News.com.au reports:
A WOMAN drank herself to death by downing up to eight litres a day of Pepsi Max mixed with prescription drugs, an inquest has been told.
British woman Victoria Lane, 39, drank up to four two-litre bottles of the soft drink to help with the side effects of medication that made her mouth dry, The Mirror reports.
Obviously we need to tax or ban Pepsi Max.
“When Mum was drinking heavily, she could get through a one-litre bottle of vodka a day and four two-litre bottles of Pepsi Max.”
The headline didn’t mention the vodka!
“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases; If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if is stops moving, subsidize it.”
– Ronald Reagan
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.
Stuff reports:
New Zealand may be headed for a “Victorian-style” future of haves and have-nots, author Max Rashbrooke says.
Yes modern day New Zealand is just like Victorian times in terms of inequality. We spend a massive $20 billion a year on welfare and this is compared to Victorian-style. We spend more on that subsidising education and healthcare for New Zealanders. But it’s never enough.
He invites the reader to imagine New Zealand’s 3.4 million adults were represented by just 100 people.
The person in 90th place on the wealth spectrum has so little wealth it is “barely visible”, around $500 of assets on average.
It’s generally called being young.
Rashbrooke surveys the policy options that have been suggested could create a more equal society. They include:
It’s the usual hard left policy prescription. Never mind it has failed in every socialist and communist state in the world. So the “solution” is:
Stuff reports:
Wellington City Council’s decision to pay its security contractors a living wage is headed to the High Court, and ratepayers could end up paying some of the legal bills.
The Wellington Chamber of Commerce announced on Friday that it would seek a judicial review of the council’s living wage policy.
The council, which has been paying its own staff a living wage since 2013, voted 9-6 in October to require its security services contractors do the same. …
But councillors were also warned by chief executive Kevin Lavery that the move could be illegal, as the council would effectively be paying 19 per cent more than the going rate for security services without seeing any “tangible” benefit.
The council’s lawyers believed it would lose if taken to court over the issue, as the Local Government Act prohibits councils from paying more than necessary for services without any corresponding benefit.
Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Milford said it did not take any great delight in heading to court, but the council needed to be held to account.
“We are taking these proceedings because we believe this decision is not prudent stewardship or efficient and effective use of ratepayer resources, 47 per cent of which is contributed by Wellington businesses.”
Delighted to see the Chamber doing this. The Council were told by their CEO and lawyers that what they intended to do was probably unlawful and would fail a lawful challenge. But instead they went ahead with their social engineering.
Deputy Mayor Justin Lester hit back and said the chamber was often silent when council spends hundreds of thousands on events like fireworks and the Santa Parade, yet it stomped its feet over a few extra dollars for workers.
The council has not considered whether it would take part in the judicial review as an interested party, or what the cost might be to ratepayers if it decided too, Lester said.
But any costs incurred would be as a result of having to respond to the chamber’s actions, he said. “It’s unfortunate.”
It’s unfortunate you ignored your own legal advice. Don’t complain when people go to court to try and ensure the Council acts within the law.
Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown said there was a clear benefit to be had from paying staff a living wage.
“Decent pay and good performance are connected.”
They’re not staff, they’re contractors. Now the staff of the contractor will be paid one wage level when doing jobs for Wellington City Council and another level for other Councils. It’s barmy.
The Herald on Sunday does a major story on inequality. And who do they decide to run not one, not two, but three photos of to illustrate their article? Max Key.
That’s appalling. Max Key is a 20 year old, just out of his teens. He is not a politician – his father is. You can argue about whether or not he gets a mention at all, but to run three photos of him is just targeting him because of his father. It’s very sad.
The Herald have a fixation with him. This article is possibly the lowlight, but in total they have had 52 articles that mention him in the last year. They should stop.
As Goff lines up to try and become the leader of Auckland, it is worth looking at how he did as the leader of Labour. The graph above is the data from the TV3 Reid Research poll which asks if people approve or disapprove of the job party leaders are doing.
