The Auditor-General has announced she will look at the following issues around the Saudi farm deal:

• the amount of public money budgeted and spent on this Partnership, how it has been used, and the outcomes achieved with it;
• whether the expenditure on services was within the appropriations of Vote Foreign Affairs and Trade, as authorised by Parliament;
• the procurement and contract management practices used by the Ministry and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to purchase services relating to the Partnership;
• whether the services received were in keeping with the business case and contract specifications; and
• any other related matter that I consider it desirable to inquire into and report on.

I’m glad the AG is investigating, and said I hoped she would.

I think the real question is what outcomes have been achieved from it.

The Herald reports:

A plan for a five-storey apartment block in Birkenhead is fuelling the intensification-versus-housing choice debate.

Many residents of Rawene Rd are upset at the proposal for their no-exit street, which features historic villas built for the Chelsea Sugar Works.

The planned 56 units, all with two bedrooms and some 50sq m, are a classic case of overdevelopment, says one of the residents, Sharon Bonfield. 

She accepts intensification is going to occur in Birkenhead, saying two other developments for 50 townhouses and apartments have been approved for Rawene Rd.

However, it is the size and scale of the block on business-zoned land which have upset the locals. The Birkenhead Residents Association has questioned the design and impact on the community.

The land is zoned for business. I’d rather have a nice new apartment block there than an office block.

There is no real  alternative to building both up and out.

Resident Steve White said the small apartments, inadequate parking, virtually no landscaping, excessive height and street shading from the building would adversely affect the environment. He said it was a shame that the council did not follow Vancouver, the Canadian seaport city that local politicians and planners use as a benchmark to make Auckland the “world’s most liveable city”.

This is Vancouver where the average detached house price is C$1.44 million and rising at $250,000 a year?

Not sure that is the best model to be promoting.

Stuff reports:

Canadian investors were the biggest foreign investors in New Zealand in the past year, well ahead of the more high-profile Chinese.

So when will Labour publish its analysis of people with Canadian sounding surnames?

The Guardian reports:

Experimentation with e-cigarettes is rising among 11- to 18-year-olds in Britain but is most common among those who already smoke or who have done in the past, according to anti-tobacco group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).

It says results from its third annual online survey of young people’s attitudes to e-cigarettes suggest that it is “unlikely” they are currently acting as a gateway to tobacco.

So what did they find?

Although 10% of nearly 2,300 surveyed for Ash by YouGov in March said they had tried e-cigarettes “once or twice”, up from 4% two years ago, regular use remained rare.

Kids experiment.

Only 2.4% said they used them at least once a month and almost all were young people who said they had been, or were still, regular tobacco smokers. The increases in use have happened as regular tobacco smoking by 11- to 15-year-olds has dropped to a low of 3%.

That’s good. No one under 18 should smoke.

Authors of the journal report, though it only covers the first two surveys, also express concerns at the increasing proportion of young people perceiving e-cigarettes to be as hazardous as tobacco ones. This, it warns, may reduce numbers of young people “willing to try and/or use what is evidently a much less hazardous source of nicotine”.

Hazel Cheeseman, director of policy at Ash, said: “These results should reassure the public that electronic cigarettes are not linked with any rise in young people smoking. Although more young people are trying electronic cigarettes and many more young people are aware of them, this has not led to widespread regular use or an increase in smoking.”

Those who campaign against e-cigarettes are campaigning against a product exponentially less harmful than smoking. The UK version of ASH gets this. They see e-cigarettes as part of the solution, not part of the problem. Can we say the same their counterparts in NZ?

The Government has published a discussion document about what to do with GST on online purchases. It is here. They key points are:

• Offshore suppliers will be required to register and return GST if their supplies of services to New Zealand-resident consumers exceed a given threshold in a 12-month period. Submissions are sought on the value of that threshold.
• In some situations, an electronic marketplace or intermediary may be required to register instead of the principal offshore supplier.

The Government has kicked for touch (for now) the most politically significant issue of the de minimis threshold of $60 GST/fees (or $400 of goods) for collecting GST at the border. That is the issue I am more interested in. If Customs starts seizing my books from Amazon, I’ll be bloody pissed off.

What is proposed in the discussion document is pretty unobjectionable, but that is because they may be unenforceable.

Basically it is saying we’re going to ask overseas e-tailers to agree to register for GST in NZ, and pay us GST.

Some may do so, for reputational reasons. But what if they don’t?

These companies may not have a legal presence in NZ. Will Amazon be banned if they don’t agree to register for and collect GST?

