News.com.au reports:

Hawke necked the frothy while on the big screen during the third Test against Pakistan.

Legend.

The Herald reports:

Foreign Minister and East Coast Bays MP Murray McCully’s office has been vandalised after New Zealand co-sponsored a UN resolution against Israeli settlements.

A photograph posted to Reddit shows graffiti on the frontage of McCully’s electorate office in Browns Bay, calling him a “traitor” and “Jew hater”.

A reminder that fanaticism can run both ways.

Being against the current Israeli Government’s policy of unilateral building of settlements on occupied territory does not make you a Jew hater. In fact 40% of Israeli citizens are against the policy also.

With the Sir Peter Leitch controversy, I guess no one knows for sure what was said, except those there. But the allegation is he said:

“I go ‘Yeah, I’m actually born here’. That’s when he said ‘Well this is a white man’s island and you should acknowledge that’,” she said.

To me this fails the sniff test. It is not just something that anyone would say – demanding a Maori women should acknowledge that Waiheke is a white man’s island.

Sure this might be what she genuinely thinks he said, but the wording seems preposterous. While Sir Peter’s version of events does not.

Such a pity that today people feel the way to do deal with a conversation that upset them is to rush to Facebook and demonise the other person.

This graph is from Croaking Cassandra. He comments:

These numbers shouldn’t really be a surprise.  Space is a normal good –  people typically want more of it, all else equal, when they can afford it –  and technological advances make longer distance commutes feasible.

No doubt there will be some issues with how the data are compiled/estimated –  quite where are the boundaries around the “built up area”, and how well is that known for, say, 1855.  But the general proposition shouldn’t be surprising: it is easy enough to think of the cramped tenement dwellings of New York in the late 19th century.

So what does this mean for today:

And the constant refrain locally is for “more density”, when there is little or no evidence that such densification is what residents would prefer for themselves.  Indeed, it would be surprising if the revealed preferences across time and across countries/cultures had suddenly reversed.

I have no particular problem if people wish to live in high-rise apartments, or in small townhouses with no garden.  And people will choose to do so if regulatory constraints limit their options –  eg if land simply becomes too expensive –  but it doesn’t look like a first-best unconstrained preferred choice for most people.  We don’t, for example, see such bunching in our own provincial cities –  where housing is less unaffordable than in, say, Auckland –  and of course by international standards even our own largest city, Auckland, is not much more than a large provincial city (just a bit smaller than, say, Nashville).

Freeing up the use of land around cities remains the key to making housing affordable again and providing the choices/options that people value.  Experience suggests more populous cities will cover more space.  That isn’t something officials and politicians should be trying to stop.

I agree. I’d do what Phil Twyford proposed and abolish the MUB for Auckland. Let people build out and up.

The Washington Post reports:

A group of more than 1,100 law school professors from across the country is sending a letter to Congress on Tuesday urging the Senate to reject the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general.

The letter, signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, is also scheduled to run as a full-page newspaper ad aimed at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be holding confirmation hearings for Sessions on Jan. 10-11.

“We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States,” states the letter, signed by prominent legal scholars including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

Having 1,100 law professors come out against you will only make it more likely he gets confirmed by the Senate, I’d say.

I might be wrong but I suspect those law professors have signed lettsr against pretty much every Republican nominee for Attorney General.

USA Today reports:

Megyn Kelly is signing off on Fox News to join rival NBC News.

The popular cable network personality is joining the peacock network, where she will anchor a new, one-hour daytime program, Andrew Lack, chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, said in a statement today.

As part of a broad, multi-year deal, Kelly will also anchor a new Sunday evening news magazine show and contribute to NBC’s breaking news, political and special events coverage.

Kelly was arguably the second biggest star on Fox. It will be interesting to see if her viewers follow her to NBC.

Kelly, who anchored The Kelly File since 2013, delivered top ratings to Fox while playing a prominent role in the 2016 presidential election. She repeatedly sparred with president-elect Donald Trump, punctuated by a contentious showdown at the first GOP debate, in which she confronted him about his insulting remarks about women.

Trump countered with slashing remarks in which he insinuated Kelly was antagonistic to him in the debate because she was menstruating. The two eventually met in Trump’s office to hash out their differences.

She also clashed with former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who left the top-rated news organization he helped shape over accusations of sexual harassment. She said Ailes harassed her starting in 2005, according to her book, Settle for More.

Amazing Ailes got away with it for so long.

The Herald reports:

New Zealand has been named the world’s best country by readers of Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

The winners of the annual Telegraph Travel Awards were voted on by more than 75,000 readers, with New Zealand emerging as the clear winner for the fourth consecutive year.

