Politico reports:

Just six weeks ago, Hillary Clinton’s advantage in the Electoral College looked insurmountable. Now, based on the latest round of public polls, it’s a different story.

If the election were held today, Donald Trump would apparently win roughly as many electoral votes as Hillary Clinton — who held a commanding lead in early August and seemed to be closing off all possible Trump routes to 270 electoral votes.

But state polling averages, which can be lagging indicators, are beginning to show Trump in the lead. According to POLITICO’s Battleground States polling average, Trump is now ahead in Iowa and Ohio — and he’s tied with Clinton in vote-rich Florida.

A slightly more aggressive estimate could add Nevada, North Carolina and one electoral vote in Maine to Trump’s tally: The New York real-estate magnate is ahead in the most recent polls in Nevada and North Carolina, and in Maine’s Second Congressional District.

That, plus all the other states Mitt Romney won four years ago, would get Trump to 266 electoral votes — just four shy of the 270 needed to win.

Five Thirty Eight now has Trump at between 40% and 42.6% probability to win with 249 to 255 electoral votes projected.

The first presidential debate is on the 26th of September.

Stuff reports:

The head of Britain’s newly formed cybersecurity agency says authorities are exploring the creation of a national internet filter to block malicious software and rogue websites.

Ciaran Martin, the chief executive of Britain’s new National Cyber Security Centre, told a conference in Washington that his agency was working on a flagship project which would block Britons from coming into contact with “known malware and bad addresses”.

According to a text of his speech published on Thursday, Martin said the system would allow consumers to opt-out – meaning that privacy and choice were “hard-wired into our programme”.

Those assurances didn’t sit well with some activists.

Martin said rogue websites would be blocked using DNS filtering, a venerable if clumsy censorship technique which prevents internet users from reaching a targeted server when they click a link or type out a web address.

But the technique is imprecise, occasionally blocking an entire website over a single rogue link.

The London-based Open Rights Group worried that the Cyber Security Centre’s mother body, intelligence agency GCHQ, risked tampering with the integrity of the internet.

The Financial Times newspaper described the project as a “Great British Firewall” – a reference to China’s vast internet censorship system.

The intentions are good but the idea is bad.

There are lots of private sector anti-malware solutions for people to choose from.

The trouble with a Government filter is that different parts of Government will then want the filter expanded to fit their needs. Justice will want sites included that breach suppression orders. Health will want sites with bad health information included etc etc. And while they start voluntary, at some stage politicians will want them compulsory.

Labour, Greens and NZ First claimed that manufacturing was doing so badly in New Zealand that it was a manufacturing crisis. In reality is was a manufactured crisis.

Catherine Beard, the executive director of ManufacturingNZ dispels four myths:

1. Manufacturing is a sunset industry
2. Food manufacturing isn’t real manufacturing
3. It’s all made overseas anyway
4. The future is in services, not manufacturing

She concludes:

Examining these four myths reveals some important truths about New Zealand manufacturing. It is strategic, it is broad-based including both food and non-food manufacturing, it is well integrated in the global economy, it is based on the ingenuity and creativity that New Zealand is famous for, and it’s bringing economic growth.

The true story of manufacturing in New Zealand is great news.

Manufacturing in NZ employs 250,000 New Zealanders and has a $12 billion wages bill.

Fairfax has published a power ranking list of Mayors, based on opinions from their local reporters.

It’s a good idea but seems to be based partially on how big the Council is and partially on how sucessful the local Mayor is at getting agreement from their Councils and communities. They have Len Brown as second equal so are basically saying no matter who is Mayor of Auckland, they will be rated 9/10.

Anyway their most power Mayors are:

• Winton Dalley, Hurunui – 10
• Len Brown, Auckland – 9
• Tony Kokshoorn, Grey – 9
• John Tregidga, Hauraki – 9
• Ross Dunlop, South Taranaki – 9
• Wayne Guppy, Upper Hutt – 9

At the other end the bottom ranked is Mike Havill of Westland at 2/10.

Enter your captions below. As always funny, not nasty.

