Martin van Beynen reports:

Revelations that Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Cera) staff tried to do commercial property deals for their own company will be investigated by the Prime Minister’s Department and the State Services Commission.

A Stuff investigation revealed on Saturday that three Cera staff employed to facilitate investment in the Christchurch rebuild tried to arrange property deals through their own company for a finder’s fee (in one case $300,000). 

Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Gerry Brownlee has told Stuff the Department for Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) and the State Services Commission (SSC) would investigate the private arrangements.

Good. While there may not have been any wrong-doing, the information to date does suggest at the very least there were conflicts of interest that were not managed.

State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes said the issues were, on face value, a matter of concern.

“In general, having a private business in the same area as a public servant’s official responsibilities would be highly problematic and is most likely to be unacceptable.

 “It would be completely unacceptable for any public servant to use their position to advance private business interests,” he said.

Gallup looks at the average approval rating of US Presidents post WWII. They are:

1. Kennedy 70.1%
2. Eisenhower 65.0%
3. Bush GHW 60.9%
4. Clinton 55.1%
5. Johnson 55.1%
6. Reagan 52.8%
7. Bush GW 49.4%
8. Nixon 49.0%
9. Obama 47.9%
10. Ford 47.2%
11. Carter 45.5%
12. Truman 45.4%

So Obama on average was more unpopular than Bush 41 and Nixon!

To be fair to him, his ratings were more consistent. He was in the 40s for almost his entire presidency. Bush 41 and Nixon had periods of very high approvals and periods of very low approvals.

Rob Hosking writes:

Green party co-leader Metiria Turei talked about the women who had inspired her. It wasn’t a bad bit of personal history and colour. The Greens are in favour of feminism, she proclaimed.

But yeah, we kind of knew that.  

The main event, the speech from Labour leader Andrew Little, also spoke of a personal journey, in his case a battle back from prostate cancer, coupled with his hopes for his own kids about owning their own home and turning that into a critique of the current government.

But policy? There was none.

In both cases, the Labour and the Green parties declared themselves in favour of nice things, and firmly against not-nice things.

Very bold indeed.

There is going to be, globally, an anti-Trump backlash, a reaction against everything the 45th president of the United States embodies. By the time the New Zealand general election comes around – probably in September, but we could know the date by the end of this week – that sentiment will be running extremely strong.

This could prove tricky, though: Labour and the Greens might be staunchly feminist, but in terms of their other prognostications on immigration and anti-foreigner sentiment and on protecting New Zealand businesses, they are closer to Trump than National is. 

 

I’m glad Hosking made this point. Who like Trump is anti TPP?  Labour and Greens and NZ First.

Who like Trump is calling for less immigration? Labour and NZ First

Who like Trump attacks foreign investment? Labour, Greens and NZ First

Who blamed Auckland house prices on people with Chinese sounding surnames? Labour

Stuff reports:

A French-Canadian man under arrest after a shooting at a Quebec City mosque on Sunday evening killed six people and wounded eight, police said on Monday.

He was identified as Alexandre Bissonnette, and was understood to be a student at nearby Université Laval.

A terrible act of terrorism. Thoughts are with Canada.

The ODT reports:

The food industry in Australia and New Zealand has managed to hold off near-universal calls from public health experts for government to crack down on junk food and sugar through its influential lobbying tactics, says the co-author of an Australian study.

The study, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, interviewed “high-level people, including former politicians and civil servants with first-hand experience of these corporate activities,” said University of Auckland’s Boyd Swinburn, in a media release.

“The main tactics used by the industry identified in the study included framing the solutions to obesity in terms of personal responsibility, using private dinners and other opportunities for lobbying politicians, cherry-picking and promoting the evidence to suit their case, promotion of deregulation and self-regulatory approaches, funding professional nutrition organisations, sponsoring children’s sport and nutrition education materials, and personal criticism of public health advocates,” Swinburn writes.

This is hilarious. A public health activist publishes a study which is basically a whine that Governments won’t do what the activists demand, and they blame everything for this apart from the fact that there is zero evidence that a sugar tax will reduce reduce obesity.

