Stuff reports:

The revolving door continues for Labour with a new appointment being made at the same time another staffer quits.

And now there’s another job to be advertised following a fifth resignation from the communications team.

Hayden Munro who has been speech-writing for Little and was promoted to a senior communications advisor in recent months has also quit.

Five out of seven comms staff quit within six months – that is so not a coincidence. And with less than a year to the election, pretty unheard of.

He’s accepted a position in new Wellington Mayor Justin Lester’s office creating a one-for-one swap scenario between the Mayor and Opposition leader’s offices.

Munro worked heavily on Lester’s campaign in the lead up to the election last month.

In his spare time I am sure, just as the Labour Whips office staffer was also producing videos for him in his spare time.

The Press editorial:

There is no escaping those increasingly tall, garish signs highlighting the location of fast-food chains now spreading across urban New Zealand.

Are they spreading? What is the growth in fast food chain outlets? Is it any greater than population growth, if at all?

When New Zealand is struggling, and largely failing, to maintain an acceptable level of national fitness, easy access to greasy and fatty takeaway foods does nothing to help.

The issue is portion size, not access to takeaways.

So when fast foods are being sold under the noses of our youngest and most vulnerable citizens, it is time to do something about it.

Linwood is one example of where a busy junction is emblazoned with advertising signage for several fast-food restaurants. Linwood Avenue School lies directly opposite KFC and about 100-metres along from a McDonald’s and Burger King. Only about 500m down the road is Linwood College.

What the editorial doesn’t mention is these fast-food restaurants are part of a shopping mall. Of course you have food outlets in a shopping mall. Where else would they be?

This is not McDonald’s or Burger King planting a shop opposite a school, with no other shops there. That might look like targeting. This is The Press whining a shopping mall has fast food outlets.

However much these children spend at these outlets, their proximity is an unwelcome temptation and a bad influence. Little can be done about the area’s existing fast-food businesses, but they have become a catalyst for action among a growing group of locals, who quite rightly say the Christchurch City Council should step in.

The group has been lobbying the council to bring in a bylaw to stop any more fast-food outlets from setting up close to the city’s schools. But council staff have written a report for councillors which says the District Plan cannot be used for this purpose. Any such attempt might leave the council vulnerable to legal action, they suggest.

That might be worth it. The council needs to throw caution to the wind. It should be bold. The health of its citizens must be one of its top priorities. 

So The Press says ignore the legal advice.

Also as I have shown many times, almost every urban area in NZ is within 800 metres of a school. A ban based on proximity to a school is nonsense.

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister John Key has today cancelled his trip to Argentina because of the earthquakes but intends to travel to Peru later this week for Apec if circumstances permit.

Key was scheduled to leave tomorrow for Buenos Aires, Argentina, for two days before heading to Lima for Apec.

As a result of this morning’s earthquake, Key has made the decision to postpone his visit to Argentina.

“The situation is still unfolding and we don’t yet know the full extent of the damage,” Key says.

“I believe it is better that I remain in New Zealand in the coming days to offer my assistance and support until we have a better understanding of the event’s full impact.

It was such a powerful quake in terms of the impact on roads etc but thankfully a lesser impact on buildings. The timing helped that few people were out driving affected roads when it happened.

The 10 states Trump did best in, relative to 2012 were:

1. Iowa – went from -6% margin to +10% = 16% net gain
2. West Virginia +16%
3. South Dakota +12%
4. Maine +12%
5. Rhode Island +12%
6. Ohio +11%
7. Hawaii +11%
8. Indiana +10%
9. Michigan +9%
10. Missouri +9%

So huge increases in Iowa, West Virginia, South Dakota which might be expected. But also picked up support in Maine and Rhode Island in liberal New England.

The 10 states he performed worse in, margin relative to Romney were:

1. Utah -22%
2. California -7%
3. Texas -7%
4. Arizona -6%
5. DC – 4%
6. Massachusetts -4%
7. Washington -3%
8. Georgia -2%
9. Virginia -2%
10. Kansas -1%

Those 10 are the only ones where he did worse than Romney.  Utah is due to vote splitting. California is no surprise. Texas and Arizona will probably be the high Hispanic population,but of course overall he did better with Hispanics so maybe not.

Stuff reports:

The decision, an inevitability since Labor pledged to oppose the referendum – known in Australia as a “plebiscite” – four weeks ago, will force a new conversation about marriage equality that will divide the Coalition and threatens to destabilise the Turnbull government.

Conservatives will resist any attempt to shift away from the policy, demanding no action on same-sex marriage until at least the next election. Most observers expect any change on that front would blow up Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership.