Stuff reports:

An agreement between Auckland Council and central government has been struck to end our biggest city’s gridlock woes.

Transport Minister Simon Bridges and Auckland Mayor Len Brown signed the Auckland Transport Alignment Project report on Thursday.

The report, a joint project between the council, the Ministry of Transport, Auckland Transport, the NZ Transport Agency, the Treasury and the State Services Commission, recommends a strategic approach for transport investment over the next 30 years.

It outlines plans to deal with the extra 700,000 people that Auckland’s population will swell by over that time and a projected increase in freight on Auckland roads of 78 per cent.

The report recommended congestion charges over a rise in property rates to help fund needed infrastructure.

Aucklanders needed to make “different choices about how to travel and at what time of day” to reduce gridlock, Brown said.

“Demand management is crucial in managing this.”

Any revenue raised from congestion charges should go towards improving transport systems, he said.

The report recommended a network of toll systems across Auckland that vary in price depending on time and location.

They are expected to be installed by 2028.

“Applying charges across the whole network also reduces the likelihood of unintended consequences resulting from diverting traffic, as prices can be fine-tuned across the network to support desired outcomes,” the report read.

Congestion charges are the best market solution for funding the transport network. They should indeed vary by time and location.

Stuff reports:

One TVNZ employee is banking more than a $1 million a year, but the state broadcaster is refusing to say who it is.

Traditionally, the healthiest pay packet has always gone to the chief executive, but has polarising Seven Sharpfrontman, Mike Hosking, edged out boss Kevin Kenrick as TVNZ’s biggest earner?

A spokeswoman for TVNZ said the broadcaster “didn’t have any plans to identify the remuneration of presenters or other individual employees”.

The question came as the British government prepared to force the BBC to reveal the size of pay packets given to 109 of its top broadcast journalists and personalities.

The BBC however is funded by the British public. TVNZ is not.

Media commentator, Bill Ralston, agreed there would be “significant public interest” in the information, but said  he would be against forcing media organisations to produce it.

Ralston said the BBC differed from TVNZ because it was advertising-free and was funded by UK taxpayers through a household licence fee – an important distinction.

“TVNZ would have some justification, I think, in demanding their presenters’ salaries were kept quiet, particularly if a presenter of a programme could hold or lose audience.

“If they build audience, they may be bringing in several millions of dollars worth of extra revenue, so they usually leverage that to get quite higher salaries.”

In a statement, TVNZ said it discloses the number of employees who earn over $100,000, broken down into $10,000 brackets, but it “didn’t have any plans to identify the remuneration of presenters or other individual employees.”

Ralston thought a case could be made for RNZ to produce its individual salary figures, because it was fully funded by the taxpayer.

I think you can make a case for Radio NZ to reveal details, as they are funded by taxpayers. Same goes for Maori TV.

Also you could make a case for NZ on Air to require details of salaries to be provided for any show they fund.

Since 1972 Gallup has been asking people in the US:

In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media — such as newspapers, T.V. and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly — a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?

So net trust has gone from around +40% to -40%. Only one third of the population has a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media and over two thirds say they have not very or no trust.

The Herald reports:

A brief liaison with a man she didn’t know cost a young Auckland woman $28 a week off her benefit for two years – but the law imposing the penalty may soon be wiped.

The 21-year-old woman, who said she did not know who was the father of her now 2-year-old daughter, was one of 13,616 sole parents at the end of March who had at least $22 a week docked off their benefits for not naming their children’s fathers.

But the law may be wiped after a lobbying campaign which has won the support of Labour, Green, NZ First and Maori Party MPs who together hold 60 of Parliament’s 121 seats.

The trouble with scrapping this law is it then provides an incentive for arrangements where the mother doesn’t name the father, so he can avoid paying child support to IRD.

It is harsh on some people who genuinely do not know the father, but if you scrap it I predict you’ll see a significant increase in arrangements where the father is known, but not named so he can avoid responsibility.

At the end of March 10,848 parents were being docked for one child, 2189 for two children, 476 for three children, 82 for four children and 21 for five or more children – affecting a total of at least 17,087 children.