A tax on sodas in NZ that reduced consumption by 10% (which is highly unlikely) and resulted in no substitution (even more unlikely) would reduce the average calorie intake by 3 calories.

This is equivalent to walking for an extra 45 seconds a day. So they want a costly and pocket hitting tax that will rake in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and have the same impact (at best) of 45 seconds of walking.

And they think the reason the Government hasn’t jumped at this stupidity is because of lobbying. It is because they are moronic.

Hamish Rutherford has an excellent article looking at the likely contenders to be the next Reserve Bank Governor. In summary they are:

• Adrian Orr, CE NZ Super Fund, former Reserve Bank Deputy Governor, former Westpac Chief Economist
• Grant Spencer, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor and head of financial stability
• Geoff Bascand, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor and head of operations, former Government Statistician, former Treasury head of forecasting
• John McDermott, Assistant Reserve Bank Governor and head of economics
• Rod Carr, Vice-Chancellor Canterbury University, former Reserve Bank Chairman, former Acting Reserve Bank Governor
• Murray Sherwin, Chairman Productivity Commission, former CE of MAF

That’s a very strong field to be choosing from and well balanced between three internal candidate and three external candidates. Of course we don’t know who else is interested so it might be someone from overseas.

The Herald reports:

Speaking on the pa, Little he said he took the relationship between Labour and Ratana seriously. Rather than simply turn up for the headline event, his MPs had been meeting with the church regularly over the last 12 months.

He wooed the church’s 30,000 followers by pledging to financially support its centennial celebrations in 2018 if Labour was in Government. Ratana was “an important figure in the history of Maoridom” and were “entitled to some support”, he said.

This is about as close to vote buying as you can get.

Ratana has an alliance with Labour, where it tells members to vote Labour. In exchange Labour pledges it will fund their birthday celebrations.

Imagine if (for example) National pledged to use taxpayer money to fund centennial celebrations for the Mormon Church in NZ, and the Mormon Church told all its members to vote National.

Liam Hehir writes:

Obama ran for the presidency campaigning against American involvement in “wars of choice” like Iraq. He was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of the more peaceful times his presidency would bring. And yet the record shows that he involved America in the Syrian and Libyan conflicts, both of which have become geopolitical and humanitarian nightmare.

On assuming the presidency, one of Obama’s first actions was to order the closure of the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At the time, this was intended as a powerful symbolic rebuke to the Bush years. Eight years later, the prison remains open and very much operational – a fact that is itself deeply symbolic.

Or consider the manner in which Obama drastically escalated the use of unmanned drone strikes. Here’s an incredible statistic – in the past eight years, more people not in declared war zones were summarily executed by drone than were killed by the three and a half centuries of the Spanish Inquisition.

No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!

The Spanish Inquisition saw 3,000 people killed over 350 years.

In 2008, at the height of his messianic fervour, Obama decreed that, “generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Following the inauguration of Trump, all references to climate change have been removed from the White House website. One of the first actions of the new president was the signing of an executive order aimed at frustrating the Obamacare healthcare law pending its full repeal. For those who supported the substance of Obama’s agenda, this will be the bitterest legacy of all.

When he was inaugurated, serious people were talking about a coming 40 years of dominance for the Democratic Party. Instead, the party has lost the Senate, the House of Representatives, 12 governorships, nearly 1000 state legislative seats and, of course, the presidency.

By the way, none of this points to any character defect on the part of the now former president. What it does do, however, is point to three incontrovertible truths about politics.

First, that idealism in opposition must yield to realism in office. Secondly, that there are no permanent victories. Thirdly, that in an imperfect world, we won’t be saved by politicians.

Obama did about as well as I expected for someone who became President with just a couple of years experience in the Senate (when he started campaigning) and no executive experience. That is one of the reasons in 2008 I thought Clinton would be a better nominee than Obama. Of course John McCain was my preferred choice – and I think he would have been a great President.