In a final defence of the policy he once opposed, Attorney-General George Brandis warned that a plebiscite was the only foreseeable way to achieve same-sex marriage and that if defeated, “the cause of marriage equality will be delayed for years”.

Brandis, a supporter of marriage equality, said Labor’s decision to block the plebiscite was “one of the more cynical exercises in politics that I have ever seen”. He implored the Senate to “stop playing politics with gay people’s lives” and “get out of the way”.

But senators had already made up their minds, voting 29-33 against the plebiscite just after 9.30pm on Monday.

Such a pity that party politics have got in the way of something which most Australians want. My personal preference is for a vote in Parliament as happened in NZ. But the Coalition got elected on a policy of a referendum and that should have been allowed to occur.

Megan Nicol Reed writes in the NZ Herald:

Because I am an anally retentive sort of a person, and because I fancy it makes the checkout operator’s job that little bit easier, I like to group my groceries on the conveyor belt. Bananas with the broccoli and beetroot. Toilet paper with the toothpaste and tampons. You get the idea. Anyway, last Sunday I had a new category. Gummy eyeballs with the spider webs and pumpkin.

“Stocking up, eh?” commented the woman serving me. “Halloween’s huge around this area, isn’t it,” she said. And then, sotto voce, “You know, I hear they come all the way from South Auckland for the trick or treating. Whole carloads of them,” she sniffed.

“So?” I said it quite boldly, and it was not what she was expecting. She had wanted my indignation, that we might quiver together in shared outrage. Instead we finished our transaction in an awkward silence.

Afterwards, loading my purchases into my car, I thought about her oddly-misplaced snobbery, about her thinly-veiled racism, about what else I could have said.

As I was lifting out my last bag, I saw, languishing in the back of the trolley, a round of brie. A round of brie I hadn’t paid for, that sub-consciously I knew I had deliberately left in the trolley.

You see, I make a habit of checking my supermarket receipt, and more often than not find I have been overcharged, two boxes of teabags rung up when I only bought one, that kind of thing. And because sometimes I don’t have time to return to the store to have the error rectified, and because I know how dishonorably supermarkets can behave towards small suppliers, and because it irks me to pay more than I owe, occasionally I take matters into my own hands.

Accidentally omitting to pay for some small thing of similar value the next time I do my shopping. Slipping my stolen cheese in with the yogurt, milk and butter, it occurred to me that, had the checkout operator witnessed my small act of thievery, she would quite probably, and perhaps rightly, judged me as harshly as I had her.

So Megan Nicol Reed writes about she recently stole food from a supermarket. This is okay to do because of any of the following:

• The checkout operator was racist
• She was once over charged in the past
• Because she disapproves of how supermarkets treat small suppliers

And then she says that kindness should be our guide. Except towards people who own supermarkets where she shops.

Once upon a time the Southern Poverty Law Centre was a great organisation. They fought the KKK and white supremacist groups.

However they have lost their way as they have now starting labeling individuals who criticise a religion as members of hate groups – showing an inability to distinguish between legitimate criticism and hate speech.

Lee Smith writes at Tablet Mag:

Late last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which became deservedly famous in the 1980s for combating violent white-power hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, published a list of 15 individuals it labels as particularly threatening anti-Muslim extremists. It is sad but telling that the SPLC’s so-called field guide to Muslim-haters is not a list of violent extremists—who certainly do exist—but is instead a blacklist of prominent writers whose opinions on a range of cultural and political issues are offensive to the SPLC. The SPLC blacklist list contains practicing Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, foreign-policy think-tankers like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, and right-wing firebrands like David Horowitz—none of whom could be reasonably described as anti-Muslim bigots.

I spoke to Nawaz on the phone in London to ask for his reaction. “A bunch of first-world, comfortable liberal Americans who are not Muslims have decided from their comfortable perch to label me, an activist who is working within his Muslim community to push back against extremism, an anti-Muslim extremist.”

Yes they have called a Muslim who preaches tolerance and non-extremism an anti-Muslim extremist.

It seems the SPLC are the ones becoming the extremists. A pity as they have done much good in the past.

The Herald reports:

The Green Party’s newest recruitment Chloe Swarbrick says she was approached by several political parties before she picked the Greens.

The failed mayoral candidate won’t say which other parties tried to win her over, though Labour leader Andrew Little has previously expressed an interest in meeting with her.

“I have always voted Greens,” the 22-year-old said after confirming her candidacy this morning.

“I just affiliate with what they do and I’m on board with their policies and their values.”

At a time when UK and US politics was becoming increasingly bitter, she wanted to be “part of a positive change”.