So there are 103 people who say that they have four or five children, and they don’t know the father of any of them??

I’m almost certain they do know. It is just that they are better off with the father paying them say $40 a week not to name them than the father having to pay say $120 a week to IRD for child support payments. Far easier to leave the bill with the taxpayer.

The law allows for exemptions in cases of violence or where there is “insufficient evidence available to establish who is in law the other parent”.

Jane said she was not told about the exemption until she met an AAAP advocate. She was referred to a community law centre where a lawyer wrote to Work and Income explaining why she couldn’t name her child’s father.

Work and Income then cancelled the $28 penalty and a month ago paid her back pay for the full amount she had lost over two years.

It sounds like the current law is flexible enough then. I’m against providing an incentive for fathers not to be held responsible.

Vernon Small writes:

Which is why Labour leader Andrew Little’s attack on the One News-Colmar Brunton poll, as “bogus” – with its sham connotations – was so ill-advised.

Opinions are divided in the caucus over whether he should even have engaged – and hence highlighted – the poor 26 per cent result.

But given he did, he might have got away with “rogue”. There are occasionally polls that step outside the expected range of results. That’s precisely what the margin of error, normally expressed as a level of confidence at the 50 per cent level, accounts for.

There is a huge difference between calling a poll “rogue” and “bogus”. 1 out of 20 polls will be “rogue” in that the confidence level for the margin of error is 95%. That is just normal sampling error. But to call a poll “bogus” is to imply that the polling company has done something fraudulent. Little is lucky Colmar Brunton is not litigious.

That was, sort of, the point Labour was making by releasing the latest data from its pollster, UMR, with a warning over its finding National was on just 40 per cent. In other words, polls can be seriously wide of the mark at times. UMR’s probably was, and so was the One News poll.

But it didn’t stop some activists adopting a sort of post-truth polling stance, asserting the UMR poll much better matched their view of reality.

Sigh. Ice cream castles in the air.

Few things are more dangerous than only believing the polls which are good for you.

It also came at a bad time for the party as it contemplates that most fraught of MMP political processes; the shape of its party list and who will be high, low and shafted.

It all comes down to the party vote, of course, but with a twist for Labour.

It has pledged to gender balance its caucus by 2017.

When the policy was signed off in 2013, then-president Moira Coatsworth said the target would be achieved by calculating the gender mix at various different levels of support and taking into account the likely electorates Labour would win.

But a party vote of 26 per cent, in line with the TVNZ poll, delivers a very different scenario – and a political death sentence for many a male aspirant – than the 35 per cent-plus yardstick the party is assuming.

The problem starts with the imbalance in winnable electorates.

At the moment Labour has 27 electorates, but only 10 are held by women and 17 by men.

Throwing in a few seats it thinks it can win, such as Christchurch Central (lawyer Duncan Webb) and Auckland Central (Jacinda Ardern) doesn’t necessarily help

Neither did the Otaki selection meeting help by picking Rob McCann over pre-meeting favourite Penny Gaylor. 

So applying the 50 per cent rule strictly, Labour faces a possible scenario where Little takes the top list slot and the next nine winnable slots go to women.

So good bye David Parker and Trevor Mallard and the chances of any other male candidate who doesn’t have an electorate.

That is being ruled out by Labour’s top table, because winnable places will need to be preserved for Trevor Mallard, as Labour’s nomination for speaker, and its policy brains trust David Parker (if he wants another term).

That doesn’t necessarily pre-suppose a top five place for both, because unless Labour gains enough seats to win the Treasury benches its nomination for speaker is academic. 

Even so, it will no doubt raise questions among the activist base. Why adopt a gender balance plan if you are going to make exceptions based on the “need” to elect existing male MPs?

So they are going to ignore their own rule. Doesn’t that then show how stupid the rule is if they have deemed it unworkable?

But there is another issue complicating matters; Labour’s shameful lack of any MPs of Asian or Indian ethnicity in the current caucus.

Of course none of this is a problem if the polls improve. At 38 per cent everyone is in, everyone is happy, At 26 per cent its every “man” for himself.