As you can see Goff started with a positive public response. He had 43% approving and just 27% disapproving for a net of +16%.
But over the next two and a half years his disapproval rating rose from 27% to peak at 54% in October 2011. That takes some doing, to double the number of people who say you’re doing a poor job. And his approvals dropped from 43% to 28%.
Overall he went from a +16% rating to a -26% rating.
Were the public wrong, or was Goff not a good leader?
Stuff reports:
Deputy leader and health spokeswoman Annette King told the party’s annual conference in Palmerston North on Saturday that Labour would also require “front of package labelling” that was easy to understand based around the number of teaspoons of sugar in a product.
So what will and will not be included?
However, King said some treat foods, such as lollies, would not be covered by the policy.
“They are a treat, they are a sweet. But if you look at the food that has got sugar in it that didn’t use to have sugar in it… We’ve got sugar in peanut butter. we’ve even got a bit of sugar in our Marmite, we’ve got sugar in our yoghurt that has a heart tick on it.”
Umm, the sugar in peanut butter mainly comes from the peanuts and is pretty small. It has around 1 gram per 15 grams.
Also most of the sugar in yoghurt comes from the milk and the fruit. There’s not huge amounts added in.
But Labour are saying peanut butter may be given a health warning, but not lollies! You’d need to have 1.35 kgs of peanut butter to exceed the recommended sugar limit in a day!
3 News also reported:
She envisaged the policy would apply to foods such as cereals, peanut butter, yoghurt and tomato sauce that did not have sugar added to them in the past.
But Ms King said treat foods such as lollies, chocolate and ice-cream would not be caught out by the requirements.
So ice cream won’t have Labour’s health warming, but other products may. What else could be caught by their policy to have health warnings on processed food with sugar in it?
Now milk is a processed food and it contains nearly 13 teaspoons of sugar per bottle. So under Labour’s policy a one litre milk bottle will carry a health warning saying it has 12.5 teaspoons of sugar!
Look at the sugar in these peas. The packet has over 12 teaspoons of sugar. Labour’s policy would see peas given a health warning!
I look forward to Labour promoting their idiotic policy where milk, peas and peanut butter are given health warnings, but ice cream and lollies are not!
Retired MFAT Deputy Secretary Peter Hamilton writes:
Diplomatic relations, cemented by visits overseas by our Governor-General, are important to New Zealand as we develop trade and economic links with key partners globally and advance our interests internationally. Our current head of state cannot carry out these functions for us. When the Queen or Charles travel abroad they can only advance the interests of the UK. Unlike most other countries we have a head of state who can’t work for us overseas.
We have in recent years had a succession of excellent governors-general who have worked tirelessly in our interests but when they travel overseas they are only “vice-regal”, so their role and function are confusing for foreign governments unfamiliar with the title of Governor-General as a “stand-in” head of state.
Questions are inevitably asked: Should they receive the Governor-General as if he or she were equivalent to New Zealand’s head of state, or should they treat them as No2 in New Zealand’s constitutional hierarchy? This makes a huge difference to the manner in which they are received and in which New Zealand is perceived overseas.
In a globalised world it is no longer appropriate to have a head of state who is not a New Zealander. An absentee head of state who is also foreign no longer accords with how we see ourselves. We are now mature and independent enough as a country to have our own head of state.
This does not mean we would have to leave the Commonwealth or make big changes to our constitutional arrangements. We simply need to turn the role of Governor-General into our head of state. As a representative of Britain, Prince Charles should be received by a New Zealander in the role of head of state who stands alongside him as his equal and not as a subservient deputy in the form of the Governor-General.
I agree.
A change would be very easy to do.
We’d still have royal tours as members of the Commonwealth, but they would be as head of the Commonwealth, not as our absentee Head of State.
The US elections this week saw the Democrats lose Kentucky. This means that of the 50 Governors, 32 are now Republicans, 17 Democrats and one Independent.
The Republicans also control 31 state legislatures to 11 for the Democrats and 8 have split control.
