This poll would see Prime Minister Farage with a majority government. The seat projection on it is:

• Reform 346 (+341)
• Labour 145 (-267)
• Lib Dems 73 (+1)
• SNP 39 (+30)
• Conservatives 17 (-104)

The cross-tabs show us where Reform is doing best:

1. Midlands 33%
2. North England 33%
3. South England 30%
4. Wales 28%
5. London 20%
6. Scotland 18%

So their strongest support is the Midlands and North of England.

And demographically:

1. C2DE: 39%
2. 50 – 64: 36%
3. 65+: 36%
4. Men 33%
5. Women 25%
6. 25 – 49: 24%
7. ABC1: 22%
8. 18 – 24: 10%

Their strongest support is from lower socio-economic voters.

1. How much is spent in support of parents as the first and most important teacher of their child(ren)? … As opposed to bureaucracy/system for the sake of it because it has always been there.
   
2. What portion of the education spend is for direcectly benefiting the child? … As opposed to bureaucracy/system for the sake of it because it has always been there.

Despite HUGE promises to reduce the Ministry of Education “head count” to 2,700 it is still over 4,200. A massive waste of tax-payer’s money in these “tough times”.

This does not get challenged by National alligned entities such as the NZ Initiative and the Taxpayers Union because … they are National aligned. The sort of trivial incrementalism occuring for an education system that is truly in crises – would be thoroughly challenged by right-wing people if they happened under Labour/Greens.

Given that well over $20billion will be allocated for education in NZ … I would assert that a truly focussed government/Minister – could shave at least a third off that … and improve outcomes and future productivity for our nation.

Announcements like an extra $140m to improve attendance are nonsensical when you understand that that is 0.7% of Vote Education. i.e. Bugger all to do the most fundamental task of getting children to actually attend.

Alwyn Poole
[email protected]

Chris Lynch reports:

Roger Bridge, a much loved, and long-serving member of the National Party and former chair of its Canterbury West Coast region, has died.

Bridge was widely respected within party circles for his dedication, loyalty, and tireless commitment to regional organisation and grassroots politics. …

Brownlee said he was “Always impeccably dress and devoted to jaguars. He was a most loyal friend for more than 30 years.

“His generosity was legendary and many will atest to that. He was on the first working group as a church appointee on the original Cathedral restoration committee. After a time as regional vice chair he became our national party regional chair in 2001 and joined the party board in 2003 serving in both rolls to 2020.

I knew Roger well. I attended uncountable conferences with Roger, and numerous dinners and drinks. He was a huge supporter of local MPs and party members.

Good friend Kate Freeman writes:

Farewell, dear Rog. A true old-school Canterbury gentleman; generous to a fault, and oh so wickedly such good fun. …

Over that time he navigated candidates and MPs, Ministers and Prime Ministers through mazes of political issues and of course the Canterbury earthquakes. He caused the odd stir too as many political players do.

But he was so much more than a wiley political operator, businessman and philanthropist. He was a friend.

His door was never closed over those years.

He didn’t bat an eyelid at piling a newborn Amelia into the back of his beautiful new Jaguar for letterbox dropping. Or hesitate to offer you a bed to stay if you were in town. And without fail, he was a willing dining companion. His generosity was legendary.

But perhaps equally splendid was his library. He was ridiculously well read. I once suggested to him that if I were to have a mental breakdown then I’d rather like to have it in his apartment and park up in one of his ample leather armchairs and make my way through his library. It was stunning! It was a boy’s library, perfect for political junkies who love global affairs. He felt there was no need to have a breakdown to wait to enjoy it. And he’d have meant it.

Kate describes him so well. He will be missed by so many.

The latest Yougov net favourability rankings on the Royal Family are:

1. Prince William +59%
2. Princess Catherine +59%
3. Princess Anne +58%
4. Princess Sophie +39%
5. Prince Edward +33%
6. King Charles +32%
7. Princess Beatrice +15%
8. Princess Eugenie +14%
9. Queen Camilla +5%
10. Prince Harry -36%
11. Princess Meghan -45%
12. Prince Andrew -80%

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:

1. Clarence Thomas – 2030
2. Samuel Alito – 2035
3. John Roberts – 2040
4. Sonia Sotomayor – 2042
5. Elena Kagan – 2048
6. Brett Kavanaugh – 2050
7. Neil Gorsuch – 2052
8. Ketanji Brown Jackson – 2057
9. Amy Coney Barrett – 2060

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:

• All voters +41%
• Reform voters +86%
• Conservative voters +79%
• Labour voters +10%
• Lib Dems +7%

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:

• The previous owner of the property with the accessway (who they claimed they had no problems with) said “They are by far the most difficult and entitled people we have come across in 27 years of living and farming in New Zealand”
• They built their house without Council consent
• Refused to pay a builder who won in the Disputes tribunal
• Refused to pay a digger operator who won in the Disputes Tribunal
• Refused to pay someone who did earthworks
• Refused to pay a logging contractor
• Refused to pay another builder who won in court
• Their pig dogs have attacked sheep
• Watters is now disqualified from owning dogs
• Watters has multiple criminal convictions

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.