stock to No Pride in Prisons.

This is just bonkers.

The video was not advocacy for or against same sex marriage. If a company does take a stand on a political issue, then yes it may face a backlash.

But the video was showing two MPs debating their opposing views on the issue. The whole point was to say we should be able to discuss issues we disagree on, over a beer. It was a video in favour of civil discussion.

And the response from the social warrior fascists is to boycott the company that was promoting civil discussion. Thus proving the original point.

Stuff reports:

The subject of Tickled, David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s 2016 documentary about “competitive endurance tickling”, has died aged 55, according to a post on Farrier’s Facebook page.

David P D’Amato was alleged, by Farrier, to have been involved in the production of online videos featuring tickling, as well as some allegedly shady practices around hiring and pressuring of participants in the videos. 

“We are incredibly sad to learn that David P D’Amato, the subject of Tickled, has passed away,” a joint statement in Farrier and Reeve’s names said.  …

Farrier’s statement concluded: “While making Tickled we always thought it was important to portray David D’Amato not just as an online bully, but as a person… Ultimately we’ll never know all the things that made David the man he was. Like all of us, he was complex and complicated.”

Reading between the lines, it looks like D’Amato may have killed himself, which is very sad – especially for his family and friends.

But D’Amato was a man who had done terrible things to many people, and his death does also mean that their harassment will now cease.

Still a sad way for this to end.

Stuff reports:

A new book by Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager is poised for release, setting tongues wagging about its timing in an election year and as former prime minister John Key prepares to leave Parliament.

An invitation to Hager’s book launch on Tuesday was widely distributed on Sunday.

The invitation said it was not a sequel to Dirty Politics “not related to the election”.

“It is a completely different book but nonetheless gripping and important.”

Yet one he is releasing the day before John Key does his valedictory speech. If it is about Key, I doubt it will bother him anymore than the last one, or the one before that.

The NZ Initiative released:

The New Zealand Initiative says Phil Twyford’s infrastructure bonds are a workable policy that could solve the funding problem that is choking off housing supply in New Zealand’s fastest growing cities.

The Housing Spokesman for the Labour Party recently announced a policy that would allow homeowners to pay off the core infrastructure over the life of the asset using bond financing.

“We’ve been advocating for this policy since 2013. As long as councils are a monopoly provider of water pipes, roads and core infrastructure, the ability of our cities to grow is always going to be held back by their funding constraints,” said Dr Oliver Hartwich, Executive Director at The New Zealand Initiative.

“Given how tight these debt limits are, it is hardly a surprise that core infrastructure expansion is being trickled out. This feeds directly into house prices in fast growing regions, where supply has no hope of keeping up with population growth.”

Hartwich said that these types of arrangements are the bedrock on which major urban expansion has been built in the Southeast of the United States, where house prices have largely remained flat for decades after adjusting for inflation.

“Although the details around where the bond funding comes from are still open to debate, the merits of breaking the infrastructure bottleneck are clear. This is not radical thinking, but a practical and sensible policy if we want to put housing within reach of first home buyers again.”

Twyford has produced some good policies in the area of housing – specifically this policy, plus abolishing the Auckland rural urban boundary.

Chris Milne writes:

By a margin of 10-3 Hutt City Council has moved a step closer to adopting a living wage policy. This will cost ratepayers about $700,000pa for no increase in service levels or improvements in key metrics such as absenteeism and staff turnover – this was the advice given to Council by the CEO and the HR manager.

The motion tonight was adopted without the Full Council discussing any legal advice or Council even obtaining its own advice. There is a real risk that paying the Living Wage is in breach of the Local Government Act.

Many ratepayers are expressing anger at significant rates rises – well here comes another one. …

To add insult to injury, Council morphing into an extension of WINZ sees about $400,000 of that $700,000 go straight to central government by way of GST, taxes and abatement of benefits such as working for families. A huge own-goal for Hutt ratepayers.

It’s not that those who voted against the Living Wage don’t care about people on lower incomes. Rather they look through the policy to how it really plays out in practice. It’s sounds caring and kind, but it’s a double edged sword, and the other side is pretty sharp.

There are all sorts of problems with the Living Wage, well summed up in the Taxpayers’ Union report “Best of Intentions, Worst of Results”. In a nutshell, the Living Wage hurts those who it is designed to help. Happy to expand further if readers wish to know more about this. The best way of informing yourself further on this is to go to the Taxpayers’ Union website and read the summary of their report.