No wonder Little and his team are hyper-sensitive to bad polls.

If Labour win say 30 electorate seats then on current polls they may not even get Andrew Little in on the list!

Stuff reports:

NZ First has broken ranks to oppose a new building for MPs and Parliamentary staff.

Winston Peters said on Wednesday claims that Opposition parties backed the plan were “simply not true”.

Peters said NZ First made it “very clear’ when approached that it would not sign up to the project.

The Government is expected to sign off on a major revamp of the parliamentary precinct before the end of the year, including the option of a new office block to accommodate those currently in the 22-storey Bowen House on the corner of Bowen St and Lambton Quay.

The Bowen House lease expires at the end of 2018 and while a renewal is one of the options Carter said it was very expensive at an annual cost closer to $6m than $5m, and was leased from a foreign company.

A cost for the new premises has not been given but it will be tens of millions of dollars.

Peters said MPs should not be “considering their own comforts” at a time when 40,000 people were homeless, and young people struggled to find a home.

“The fact is we don’t need 120 parliamentarians, 100 would be sufficient, at which time we would have plenty of room. Former Prime Minister Keith Holyoake used to have five people in his office – Prime Minister John Key has 55. Before anyone starts screaming about the need for more space let’s take a look at how bloated the system now is.”

Peters as usual is speaking nonsense and conflating the PM’s Office with DPMC. Last time I checked there were fewer ministerial staff than with the previous Government that Peters was in.

But regardless of that, the Government should abandon the new building plans now. If even one party opposes them, you’re creating a nightmare for yourself. Trust me, I saw this in the 1990s.

It doesn’t matter how logical the proposal is that building a say $45m building is far better for taxpayers than say paying $6 million a year in rent. What you will endure is all election year being Winston saying “They are spending $45 million on their own luxury offices instead of on your local school or hospital”.

It’s dishonest and not true. But that won’t matter. You won’t win this argument with logic and the fact it would save taxpayers money. If you go ahead, you will be handing Peters a platform for election year.

Andrew Geddis writes:

So what Stuart Nash is calling for here is Ministers to completely ignore fundamental precepts of our constitution. Now, I get why he is doing so – he’s seeking to capitalise on some widespread outrage with how Delegat was treated (more on that in a moment).

But the fact is that the Government cannot and should not do what he’s saying it should, and he’s completely out of order to demand that it do so. Because if he wants to one day be Minister of Police, he will have to respect and abide by these rules that he’s so cavalierly calling on National Ministers to ignore. Simply put, if he were the Minister, he couldn’t (and shouldn’t) do what he’s saying the National Party Ministers ought to do – which makes his calling for this action deeply disingenuous at best, and something much worse at worst.

Ministers can and should not interfere or comment on individual sentencing decisions, before appeals have been exhausted.

Graeme Edgeler writes:

The Minister of Police shouldn’t be commenting of sentences before the appeal period is up in the first place, but criticising a Minister for not holding firm on the proposition that people who assault cops should be charged with the more serious aggravated assault charge (rather than the less serious assault on Police charge) is ridiculous when you are discussing a case where the person pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated assault.

The key thing here is that Delegat was not charged with the lesser charge of assault on a police officer, but the more serious aggravated assault. All the media have missed this.

So, news media, you suck at this. Why, in the biggest criminal justice story in New Zealand for several days, did not a single news article (well, not a single news article accessible on google news at any rate) mention what the person at the centre of it was actually convicted of? Several news articles mention both Nikolas Delegat and “aggravated assault”, but only ever in the context of it being the charge he originally faced, which appears not to be true..

Stuart Nash, you suck too, assuming that the quotes from you in this Herald article is accurate (and, because I already seem to have forgotten what I’ve just written, my assumption is still that it is). First, you shouldn’t really be calling on the Government, and especially the Minister of Police to interfere with a prosecution, which you are reported as doing here …

Now assaulting a police officer has a maximum six month sentence and aggravated assault is a maximum three year sentence.