So I’m not sure this will achieve much. It may get some voluntary compliance for reputational reasons, but not too many businesses will rush to pay a voluntary tax. If all OECD Governments agree to pass laws mandating each other’s GST laws must be honoured by their own businesses, then it would be a different matter.

So as I said the big issue for me is the de minimis threshold. There may be a case to reduce it a bit, but if the cost of collecting GST at the border is more than the revenue from it, then the threshold is too low.

Stuff reports:

Up to five days warning is needed to fly a toy aircraft in Wellington.

New rules governing remote control aircraft came into effect earlier this month so when lawyer Leith Townshend got a remote control helicopter from his partner for his birthday, he thought he better play safe.

He emailed Wellington City Council asking what he needed to do to fly his helicopter within the rules.

He was told he had to file his flight on Airways NZ’s Airshare website.

Airways require a complete flight plan of his toy, including latitude, longitude, the intended radius, the height of his flight above sea level, the height of his launch pad above sea level, and whether he had a certified transponder.

He also needed to refer to the Civil Aviation Act, supply a written description of the operating area, how long he intended his flight to take, and describe his emergency procedure.

His helicopter weighed less than 1kg.

“I understand why the rules are important for large drones. For some of the smaller stuff it seems crazy – to get children to fill flight plans,” Townshend said.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. This stuff drives me buts – taking all the joy out of a kid’s toy.

Stuff reports:

New figures collected by Regional Public Health suggests benefits from pushing back the cut-off time for selling alcohol to 4am has worn off, with binge-drinkers – university students in particular – back to their old habits.

In other words, as predicted, the change of closing times didn’t work. But instead of admitting this, they claim try more of the same.

Police and Regional Public Health began experimenting in January with supporting new bottle stores in the CBD if they agree to restrict their operating hours and sell “premium” liquor only.

Since then, four licences have been granted to new bottle stores that agree not to sell the cheap stuff, while another existing bottle store has pegged back its hours and promised to deal only in high-quality booze.

Stephen Palmer, a Wellington region medical officer of health, said another bottle store in Cuba St was being encouraged to go down the same path.

The aim was not to run mainstream beer out of town, but to reduce its availability and “nudge” the public towards drinking smaller amounts of more expensive beer and wine, he said.

Palmer put Tui, Lion Red, DB Draught and Heineken in the mainstream category, while the likes of Tuatara and Moa were more at the craft beer end of the spectrum.

This is outrageous. The Police and health officials are now trying to dictate what brands of beer can be sold. I’m a fan of craft beer, but to say you’ll only support granting an alcohol licence to outlets that only stock craft beer is taxpayer funded activism which goes well beyond their statutory role.

Police and Regional Public Health were now opposing all liquor licence applications for “mainstream” bottle stores, he said.

So the NZ Police now want to decide what brands of beer are okay to sell. The Minister should bash the Commissioner ears and warn him that public confidence in the Police will decline, if they continue this social activism.

Richard Harman at Politik reports:

The Government has found a way of over-riding local authority planning regulations.

It is planning on forcing local bodies to take commercial viability into account when they are drawing up district plans and granting consents. .

The proposal replaces earlier hopes that the Resource Management Act would be able to be amended to take economic matters into account in planning.

The Government does not have the numbers to pass that legislation.

In essence the new proposal will give builders and property developers a say in whether a Council plan could actually work.

And it will not require legislation. …

Mr Smith is proposing to capitalise on a Supreme Court Decision last year that said that a National Policy Standard (NPS), a little used device provided for in the Resource Management Act, “trumped” other sections of the Act.

That meant that if a planning requirement was in an NPS then that superseded any requirement a local authority might try and impose.

“It becomes another lever that makes the equation basically more sympathetic to providing for growth.”

So he is proposing that there be an NPS on urban development.

Excellent idea, if it works. This could be very important.

Environment Minister Nick Smith told POLITIK last night that the proposal arose out of the independent panels reviewing both the Auckland Unitary and the Christchurch District Plans.

The panels found that it was commercially viable to build only about a third of the houses that the planners claimed their plans allowed.

Mr Smith said planners living in an ideal world imposed requirements on things like setbacks, yard sizes and stud heights.

“But every time you add one of those rules you impact on the overall cost of the development,” he said.

“And the bit the planners don’t get is that you can’t force someone to do a development.

“They will only do it if it is commercially viable.

“Lots of those rules that get put in end up making these plans unviable.”

