The latest Yougov net favourability rankings on the Royal Family are:
Meghan will be pleased she is still more popular that the paedophile!
Stuff reports:
Peters strongly rejected Hipkins’ assertion that he held a record for being the worst behaved or most suspended MP.
“Chris Hipkins says a lot of things. But he is a sausage eater who doesn’t know what a woman is,” Peters said.
When Stuff asked what he meant by that comment, Peters clarified that Hipkins was a “sausage roll eater”.
It would have been funnier if Peters hadn’t clarified, and just let the original statement stand!
The Herald reports:
Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered New Zealand’s 2025 Budget on Thursday in a vivid blue pencil dress.
The distinctive outfit is believed to be the Nouvelle Sculpt Stretch Crepe Dress, from British womenswear label The Fold London.
It was a sartorial choice that sent all the wrong messages, according to one New Zealand fashion designer.
Caroline Marr, owner of Auckland-based fashion brand The Carpenter’s Daughter, called Willis’ decision not to wear a Kiwi brand during the high-profile moment a signal of “total disrespect” to the local fashion industry.
Oh FFS, how is this news? It’s just a total bullshit story.
A good response from Chris Bishop:
I asked ChatGPT when each US Supreme Court Justice is expected to die based on standard demographic data. Most will probably exceed the average as they would have above average access to healthcare. But this can give us some idea of how long the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court might remain. The expected death dates, in order, are:
So a majority is near guaranteed until at least 2035. It is unlikely that both Thomas and Alito would die in office or resign during a Democratic presidency, so in reality it is probably at least 15 years until a possible change. The three Trump nominees are likely to be there until 2050, so the GOP just needs to appoint two of the five vacancies likely to come up before then to retain a majority until 2050!
The Free Press reports:
The IPC never declared a famine in Gaza. The report she cited was a projection of possible outcomes, not a conclusive finding. The next month, USAID issued its own analysis alleging that famine was underway, an indictment so serious that it required confirmation from an independent board of global experts known as the Famine Review Committee (FRC).
The FRC, which functions as the IPC’s final authority and quality control check, rebuked the USAID analysis, calling its conclusions insupportable. The failures were stunning.
Private sector food deliveries, such as trucks contracted to commercial warehouses, were left out of the agency’s estimates of the total food supply in north Gaza. As a result, as much as 82 percent of the “daily kilocalorie requirement” in northern Gaza last April wasn’t counted. In the same month, USAID’s famine monitor also left out 940 metric tons (2 million pounds) of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast donated by the UN to bakeries in north Gaza, enough to make about 1,400 metric tons (3 million pounds) of bread.
The IPC is the authoritative body when it comes to defining how severe food insecurity is in a region, and whether it constitutes a famine. They have never declared there is a famine in Gaza. They have in Sudan, incidentally.
It was never in doubt that the Israel-Hamas war brought immense human suffering to Gaza, including from food shortages. But USAID depicted a world that had little in common with reality.
There is suffering and a shortage of food. But that is not the same as a famine.
Famine—like genocide, fascist, and dictator—is a word susceptible to rhetorical abuse that can dilute and even invert its meaning. “My goal was to take famine from being a rhetorical word and make it a technical term,” Haan told me. When the IPC uses the word famine now, “we mean famine.”
If everything is a genocide, a famine or a fascism, then over time nothing is. It is important to not allow hyperbole rob terms of their meaning.
An interesting poll in the UK on transgender issues.
In terms of net agreement with the UK Supreme Court decision that women-only spaces can exclude trans women, the results were:
So that is net approval from all major voting blocs. Few issues achieve that.
Sarah Milgrim was 26. Yaron Lischinsky was 30. They were about to get engaged. They were murdered in Washington DC by Elias Rodriguez, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (a far-left, Marxist, pro-Palestine group) and Black Lives Matters activist.
After he murdered them he shouted “There’s only one solution, Intifada revolution,”
So immensely sad.
Last week Stuff ran a story that started:
Leah Gibson and Carl Watters have both been charged with trespass for using an access way that crosses their neighbour’s land and say they and their kids have been reduced to sneaking off the property at night. The neighbour says they knew what they were buying into and he’s offered them a fair agreement. Tony Wall reports on a case of neighbours at war.
My first instinct was sympathy for them. Of course they should be able to use an access way, and the Police involvement seemed over the top:
One morning in late January, Leah Gibson drove down the steep, winding track that she’d always used to leave her idyllic property nearDovedale, Tasman.
She and her toddler daughters, Millie, 3, and Lacey, 2, were off to dentist and doctor’s appointments in Richmond.
When she got to the bottom of the drive where it joins Win Valley Rd, she found two police cars and four officers waiting. They pulled her over.
“They said, ‘We’re actually here to arrest you’,” Gibson recalls.
