Politik reports:

Goff also signalled an ambition for some central Government authority to be devolved to elements of the Super City. “Seventy percent of the growth in the country’s population and 95 percent of the growth in the working age population will be in Auckland.

“In terms of an organisation like ATEED (Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development)  – they will know more about promoting the city than NZTE (New Zealand Trade and Enterprise).  Transport Auckland will know more about Auckland’s needs than the Transport Agency.”

“Not immediately, but I think a case could arise for more authority and funding to be devolved from central to local government.”

Most people think the CCOs need to be reined in with their runway spending, but Goff thinks they need more powers and more money.

Shudder.

The NZ Initiative has released a report called “The Health of the State”. Main points are:

• Lifestyle regulations assume people do not always act in their best interests and must be protected from themselves.
• Some public health policies (current and potential) lack strong evidence.
• The report provides an economic toolkit to test the reliability of these studies.
• The report uses three policy case studies: food taxes; e-cigarettes; and alcohol marketing.
• The report concludes that some regulations are not based on sound evidence, and may not even improve health outcomes.
• In these cases, encroachments on freedom are even more unjustified.  

Some extracts from their case studies:

Food Taxes – The report finds that studies fail to prove that taxes will achieve their stated policy intention: reducing obesity. Many studies focus on proxies, like whether a tax will reduce consumption or expenditure of that good. But they do not consider whether people substitute to cheaper products or other unhealthy food.   

This is a key point I have often made. Food is very different to tobacco. Almost every substitute to tobacco is far far healthier for you. This is not the case for food and drink.

Despite aggressive policies by government to get New Zealand ‘smokefree by 2025’, the smoking rate is now only decreasing marginally. This suggests that those who continue to smoke either do not want to quit, or lack access to effective cessation tools. Meanwhile, e-cigarettes are a much safer alternative to conventional cigarettes, with the potential to reduce the overall harm of smoking. Yet these products currently face greater regulatory burdens than cigarettes and tobacco products that have proven risk.  

It’s bizarre that it is legal to buy and sell tobacco in New Zealand, but illegal to sell e-cigarettes!

Andrew Little posted on Facebook about his visit to the Auckland Jewish Community Centre.  A very nice post from him about the Jewish community.

Sadly the comments on the post (and no I don’t blame him for them) show how antisemitism is alive and well in NZ.

Jason Bryant doesn’t seem to understand (or care) about the difference between the state of Israel and Jews living in New Zealand. This is as bigoted as blaming the actions of Saudi Arabia on a New Zealand Muslim.

But it gets worse.

Sean Parkinson actually calls for death to all Jews. What a lovely chap. Would have been right at home in Nazi Germany.

And then we also have Michael Peacock with the conspiracy theories that Jews were behind 9/11 and running the world banking system,

They so hate Jews they can’t even see the point being made by Fraser Newman that blaming the actions of one country on all jews is like blaming the Kashmir violence on all Indians.

Quite sickening that such a positive post by Andrew Little gets such vile comments.

The annual press freedom debate is coming up, which is always a fun night which also raises money for the Media Safety and Solidarity Fund, a joint fund with the Media Alliance in Australia which help journalists and their families around the Asia-Pacific region.

Details are:

• Date: Thursday May the 5th
• Venue: The Backbencher.
• Moot: ‘That local body elections are a waste of time’
• Affirmative: David Seymour, Andrew Little, David Townsend.
• Negative: Judith Collins, Metiria Turei, Pinky Agnew.
• Chair: Jane Patterson.
• Tickets: $25 from Brent or Jane

Will be fascinating to see David Seymour and Andrew Little on the same time, and same for Judith Collins and Metiria Turei.

One News reports:

Answer the question Mr Little: Labour leader gets repetitive, won’t answer straight on Ardern link

It seems Labour leader Andrew Little isn’t keen to answer questions about the father of one of his MPs that is linked to a hotel deal in Niue that he has criticised.

I bet he won’t.

Either Little was unaware that Ardern’s father was one of the trustees, or he didn’t care. That means either incompetence or malice.

Mr Little yesterday came out swinging about the fact that the Scenic Hotel Group was given the contract to run the Matavai Resort on the tiny Pacific island, weeks after the chain’s founder gave a donation to the National Party.