I can’t work out why any sensible body would outsource their wages policy to a self-appointed entity with no accountability.

The Telegraph reports:

In every other country in the world, the conventional wisdom dictated the financiers had to be bailed out. The alternative was catastrophe. Cash machines would stop working, trade would grind to a halt, and output would collapse. It would be the 1930s all over again. The state had no option but to dig deep, and pay whatever it took to keep the financial sector alive.

Stuff reports:

A city council committee is advancing plans to create a “Christchurch dollar” and wants a meeting with regulators about the concept.

Te Hononga Council – Papatipu Runanga Committee is interested in a community currency for Canterbury and the Treasury and Reserve Bank have been approached about the concept.

Things must be going great in Christchurch, and all the issues from the earthquakes sorted out for the Council to be focusing on such an important issue.

Eric Crampton proposes a sensible approach to the projected surpluses New Zealand now has ahead of us:

1. A third of the projected surpluses being devoted to tax cuts (so about $2.8b by 2021).
2. A third of the projected surpluses being devoted to spending increases
3. A third of the projected surpluses being devoted to paying down government debt

He notes:

Government should resist calls to simply increase spending in response to surpluses. The government has been pushing hard, over the past few years, to encourage a greater focus on the value that government delivers for its expenditure as the measure of its success rather than just what it spends. If it identifies areas where spending delivers strong value for money, by all means increase spending in those areas. But that has to come with a commitment to pare back spending in areas where spending doesn’t really achieve much. Blunt calls to increase overall expenditure miss that the government still has a lot of work to do in identifying areas where spending should be reduced because it is ineffective.

I agree. Simply increasing spending to match the increased tax take due to fiscal drag is wrong.

All the normal suspects are calling for bottled water exports to be banned, implying the level of exports is a threat to our water supply.

Here’s the five key numbers:

1. Bottled water exports 8.7 million litres
2. Extracted water 10 trillion litres
3. Annual freshwater 500 trillion litres
4. Bottled water exports/extracted water 0.000087%
5. Bottled water exports/annual freshwater 0.000002%

Here’s an analogy in terms of something we can relate to – the size of NZ.

NZ comprises 268,021 square kms. If this represented our total annual freshwater, what would represent the total bottled water exports. It would be 0.0047 square kms which is an area equal to 69 metres long and 69 metres wide.

Another analogy is distance to the moon. The moon is 384,400 km from Earth. If this represented our total annual freshwater, then the distance representing bottled water exports would be 6.7 metres.

The Herald reports:

The email which Kim Dotcom claimed was proof of a conspiracy against him is a forgery, the Serious Fraud Office has said.

The Herald can today report for the first time that the SFO investigated the email, which emerged on the eve of the 2014 election claiming then-Prime Minister John Key was involved in a conspiracy to get Dotcom.

It is also a definite statement rejecting any possibility the email is genuine.

In a statement, the SFO said: “The SFO confirms that it carried out an investigation into this matter. As a result of that investigation, the SFO is satisfied that the email was a forgery.”

Dotcom said today that he still believed the email to be genuine and was surprised the SFO was able to be so definite.

“I believe the email to be real,” he said.

Oh bullshit. If you thought it was real you’d have used it in court. It was an unsophisticated forgery that a teenager could have done better.

The Herald reports:

A Labour MP admits he went too far when he suggested a convicted killer and paedophile should be scalped in prison.

Stuart Nash, who is Labour’s police spokesman, responded angrily on Facebook after convicted murderer Phillip John Smith won a legal challenge against the Corrections Department yesterday over the confiscation of his toupee.

In a decision released yesterday, the High Court ruled that Smith’s right to freedom of expression was breached when his hairpiece was taken from him.

Writing on Facebook last night, Nash said: “What on earth is going on when a judge rules that a convicted murderer and paedophile’s freedom of expression was ignored and that his rights had been breached because Corrections took his hairpiece?

“He has no rights!! He sexually abused a young boy and then 4 years later stabbed this boy’s father to death as the man tried to protect his son!”

Nash went on to suggest that a fellow inmate should scalp Smith.

“Scalping is associated with American Indians but it was actually started by Europeans.