The NZ Initiative has a very useful report looking at the positive impact of migrants on New Zealand. Some highlights:

• Immigrants are less likely to claim a benefit, more likely to be employed, and their children have better education outcomes than native born New Zealanders
• Relatively little ethnic or migrant clustering
• Migrants contribute to job growth by increasing demand for local goods and services
• Research into the effects of temporary migration in the decade to 2011 found a positive effect on the earnings and employment of New Zealanders. This may be because migrants fill jobs that native born are reluctant to do, and because migrants provide a boost to the sectors in which they work.
• Research from New Zealand and overseas finds that immigration improves productivity and GDP per capita growth.
• Migrants contributed a net +$2.9 billion to the government’s books in 2013. On a per capita level, this was equivalent to +$2,653 per migrant. Native born New Zealanders contributed a net +$540 million to the government’s books, or +$172 per person.

The last data point seems surprising at first, but this is because with migrants we get the benefits of them working and paying tax in New Zealand, but we generally haven’t had to pay for the costs of educating the. So their net contribution to Government finances is significant.

The full report is 57 pages and well worth a read. It dispels some of the myths that certain politicians have pushed.

Another interesting point is that migrants are only half as likely as non-migrants to commit a crime.

Martin van Beynen reports:

Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority’s (Cera) staff employed to bring investment to Christchurch set up their own company through which investors would pay them a fee on private property deals, a Stuff investigation has found.

The senior public servants were employed by the Cera investment facilitation team, but at the same time had their own company which offered investors property proposals in the hope of earning a large finder’s fee.

The private dealings have emerged in relation to the sale of the damaged Youth Hostel Association (YHA) building at 273 Manchester St in late 2014.

 Emails and company documents show three Cera staff working for the investment team – Murray Cleverley, who was manager of the Greater Christchurch Investment Strategy, and two investment facilitators, Gerard Gallagher and Simon Nikoloff – were involved in the transaction at the same time as being employed by Cera.

Cleverley is a property investor and the chairman of the Canterbury and South Canterbury District Health Boards. Nikoloff and Gallagher work for Cera’s successor Otakaro Ltd, which is tasked with delivering the Government-led anchor projects and managing Crown assets, including surplus land in the central city and the residential red zones. 

The Cera staffers say they were entitled to do private deals and a company they set up to do so was formed “with the full knowledge of our employers”.

I think this stinks, and should be investigated. I am not saying any laws were broken, but public servants should not be running a company on the side in an area in which they are employed.

Stuff has learned that Gallagher and Nikoloff approached the Youth Hostel Association in what it perceived was their capacity as Cera staff, around the same time as the company was formed.  

The two Cera staffers then began promoting the building, and other properties, through their private business, to Sydney mining services tycoon Kevin Maloney and his representative Ewen McKenzie, a former Australian rugby team player and coach.

If YHA thought they were then in their public capacity, and they used to to gain business for their private interests, that is wrong.

Let’s put aside for a second the actual policy behind the Trump Administration’s ban on citizens of certain countries entering the United States.

Personally I think treating all citizens of a country as the same is bad policy. Tens of thousands of Iranians visit the US, and even study there. They are the best hope of their country one day throwing off their theocratic despots. I’d want more of them, not less.

But even if you disagree with me and think the policy is a sound one, the incompetent way it has been implemented should ring warning bells for the chaos and likely incompetence of the Trump administration.

Major law changes like this should be notified well in advance in draft form, allow a period for feedback and clarity to be gained, and then finalised and published. Lawyers should be involved to make sure it is legal and clear. And it should have an implementation date that gives authorities time enough to prepare.

The chaos that has ensured would not have happened if any semblance of normal Government process occurred. Instead it looks like the directive was drawn up by White House staff, and Department of Homeland Security lawyers kept out of the loop.

This has resulted in the following:

• Permanent residents of the United States who are temporarily overseas not knowing if they can return to their country of legal residence and home where their families are.
• No clarity on how it impacts dual citizens such as Iranian British citizens. So someone who fled the Islamic regime in the 1970s and lives in the UK may have been impacted by this.
• No clarity on how it affects those who had already gained visas to enter the United States
• No clarity on if it applied to people who had already boarded a flight when it was promulgated

So even if you think the policy is a good thing, you should be alarmed at the incompetence involved in formulating and executing it. Now several Judges have suspended parts of it, as authorities struggle to even understand it. It’s a mess.