It is a tension we see often – the idealistic bureaucratic view vs the commercial reality.

Stuff reports:

Organisers of a troubled water slide event that originated in New Zealand have scrapped the business model after the venture failed across the Tasman.

The Monster Slide event moved to Australia in March, leaving behind angry New Zealand customers owed refunds and suppliers claiming they are owed thousands of dollars.

Monster Slide Australia Pty Ltd was to run the Australian events and is linked with Monster Slide in New Zealand, which was operated by Trill Productions and its director, Jamie Templeton – a Wellington entrepreneur.

Despite the controversy in New Zealand, it was hoped organisers could make it a success in Australia. Nearly six months into the venture, they have failed to run three advertised events and have now torn up their business model.

I thought their business model was dupe people into buying tickets for an event they never actually provide.

“An economy constrained by high tax will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs.”

– John F. Kennedy

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.

The opposition parties are showing their true colours.

When TV3 made a commercial decision to change Campbell Live, resulting in the departure of John Campbell, MPs from Labour and Greens decried this as terrible. They said the media needs strong voices. They said it was appalling that John Campbell would no longer be on the air.

However yesterday we saw the opposition parties effectively demand that Mike Hosking be taken off the air, because – well he doesn’t always agree with them.

So think about this. What Labour and Greens are saying is that they only want media that agree with them.

Little said Hosking’s dominance across so many media platforms was concerning.

“The point is that Mike Hosking is extremely influential because of his involvement with Newstalk ZB, TVNZ and the Herald.”

Waa, waa, waa.

If people don’t like what Hosking says, they can choose not to watch him, listen to him or read him.

Little accused Hosking of being “totally aligned to the Government of the day” and showing “no attempt at objectivity”.

If you think he really is biased, then you can complain to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, the Press Council or the Online Media Standards Authority.

Instead we have a Muldoon like attack on the media, because basically Little says Hosking doesn’t agree with Labour enough.

At fault was “broadcast media having opinionated people holding prime slots,” he said.

Here is the true hypocrisy. John Campbell had plenty of opinions. Does Andrew Little think John Campbell should not have had a prime slot? Of, course not. Little is just against media who don’t agree with him.

Shaw said it was “pretty obvious” Hosking was biased and there weren’t any balancing voices with the same reach.

They must be kidding.

The vast majority of editorials and opinion columns in Fairfax and APN publications are critical of the Government.

On Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon show, you can go all week without hearing anyone say anything vaguely supportive of the Government.

Anyway it is a good thing that Labour and Greens have shown their true feelings. They want a media that agrees with them and they will publicly attack and denigrate people in the media who don’t agree with them.

Who will be next on their hitlist?

The Herald reports:

The first couple to be issued a same-sex marriage license in Florida sued the state Thursday, saying that the statistics bureau still won’t allow hospitals to list both same-sex parents on birth certificates.

Cathy Pareto and Karla Arguello of Miami, who had twins last week, filed the lawsuit in court in Tallahassee, Florida. Two other married, same-sex couples also are part of the lawsuit.

In the hours after giving birth, Pareto said she and her wife were told by the hospital records manager that both of their names couldn’t be on the birth certificate.

“We went through the whole fertility process together,” Pareto said. “The whole thing has been a unified front as a married couple. To then be told I couldn’t be on my own children’s birth certificate? It was degrading.”

I presume only one of them was pregnant?

But I guess the comparison is with a heterosexual couple where say the male is infertile and they use a donor. If the male partner would get his name on the birth certificate despite no biological connection, then I’d expect the same of a female partner.

Danyl McLauchlan blogs:

A core problem we have on the left, I think, is that very few of our MPs actually understand politics. Of course it depends on how you define the term – if you expand it to include policy and ideology and political history and hating neoliberalism then yes, sure, they know about that stuff. But on the actual core challenge of influencing the public to achieve power they are mostly demonstrably clueless. Worse, they’re blind to their cluelessness. ‘Bad at politics?’ They would snort. ‘Aren’t they MPs? Haven’t they risen to that height through their own political genius? Doesn’t that, by definition, make them awesome at politics?’

Many MPs can spend a couple of decades in Parliament but have pretty weak political skills and understanding. There’s a certain amount you can learn, but there is also natural ability.