I do not think a first time offender should get jail for an ordinary assault. But there are two aspects that make me think it may be warranted in this case.

The first is that Delegat not only pummeled the officer into unconsciousness, but kept hitting here when she was unconscious. This is a desire to inflict serious damage on her. Permanent brain damage could occur. Even being knocked unconscious can have long-term effects, let alone being punched once you have gone unconscious.

This to me is quite different to throwing some punches in a fight, or even punching an officer to prevent them arresting you (still deplorable). He carried on just to inflict as much damage as possible.

The second factor is touched on by Geddis:

Delegat’s attempt to deflect responsibility for his actions away from himself and towards the “rather out-of-control drinking culture” at Otago carry echoes of the statement to court from the rapist (and former Stanford University student) Brock Turner. In seeking to minimise his offending, Turner pointed to “the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at [University]”

Don’t blame the drinking culture. Blame yourself.

UPDATE: Whoops typo in the headline. Should of course be shut up not shit up 🙂

Stuff reports:

Drivers fleeing police have injured dozens of innocent bystanders and police officers officers, a new report shows, amid a proposal for harsher consequences.

A crackdown on fleeing drivers is proposed in a Bill introduced to Parliament this week by Transport Minister Simon Bridges, and includes penalties of up to two years’ disqualification from driving for failing to stop for police.

The move comes as new Ministry of Transport figures show 582 people were injured by fleeing drivers in the past five  years. Of those. 82 were innocent bystanders and 51 were police officers.

You need more than disqualification. Those who flee are probably disqualified anyway.

The bill also proposes to strengthen courts’ powers to confiscate fleeing drivers’ vehicles permanently if they offend twice within four years.

A good idea. But how about a short sharp punishment. You flee, and you automatically have at least a week in jail.

Victoria University criminologist Professor John Pratt has questioned the logic of imposing harsher penalties – when the point of fleeing police is generally to avoid punishment.

By this logic there should be no penalty at all.

“I don’t think it will have much effect on these particular cases because people who do these sorts of things for the most part are likely to be young men who don’t have much to lose in the first place.”

Pratt suggested making it harder to steal cars and preventing problem drivers from getting behind the wheel in the first place was likely to be more effective.

And how do you do that? Equip every car in NZ with a DNA sensor?

Expected Income Redistribution

Steven Joyce pointed out:

New data from the Treasury shows that income redistribution across New Zealand’s income tax and support system continues to increase, with the top 10 per cent of households forecast to pay 37.2 per cent of income tax in 2016/17, compared with 35.5 per cent in 2007/08.

“This latest data confirms that New Zealand’s income tax and support system significantly redistribute incomes to households in need,” Acting Finance Minister Steven Joyce says.

“Higher income households are paying a larger share of income tax than they were in 2008, and lower income households are paying less – the 30 per cent of households with the lowest incomes are forecast to pay just 5.4 per cent of income tax, compared with 6.3 per cent in 2007/08.

Labour keep trying to portray NZ as having got more unequal but the truth is that we have a highly redistributive tax and welfare system.

Here’s how things have changed for the bottom decile from Labour’s last year to the current one:

• Tax has dropped from $372 million to $313 million
• Welfare payments increased from $2,246 million to $2,748 million
• Net tax gone from -$1.88 billion to -$2.44 billion

And here’s how things have changed for the top decile:

• Tax has increased from $9.4 billion to $11.6 billion
• Share of tax gone from 35.5% to 37.2%

So the next time Labour say the Government is waging a war on the poor, recall that in fact the bottom decile are receiving more in state support and the top decile paying more in tax.

Personally I’d like to see tax rates drop across the board now we are back in surplus.

A useful graph from the Food and Grocery Council. As you can see the impact on soda sales in Mexico from their sugar tax has been minimal.

Over two years sales dropped a miniscule 0.5% after the tax was introduced. By comparison sales in NZ in the last year dropped 4.7% with no soda tax.

Sugar taxes are great at increasing the tax burden on families, but there is no evidence that they have reduced obesity.