The Telegraph listed 26 reasons why New Zealand was best in the world, including landscapes that “make you want to applaud”, “magnificent Maori culture” and that “it really does look like Middle Earth”.

Some local doomsayers try to talk NZ down as we are not environmentally perfect (you know unlike every other country on Earth) but the reality is the vast vast majority of people from other countries are amazed by our lakes, rovers, forests and mountains.

Stuff reports:

The country’s only convicted plane hijacker has almost completed her prison sentence and is threatening to hijack another aircraft if she gets the chance.

Asha Abdille stabbed both pilots on an Air New Zealand flight from Blenheim to Christchurch in February 2008. One passenger was injured in the incident.

The Somali refugee took knives onto the 19-seater plane, which was forced to make an emergency landing.

Abdille was sentenced to nine years in prison, and her sentence expires on February 7.

She is currently held in a psychiatric unit in the Wellington region, but refused to attend her final Parole Board hearing in early December.

A written summary of the hearing, obtained by RNZ, said Abdille was still classified as high risk and has “said that she will attempt to hijack another plane and has threatened to set herself on fire”.

The decision noted no reintegration plan has been developed for the 42-year-old by the unidentified hospital she was held in. But it said “work is being undertaken by the hospital together with the [Corrections] Department about the best way of managing Ms Abdille in the future”.

The Parole Board went on to say hospital staff have “ongoing concerns about potential risky behaviour in the community on any release”. A 2014 report said Abdille had agreed to trial an antipsychotic medication, Clozapine.

It is understood Abdille, who is currently regarded as a special patient, will transfer into the mental health system on a compulsory treatment order (CTO) when her sentence ends next month.

That seems like the only safe outcome.

Chris Trotter writes:

The political consensus at the beginning of 2017 – election year – is that the National-led Government will hold on to power.

Not in its own right, as might have happened had John Key led them into battle, but with sufficient parliamentary support to govern comfortably. The identity and character of National’s support will likely prove the most intriguing electoral story of the year.

The most significant political event of 2017, however, could well be the collapse of the Labour Party and the emergence of the Greens as New Zealand’s leading party of the centre-left.

Here’s a test for readers. Can you name a major policy difference between Labour and Greens?

When Labour were in Government, there were many areas where the Greens differed from Labour. But Labour in opposition has adopted screeds of Green policy they used to oppose (such as paying the in work tax credit to people not in work).

After a downwards trend for around 30 years, we may have seen it reverse. The toll has now increased for three years in a row.

This is the more useful graph, showing the toll per 10,000 vehicles. But even on this one you see the last three years looking different to the ones before.

The Herald has a list of baby names rejected by DIA. They include:

• Lucifer
• Anal
• Mafia No Fear
• MMMR
• V8

I wonder what the correlation is between children whose parents chose a name that is rejected by DIA, and children who end up abused?

Stuff reports:

William Christopher, who played the unassuming US Army chaplain, Father Mulcahy, struggling to bring spiritual comfort to an anarchic surgical unit during the Korean War on the long-running hit TV series M*A*S*H, died on Saturday (local time). He was 84.

I watched M*A*S*H growing up as a kid, and have rewatched it often over the last 30 years. A great show, and the final is the most watched non sports show of all time in the US – 125 million viewers.

The death of Christopher made me wonder how many other actors were still alive, and what had happened to them all. Here’s the list:

• Alan Alda (Hawkeye) – aged 80
• Loretta Swit (Hot Lips) – aged 79
• Jamie Farr (Klinger) – aged 82
• William Christopher (Mulcahy) – died 2016 aged 84
• Wayne Rogers (Trapper) – died 2015 aged 82
• McLean Stevenson (Henry Blake) – died 1996 aged 68
• Larry Linville (Burns) – died 2000 aged 60
• Gary Burghoff (Radar) – aged 73
• Mike Farrell (BJ) – aged 77
• Harry Morgan (Potter) – died 2011 aged 96
• David Stiers (Charles) – aged 74

So five dead and six still living.

A few days ago Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu made an angry phone call to Murray McCully threatening some sort of retaliation if NZ supported the UN Security Council resolution.

Today it is reported Netanyahu is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of illegally accepting valuable gifts.

Even for McCully, that is impressively quick work 🙂

I don’t often blog on blogs at The Standard, but sometimes they can’t be ignored. Now this particular blog is authored not by some low level nobody but a senior Labour Party officer and activist, and purported nominee for New Lynn.

Mr Savage has worked out why John Key resigned. He quotes a Suzie Dawson, who claims to be a NZ journalist seeking asylum in Russia. And according to Suzie, Kim Dotcom has claimed that he has an even bigger moment of truth – two terabytes of e-mails from NZ Government servers. And these are even bigger than the Podesta e-mails, which is why John Key resigned.