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully and Scenic have denied there is anything amiss, but that hasn’t stopped Mr Little speaking out about the deal, saying it stinks.

It emerged today that the father of Jacinda Ardern, Ross Ardern, is a trustee owner of the resort, and would have helped appoint the hotel’s board of directors, who organised the contract tender.

Mr Little was asked repeatedly by ONE News if his accusations reflected badly on Mr Ardern, but he wasn’t biting, giving the same stock answer every time.

Little went on about how the trustees were personally appointed by McCully and the decision stunk to high heaven. How can that not be seen as a slight on Mr Ardern (who is a very respected public servant)?

This graph from the Wall Street Journal is very powerful. It is backed up by almost every expert analysis of the situation in New Zealand – land availability is the biggest factor in house prices.

If you want cheaper house prices in Auckland, vote for a Council that will make more land available.

Andrew Little said:

“Kris Faafoi is a very talented MP whose hard work has earned him a place on the Shadow Cabinet. He is instantly recognisable to many New Zealanders and connects well when he’s on the road – an invaluable skill when working with the tourism industry.

When you read this carefully you see that Little is saying that Kris is being promoted because he used to be on TV and gets on well with people.

The Guardian reports:

George Osborne has said the British government would lose £36bn in net tax receipts, equivalent to 8p on the basic rate of income tax or 7p on VAT, if the UK leaves the EU and negotiates a bilateral trade agreement with the bloc.

The chancellor said a 200-page Treasury analysis of the impact of Brexit showed it would make British families poorer, and he accused leave campaigners of believing that was a price worth paying. But out campaigners said that the chancellor was talking down the British economy in an unpatriotic way.

The study concluded that a Canadian-style model, in which the UK negotiated a new trade deal with the EU that did not require freedom of movement, would reduce Britain’s GDP by 6.2%.

The Bremain campaign seems to be campaigning entirely on scaring people from Brexit, rather than the positive benefits of the EU. I’m not sure it is a good strategy.

Another group, Grassroots Out, argued that the £4,300 figure amounted to 21p a person a day in return for national sovereignty.

A good line.

The SMH reports:

The Senate has defied Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull just one day into a three-week special sitting of Parliament, handing him a double dissolution trigger and setting the stage for an unprecedented 75-day election campaign.

Mr Turnbull’s high-risk plan to hold a double dissolution poll on July 2 comes as two new polls found the Coalition tied or even trailing a resurgent Labor opposition.

It will be a fascinating election.

The winning party may also get a majority in the Senate as they have changed the law so preference deals between parties no longer have the same impact so you are less likely to get someone elected who had 0.5% primary vote.

That means the May 3 federal budget will now form a key element of the government’s re-election pitch and that a pair of untested leaders – neither Mr Turnbull nor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten have led their party in a campaign before – will fight for Australians’ votes in what shapes as a marathon political contest.

Mr Shorten is due to deliver his budget reply speech on May 5, and Mr Turnbull must visit the Governor-General no later than May 11 to formally issue the writs and announce the poll.

On Sunday, Mr Turnbull confirmed defeat of the ABCC bill would mean “there will be a dissolution of both houses and an election of the 2nd of July” and speaking after the Senate vote, Liberal Senate leader George Brandis said the restoration of the ABCC was an important part of the government’s economic agenda.

The election needs to be fought on more than the fighting union corruption. That is an important issue, but not the most important issue to every day Australians.

Stuff reports:

McDonald’s is opening a restaurant in America that’s unlike any other McDonald’s in the world.

The new 6500-square-foot location in Missouri will offer all-you-can-eat french fries, customisable desserts, sandwiches, and burgers, as well as table service, The St. Joseph News-Press reports.

How terrible. I expect the normal suspects will call for this to be banned.

I wonder how long until they demand hotels ban breakfast buffets also?

Liam Hehir writes at Stuff:

For example, there’s no suggestion that the prime minister himself makes use of a foreign trust (or, indeed, does anything illegal). However, we are told by political analysts that he has a perception problem since his long-time lawyer works for a firm that advises on such trusts for other clients. Again, there has been no suggestion that the services provided to those other clients are in any way provided illegally or unethically.