And try to think about the human lives this has impacted. Imagine you have lived in the United States for 30 years. Your family lives there. You were born in Iran but left Iran because you disagreed with the leadership of Iran. You are not even religious. You are travelling for work, and suddenly find you may not be able to return home to your husband/wife and kids. All because of where you were born.

Or this example of an Iraqi who has risked his life working with the US in Iraq.

15Stuff reports:

Former Conservative Party leader Colin Craig has served notice of his intent to appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit he took against a blogger for publishing a poem he wrote to his former secretary.  …

“There is no evidence before me of any sort that there is any value in this work or that either of the defendants has derived any income at all from it, from publishing it. It is obvious to me that the plaintiff would fail at substantive trial in establishing that in fact either of the defendants had monetarily profited from their publications of the work.”

She agreed with the argument that Craig had sought to “inappropriately import other grievances that he has against Mr Williams” and said the proceeding had “an element of impropriety”.

“This court does have the inherent power to prevent misuse of its procedure. It would be manifestly unfair to the first defendant or would otherwise bring the administration of justice into disrepute among right thinking people to permit this proceeding to continue, given that I am quite sure that the real argument that the plaintiff has is in respect of breach of confidence and his concern to protect his reputation…

“I consider… that this is a proceeding which involves a deception on the court. I do not consider the process of the court has been fairly or honestly used. It is being employed for an ulterior and improper purpose which I have already named. It is manifestly groundless and without foundation. 

“This is a vexatious proceeding. It has been brought for collateral purpose,” she said. 

The court’s decision was damning of Craig and said his case was essentially without merit. I can’t imagine an appeal will get anywhere. However the strategy might not be to win, but to just force others to keep spending money on legal fees.

On Monday Craig filed notices of appeal with the High Court at Auckland, saying Judge Sharp had failed to give the appropriate weight to the fact he was was representing himself, that she had incorrectly concluded the proceeding was an abuse of process, that she had incorrectly concluded that his claim would fail at a substantive hearing, and that copyright did not apply to the poem. 

Wait a moment. Craig is a multi-millionaire, and the plaintiff in this case. He is not the respondents being forced into court against his will. And he is clearly able to pay to have legal representation. So why should the Court give him leniency for having failed to follow court procedures, when it is all his own choice.

The Herald reports:

A political comeback is on the cards for Kim Dotcom who will “probably apply” for citizenship so he can stand in this year’s General Election.

German-born Dotcom, who founded the Internet Party in the 2014 election, has a poll on Twitter asking people to vote on his proposed application.

“I’m now eligible to apply for citizenship. And if I became a citizen I could run myself at the next election. I’m interested to know how Kiwis would feel about that,” Dotcom told the Herald on Sunday.

Citizenship applicants have to prove they have lived here and been a resident for five years, intend to remain, speak English and be of good character.

The latter includes the requirement to tell the Citizenship Office if they have been reviewed, investigated or had legal action taken against them by police, the Ministry of Justice, Immigration NZ, Customs Service, Transport Agency, Department of Internal Affairs, Inland Revenue, Passport Office or Work and Income.

Dotcom is on bail as he fights extradition to the US after being arrested in 2012 on US charges relating to his Megaupload business. Dotcom and his three co-defendents deny the charges.

By yesterday, nearly 6000 people had voted, with 80 per cent in favour of Dotcom becoming a New Zealand passport holder.

“I see the comments [to the tweet] are split 50/50. What matters to me is the poll.”

This is a great idea. I urge everyone to find Dotcom’s pol and vote for him to run. Preferably he should again spend $5 million trying to change the Government and help get Labour/Greens elected.

But Dotcom said the party was “alive and well” and he might just be the man to fill the leadership vacancy.

Yes you are. Go for it.

A reader has sent me some data suggesting it wasn’t just the Fun Police that killed the Sevens, but also the ticket prices. Here are the 2 day ticket prices for each year and the attendance.