Are New Zealand First backbenchers ‘awesome at politics’? They are not. The leader of their party is and he needs people to fill out the rest of his caucus and his backbenchers are really just a bunch of nobodies who’ve lucked into that slot. And an awful lot of Labour and Green MPs have done pretty much the same thing. They’ve used parties founded by or led by people with political acumen as vehicles for entry into Parliament, stayed there, some of them for decades, while evidently learning nothing. How many left-wing MPs have won a seat off National recently? How many have taken down a Minister? Won cross-party support for a bill? How many have even increased the party vote in their own electorate?

Good questions.

Very few. National expects success from their MPs. If they don’t perform they ditch them.

Not always, but National has been more ruthless. Challenges to sitting electorate MPs are quite common. We had two at the last election. A number of incumbent MPs have been told they won’t get a high list ranking and retired. And Key has dropped Ministers, just to allow fresh blood to come through.

But both of our left-wing parties have contrived to build MMP parties that protect mediocrity and fail to incentivise electoral success. It’s a huge problem. We desperately need party structures that discourage MPs from making ridiculous unforced errors. MPs should be worried about what the 50,000 voters in their electorate will think of their decisions, not their friends in whatever faction empowers them, or the couple dozen activists who engage with them on twitter and support whatever they do.

Not all electorate MPs have better political skills than list MPs. But on average they do. And electorate MPs greatly value the grounding they get from engagement in their electorates. They have to deal with everyone – not just those who agree with them. But some List MPs do live in a bubble, where their instincts are out of touch with the wider community.

Again this is on average, not all cases.

The most successful opposition MP at the moment is Kelvin Davis. He’s also one of the newest MPs and his background is teaching. And he got in by winning a tough electoral race. That’s telling us something, I think, about the value of all those honors degrees in political science or backgrounds as political staffers or decades of parliamentary experience that his fellow, ineffectual opposition safe-seat or list MPs possess.

Indeed.

The Herald reports:

Parents who don’t believe in vaccinating their children will no longer be able to take them to childcare or kindergarten in Victoria under proposed reforms.

The state government is introducing legislation that will require children to be fully vaccinated before such attendance is allowed.

The proposed law also closes a loophole that makes an exemption for parents who choose not to vaccinate their children on the grounds they are conscientious objectors.

Children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons will remain exempt.

In NZ I believe almost every childcare centre requires vaccinations as a condition of acceptance anyway, so not sure there is the same problem here. The immunisation rate has gone from 76% to 93%, which is good. However we really want it as close to 100% as possible.

Andrea Vance writes:

Pints all round for David Seymour. 

The Epsom MP strived to keep bars open during early morning Rugby World Cup matches.

Consoling beersies for the Greens, who spent much of the week as party poopers after initially opposing Seymour’s bill. They ended it as flakes, flip-flopping on their principles.

I’m a bit biased as I know David, but I really think he has done a very good job to date in moving ACT forward beyond the turmoil of its past.

The whole episode points to a wider identity crisis in politics. In a blind taste test could you differentiate between parties?

Seymour stayed true to ACT’s roots as a voice for business. That does mark a departure from recent predecessor who put National’s interests ahead of all else, including their base support. With his bill, Seymour called out deficiencies in the Government’s alcohol reforms.

Also Seymour’s questions in Parliament have not been patsy questions on charter schools, but sometimes quite aggressive questions on government spending.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill writes in Politico:

It was August 7, 2012, and I was standing in my hotel room in Kansas City about to shotgun a beer for the first time in my life. I had just made the biggest gamble of my political career—a $1.7 million gamble—and it had paid off. Running for reelection to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Missouri, I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat

So how did she do this?

Tom Kiley, my pollster, turned up some findings that seemed crazy to me. For example, less than one quarter of the likely Republican primary voters believed that Barack Obama had been born in the United States. These were the voters who could help tip a Republican primary to an archconservative, but that conservative would have a hard time winning the state. Yes, it was a three-way primary of equally viable candidates, but a subset of energized people with strong religious convictions and serious aversion to gay people, public schools, immigrants and reproductive choice could help elect someone like Akin.

Pollsters can be useful to not just understand your voters, and swinging voters, but also your opposition.

His extreme positions on social issues and ridiculous public statements made him anathema to many independent voters. He sponsored an amendment that would define life as beginning at conception, thereby outlawing common forms of birth control. He voted against repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. When the Affordable Care Act was being debated, he stood on the House floor and asked for God’s help in keeping the nation from “socialized medicine.” In 2008, he claimed in a House floor speech that it was “common practice” for doctors to conduct abortions on women “who were not actually pregnant.” He had made speeches calling for America to pull out of the United Nations and claiming the government had “a bunch of socialists in the Senate” and a “commie” in the White House.