If they can win the White House next year, they will have the presidency, the House, probably retain the Senate and most of the states. Most importantly they would be likely to get to appoint new Supreme Court Justices as Bader Gisburg will be aged 87 by 2020, Stephen Breyer 82 and Antonin Scalia 84.
The NY Times reports:
China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government previously disclosed, according to newly released data. The finding could complicate the already difficult efforts to limitglobal warming.
Even for a country of China’s size, the scale of the correction is immense. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China has released much more carbon dioxide — almost a billion more tons a year according to initial calculations — than previously estimated.
The new data, which appeared recently in an energy statistics yearbook published without fanfare by China’s statistical agency, show that coal consumption has been underestimated since 2000, and particularly in recent years. The revisions were based on a census of the economy in 2013 that exposed gaps in data collection, especially from small companies and factories.
Illustrating the scale of the revision, the new figures add about 600 million tons to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than 70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States.
That extra 600 million tons is nine times greater than the total emissions of New Zealand.
Stuff reports:
New Zealand wasn’t very clever when it came to how infrastructure at new housing developments was funded, he said.
At present, developers would have to pay all the costs for services inside a new subdivision, with the costs passed on to home buyers.
“It gets added on to the price of the house and paid off over time as you pay the mortgage off, with expensive commercial bank interest rates.”
The impact of this was to pump up the cost of new houses by as much as $100,000 and have that cost capitalised into the market value of all homes nearby.
Twyford said a smarter way of paying for that infrastructure would be by local government borrowing for it, at cheaper rates than mortgage rates.
Home owners would then pay it back through a targeted rate over 30 years, spreading the cost over the lifetime of the infrastructure.
I think this is an issue worth considering. Should infrastructure for new homes be funded by way of up front developer levies, or by targeted rates on the properties?
I think there is a case for more of it to be funded by targeted rates.
Radio NZ reports:
Lilian Turner, 95, who faced deportation to Britain, where she had not lived since after the end of World War II, has been granted residence.
The widow’s case comes as the Law Society and immigration lawyers say they are seeing an increasingly tough stance on deportations by Immigration New Zealand.
But the agency said while it was focused on immigrants with criminal convictions, and those who posed a threat to national security, it had no intention of deporting Mrs Turner.
The appeals tribunal decision brings to an end a 13-year battle for Mrs Turner to regain the residence status she had nearly 40 years ago.
Mrs Turner and her husband moved to New Zealand in the 1970s, but their permanent resident status lapsed when they moved back to Africa.
Of course it is right she keeps her residency status, but for me this highlights why we should be promoting citizenship more, and restricting certain rights such as voting to citizens. If Mrs Turner had become a citizen during her 30 years living here, then she’d never have to worry about residency. But many do not become citizens because there are so few benefits in doing so.
Stuff reports:
New Zealand workplaces are more diverse and accepting than those in Australia, an employment study says.
Research by human resources and recruitment company Randstad shows 78 per cent of New Zealand workers believed their company had an open and inclusive culture and 88 per cent valued diversity in the workplace.
The study of at least 400 New Zealand employees aged between 18 and 65 said 16 per cent of workers had experienced gender discrimination, compared to the global average of 21 per cent.
The study surveyed workers in 33 other countries, including Australia, where 25 per cent of workers said they had experienced discrimination.
Religious discrimination affected 9 per cent of New Zealand workers compared to 16 per cent in Australia, which was equal to the global average.
New Zealand was ranked one of the most tolerant towards workers of different races, with 10 per cent having suffered racial discrimination at work, compared to 20 per cent in Australia and a global average of 17 per cent.
So the levels of discrimination experienced in NZ workplaces was:
Stuff reports:
Labour MP Phil Goff is poised to confirm his bid for the Auckland Mayoralty, sounding the final death knell to Len Brown’s prospects of another term.
Goff is expected to make the announcement on November 22 and has already pulled together a campaign team, which includes former Brown aide, top spin doctor David Lewis.