• 2011 $125 and sold out
• 2012 $145 and 62,805 attended
• 2013 $199 and 60.426 attended
• 2014 $209 and $52,633 attended
• 2015 $199 (initially) and 36,000 attended
• 2016 $137 and $29,500 attended

So as the ticket prices went up the attendance started to fall off, and then as the audience plummeted they reduced the ticket prices but by then it was too late – it was no longer THE event to get tickets to.

Gavin Fernando writes:

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich was widely condemned for joking that the President’s youngest son would become a school shooter.

“Barron will be this country’s first homeschool shooter,” wrote Rich, in a now-deleted tweet.

The message was left up for about three hours before she deleted it.

Facing heavy criticism, she then made her Twitter account private, blocking public viewing of it.

Other social media users slammed Rich for targeting the child, with some calling her a “piece of trash” and others calling for a boycott of NBC, which airs SNL.

Twitter, of course, is a free-for-all. It’s a bloodbath filled with oft-nameless trolls, and let’s face it, Donald Trump has mastered the art of trolling.

As his father’s campaign gained prominence, Barron increasingly became a target of abuse – mostly, oddly enough, by people you’d assume were against President Trump due to his bullying politics.

The hypocrisy is strong.

Following Donald Trump’s rise, his opponents have criticised his youngest son on everything from his haircut to his clothing, inspiring an onslaught of memes and routine comparisons to Joffrey Baratheon, the cruel and entitled heir of King Robert in Game of Thrones.

Sure, it’s not about Barron directly. How could it be? He’s barely said a word in public, let alone anything worthy of criticism.

But disdain for the President is no reason to troll him – after all, isn’t that largely why progressives dislike Trump? Because they see him as a bully who picks on those that are weaker than him?

Kudos to the classy Chelsea Clinton for calling out the trolls and bullies of Barron.

The Herald reports:

This is one of several homes Niki Rauti has turned down.

It’s brand new, fully insulated, never been lived in and just 650m down the road from the former state house she’s being evicted from.

But, the 62-year-old doesn’t want it because she says she can’t cope with the stairs in a two-storey house.

“I can’t get up stairs,” she said. “I can get up one, two, three steps, but it’s hard because of my arthritis in my knee.”

The new house, one of a block of new two-storey units, is in Bunkys Way, a new street off Sunnymead Rd in Glen Innes which runs parallel to Taniwha St where Rauti has lived for 21 years.

Rauti has been fighting the Tamaki Regeneration Company since last year when it took ownership of her state house in a plan to treble the current 2500 houses in the area, keeping about the same number of social housing units and selling the other new homes. …

She was first given notice to leave the house in 2014 when it was still owned by Housing NZ, but the company backed off then because it did not need to develop the land immediately.

She was given notice again late last year to leave by January 18.

The Tenancy Tribunal adjourned the latest application for a possession order after Rauti argued that she was not given proper notice, that the company applied for the order before it had the legal right to it, and that its action was “retaliatory”.

The company says it has offered her four other homes to move into in the Glen Innes area as well as the one in Bunkys Way.

“We have not received feedback from Ms Rauti on any of these houses,” said housing general manager Neil Porteous.

Rauti said she turned down the Bunkys Rd house and another one because they were two-storeyed, another house in Vienna Row because it was damp, and one in Tripoli Rd because it was an older house and likely to be demolished soon as part of the redevelopment of the area.

My God the sense of entitlement is strong in this one. This selfish person is trying to block 5,000 new homes being built because of her sense of entitlement. This is the poster child for the left’s campaign in Auckland against the Tamaki development.

The Guardian reports:

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, has published an open letter to the country’s citizens ahead of elections in March, telling anyone who cannot respect its customs to leave.

People who “refuse to adapt, and criticise our values” should “behave normally, or go away”, Rutte said in a full-page newspaper message seen as a bid to win over voters drawn to Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration, anti-Muslim Freedom (PVV) party.

He said the Dutch were “increasingly uncomfortable” with those who abused the freedoms they enjoyed after coming to the Netherlands, who “harass gays, or whistle at women in short skirts, or brand ordinary Dutch people racists”.