The party already has five Auckland-based MPs and several more high-ranking candidates based in the city.

However, it is understood that at least one of the party’s MPs will leave Parliament at the next election.

Their Auckland MPs are Genter, Clendon, Roche, Davidson and Coates.

Not sure who is standing down but Clendon is very low impact so that would be my guess.

Swarbrick got almost 30,000 votes for Mayor. If she can attract even two thirds of that to the Greens that is worth an extra 1% for them. However maybe they were voters who already vote Greens?

David Leonhardt writes in the NY Times:

Many charter schools fail to live up to their promise, but one type has repeatedly shown impressive results.

Hannah Larkin, the principal at Match, refers to such schools as “high expectations, high support” schools. They devote more of their resources to classroom teaching and less to almost everything else. They keep students in class for more hours. They set high standards for students and try to instill confidence in them. They focus on giving teachers feedback about their craft and helping them get better.

And how have these schools done?

The latest batch of evidence about this approach is among the most rigorous. Professors at M.I.T., Columbia, Michigan and Berkeley have tracked thousands of charter-school applicants, through high school and beyond, in Boston, where most charters fit the “high expectations, high support” model.

Crucially, the researchers took several steps to make sure the findings were real. They compared lottery winners with losers, controlling for the fact that families who applied for the lotteries were different from families who didn’t. They also counted as charter students all those who enrolled, including any who later left.

This is quite crucial. Some here claim that kids are doing better at charter schools because the sort of parents motivated to apply are parents more interested in their kids education. But these researchers took this into account by comparing outcomes of those who applied and got in with those who applied and did not.

When you talk to the professors about their findings, you hear a degree of excitement that’s uncommon for academic researchers. “Relative to other things that social scientists and education policy people have tried to boost performance — class sizes, tracking, new buildings — these schools are producing spectacular gains,” said Joshua Angrist, an M.I.T. professor.

Students who go to Boston’s charter schools learn reading and math better and faster than students elsewhere. They are more likely to take A.P. tests and to do well on them. Their SAT scores are higher than for similar students elsewhere — an average of 51 points higher on the math SAT. Many more students attend a four-year college, suggesting that the benefits don’t disappear over time.

Yet Labour, Greens, NZ First and the unions are determined to close down every charter school in NZ.

The gains are large enough that some of Boston’s charters, despite enrolling mostly lower-income students, have test scores that resemble those of upper-middle-class public schools. The seventh graders at the Brooke Charter schools in East Boston and Roslindale fare as well on a state math test as students at the prestigious Boston Latin school, the country’s oldest public school and a school with an admissions exam.

Not only do they close the gaps between poor and well off students, the story cited has graphs showing they almost entirely close the gap between white and black students.

A frequent criticism of charters is that they skim off the best students, but that’s not the case in Boston. Many groups that struggle academically — boys, African-Americans, Latinos, special-education students like Alanna — are among the biggest beneficiaries. On average, notes Parag Pathak, also of M.I.T., Boston’s charters eliminate between one-third and one-half of the white-black test-score gap in a single year.

The left should be embracing charter schools, not trying to close them down.

Two recent analyses of multiple studies concluded that charters do not hurt outcomes at other schools — and may even help improve them, by creating competition.

A dirty word to some – competition.

For anyone who sees some merit on both sides, I’d encourage listening to Susan Dynarski, one of the researchers who conducted the Boston study.

A University of Michigan professor (and Times contributor), Dynarski is a proudly progressive former union organizer. She told me that she had agonized over being on the opposite side of an issue as some of her friends and usual allies. …

“The gains to children in Massachusetts charters are enormous. They are larger than any I have seen in my career,” Dynarski wrote. “To me, it is immoral to deny children a better education because charters don’t meet some voters’ ideal of what a public school should be. Children don’t live in the long term. They need us to deliver now.”

A very good article.

538 report:

The streak is over. For the first time in its 148 years of existence, Elliott County, Kentucky, failed to vote for the Democratic candidate in a presidential election. Based on current vote counts, Trump will finish with 70 percent of the vote, a huge swing from the 47 percent that Romney received in a narrow 2012 loss.

If it has voted democratic for 148 years then that is the longest stretch of the 3,143 counties in America.

They had almost 5,000 registered Democrats and just 227 Republicans. Yet Trump got 70% of the vote.

Hope everyone is okay. Some huge rattles. Can’t recall a quake this scary hitting Wellington before in recent years.

Must have been especially scary for those in Canterbury.

Have lost count of the number of after shocks.

Stuff reports:

Kiwisaver should be made compulsory and there needs to be a gradual lift to the retirement age, former finance minister Sir Michael Cullen says.