Lewis’ presence in Goff’s camp is confirmation that the Left have swung in behind Goff’s candidacy, stripping Brown of the support and financial backing behind his previous successful bids.
Sources say that Brown will announce a decision about the mayoralty before Christmas and he has been counselled that he no longer has the backing to mount a successful bid. But it remains unclear if he will try to win another term, despite his lack of backing of the progressive vote in Auckland.
Goff’s camp are confident the MP has strong support across the Auckland region and that he is also a popular pick in Wellington, where the Government sees him as a strong and credible mayor who they can work with to get things done.
The key question is will Goff spend less than Brown? Len Brown and his Council hit Aucklanders with a 10% rates increase, at a time when inflation is under 1%. Will Goff commit to a cap on rates increases?
Len has surprised no one by saying he won’t stand again. But will a Goff led left Council be any different?
Andrea Vance writes:
Later, Mark – and some of his colleagues – were befuddled by the outrage. “It’s not racist – grow up,” he blustered.
Yes, Ron Mark, it is. It’s deplorable that as a Member of Parliament you need this explained to you. Every other party in Parliament – bar your own – understands this and have condemned your behaviour.
It is racist, because Lee was offended. It is racist because it implies that you are more “Kiwi” than Lee, who has made New Zealand her home for 30 years. …
It’s racist enough to get you arrested. In April, an Upper Hutt man was arrested for ordering tourists on a bus to “go back to your own country”. The ugly scene was filmed and uploaded to You Tube.
Dozens of similar racist rants – usually on public transport – have been shared across the world. Usually they end in a court appearance.
Mark’s words are even more shocking than those viral videos because they came not from an ignorant lout on a bus, but from the mouth of an MP – to another MP – during a parliamentary debate.
Ron Mark would do well to apologise, rather than insist he said nothing wrong.
The most charitable we can be about Mark is to liken him to the embarrassing docile old uncle who knows no better. But that excuses him. And it’s more likely Mark’s behaviour was calculated.
He was working from the Winston Peters’ playbook, and is now revelling in the attention he’s receiving from the redneck constituency.
Peters was duly out, belligerently defending his MP this morning. But the politics are indefensible precisely because they aren’t politics.
Politics is raising general concerns about immigration. NZ First has gone well beyond that to targeting and stigmatising individuals and national (usually Asian) groups.
It’s time to be honest about that strategy and call out NZ First for exactly what it is: a racist party.
Sadly true – but not all of them. Tracey Martin had the guts to say it was wrong.
Stuff reports:
Former Conservative Party leader Colin Craig has been outed as a foul-mouthed “Mr X” who posed as a party whistleblower.
The anonymous “whistleblower” features in a booklet distributed to mailboxes in July, in which Craig claims he was the victim of a political conspiracy.
Craig has now admitted he was Mr X, who was quoted in the booklet as describing Craig as “freakish under pressure” and said he had a chance of a comeback.
“A lot of expletives have been deleted from this dialogue,” the interview begins.
Craig said he didn’t see any problems with talking about himself in the third person and framing it as an anonymous whistleblower.
It was a common literary tool to get a message out to readers, he said.
You couldn’t make this up.
You interview yourself for a brochure you put out, pretending to be an anonymous third party commentator – on yourself. And then you send it to half the households in New Zealand.
Interview with Mr X, as published in the booklet:
Interviewer: Colin Craig is not in office
Mr X: Well no but he nearly … got there last time. He gets votes and the media love him so that qualifies him to be a target.
Interviewer: Craig says he has been getting pretty positive feedback from supporters.
Mr X: Yeah well maybe he says that but … don’t forget they are mostly a bunch of bigots, they will dump him, just wait and see. Most media have already written him and the party off.”
Interviewer: So there is no way back for Craig after this?
Mr X: No chance … well OK there is a chance but only because he is freakish under pressure and he seems to be largely unphased (sic) by this whole thing.”
I really don’t know how he ever thought this was a good idea.