At this stage you , like me, are outraged that a mother with toddlers is being arrested merely for driving down a track. But as I read the full story, my sympathies changed:
According to the couple, relations with him were initially good, and there were tentative discussions to formalise the existing right of way in their favour.
But last year the parties began arguing over the issue of stock grazing on the access way – Mirkin would close the three gates across his section of the track even when none of his stock were present, the couple claim.
Watters says he retaliated by padlocking the gates open; he claims Mirkin then cut the locks and padlocked the gate shut; at which point Watters cut the new locks and at one point took a gate from its hinges.
This is the point at which my sympathies changed. It is Mirkin’s property and access way, and they were padlocking the gates open, and cutting off the padlocks the owner put on, and removed a gate. The sense of entitlement seemed high.
Gibson and Watters believed the conditions were unreasonable – there was a ban on heavy vehicles which they needed for their farm and forestry block, visitors couldn’t use the drive without Mirkin’s written consent and they had to pay him $100 a month, which they claim is “extortion”.
$100 a month doesn’t seem like extortion to me. Seems pretty reasonable.
A follow up article, confirms my suspicions that the couple claiming they were victims, were not. It reveals:
Good to see Stuff follow up the original story.
Radio NZ reports:
At the same time, RNZ will have its budget cut by $18m over four years – $4.6m a year – around 7 percent of its current $67m allocation.
This means they will still be getting $62 million a year. In 2017 they got $35 million. Any other media organisation would love to have revenues in 2025 that are 77% higher than in 2017.
Even if you take inflation into account, Radio NZ funding next year will be 38% higher than in 2017.
Budget 2025 includes $6.4 million over four years to hire journalists in heartland New Zealand for reporting on councils and courts.
Minister for Media and Communications Paul Goldsmith said the funding will help communities stay informed and hold decision-makers to account.
“It will get funding into regional newsrooms so that more local frontline journalists can report on the things that matter to their audiences.”
The money will expand two existing programmes – Local Democracy Reporting and Open Justice – which the minister said had an emphasis on “reporting, rather than opinion”.
These two areas are the rare areas of media worth funding centrally. As Goldsmith says they are old fashioned reporting, not opinion. But they are also vital parts of New Zealand that need sunlight. We want media reports of court cases, and decisions by Councils.
The Herald reports:
During her Budget presentation, Willis said that pay equity costs in 2020 were initially expected to reach $3.7b but there had since been a “blowout” with costs rising steeply, especially due to Labour’s 2022 decision to fund claims in the “funded sector”.
The exact figure isn’t known, but as they have announced a $12.8b reduction in the cost over the next four years, it is safe to assume the scheme Labour put in place claiming it would cost under $4 billion was looking to cost over $15 billion.
In the long run the annual cost to taxpayers could have been around $5 billion a year. To fund this would mean the top tax rate would have to go from 39% to 57%!
There is definitely a double standard here. We even have an excellent example to highlight it.
In 2021 an Auckland Transport manager posted a message to a Facebook group cautioning against a bill that was being considered by Parliament. It turned into an employment issue due to complaints from activists, and the media named and shamed him. It was Stephen Rainbow, incidentally.
In this case we have someone wearing their work lanyard yelling abuse at the Deputy Prime Minister during a live media event, and insulting him in front of TV cameras. In this case the media don’t name him.
I am sure readers will recall how people said it would be terrible if the TPM co-leaders suspension meant they couldn’t attend the Budget debate. So the Government decided to delay the debate on their suspension until June.
But guess what. Today in the House as MPs gathered for what is the most consequential event of the year – the Budget, one party had half of its MPs missing – including both co-leaders. That was TPM of course.
Again they have no interest in governing, legislating or scrutinising. If they did, their co-leaders would be there. To be honest I doubt anyone would notice any difference once they are suspended for 21 days.
I suspect the usual suspects will call the Budget just released an austerity budget. They are lying. Austerity has a specific meaning. It is when you cut overall expenditure. It doesn’t mean they have increased it less than what we would like.
Anyone who claims the government has an austerity budget is dishonest or dumb or both.
There is a very simple way to determine if this is austerity. You can compare the spending in the budget for the 2025/26 financial year to the spending Grant Robertson announced in his 2023 Budget for the very same 2025/25 financial year.
So this is comparing like for like. This is what Robertson said he would spend in 2025/26 with what Willis has said she will spend in 2025/26. Core expenses are $2.6b higher and total expenditure is $6.8b higher. So again anyone who claims this is austerity is a liar.
In four key areas of social policy, spending is greater in this budget than Robertson said he would spend.
There have been cuts to spending in some areas – to fund higher priority spending in other areas. This is the normal job of Government – to redirect spending from one area to another. But that is not the same as cutting spending overall.