This, as well as lifting contribution levels, will help the country avoid making a “very, very dangerous bet” on income taxes paying for superannuation in the future.

Cullen, who was behind Kiwisaver’s introduction nine years ago, spoke at the Workplace Savings New Zealand conference in Auckland on Monday.

Cullen said in those nine years Kiwisaver had grown to just over $35 billion and 2.7 million members.

But while he thought it had been a success, a couple of key changes needed to be made to make it an even bigger success.

This included the “controversial” choice to make the scheme compulsory, but also relied on a gradual lift in the retirement age, which he said would help grow Kiwisaver to a $100b industry.

I support increasing the retirement age but am wary about making KiwiSaver compulsory – that removes choice from people as to how best to save for their retirement. Some might want to invest in a business. Others might want to invest in property. Dictating a compulsory method of savings imposes one size fits all.

He said a compulsory scheme offered a “third pillar” to monetary and fiscal policy, both of which had side effects.

The Government could lower or raise somebody’s contribution rate to help stimulate the economy, he said.

“The foregone income remains the property of the individual, that’s its beautiful advantage compared with interest rates.

“You’re not redistributing from people trying to pay their mortgage to people who are elderly and have large surpluses with a bank.”

I like the idea of increasing or decreasing contribution rates as an additional monetary policy tool. Cullen makes a good case for it.

However you don’t need to have it compulsory for this to still be an effective tool.

Contributions should be raised from the “inadequate” 3 per cent to closer to 6 per cent over the next six years or so, which was more in line with Australia.

I’m contributing at 8% but again it is not one size fits all. Not all employees could afford a 6% employee contribution. Also if the intention was to have the Government match that, the fiscal cost would be large.

538 reports:

Every state that elected a Republican candidate for Senate voted for Trump, and every state that elected a Democratic Senate candidate voted for Clinton.

The 2016 Senate elections were the most nationalized ever.

This is unique.

Indeed, this is the first time that all the states (with Senate races on the ballot) have voted for the same party in both the presidential and Senate races. Senators were first popularly elected in 1914, and the next presidential election took place two years later, in 1916. So that’s 100 years and 26 presidential election cycles in all.

And this happened despite such a non traditional Republican candidate.

If you want to know how a state will vote in a Senate race, looking to how it voted in the previous two presidential elections tells you almost everything you need to know. And this phenomenon is relatively new and coming on very strongly.

If this pattern continues in the next couple of election cycles, it’ll be very bad news for Democrats. Every state has the same number of senators regardless of population, and there are more Republican-leaning states than Democratic-leaning states in presidential elections right now. Trump won 30 states, even as he lost the popular vote.

So if Republican can hold those 30 states then they end up with a permanent filibuster proof Senate.

Given that politics is mostly cyclical (i.e., the national electorate favors Democrats and Republicans equally over time), the current makeup of the parties’ coalitions means that over the long term, Republicans are in a far better position to win Senate seats than Democrats are. For Democrats’ position to improve, they need to change their coalition, or voters need to start splitting their presidential and Senate tickets again. Otherwise, the Democrats will need to get used to being locked out of power.

Too early too know if the correlation was a one off.

Radio NZ reports:

One of the women who was jailed for her part in the death of Rotorua toddler, Nia Glassie, has had another child removed from her care by Child, Youth and Family (CYF).

Oriwa Kemp was jailed for three years and four months for the assault and wilful ill-treatment of the three-year-old, who died in 2007 after prolonged abuse.

She has given birth to at least three children since serving her sentence – all have now been taken by CYF.

So how do you stop this sort of sterilisation? I don’t advocate that, as too harsh a power for the state. But surely something can be done?

Doesn’t CYF have the power to get a court order stating that any children born to a parent will automatically be taken into state care, with the idea being this will be a deterrent. Was this done in this case?

Claire Trevett writes:

But today Labour will have moved on to bigger battles.

The United States elections reportedly prompted a 141 per cent increase in Americans searching New Zealand property listings on realestate.co.nz.

Labour’s team will be calculating likelihood ratios on a list of American-sounding surnames for phase two in its campaign to save the New Zealand first-home buyer.

Heh.

The Herald reports:

Auckland council bureaucrats have spent $500,000 on a new city slogan, which has already been condemned as “outrageous” by some councillors and does not have the support of new mayor Phil Goff.

The city’s proposed new global brand – The Place Desired by Many – was worked on by 115 council staff over two years.

You are effing kidding me.

Last night, Auckland councillor Dick Quax blasted the move as “outrageous raping of the ratepayer” and councillor Chris Fletcher said it was “a complete waste of money”.