So how could we maneuver Akin into the GOP driver’s seat?

Akin went on during the campaign after he claimed that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant. This not only cost him the seat, but possibly the Republicans the Senate.

Using the guidance of my campaign staff and consultants, we came up with the idea for a “dog whistle” ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad—and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.

Clever – you make him your main opponent, which makes him more attractive to Republican voters.

My consultants put together a $1.7 million plan. Four weeks out we would begin with a television ad boosting Akin, which my campaign consultant Mike Muir dubbed “A Cup of Tea.” The production costs were pretty low, about $20,000, because we didn’t have to film anything. We just used pictures and voice-overs. We would spend $750,000 at first and run it for eight or nine days. Then we’d go back into the field and test to see if it was working. If it was, we’d dump in more “McCaskill for Senate” money, and we’d add radio and more TV in St. Louis and Kansas City. The second TV buy would approach $900,000. We hoped that some of our friends watching the TV ads would catch on and some of the outside groups would augment the last week with mail and radio. Sure enough, a radio ad calling Akin “too conservative” that went on the air in the closing days of the primary was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. We would later find out that their rural radio buy was $250,000.

As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.

That’s a big call – spending almost $2 million not on promoting your own candidacy, but trying to get Republicans to rally around Akin.

But it worked. I wonder how many other candidates have spent money trying to influence the opposition primary?

A pretty stunning graph showing how much the world has changed for the better for the vast majority. We’ve gone from 95% of humans in poverty to under 20% – and the biggest change has been the last 50 years.

Dylan Matthew at Vox reports:

If you’ve ever doubted that 2015 is the best time to be alive in human history to date, take a look at this chart …

In the 19th century, extreme poverty — defined here as living on less than $1.25 a day* — was the norm. In 1820, 94.4 percent of humans were below that line. Only a tiny fraction of the world enjoyed standards of living that were remotely bearable. Progress was initially slow. By 1910, the share had only gotten down to 82.4 percent — a 12-point drop over 90 years. But things picked up after World War II, and 89 years after 1910, only 28.9 percent of people were in extreme poverty. To repeat: From 1820 to 1910, there was a 12-point drop. From 1910 to 1999, there was more than a 53-point drop.

This also explains a lot of our global political history. When 80% of the world is living in poverty, then communism and socialism looks very attractive. But it has actually been the spread of capitalism to China and India that has led to the massive declines in poverty.

Stuff reports:

Labour’s primary industries spokesman Damien O’Connor said the Government was “asleep at the wheel” over Solid Energy, and could not afford to ignore the warning signs over state-owned Landcorp’s “incredibly ambitious” dairy farm conversion.

“While there are obvious differences in the two cases, the parallels of a highly ambitious project getting into trouble due to a tumbling commodity price must raise the alert level.”

Solid Energy suffered following a continuing slide in the price of coal on the international market, which O’Connor likened to the under-pressure dairy industry as the milk price collapsed.

The solution is not for Ministers to dictate to Landcorp what to do with their land.

The solution is for Landcorp to sell the land, and let private investors take the risk.

We don’t need a state owned dairy farm.

The state should only own land needed for conservation purposes or other needs such as treaty settlements. If we’re using the land for dairy cows, we don’t need to own it.

Over the weekend I read the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill.

As I blogged when introduced, I’m a supporter of it. In fact I think over time you might widen its eligibility criteria to other serious crimes.

But there is one section of the bill, which goes too far in my view. Child sex offenders are near the lowest of the low, and I’m all for a register to allow authorities to track them. But let’s look at the list of personal information to be reported:

• Name/s
• DOB
• Address/s
• Identity of children in same residence
• Nature of work and name and address of employer
• Membership of any groups with kids in them
• Details of cars owned or driven
• Details of tattoos etc
• Passport details
• Numbers of landlines or mobile phones

So far so good. Then we turn to the Internet details:

• details of e-mail addresses used
• details of online accounts and aliases used or intended to be used

Again no problems. But:

• details of any ISP used or intended to be used including login details, user name and password

Passwords?

That would then give the state the ability to monitor basically their Internet communications. A government official could login and see every e-mail sent to or from them. And this could be for life.

Everything else is reasonable. But the password is not. It is the Internet equivalent of having the state listen in to every phone call you make – without any warrant. Or open every item in the post to and from you – without a warrant.

If there is reasonable cause for concern, then they can get a warrant to intercept the communications. I’m okay with those on the register having to hand over usernames and login details so they know what accounts to target if there is concern. But including the password in the register of information is a step too far.