Pleased to see they are means testing the KiwiSaver subsidy from taxpayers. Giving $500 a year to people earning over $180,000 is just robbing Peter to pay Peter.
The projected surplus in 2028 is very very small, and there is no doubt the government will need to keep discuss discipline very tight next year also, despite it being an election year. We have to get back into surplus and start repaying debt before the next global economic shock hits.
The Herald reports:
An economist from New Zealand’s largest bank said the Labour Government went on a “debt-funded spending spree”, leaving a fiscal mess for the current Government to clean up.
ANZ economist Miles Workman, in a research note previewing next week’s Government Budget, said the large growth in spending that occurred in Labour’s second term was an “inflation-fuelling fiscal expansion” that was yet to be fully unwound by the coalition. …
To illustrate the challenge, Workman cost-adjusted pre-pandemic government expenses and compared them to what the Government was actually forecast to spend.
This shows that “cost-adjusted government expenses were forecast to run around $15 billion higher per year compared to just before the pandemic” and suggests that it is not just the state of the economy or rising costs that is driving the Government’s massive deficits.
“The point this [calculation] makes is once you strip out the increased cost of delivering public services, the Government is still spending about $15b a year more per year than just before the pandemic,” Workman told the Herald.
“The pandemic came along. The last Government provided support, but it kept spending. Around Budget 2022, inflation was starting to pick up. The output gap was showing there wasn’t any resource available in the economy to accommodate future fiscal expansion, but the Government delivered another stimulatory Budget,” he said. …
It was not right to “pin persistent fiscal deficits on the state of the economy. Rather, these reflect a fundamental shortfall between government revenues and expenses left by the previous Government – a shortfall the current Government is addressing only gradually (by containing growth in new spending and allowing growth in the nominal economy to outpace that of the public sector),” the note said.
Labour left the incoming Government a permanent structural deficit. We should never forget that.
Radio NZ reports:
Loudly heckling a politician at a public event is “absolutely” cause for dismissal if it clearly tarnishes the employer, says an employment law specialist.
A Wellington worker’s heated exchange with Winston Peters at a public press conference has landed him hot water with his employer, who does work for the government.
The insults flew as the minister for rail was detailing a $600 million funding boost for rail at a press conference at Wellington Train station during the morning commuter rush yesterday.
The man interrupted the conference, loudly accusing the deputy prime minister of talking bollocks.
The heckler was wearing a lanyard that identified his employer as engineering firm Tonkin +Taylor. The company issued an apology, saying it was investigating in line with its code of conduct and did not condone behaviour that fell short of that code.
They could sack him, but they shouldn’t. A warning would be appropriate.
Having said that what he did was very stupid. He repeatedly insulted the Minister for Rail, who was announcing more money for Kiwirail, and his employer is a major contractor to Kiwirail. And his heckling wasn’t funny or policy based. It was just personally abusive.
Stuff reports:
Andrew Little has promised to act on what Wellingtonians want: saving Begonia House and Khandallah Pool and complete the Karori Event Centre.
However, the Wellington mayoral candidate did not make any mention of the Golden Mile project in his campaign speech.
He has correctly said that the Council should not sign any further contracts around the Golden Mile. Nominations open in less than 50 days, and the new Council should be allowed to decide what is best for the city.
Little promised to end public excluded meetings, ending the “misuse of ‘commercial confidentiality’”, which was code for “we don’t want to tell you”.
He pointed to areas where the council has wasted millions with little oversight: like the $150 million town hall blow out.
Great on ending public excluded meetings. Incidentally the blowout ion the town hall is more than $150 million. It could be over $270 million.
Biden’s health has been very big news this week, around two issues – his dementia and his cancer diagnosis.
The dementia issue was front and centre because of two books released about the cover up over his declining cognitive ability. Adding to that was the release of the audio tapes of his interview with the special prosecutor:
Amid long, uncomfortable pauses, Joe Biden struggled to recall when his son died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected or why he had classified documents he shouldn’t have had, according to audio Axios obtained of his October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur. …
The audio also appears to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Democrats and Biden’s White House blasted Hur for his observations about Biden. They repeatedly insisted he was “sharp” and that Hur was politically motivated. But the audio from the five-plus hours of interviews indicates he and co-counsel Marc Krickbaum were respectful and friendly.
Those who attacked Hur for his observations should be ashamed. It is now apparent that not only did he not exaggerate, but if anything he was relatively benign. Hur told the truth, and was assailed for it by operatives who didn’t want the public to know.
Then in the last few days we have the news that Biden has Stage 4 metastasized prostate cancer. This is terrible news for him and his family. The fact he lost his eldest son to cancer makes it more horrible.