News.com.au reports:

The Australian taxpayer funded company tasked with the monumental job of building our national broadband network is fond of saying that the final product will make us a world leader in broadband capability, but the Kiwis might have something to say about that.

On Friday last week New Zealand fixed-line telco company Chorus announced it will extend its 1Gbps fibre broadband service across the entirety of its Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) footprint beginning in October.

Chorus already has more than 4000 fibre connections in Dunedin capable of such speeds but will now offer the “maximum speed the network electronics allows today” to customers across the country, the company said.

Chorus CEO Mark Ratcliffe said by “championing gigabit residential and business services” New Zealand will be “catapulted up the league tables of broadband speed rankings”.

The current average download speeds across the Chorus network is 30.5 megabits per second (Mbps) but the upgrade will allow users to achieve download speeds approaching 1000Mbps and uploads of up to 500Mbps.

Comparatively, many Australians who have signed up to the NBN currently receive download speeds within the range of 25Mbps to a possible maximum of 100 Mbps. Full fibre connections are expected to make up about 20 per cent of the completed NBN rollout meaning retailers will one day be able to offer 1Gbps speeds to the lucky few.

d

Phil Quin writes at Stuff:

Much like the gallant Argentinians in Hamilton on Saturday night, Labour MPs will be reeling.

After a sustained period of frenetic activity, most of it on their terms, much of it in favourable territory, they ended up on the receiving end of yet another in an unbroken stretch of one-sided wallopings.

Any similarity ends there. Whereas the Pumas players and coaching staff gracefully acknowledged being outplayed by a better team, Labour leader Andrew Little grumpily dismissed the poll, which had Labour at 26 per cent, as “bogus” and trudged off for Canada, where his colleagues must be hoping he has scheduled deportment lessons from Justin Trudeau.  

My conclusion is he released their own internal polling because he was worried about a coup when he was overseas. It was a panicked decision.

This echo chamber thinking –– the tendency in politics to believe only what suits and reject everything else as a conspiracy –– is not new. In fact, confirmation bias is a ubiquitous force in all human affairs, as powerful as gravity.

I’ve worked on campaigns in deep blue seats where nothing could convince Labour candidates and volunteers that a stray encouraging word from a solitary passer-by isn’t evidence of a coming landslide.

It makes sense at the level of human psychology; otherwise, wouldn’t we just give up and go home? And yet, politics requires far less sentimentally, at least from those in leadership roles.  

Yet to meet a candidate who doesn’t think that maybe just maybe they will win that safe seat off the other party.

A hard-headed assessment of Labour’s performance cannot but conclude that the party lacks talent along with basic political competence. Contrast its current frontbench with those that preceded Labour victories in 1984 or 1999.

The best of the current lot, by a comfortable margin, is the veteran deputy Annette King who featured in both. Phil Twyford, who got lucky with his portfolio, generates a fair few headlines, but his recent call for a State of Emergency on housing affordability, along with earlier targeting of Chinese surnames, suggests questionable judgment, not to mention an alarming propensity for hyperbole.

Among the others, Kelvin Davis is one of few who seems to understand what an opposition’s job is. The rest seem to spend most of their time on social media retweeting people who already agree with them. 

Even if it were possible, replacing Little won’t solve anything without root and branch party reform and a ruthless cull of caucus deadwood. 

Labour’s challenge is they may get no List MPs next election which means the only way to get new MPs in there is to have Electorate MPs retire.

Rob Hosking writes:

I think I have diagnosed the Labour Party’s problem.

Okay, one of the Labour Party’s problems.

The problem is spreadsheets. Noses are buried so deeply into Microsoft Excel or whichever spreadsheet programme the Labour research team uses, they are losing sight of all political reality.

The party’s Parliamentary team, and certainly its back-office –  or at least those who are left in its back office – are obsessed with data.

Spreadsheets, graphs, data points, shifting trendlines and margin of error are all matters of weird fixation. They are treated like a combination of the Holy Grail and the Holy Bible: the subject of the ultimate quest and also matters of holy writ.

Data is very important but it is just one input. It is not a substitute for being in touch with the community.