The SST has a big story on how more ministerial staff warn over $100,000 than in 2008. It has gone from 17 to 53, representing around a third of the staff. This means that in each ministerial office, there are on average two people earning over $100,000.

Now it is newsworthy that ministerial staff are being paid more on average. However the story lacked some context, when you consider the paragraphs that say:

Since coming to Government, National has pledged restraint in the public sector.

However a public sector representative questioned whether the same message was being felt by those doing the bidding of National ministers.

There is a difference between a freeze on how much individuals get paid, and a freeze on total funding for salaries.

What I’m interested in, as a taxpayer, is how much more, if any, we are paying for the running of ministerial office. This would have been useful, even vital, information for the story. And it took around 15 minutes to find out from Treasury documents.

The 2015 budget allocated $25.842 million for ministerial support services. In 2008/09 the cost of ministerial support services was $30.375 million. So in fact spending on ministerial offices has dropped 14.9% in seven years. That is what I call restraint.

Also the cost of VIP transport has stayed constant – in fact down 0.1% from 2008/09.

And ministerial travel has gone up just 3.1% over seven years. Well under inflation.

So actually overall, pretty good spending restraint.

Kris Faafoi, Labour’s state services spokesman said the main responsibility of the staff in the Beehive was simply to make their minister look good.

So Kris is saying the main job of Grant Robertson and Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins was to make Helen Clark look good? I wonder if they agree with his characterisation.

But as we have gone onto Labour, what happened to ministerial spending between 2000/2001 and 2008/09?

• Ministerial support services increased 45.3% (down 14.9% under National)
• VIP transport increased 43.3% (down 0.1% under National)
• Ministerial travel increased 30.7% (up 3.1% under National)

Andrew McConnell said the approach of the Government was consistent with “the Government’s aim to reduce the number of public sector numbers, and to have fewer but higher skilled people”.

Indeed. National ministerial staff are being paid more, but there are fewer of them – hence the overall cost of running ministerial offices has dropped, not increased.

The Herald reports:

The number of Kiwi children in relative poverty has jumped over 300,000 for the first time since 2010 – but it’s because of record inequality, despite falling absolute hardship.

So fewer kiwi children are in hardship – that is good news. That is what we should focus on.

The Ministry of Social Development’s annual household incomes report shows that the numbers below a European standard measure of absolute hardship, based on measures such as not having a warm home or two pairs of shoes, fell from 165,000 in 2013 to 145,000 (8 per cent of all children) last year, the lowest number since 2007.

So fewer kids in hardship than under Labour. That’s good. And we should keep working to lower it more. All kids should have warm homes and decent footwear. However the answer is not always as simple as just more money – it is also budgeting advice, parenting skills, better agency support.

Children in benefit-dependent families also dwindled from a recent peak of 235,000 (22 per cent) in 2011, and 202,000 (19 per cent) in 2013, to just 180,000 (17 per cent) last year – the lowest proportion of children living on benefits since the late 1980s.

Again this is great. On almost every social indicator, the data is clear that growing up in a household with no working adults, you on average have much worse outcomes. It’s not just about income either.

So we have lower hardship than under Labour and fewer children in non working households than at any time in last 25 years. That’s headlines we won’t see much of.

But inequality worsened because average incomes for working families increased much faster at high and middle-income levels than for lower-paid workers.

Which shows how silly the focus on inequality is, as opposed to actual hardship. What counts is increasing living standards for all families, not seeing it as a negative thing that middle level incomes rose father than lower incomes.

Council of Trade Unions economist Dr Bill Rosenberg said: “Rising inequality means that even if the economy is growing, the income from it is not being fairly shared.”

No, and only in the former USSR did you have income “fairly” shared. In non communist countries income is earnt by individuals and families, not by the Government to share out. We do redistribute via tax and welfare, but you will never ever have no income inequality unless you tax people so much they all leave, so we have a universally low income society.

And frankly there is nothing wrong with the fact a 50 year old senior executive earns a lot more than an 18 year old in their first job, or a 75 year old who is retired.

Back to the material hardship measurement.  Here’s some data from the report:

• Only 4% of households have severe material deprivation on the EU index – lower than 17 EU countries, and higher than only seven
• For 65+ households, only 1% in severe material deprivation
• For households with children, 8% in severe material deprivation on EU index – putting us at the midpoint for the EU
• The percentage of children in hardship on the NZ index has declined from 17% in 2008 to 12% currently