Let us put to one side for one moment the fact that the same commentators pronouncing on the unfortunate public perception of the matter are the people who are responsible for shaping public perception. That’s bad enough. But are the pickings really so slim that the best we can do is try to impose some guilt by association on the basis of your lawyer’s other clients. I wonder how many television reporters would like being told that they have a perception problem because the firm they used to buy their house also defends criminals?

That’s a great comparison.

Stuff reports:

Auckland doctor Robyn Toomath spent years telling her diabetes patients to lose weight only to have them fail despite their best intentions.

Eventually she stopped altogether and her book, Fat Science, explains why.

Radical as it might sound Toomath says individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for becoming fat, or obese.

“It’s not appropriate to consider body size as being within our personal control when genetics and the environment in which we live has such a powerful effect.”

Toomath says some people are genetically pre-disposed to weight gain and in an environment packed with fatty, sugar-soaked food, it is inevitable they will lose any battle of the bulge.

I totally disagree. Yes there are genetic and environmental factors but they are far less powerful than the power of individual choice.

I got massively overweight because I ate too much food.

I lost the weight because I stopped eating so much food, and did more exercise.

My problem wasn’t the type of food, the advertising, the taste. It was simply I ate too much. And that is the case for most people who are overweight (not all).

Toomath blames almost everything on evil big business, and discounts any significant role for individual choice.

Andrew Little announced:

Kris Faafoi has been promoted to Labour’s Shadow Cabinet and receives the Tourism portfolio while Clayton Cosgrove takes on a business outreach role – a move prompted by Mr Cosgrove’s decision to not stand at the next election, says Opposition Leader Andrew Little.     

Business Outreach? That doesn’t sound like a portfolio, but a description for a corporate fundraiser.

Louise Upston announced:

Associate Local Government Minister Louise Upston has announced that the online voting trial proposed for this year’s local body elections will not proceed as more work is required to ensure a trial meets public and government expectations.

“Public confidence in local elections is fundamentally important. Given real concerns about security and vote integrity, it is too early for a trial,” says Ms Upston.

Too early? I’d accept that in 2000 or even 2006 but not 2016.

I feel very sorry for the local bodies who have invested time and money into this, to be told no by the Government. The whole point of a trial, is to try it.

Fewer and fewer people use the post office. The turnout will continue to decline for local body elections if the Government continues to make it hard for people to vote. So if there is low turnout, blame the Government for saying no.

35% of people in the NZ Election Study said they would choose to vote online if they had the choice. That is for parliamentary elections, and I suspect it would be even higher for local body elections as postal voting is far more insecure than Internet voting.

The Herald reports:

Fonterra has continued to lose farmers to its competitors, based on latest production data.

The co-operative’s market share last year ran at about 85 per cent, down from 96 per cent at the time of its inception in 2001.

A timely reminder that Fonterra is not a monopoly. If dairy farmers think they will get a better price from another company, they can do so.

Rakaia-based specialist dairy manufacturer Synlait Milk said last month that it had picked up 28 new Canterbury milk suppliers – bringing its total to 201 for 2016/17.

Synlait said increased demand for nutritional products and increased production capacity had created a chance for more Canterbury dairy farmers to sign up.

Open Country Dairy – the country’s second biggest dairy manufacturer – is also understood to have added new suppliers.

“They are picking up as many as they need, based on their capacity and what they want,” Kilsby said.

Good to see the smaller companies growing.

The Economist reports:

VISITING a supermarket in Venezuela is like entering Monty Python’s cheese-shop sketch. “Do you have any milk?” The shop assistant shakes her head. Sugar? No. Coffee? No. Soap? No. Cornflour? No. Cooking oil? No. Do you in fact have any of the products that the government deems so essential that it fixes their prices at less than what it costs to make them? No.

This is inevitably happens with stupid price controls.

The Venezuelan government spends like Father Christmas after too much eggnog, subsidising everything from rural homes to rice. It cannot pay its bills, especially since the oil price collapsed, so it prints money.

Sounds like Green Party policy under Russel – subsidise everything and print money!

The IMF predicts that inflation will be 720% in Venezuela this year, a figure Zimbabwe hit in 2006. By 2008 Zimbabwe was racked by hyperinflation so crippling that beggars who were offered billion-Zimbabwe-dollar bills would frown and reject them (see chart).