However sympathy for Biden doesn’t negate the public interest in whether he truly had no idea he had prostate cancer until after he left office. Some cancers are very fast moving, but prostate cancer is not. The Herald reports:
In interviews with the news media, some physicians raised the idea that Biden could have known about his condition while in office, saying it was surprising that the President – who has access to some of the best health care in the country – would not have learned about his cancer earlier.
“He did not develop it in the last 100 to 200 days,” Dr Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist who served as an adviser on the coronavirus pandemic for the Biden administration, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. “He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.
“I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that,” added Emanuel, who noted that both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had reported being tested for prostate cancer.
There seem to be four possibilities here. They are:
It feels a bit yucky discussing this, as Biden is highly likely to die from the prostate cancer (however it may be years, not months). But it is a legitimate part of the discussion about where the White House staff were covering up for his infirmities – both physical, and mental.
Reasonable people could disagree about whether Biden was able to do the job of President during his first (and only) term of 2021 – 2025. But it is crystal clear that Biden would have been absolutely incapable of being President for a full second term. The fact that they tried to do so, when they must have known he could clearly not remain mentally pr physically strong enough until 2029 reflects extremely badly on the Democratic Party.
One solution could be to pass a law requiring the President to undertake a comprehensive physical and mental examination, done by a panel of doctors (not just the White House physician). Maybe extend this to major presidential candidates also.
The Labour Party can’t form a potential Government without TPM, so they appear to have decided to go all in on their behalf. Evidence:
Personally I’m delighted. The more Labour hug the toxic TPM, the more it will doom them come the election as voters realise that a vote for Labour is a vote for Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer.
Roger Partridge writes:
Auckland Council has settled on an innovative approach to combating climate change: spend around $36 million a year on reducing New Zealand’s carbon footprint without reducing net emissions by a gram.
As The Centrist revealed this week, the Council’s food scrap collection scheme – rolled out across 470,000 homes, whether anyone asked for it or not – achieves gross emissions reductions at the bargain price of $1,440 per tonne.
That is 28 times the price of a carbon credit on New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme.
Fiscal insanity. It achieves nothing, for a huge cost.
First, Council ships Australian-made bins and Chinese liners to Auckland. Then, each week, it collects partially used scraps from the 35% of households that bother, loads them onto trucks, and sends them 200km south to Reporoa. Nothing says “climate policy implementation” quite like a weekly 200km journey by road to Reporoa.
Yet, even if the scheme reduces landfill methane, it doesn’t lower New Zealand’s net emissions. Under the ETS, those savings just free up carbon credits for someone else to use. The ETS cap – not Council policy – sets our national net emissions.
Meanwhile, the bins are made in Australia and the liners manufactured in China – leaving a hefty global emissions trail from production to delivery. The result? A $36 million scheme that might actually increase global emissions. But at least it feels green.
This is why you can’t believe Councils when they say there is no alternative to rates increases. They try and convince us it all goes on core infrastructure, but it is not the case.
Stuff has a very good article on the issues around former Deputy Police Commissioner Jevan McSkimming. It doesn’t cover everything, as some issues are before the courts, but there is one part I want to highlight:
More than 20 months earlier, in February 2023, a Stuff reporter received an email containing explicit allegations about McSkimming. It was the kind of thing that often drops into journalists’ inboxes, and usually lies somewhere between bluster and bullshit.
The emails about McSkimming continued throughout 2023, with further concerning allegations, but little proof that would sustain a story.
The things suggested could scarcely be immune to office whispers and gossip.
In that time, however, McSkimming’s star continued to rise.
On March 28, 2023, six weeks after allegations against McSkimming reached Stuff, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins accepted advice from officials that McSkimming was a “fit and proper” person, that he was “honest and trustworthy”, and should be appointed deputy commissioner.
Here is the question I have. If the person making allegations against McSkimming had taken them to the media six weeks before Hipkins appointed him Deputy Police Commissioner, is it plausible that these allegations were not known to anyone at Police National HQ?
Who knew at Police HQ? Did they investigate? Did they inform the PSC? Did they inform the then Prime Minister? Did they inform the IPCA?
Hipkins has insisted there were no red flags regarding McSkimming.
And the only hint of concern can be found in a letter from Hipkins’ office to the Cabinet Appointment and Honours Committee.
“Deputy Commissioner McSkimming,” it begins, before the remainder of the sentence is redacted from the document that was publicly released.
It then goes on to say: “This is not seen as an impediment to Deputy Commissioner McSkimming’s appointment.”
If the redacted section doesn’t relate to these allegations, then why not state that explicitly?
I find it hard to believe that if someone is e-mailing the media about him, that their allegations were not known to some in the Police hierarchy. Now they may not have thought them credible, but they should have investigated.
I suspect once the criminal aspects of this are dealt with (as that must take priority) there will be a need for a public inquiry into who knew what, and when.