The Herald reports:
A Facebook page belonging to an Auckland man shows pictures of him posing with an Islamic State flag, holding an AK47-style rifle and speaking of his role in a holy war. …
Mr SaifuAllah, 23, told the Herald that he “100 per cent” supported the views and actions of Islamic State.
He said he changed his name three years ago but was born as William Ringo Ratapu-Howard in South Auckland, where he still lives.
He said the Government had confiscated his passport last year, stopped him travelling to Sydney in May where he planned to marry his Lebanese fiancée and that he had repeatedly been questioned by the SIS about his beliefs.
Mr SaifuAllah said he converted to Islam about three years ago to escape his life of drugs and crime.
“I was in Black Power. I couldn’t see my life going anywhere, I was having a bad life, I was a gang member.”
His older brother found the religion first, and introduced it to their mother and then him, he said.
The religion has led him away from those aspects of his past. However, he has also been introduced to radical beliefs that see him sympathise with the terror group.
Maybe people will realise that when the Government says there are a non-trivial number of extremists in New Zealand, they’re not just making it up.
One can hope he is one of those who is talk, not action. But you never know. Australia has had several who have gone from talk to action.
Mr SaifuAllah has multiple photos and comments on his Facebook page professing allegiance to the terrorist group.
In a 2014 interview with TVNZ, he said he did not support the views of the terror organisation. He does now.
“These are my views and I support them 100 percent,” he said.
His photos are captioned with war cries and comments made this week spoke of his role in a holy war fought so “one day Islam will dominate everything that the sun sets on”.
He has images of the Islamic State flag and other propaganda from the terrorist group.
Photos and graphics show soldiers, war cries and religious quotes.
Comments in recent days show his allegiance to these sentiments. “One day Islam will dominate everything that the sun sets on meaning the whole earth,” he said on Wednesday.
Personally I’d let him travel to Syria so long as he agrees to cancel his NZ citizenship and never come back.
Some great winners in the Women of Influence Awards. They include:
Businesswoman Joan Withers has been named the supreme winner at this year’s Women of Influence awards.
Judges said her work championing board diversity and striving to close the gender gap resulted in a unanimous decision.
Withers left school at 16 years old and worked as a junior bank teller before moving up the ranks of the advertising world. …
She is currently the chairwoman of Mighty River Power and TVNZ, a director of ANZ and a member of the Treasury Advisory Board.
She also spent two years as The Radio Network chief executive, fours years as Fairfax Media chief executive and about 15 years as an Auckland International Airport director and chairwoman.
The Women of Influence Awards – a partnership between Fairfax Media and Westpac – celebrate the leading women shaping the future of New Zealand.
I find it amusing that Westpac is a partner in the awards, and an ANZ Director wins 🙂
Withers is a great choice – highly respected.
Linda Jenkinson won for her entrepreneurial success in the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand.
From Palmerston North, but now based in San Francisco, Jenkinson is a serial entrepreneur and was the first New Zealand woman to take a company public on the NASDAQ exchange.
She is currently the chairwoman and owner of LesConcierges, the largest luxury corporate concierge company in the world, catering to more than 65 million members.
Getting a company onto the NASDAQ is no mean feat.
Vicky Robertson won for her continued focus on results and ability to work effectively across a wide range of stakeholder groups.
Whether it was speaking about the competition policy at the 1995 APEC summit in Osaka, reviewing the Climate Change Policy and KiwiSaver scheme or leading Treasury to explore new approaches to policy design, judges said she makes a huge impact for a prosperous New Zealand.
Robertson has just been appointed the CE of the Ministry for the Environment.
Community and not-for-profit
This award was won by Stacey Shortall for the depth and breadth of her contribution and influence in her work with children.
This includes developing a weekly homework club at a decile one school, initiatives in the battle against domestic violence, advocating against violence toward children and developing a prison programme to help jailed mothers maintain meaningful connections with their children.
A partner at Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, Shortall has been recognised as a leading lawyer in New Zealand by Chambers, The Legal 500, Legal Media Group and NZ Lawyer.
Amazing she has time to do all that and be a partner in a major law firm.