I have a trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. It cost me US$1 and was over-priced.

The Telegraph reports:

Professor Sir David MacKay, who has died aged 48, was a Cambridge University physicist who set out to cut “UK emissions of twaddle” by applying the laws of physics and mathematics to the debate on sustainable energy.

48 is so very young.

MacKay’s genius was to express all forms of power consumption and production in a single unit of measurement – kilowatt hours per day (kWh/d). A 40 watt lightbulb, kept switched on all the time, uses one kWh/d, while driving the average car 50km a day consumes 40 kWh/d. Such comparisons, MacKay argued, help to shift the focus to the major issues away from much-hyped “eco-gestures” such as believing you have done your bit by remembering to switch off the mobile phone charger. “The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second,” he wrote. Switching it off for a year saves as much energy as is needed for one hot bath. Such gestures were akin to “bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon”.

I wish EECA or someone would so something like that here – clearly explain what measures are significant and which are trivial.

Applying the same approach to electricity generation, MacKay argued that for renewable facilities to make an appreciable contribution, they would have to be developed on a massive, industrial scale. At the time the book was written, Britain was generating about 4.5 per cent of its electricity from renewables, mostly hydro-power, landfill gas and wind.

Any substantial increase would involve nationwide projects that would have significant effects on the environment. If, for example, it was decided burning biomass (crops for fuel) was the answer, about 75 per cent of Britain would need to be covered in biomass plantations to meet only 25 per cent of our current electricity demand.

Some rational facts!

We require either a radical reduction in consumption, or significant additional sources of energy – or, of course, both” – the main “clean” alternatives to renewables being nuclear and so-called clean coal, “which is as yet an unproven technology”. MacKay was, he claimed, “absolutely not anti-renewables. I love renewables… but I’m also pro-arithmetic.”

Pro-maths – I like it.

It was here that the consumer could make a difference: “ ’Turn your thermostat down’ is, by my reckoning, the single best piece of advice you can give someone. So is ‘fly less’ and ‘drive less’. But hybrid cars and home windmills are just greenwash.”

Again be good to have a NZ guide to what makes the most difference.

There’s been a lot of stories about the detention of the Channel Nine crew who went to Lebanon to film the kidnapping or recovery of two children by a team hired by their Australian mother.

I can understand why the mother would want to hire a team to recover her children after their father refused to return them from a holiday.

But why a media organisation thought it would go along and film this, I do not know. Even worse, they may have put up the money for the operation, which means they face criminal liability for the kidnapping.

I feel sorry for the staff who are in jail in Lebanon. They may face a lengthy jail sentence. The ones who should be in the gun are the decision makers who decided to authorise this and authorise the money.

The Herald reports:

Foreign Minister Murray McCully says any suggestion a donation to National was a factor in the decision to grant a hotel chain a contract in Nuie is “utterly baseless.”

Labour has called for the Auditor General to look into Scenic Hotels Group contract to manage the Matavai resort on Niue after it was discovered the group’s founder, Earl Hagaman, gave a $101,000 donation to National the month before the contract was announced in 2014.

Mr McCully said he had no involvement in the tender process or the decision, which was run by Auckland-based consultancy company Horwath HTL in 2014. There were two proposals and Scenic Hotels was the preferred one.”I have the total confidence in the way this process was run and had no involvement in the awarding of the contract. Any suggestion that this contract was awarded on anything other than the basis of a rigorous commercial process is utterly baseless.”

Since 2011, the Government has put $18 million into the Matavai as part of its efforts to boost tourism to the small Pacific Island country.

That included $7.5 million after Scenic Hotels took over the management to build a conference centre.

Labour leader Andrew Little asked the Auditor General to investigate whether Mr Hagaman’s donation to National at the same time his company was tendering for the Niue contract was above board.

I think it is appropriate for the Auditor-General to investigate, but that doesn’t mean I think there is any link.

This is why it is good to have transparency of major donations – so people can apply scrutiny such as this.

It also means that anyone donating a significant amount knows their donation is public.

Brendan Taylor, the managing director of Scenic Hotel Group, said linking the donation to the tender was “a lot of misinformation.”