But the style of thinking  and personality type which is good at coming up with such data is – how shall we put this delicately – not always best at connecting with other human beings. Yet, Labour’s whole style of thought and strategic thinking now seems driven by this kind of worldview. 

The idea you can wave a graph in front of a struggling, not particularly motivated citizenry in poorer areas such as Clendon or Bell Block or Porirua or Christchurch East, and get them to vote for you, must be close to the ultimate in politically disconnected geekery.

It is why Labour has been obsessed with the output of Statistics New Zealand – an admirable body, in my experience, and one whose staff are magnificently and stroppily resistant to any attempt by any politician to game their statistics or spook them into not reporting inconvenient facts.

And so it is why Grant Robertson and fellow MPs Phil Twyford and Jacinda Ardern attacked the independence and integrity of Statistics New Zealand last month.

If the GDP figures out tomorrow are positive, will they attack Stats NZ on them?

In a different sort away, the infamous Chinese sounding names database Mr Twyford put together last year was a similar example of the same syndrome: the conviction that if data looks awesome on a spreadsheet in an office in Wellington it will be a powerful argument that will confound the party’s enemies and gobsmack the humble Kiwi voter with its brilliance and vision.

Heh yes that seems to be their thinking.

The attack on Statistics New Zealand a month ago has been mentioned: this week, there was the – admittedly much less serious, but equally psychologically telling – refusal to accept the result of the Colmar Brunton poll.

Now, a sensible reaction would have been to shrug, admit Labour is not doing as well as it would like, but perhaps add the classic, rather boring but politically prudent line about not commenting on individual polls.

Instead, Mr Little damned the poll as “bogus.” To compound the matter he then released Labour’s own polling, which had several effects, none of which are helpful to the party.

One is it kept the story going for another 24 hours.

Two, while the junkies might know that UMR is a reputable pollster, undecided voters are only going to hear “Labour’s pollster” and decide the whole thing is a bit of a jack up.

And even the political junkies are asking pointed questions about the weightings used in that UMR poll, what methodology, and precisely what questions were asked. Despite promising to release its methodology, Labour has not done so. 

Rattled
While the prime minister has not had a good year or two, and many National supporters are getting exasperated, at the minimum, with the growing arrogance coming out of the more elevated floors of the Beehive, a poll which says Andrew Little is more popular than John Key – as Labour’s private polling shows – just doesn’t quite feel right.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, by releasing its own private polling Mr Little showed how rattled Labour is.

If Labour believed their own polls their MPs would be in a buoyant mood, Their leader is more popular than John Key and National is at its lowest level for 10 years with Labour/Greens on the verge of being able to govern alone.

The funny thing is their MPs don’t look at all like they are on the verge of a massive victory.

Stats NZ reports:

Gross domestic product increased 0.9 percent in the June 2016 quarter, following a revised increase of 0.9 percent in the March 2016 quarter, Statistics New Zealand said today.

“Growth this quarter is being driven by strong domestic and export demand,” national accounts senior manager Gary Dunnet said. “Household spending was up 1.9 percent, with Kiwis spending more on going away, eating out, and furnishing their houses.” 

Strong international demand saw exports increase 4.0 percent, with exports of goods posting its biggest quarterly increase in nearly 20 years. This increase was driven by exports of dairy products, meat, and fruit.

“Eleven of the 16 industries were up this quarter, with construction once again providing a boost to production.”

Construction grew 5.0 percent, with all construction sub-industries showing increases. This growth also reflected higher construction-related investment, with investment in residential building strongly increasing.

Service industries continued to grow, with a 0.7 percent increase. The main drivers were rental, hiring, and real estate services; retail trade; and health care.

GDP per capita increased 0.5 percent this quarter, following a 0.3 percent increase in the March quarter.

Bill English has noted:

The third highest growth rate in the OECD shows the Government’s management of the economy is delivering more jobs and opportunities for New Zealanders, Finance Minister Bill English says.

Statistics New Zealand reported Gross Domestic Product grew by 0.9 per cent in the three months to 30 June 2016. This took annual growth to 3.6 per cent – putting New Zealand’s growth rate in the top three among developed economies.