Now Mr Savage says he is not sure if this is all true, but goes on to say he has verified Dawson is seeking asylum and:

“she did write at Spinbin and the quality of her work is high.  My impression of her taste grew considerably when I saw that she linked to Simon Louisson’s excellent Standard post on the Panama Papers.”

So he has decided to share his conspiracy theory with the world. Now I have to admit I had not heard of Suzie Dawson before. And I will admit to an instinctive bias that anyone who claims they need to seek asylum in Russia from New Zealand is probably barking mad. But hey I may be wrong.

So let’s look at her own words from this interview:

• I remember us getting followed around by Auckland Transport vehicles (Auckland Council often subcontract to the SIS!
• there were days in 2014 where I honestly did not expect to see the light of day in that week. (maybe it was bad weather?)
• So, at the end of 2014 after there had been several overt attempts on my life, which I document in the documentary (does a brave soul want to watch the documentary for us, and give us a summary?)
• Because privatised spying and privatised policing is huge, this is what we face now, is for-profit companies that make money from targeting us. (didn’t know we had privatised the SIS – how cool)
• And then the instituationalisation, which Redstar touched on earlier when he told you that one of our media team members was actually forcibly hospitalised in a mental hospital to try to discredit him and he is not the only one. (they may have got the wrong one)
• Then I covered off the specific assassination attempts that I experienced in the lead up to the Moment of Truth event. (Who was behind these assassination attempts? As the MoT destroyed any chance of a Labour/Green Government, maybe it was Trevor Mallard and Julie-Anne Genter?)
• I had the interior ceiling of my house painted and then little holes would appear in my ceiling, just randomly – it’s so sad – I used to go and stick chewing gum in them or pick-up-sticks – honest to God – because one day my ceiling has no holes in it then the next day there’s these little holes in it and I’m like ‘what the hell is going on?’ (?borer)
• In the movie I talk about how they tried to drive me and my children off a cliff at night in Northland in a place called Dome Valley. (Dome Valley must be the clue that it was the GCSB)
• I’m going into this blackout, I will call you as soon as I’m coming out of it. That’s the kind of terror that we would have to face. I would literally not know whether I was going to make it to the other end of my journey or not. (I’ve had that on the late bus home)
• ‘I’m being targeted, I’m going onto TrapWire’ and that was like our code word. That was the code word that meant, I’m going into the city where I will be on public surveillance because I had discovered that they were less inclined to harm me when I was in a public space that had surveillance cameras, than they were in my house where they were the only ones controlling the cameras so in a strange way that became sanctuary for me. (hide in public – genius)
• One is that, none of the activists that I work with or any of the political figures have ever disbelieved what happened to me because to some degree it’s happening to all of them. (can we get a list of those who don’t disbelieve that?)
• our Prime Minister is a United States vassal, that’s the only way I can put it really. He’s like a proxy power for the United States. So the United States was pushing… he was a member of the New York Federal Reserve, which is one of the biggest Federal Reserves, the most important and historic Federal Reserve Banks in the United States. (Does this mean we are no longer a vassal as John has retired?)
• We were standing in the way of absolutely everything that they were trying to do to our country and I was the conduit to the international media and to breaking the information out of New Zealand and getting it into the global sphere. And I think that that is one of the many reasons that they came down on me particularly hard. (Has anyone ever heard of this person before reading this post?)
• If you look at the science of 9/11, it’s obvious that there is a lot of questions to be asked there, just purely from a scientific perspective. (Of course she is a truther)

I must thank Mickey Savage for bringing this to our attention. May I suggest they make her a regular guest blogger.

News.com.au reports:

Possibly the least surprising part of the story.

It looks like this happened just after the New year so won’t be included in the catalog of Islamic terror attacks in 2016.

The count for 2016 is:

• 2,472 attacks (over 47 a week or seven a day)
• in 61 countries
• 21,224 people killed (over 400 a week)
• 26,654 injured

This is actually am improvement over 2015 which had 2,866 attacks killing 27,628 people.

Fairfax have bravely made their 20 annual political predictions. They are:

1. John Key will feature in the Queen’s Birthday honours list, but as befits the man who reinstated knights and dames he will be dubbed “Sir John” rather than join the ranks of the untitled – but supposedly more prestigious – Order of New Zealand.

2. Former Labour MP Shane Jones will shy away from another term as an economic ambassador and instead signal a return to politics by throwing his hat in the ring with his old mate Winston Peters and NZ First.

3. Labour’s Raymond Huo will return as an MP before the election – and be given a winnable place on the party’s list as it seeks to rectify its diversity deficit.