Mr Hagaman had donated to National and Act in the past. “What he does from a personal perspective is totally up to him. What we do at the Scenic Hotel Group, in a lot of cases, we’ve got nothing to do with each other.”

“I was involved in the whole [process] and I can put my hand on my heart and say I know it was a squeaky clean transaction. There was no favouritism in any way towards it.”

And who are the trustees?

The Matavai is owned by the Niue Tourism Property Trust on behalf of the Government of Niue, which owned the resort before then. That arrangement was put in place in 2011 to ensure oversight of the aid investment New Zealand was putting in. Mr McCully appoints the trustees who are Ross Ardern (NZ’s High Commissioner to Niue and father of Labour MP Jacinda Ardern), Ministry of Foreign Affairs deputy secretary Jonathan Kings and former High Commissioner Mark Blumsky, who was formerly a National MP and now lives in Niue.

I really don’t think the father of a Labour MP is going to be awarding tenders to a company because they donated to National.

In another story, the Herald reports:

The managing director of Scenic Hotel Group says he doubted the company’s founder knew the company was negotiating a management contract in Niue, which it won, at the time he made a $101,000 donation to the National Party.

Labour wants the Auditor-General to look into Scenic Hotels Group’s contract to manage the Matavai resort on Niue after it was discovered the group’s founder, Earl Hagaman, gave the $101,000 to National during the election campaign before the contract was awarded in 2014. Foreign Minister Murray McCully said any suggestion the donation was a factor in granting Scenic Hotels the contract was “utterly baseless”.

Mr McCully said he had no involvement in the tender process or decision, which was run by Auckland-based consultancy company Horwath HTL in 2014. Scenic Hotels was one of two proposals and was the preferred one.

Scenic Hotel Group managing director Brendan Taylor said Mr Hagaman knew the company was looking into Niue but that had been a six-year process and Mr Hagaman had not even known where Niue was. Any mention the company was tendering for it would have been “a cursory conversation”.

As I said, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if the Auditor-General investigates, just to remove any suspicion. But I don’t see anything beyond coincidence at this stage.

Real Clear Politics reports:

The U.S. Department of Energy published data last week with some amazing revelations — so amazing that most Americans will find them hard to believe. As a nation, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent from last year. Over the past 14 years, our carbon emissions are down more than 10 percent. On a per-unit-of-GDP basis, U.S. carbon emissions are down by closer to 20 percent.

A fracking great result.

Even more stunning: We’ve reduced our carbon emissions more than virtually any other nation in the world, including most of Europe.

 How can this be? We never ratified the Kyoto Treaty. We never adopted a national cap-and-trade system, or a carbon tax, as so many of the sanctimonious Europeans have done.

The answer isn’t that the EPA has regulated CO2 out of the economy. With strict emission standards, the EPA surely has started to strangle our domestic industries, such as coal, and our electric utilities. But that’s not the big story here.

The primary reason carbon emissions are falling is because of hydraulic fracturing — or fracking.

This is where the Greens fall down. They say time and time again that climate change is the most vital issue of all time, yet they refuse to have anything to do with other energy sources with lower greenhouse gas emissions such as fracking and nuclear energy.

Fracking is simply a new way to get at America’s vast storehouse of tens of trillions of dollars worth of shale oil and gas that lies beneath us, coast to coast — from California to upstate New York. Fracking produces massive amounts of natural gas, and, as a consequence, natural gas prices have fallen in the past decade from above $8 per million BTUs to closer to $2 this year — a 75 percent reduction — due to the spike in domestic supplies.

This free fall in prices means that America is using far more natural gas for heating and electricity and much less coal. Here is how the International Energy Agency put it: “In the United States, (carbon) emissions declined by 2 percent, as a large switch from coal to natural gas use in electricity generation took place.”

The problem with many in the Greens and environment lobby groups is they don’t care about facts or science. They have a quasi-religious view that anything extractive is unnatural and hence should be banned. So even though fracking has seen the US decrease their greenhouse gas emissions, they still want it banned.

“The bounty to the white-herring fishery is a tonnage bounty; and is proportioned to the burden of the ship, not to her diligence or success in the fishery; and it has, I am afraid, been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty.”

– Adam Smith

The quote of the week is brought to you by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. To support the Union’s campaign for lower taxes and less government waste, click here.