“Despite the tough period the dairy industry has been through, we are in the unusual position of enjoying solid growth, rising employment and real wages at the same time as very low inflation.

New Zealand’s annual growth rate of 3.6 per cent is more than double the OECD rate of 1.6 per cent and compares with 3.3 per cent in Australia, 2.2 per cent in the United Kingdom, 1.2 per cent in the United States and 0.8 per cent in Japan.

And do you recall the Labour/Green/NZ First manufactured manufacturing crisis. Well the manufacturing sector is 2.8% bigger than a year ago.

Also pleasing is the growth is mainly in the private sector, not the government sector. Private consumption is up 4.0% compared to 1.7% for government consumption.

Also Labour has claimed real GDP per capita is not increasing. Well real GDP per capita has increased 6.3% in the last three years from $45,681 to $48,545.

Aimie Cronin writes in Stuff:

I’m so sick of Mike Hosking. All the eye rolls I have wasted on him, the shakings of my head, the human equivalents of the stunned faced emoji.

Has she ever considered not listening? It isn’t compulsory. There are many many radio shows you can listen to. But for some reason she feels obliged to listen to someone she doesn’t enjoy, presumably just so she can get outraged about him.

He is a character in our media landscape with no redeeming qualities

Such harsh, bordering on hysterical, language.

and what puzzles me more each time he says something backward, is that he still has a platform in which to do it.

Now we get the true agenda. I don’t like what he says so I think he should be removed from the airwaves.

Hosking fans jump to his defence saying those against him need to lighten up and stop being PC, but those people are boring. They are trying to justify their own idiocy.

Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot, is the shorter version of this extract.

I have a solution for Aimie’s problem of being forced to listen to Hosking, and the fact other people listen to him.

She should apply for a job with one of Newstalk ZB’s competitors and broadcast at the same time as him. Then she will be unable to listen to him, and of course the vast vast majority of radio listeners will abandon Hosking to listen to her instead.

Richard Harman writes at Politik:

Transport Minister Simon Bridges believes his proposals to regulate the taxi industry will be world leading.

The Land Transport Amendment Bill aims to bring Uber in from the cold and make it part of the mainstream taxi industry.

But in the process, it will require some concessions from Uber.

Bridges says the Bill will allow for a more competitive small passenger services sector than we have ever seen before.

 “We’ve tried to be scrupulously fair in this process and cerate the best regime for the sector and not for any particular interest,” he told POLITIK.

Uber drivers may not see it that way.

Under the Bill drivers of “small passenger services,” vehicles drivers will continue to be required to hold a “P” licence endorsement and to display a driver identification card.

A fit and proper person check, including a Police check, will need to be undertaken before a P endorsement is granted.

Drivers will no longer need

• an area knowledge certificate:
• to pass a full licence test every five years:
• have completed the passenger endorsement course:

These are good changes. They will reduce the cost and time to get a P endorsement. However some of the changes need not wait for legislation.  The passenger endorsement course requirement could be dropped by order in council I am told.

Bridges gives a hint to the tensions that exist within the industry when he says that new operators (Uber) face un-necessary compliance costs and obsolete requirements which were drafted in the 1980s well before smart phones had been invented.

But he also says: “If you are an established firm, a co-op taxis or the like, you are equally frustrated and perhaps even angry because there are other operators who in your view are not playing by the rules and have an unfair advantage on that basis and are also potentially  operating in a way without any assurance as to safety.”

Bridges says it is going to be a very different regime to what we have had. It will bring all small passenger services including Uber, traditional taxis, dial-a-driver and some other models all onto a level playing field.

I feel much safer with a driver I have ordered through my smartphone, than a driver you get by phoning up or randomly hailing down. When I order through my smartphone I get verified recorded knowledge of:

• The driver’s numberplate
• The driver’s name
• The driver’s photo
• The driver’s mobile number
• The time of pick up
• The route driven

I also know that I get automatically prompted to rate their service out of five, so they have a huge incentive to behave well.