4. ACT will fail to increase its MP count from one, although National will again offer it a lifeline in Epsom.

5. The Maori Party’s co-leader Marama Fox will fail to win a seat, either as an electorate MP or on the party’s list, condemning her to be a one term MP.

6. Barack Obama will visit New Zealand in 2017.

7. The May Budget will see National promise movements in the $48,000 and $70,000 tax bracket thresholds – but pledge to only bring tax cuts in in full if re-elected.

8. Gareth Morgan’s The Opportunities Party (TOP) will score less than 3 per cent and fail to win any seats.

9. The Greens will do little better – and little worse – than their 2014 result.

10. Judith Collins and Steven Joyce will clash over the party’s economic direction – and Joyce will prevail.

11. Chris Finlayson, Peter Dunne and Annette King will call it a day.

12. One National and one Labour MP in electorate seats will leave within six months before the general election, under an unspoken deal that will maintain the voting balance in the House.

13. The Greens will be given a free run in some electorates, under a deal with Labour, but will still fail to win any constituency seats.

14. Louise Upston and David Bennett will prove the weakest links in the English ministry.

15. Jonathan Coleman will take over the foreign affairs portfolio from May, but only after an internal tussle with at least two other ministers for the plum job.

16. Winston Peters will not be prime minister, nor be in line to be, under any deal he does to support the next Government.

17. Economic growth will top 4 per cent during 2017.

18. Auckland house prices will be lower in real terms by Christmas than they were at the start of 2017.

19. There will be one more political bombshell in 2017 that will change the course of the election and install Andrew Little as prime minister.

20. At least two party leaders will be heading for the door by Christmas.

Some comments from me:

• As Raymond is male, Labour may be constitutionally unable to give him a winnable list place. Their binding policy is for 50% female, and as most electorate seats are held by men, the first few list rankings must all go to women.
• I’d say the The Opportunities Party will be under 1%, not just 3%
• 4%economic growth would be amazing
• Probably need a bombshell for Little to be PM. For his sake hope it is better than “The Moment of Truth”

Stuff reports:

Five cyclists died on the roads in 2016 – the lowest annual number recorded in 25 years, latest road toll figures show.

The Cycling Action Network hailed the preliminary figures as “encouraging”. 

CAN spokesperson Patrick Morgan said the decline was a reflection of more people riding and becoming accustomed to cyclists.

Nice to see the cycling toll so low. A pity the overall road toll looks to be increasing.

As more people take up cycling on New Zealand roads, more ambitious government projects for safe cycling would be needed, he said.

But he praised the transport minister’s program for creating new urban cycleways.

“There has never been a better Minister of Transport for cycling than Simon Bridges.” 

High praise.

Stuff reports:

Jetstar is suspending its direct flights from Wellington to Melbourne, citing a lack of passenger demand.

It’s passengers will need to travel via Auckland or Christchurch from March 1, although Air NZ and Qantas still offer direct flights.

Those who have already booked Jetstar flights for March or later will be offered a full refund or the option of the extra stop en route.

“We launched our direct Melbourne-Wellington service nearly two years ago, however, despite continued efforts by Jetstar and local partners to promote the flights, we haven’t seen the passenger demand we’d hoped for,” a Jetstar spokesperson confirmed on Friday.

So if existing services are being dropped due to lack of demand, doesn’t that mean you should be very wary of the projections that a longer runway will lead to many more services, flights and passengers?

The Secretary of the Refugee Council of New Zealand is a Mr Kaileshan Thanabalasingham.

A Kaileshan Thanabalasingham was deported from Canada in 2006 as the reputed leader of a Tamil gang that killed several youths in the 1990s.

Tamil Canadian reported:

The reputed leader of a Tamil gang whose battle with rival gang members on the streets of Toronto claimed the lives of more than a dozen youths in the late 1990s, and once led to a midday shooting on Highway 404, was deported late last night to Sri Lanka.

Kaileshan Thanabalasingham was one of the main targets of Project 1050, a joint police and immigration investigation that ended with the arrest of close to 51 alleged gang members on Oct. 18, 2001.

The majority of the accused were charged under a section of the immigration act that prohibits involvement in a criminal organization, marking the first time street gangs were classified as “organized crime” under immigration laws.

Known in Toronto’s Tamil community as Kailesh, the 36-year-old father was accused of leading the VVT gang, a west Toronto group that was formed in the early 1990s and named for Valvettithurai, a northern Sri Lankan town.

Thanabalasingham denied he led the VVT, or that his criminal convictions — possessing a machete in 1996 and a 1998 conspiracy to commit assault for trying to acquire guns for others — were related to gang membership.

If this is the same person (and I am informed his year of birth is the same, and he has family in Toronto) then you wonder how someone deported from Canada gets entry into New Zealand?