Rutte, whose liberal VVD party narrowly trails PVV in the polls with elections less than two months away, said he shared the feelings of those who thought: “If you so fundamentally reject this country, then I’d prefer it if you leave.”

More Government heads should say this.

Stuff reports:

US President Donald Trump has formally withdrawn the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In one of his first acts in office, Trump signed an executive order on Monday morning (Tuesday morning NZ time) to pull out of the world’s biggest free-trade deal, signed in Auckland last year.

The left in NZ should be delighted by President Trump. He has done what they couldn’t do, and killed TPP.

Time to forget about the US when it comes to free trade and focus on other countries.

Mike WIlliams writes in HB Today:

Tukituki is a very marginal electorate and Lawrence could indeed suffer the humiliation of defeat.

Simon Lusk’s piece in Hawke’s Bay Today on Tuesday states that the seat looks “relatively comfortable for National”, but his analysis is badly off the mark.

For a start, he quotes polls which show National well ahead of Labour, however these are party vote polls not the candidate vote which Lawrence would need to get elected.

These two votes are very different. When Labour scored 25 per cent of the party vote in 2014 it won 33 per cent of the candidate vote electing MPs like Stuart Nash in Napier.

Equally when Bill English led National to 20 per cent of the party vote in 2002 his party’s candidate vote was in the mid-30s.

Regrettably for Simon Lusk’s argument, party vote polls are no guide to electorate outcomes and he’s wrong again when he says that overturning a 6490 majority would be “unprecedented”.

In Aoraki, Jim Sutton saw a 6453 majority in 2002 turn into a 6937 deficit in 2005.

That’s a turnaround of 13,390 votes in a seat very similar to Tukituki. Harry Duynhoven saw his 15,000-plus majority go up in smoke in New Plymouth in a similar fashion.

Lastly, Simon Lusk ignores the electoral elephant in the room.

Much of the 6490 majority Lawrence Yule would have to defend will be a personal vote built up by Craig Foss over five elections and some of it will be an endorsement of John Key as Leader.

Neither of these will be factors in the upcoming election. Foss has announced his intention to move on and National has swapped a leader who repeatedly scored 40 per cent plus of the party vote and a slew of electorates for Bill English who led National to its lowest ever vote in 2002.

I’m not sure comparing Labour in 2017 to National in 2005 is a good comparison. National increased its party vote in 2005 by around 18% to 39%. Labour currently appear to be stuck in the mid to high 20s.

Richard Harman writes at Politik:

During the last election campaign the-then Labour Leader, David Cunliffe went to Lyttelton to launch Labour’s jobs’ policy.

He chose an engineering works as the venue, and he made a short speech in front of a small group of safety vest wearing welders and fitters and turners.

He was in a suit. He was awkward and plainly was not at home.

All the workers wanted to know was whether he would cut their income tax. He wouldn’t.

Imagine how well Labour would do if it told workers that it would allow them to keep more of their hard earned money.

Even when Labour tried to connect with the new economy and got its Finance spokesperson, Grant Robertson, to prepare a report on the future of work, the party didn’t really seem to know what to do with the results.

By all accounts, the report has been put on a shelf.

Two years of work to produce a door stop!

And some of the criticism of Little is unfair.

He may not be the kind of showman Key was, but he is regarded by many in Parliament (including the National Party) as a pretty decent sort of bloke.

I agree. Andrew is a decent bloke. DIsagree on his policies of course.

However, one area where Labour is vulnerable is in its Memorandum of Understanding with the Greens.

The Greens gains from this arrangement are obvious; they get credibility and a guaranteed chance to be a part of a future Labour Government.

But the gains for Labour are not so clear, and they are left open to being associated with random Green moments of policy madness.

Yep. And there will be a few.

And Little would like to see a more ambitious approach to infrastructure spending so that we did more than “catch up”.

And here he can call on Labour’s heritage.

It’s amazing when you go down to those hydro schemes in Central Otago, and you just think how visionary that was.”

These are all the hydro schemes that his MOU partner is totally opposed to and object to every time someone tries to get one consented?