Myles Thomas of the Coalition for Better Broadcasting wants to tax Internet users to prop up media companies!
He writes in NBR:
Earlier this year, Parliament passed a Bill to continue theTelecommunications Development Levy. It siphons $50 million from the revenue of the telcos and ISPs to fix mobile phone ‘black spots’ and provide more rural broadband.
Yes that is an Internet charge to fund Internet coverage.
It’d be pretty straight-forward to extend this levy and it would provide significant, long-term funding for journalism in New Zealand. An arm’s length government agency could be enlisted to distribute the funding to news media of all kinds – newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, authors, bloggers and even NBR.
Could you imagine it with a left Government in power. All the favourite lovelies would get lots of money from the Government.
This idea to levy telcos and ISPs to fund journalism is actually just putting together several existing processes. It’s an innovation that would provide quality journalism to New Zealand into the foreseeable future, whatever the predominant technology becomes, while supporting existing news media infrastructure.
Not exciting at all, but the latest in a long list of industries that find the Internet challenging, wanting handouts through an Internet tax. The music industry wanted a levy on CDs. No doubt taxi companies would love to be subsidisied by an Internet tax because of Uber. And let’s tax the Internet to give money to motels competing with Air BNB.
And we’d better tax e-mails and give the money to NZ Post.
Christopher Brooker writes in The Telegraph:
China, now easily the world’s largest emitter, contributing 24 per cent of the total, plans by 2030 to double its CO2 emissions, not least by building 363 more coal-fired power stations. India, now the third-largest emitter, plans by 2030 to treble its emissions. The fourth-largest emitter, Russia, despite slashing its emissions after 1990 by closing down much of its old Soviet industry, now proposes to increase them from their 2012 level by up to 38 per cent.
Which makes a mockery of anything the rest of the world does.
If you want a binding agreement on climate change, you need to get the top 10 emitters to agree on a cap. If they can all agree, then the rest of the world will probably follow.
But if China, India and Russia are all saying they’ll massively increase emissions, then any impact of emissions reductions from the rest of the world is an expensive waste of money.
Here’s the top 10 emitters:
Those 10 represent around 72% of global emissions. Again whatever they agree to, I am sure countries like New Zealand, Tanzania and Singapore who are around 0.2% each will match them.
Stuff reports:
Labour leader Andrew Little has all but dumped the party’s controversial NZ Power policy.
In his opening address to the party’s annual conference in Palmerston North Little said the policy, which aimed to set up a single buyer for the country’s power generation, was too complex to explain simply to voters.
When it was announced it was widely criticised by business and the sector as too interventionist.
Little said the policy, which was unveiled before the last election in concert with a similar policy from the Greens, was important.
There was something wrong with the power system, given rising prices and the high salaries paid to top executives in the sector.
“But our answer to that has to be something we can explain simply to New Zealanders. … So we will have to revisit the NZ Power policy.”
It is understood the Greens will also drop the policy before the next election.
Good. It was the worst of their policies. It was a de facto nationalisation of the power generators, which would have seen the state determine all prices, who can build new supply, and would have destroyed any competition between generators. It was an appalling policy.
But not all good news:
He said if Labour won the election in 2017 it would pass legislation to implement the foreign sales ban policy.
It would also try to renegotiate the deal on the foreign buyers issue, something Trade Negotiations Minister Tim Groser had indicated was possible over dairy exports.
“We will not support anything that takes away the right of New Zealand politicians in our democratic elected Parliament to make laws in the best interests of New Zealand … it simply isn’t acceptable,” he said.
He said other countries had deals that allowed such a restriction on land sales, but the current Government had not even tried to secure an exemption for that.
Little said Labour was a free trade party, but standing up for the right of Parliament to legislate in the interests of its citizens was not anti-free trade.
Asked if it would be acceptable for other countries to make unilateral changes – for example if Japan legislated against dairy imports – Little said “other countries can do what they like”.
So Little is saying he is fine with other countries breaking agreements they make with New Zealand, because he intends to do the same. Credibility zero.