Bureaucrats gone mad.

The Washington Post finds 13 things in the exit polls:

1. Trump won the white vote by a record margin – but only 1% more than Romney
2. There was no surge of female voters – fewer women voted
3. There was no surge of Latino voters – Trump did better than Romney
4. Education level mattered hugely in your vote choice
5. Trump did better with white evangelicals than Romney – despite being on his third marriage
6. Trump didn’t bring lots of new voters to the process
7. The economy was the big issue — and Clinton won it
8. This was a change election. And Trump was the change candidate.
9. Obamacare was a wind beneath Trump’s wings – the 25% increase in premiums helped Trump
10. Trump’s personal image was and is horrible – still only 38% favourable rating
11. Clinton’s email hurt her – 63% of Americans said it was a significant issue yet Democrats tried to claim no one cared
12. This was a deeply pessimistic electorate
13. People didn’t think Trump lost the debates as badly as I did

The Washington Post looks at the winners and losers of the US election:

Winners

• Donald Trump, 45th President
• Reince Priebus, RNC Chair – for staying loyal
• Senator Roger Wicker, Chair Republican Senate Committee – kept the Senate
• Kellyanne Conway, Trump Campaign Manager – managed Trump
• Allan Lichtman – called the election for Trump – perfect record since 1984
• Michelle Obama – the star of the campaign

Losers

• Hillary Clinton
• President Obama – legacy destroyed
• Organisation/Money/TV Ads – Trump won with few of them
• The media – did not understand the electorate
• Evan Bayh – massively failed to win his old seat of Indiana
• Chuck Schumer – will not be Senate Majority Leader

The Herald reports:

Members of Parliament have been given a 2.49 per cent pay rise, meaning the Prime Minister receives an extra $11,170 a year and backbench MPs get a $3890 bump.

The Remuneration Authority has released its determination on MPs’ salaries, the second since a change to peg MPs’ salary increases to those in the wider public sector.

The increase takes Prime Minister John Key’s salary to $459,739 while Labour leader Andrew Little and Cabinet Ministers will get $288,900 – up $7020.

Backbench MPs without extra responsibilities will get $160,024, up from $156,136.

I’ve done my normal table showing the new salary for each position, plus the non salary components.

Asra Nomani writes in The Washington Post:

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.”

This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States.

But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

So why?

I support the Democratic Party’s position on abortion, same-sex marriage and climate change.

But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.

The media didn’t report very much the 25% increase in health premiums as a result of Obamacare. But that was a big issue for many.

Finally, as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the “Islam” in Islamic State. Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, their media channels, such as Al Jazeera, and their proxies in the West, in a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

Bravo.

By mid-October, it was one Aug. 17, 2014, email from the WikiLeaks treasure trove of Clinton emails that poisoned the well for me. In it, Clinton told aide John Podesta: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL,” the politically correct name for the Islamic State, “and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton. Yes, I want equal pay. No, I reject Trump’s “locker room” banter, the idea of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico and a plan to “ban” Muslims. But I trust the United States and don’t buy the political hyperbole — agenda-driven identity politics of its own — that demonized Trump and his supporters.

And for the future:

Days before the election, a journalist from India emailed me, asking: What are your thoughts being a Muslim in “Trump’s America”?

I wrote that as a child of India, arriving in the United States at the age of 4 in the summer of 1969, I have absolutely no fears about being a Muslim in a “Trump America.” The checks and balances in America and our rich history of social justice and civil rights will never allow the fear-mongering that has been attached to candidate Trump’s rhetoric to come to fruition.

What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.

We have to stand up with moral courage against not just hate against Muslims, but hate by Muslims, so that everyone can live with sukhun, or peace of mind, I finished in my reflections to the journalist in India.

Again, bravo.

Stuff reports:

Max Key has said he received “death threats twice a week” in a speech at this year’s NetSafe conference in Auckland today. 

The Prime Minister’s son was invited to speak on ‘the price of celebrity’, alongside Mike Puru, Kris Fox, Richie Hardcore, and Verity Johnson.

A tweet from Richie Hardcore wrote, “In your teenage years everyone is trying to find yourself…I was getting death threats twice a week’ Max Key #netsafecoht“.

Key said he wasn’t at today’s event looking for sympathy.

“I don’t want any sympathy for the bullying I get. I want to raise awareness for the kids, who are getting bullied, that don’t have people around to support them like I do.”

He has suffered ruthless messages and abuse from people on and offline in the past, many of them directed at his father. 

It’s sad that some people have so much hatred that they think threats of violence or worse is acceptable.