“Perhaps someone in jail who isn’t too fond of monsters who destroy little boys[sic] lives by stealing their innocence in the worst way possible could reintroduce Mr Smith to the practise[sic].”

I recall all the Labour MPs condemning Judith Collins for a poorly worded comment about double bunking. Will they be commenting on Nash’s call for other inmates to scalp Smith?

News.com.au reports:

Wow this is an epic fail. It’s one thing to get this wrong in the heat of the moment, but to write an op ed that makes hysterical claims that merely expose his economic illiteracy is a special kind of stupid.

The ODT reports:

A Dunedin academic has warned parts of South Dunedin and the city could have just 17 years before sea-level rise makes them uninhabitable.

Prof Jim Flynn told the Dunedin City Council yesterday Australian insurance companies were already excluding sea-level rise as a risk covered in their policies.

That could make homes uninsurable in the area in the next five years, he said. …

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) formula showed sea rise for 2014 was 7.2mm and 8.5mm in 2015.

If the rate continued to increase, a 25cm increase could occur before 2034.

By 2090, South Dunedin would be under 5m of water, along with Forsyth Barr Stadium, the Otago Polytechnic and other low-lying areas.

Jim Flynn is an academic, but not in any climate field. He is a professor of political science. He should stick to that.

Unlike the ODT that just repeated his hysteria, Newshub did some actual research:

Prof Flynn said sea level rise is increasing over time and is almost at 1cm a year, with 2015 rising by 0.86cm and 2014 by 0.75cm, citing NASA data.

However Newshub was unable to verify this claim, with NASA’s website citing the current rise is at a rate of 3.4mm a year – significantly less than Prof Flynn says.

They also interviewed actual climate scientists:

Dr James Renwick and Professor Tim Naish, both from Victoria University and specialising in climate change, aren’t particularly confident in Prof Flynn’s predictions.

“He’s right to be raising the issue as a real concern but I have a little bit of concern that his numbers are slightly on the high side, or very much on the high side,” Prof Naish told Newshub.

Instead he said the 30cm rise globally would be more likely to be reached by 2050-60 – still near enough to be concerned, but not as frantic as Prof Flynn said.

The rising sea level is a problem, and it is mainly caused by human activity. But it isn’t going to be 25 cm in 17 years. I’d be willing to make a large bet on it.

On current trends, it is likely to be 5 to 7 cms.

The Daily Mail reports:

Britain is pumping huge sums of foreign aid into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has found 24 schools named after Palestinian terrorists and evidence of widespread encouragement of violence against Israel by teachers, with terrorists routinely held up as heroes for schoolchildren.

Pictures of ‘martyrs’ are posted on school walls, revolutionary slogans and symbols are painted on premises used by youngsters, sports events are named after teenage terrorists and children are encouraged to act out shooting Israeli soldiers in plays.

And all funded via foreign aid.

I wonder how much money from NZ taxpayers goes towards these schools?

Stuff reports:

After the fizzer that was the Wellington super-city proposal, the three councils that make up the Wairarapa look set to become one.

The Local Government Commission has published a draft proposal to combine Masterton, Carterton and South Wairarapa district councils, after its inquiries found there was a public mandate for change.

The new council would be made up of a mayor, elected by Wairarapa district voters, and 12 councillors elected from seven wards, including two rural ones.

Five community boards will also be created for Featherston, Martinborough, Greytown, Carterton and Masterton, comprising 21 members in total.

Sounds sensible to me – one Council for Wairarapa but community boards for the major urban areas.

Gareth Morgan’s party announced:

all those citizens over 65 years of age – $200 each per week. In addition elders who satisfy a means test will be able to top up to the current NZ Superannuation level by a further $7,500 pa. We will index the top-up to elders’ costs not to average incomes.

This is actually a huge decrease for those on NZ Super. It is not a UBI but a stealth means test.

At present everyone aged 65 gets around $15,000 a year. Morgan is saying he will cut it to $10,000 a year for those who have income of over $50,000 a year.

Personally I support means testing NZ Superannuation, but they are hiding that this is what the impact of their policy is.

The other significant thing is that they are saying they will index the top-up to inflation not average incomes. This means that over time the level of income for retired people will be less than under NZ Super.

Now again I actually support this, but do people realise that this so called UBI is actually a means test and a reduction in the floor?