The Wellingtonian has had an 8 member panel of Wellingtonians rate the 15 Wellington City Councillors. They were rated on five areas, and also given an average overall rating. So who got top and bottom in each.

Note that these ratings are of course the opinions of the panelists only.

Overall Top

1. Paul Eagle 80.7%
2. Nicola Young 69.8%
3. Justin Lester 69.4%

Overall Bottom

1. Helen Ritchie 34.3%
2. Ray Ahipene-Mercer 44.5%
3. Jo Coughlan 46.5%

Top Accessibility

1. Paul Eagle 84.3%
2. Justin Lester 80.0%
3. Celia Wade-Brown 78.1%

Bottom Accessibility

1. Helene Ritchie 38.3%
2. Ray Ahipene-Mercer 42.9%
3. Malcolm Sparrow 51.0%

Top Effectiveness

1. Paul Eagle 75.7%
2. Iona Pannett 66.3%
3. Nicola Young 63.1%

Bottom Effectiveness

1. Helene Ritchie 30.0%
2. Mark Peck 38.6%
3. Ray Ahipene-Mercer 40.0%

Top Proactiveness

1. Paul Eagle 77.1%
2. Iona Pannett 68.1%
3. Nicola Young 65.6%

Bottom Proactiveness

1. Helene Ritchie 33.6%
2. Sarah Free 35.8%
3. Ray Ahipene-Mercer 37.1%

Top Work Ethic

1. Celia Wade-Brown 90.0%
2. Paul Eagle 87.9%
3. Justin Lester 81.3%

Bottom Work Ethic

1. Helene Ritchie 36.7%
2. Ray Ahipene-Mercer 46.7%
3. Jo Coughlan 48.8%

Top Wellington First

1. Paul Eagle 80.7%
2. Simon Woolf 75.7%
3. Simon Marsh 70.0%

UPDATE: The panel were:

• John Milford, Business Central CEO
• Allan Probert, Khandallah Business Improvement District secretary & veterinarian
• Lyndy McIntyre, Living Wage Wellington co-ordinator
• John Dow, events, marketing & sports leader
• Victoria Spackman, Gibson Group CEO & former chairman of Bats Theatre
• John Sherwan, Adjunct professor at VUW/businessman
• Jack Marshall, Wgton City Youth Council chairman
• Ian Apperley, Strathmore Park blogger

I think it was the wrong call to restrict MPs salary increase to the overall public sector, rather than to similar positions. The salary of the Prime Minister should not be determined based on what the going rate for policy analysts is.

I was interested in what the relativity has been over the years between the salaries set for MPs, and the salaries set for judges, as both are set by the Remuneration Authority. Have MPs had bigger increases than judges? The same? fallen away?

I headed down to the National Library to dig out determinations from 1985 onwards, and the data is below.

This compares the salaries set for backbench MPs with District Court Judges. An MP used to get 73% of what a District Court Judge gets, but today they get just 48%. That is excluding superannuation subsidies which are far more generous to judges.

Then I compared Cabinet Ministers to High Court Judges. In 1985 they were paid almost the same (Ministers got $957 more). Today a Cabinet Minister gets just 67% of what a High Court Judge gets. They get paid almost $150,000 less.

Finally we have the Prime Minister and the Chief Justice. The PM today gets 90% of what the Chief Justice gets, but in 1985 he got paid a third more than the Chief Justice.

So as unpopular as it is with many, MPs salaries have actually fallen away compared to similar positions in the past.

The Herald reports:

Hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by British, American and French soldiers after the end of the Second World War, a German historian has claimed.

In a new book, Professor Miriam Gerhardt, a well-regarded German academic, challenges the established view that Soviet troops were responsible for the vast majority of rape cases in occupied Germany.

“The assumption that Western Allied soldiers would not do such a thing turned out not to be true,” she told the broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “In the method and violence of rape there was no difference between American GIs and the Red Army, as far as I can see.” …

Prof Gerhardt said she had also studied the records of illegitimate “war children” born to German mothers and Allied fathers, and assumed that there had been 100 rapes for each birth, coming up with a figure of 190,000 rapes by American soldiers alone.

Hard to imagine a more dodgy calculation. Assume every birth is the result of a rape, and that for every birth there were 100 further rapes.

Antony Beevor, the author of The Second World War, described Prof Gerhardt’s methodology as “ludicrous”.

“It’s almost impossible to come up with figures, but I think to say there were hundreds of thousands is a great exaggeration,” he said.

“If she’s doing it on the basis of illegitimate children that’s ludicrous. There was a huge amount of voluntary sex. There were vast numbers of cases of genuine fraternisation. Many young women were hanging around outside the gates of American camps.”

I note the historian has published her claims in a book, not a peer reviewed journal.

Stuff reported:

Australian student Jasmine Pilbrow has been banned from any Qantas flights after staging an impromptu protest about the transfer and deportation of a Tamil man to Sri Lanka on board Qantas flight 838 last month.

Now this would be outraegous if her protest had been outside the airport, or outside a Qantas office. But it wasn’t.

Pilbrow, who had boarded the plane, refused to sit down until the refugee, 25-year-old Puvaneethan, was taken off the plane on February 2.

A plane is not a place for sit ins or protests. Of course Qantas will ban you from their (private) flights if you disrupt a flight, inconveniencing every other passenger.

Rodney Hide writes in the HoS:

A Peters win would destabilise the Government and power up a Wellington electorate MP. Ohariu would benefit – not Northland. On winning Northland, Peters would resign as a list MP to clear the way for the next candidate on New Zealand First’s list. That candidate is Ria Bond … from Invercargill.

That’s right. In choosing Peters, Northland voters would be electing an MP from Invercargill.

Those in the Far North would elect a candidate from the deep south.

But it gets better.

Peters lives in Auckland. Parliament is in Wellington. That’s how he divides his time. Kerikeri is 250km north of Auckland. So Peters is asking the people of Northland to vote for an Aucklander to elect an MP from Invercargill and empower an MP from Wellington.

Yep.

It has been 40 years since Peters stood for Northern Maori. He’s late in rediscovering the north but his campaign is exciting.

I believe he prefers a close second. Winning would be altogether too much work.

Northland is a huge electorate with huge needs. John Carter used to spend every spare minute doing constituent cases, and driving around.

How often would Peters visit the electorate from St Marys Bay?

Derek Yach is a former executive director of the World Health Organisation NCDs (non communicable diseases). He writes in an opinion piece for the 10th anniversary of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control:

The earliest work of the FCTC involved demonizing the tobacco industry and cutting off contact with them. That was a successful and simple strategy at the time. But now we face new realities. Major multinationals are edging towards greater investments in innovative harm reduction products; and state monopolies led from China, Indonesia and India are poised to soon be the dominant manufacturers by volume of traditional tobacco products.

Implementation of the FCTC will be tougher as state monopolies’ power grows – as it is in the very countries where prevalence remains extremely high or increasing. …

Multinationals seek predictability and respectability. The FCTC gave them the first and harm reduction may give them the second. There is no example of a legal consumer goods sector being regulated out of existence. There are many examples though of how entire industrial sectors can shift from being damaging to the environment or health to being less damaging through the use of innovative technologies, smart regulations, consumer pressure and constant media voice.

In my observations of public health lobby groups, they tend to be divided into two types. The first are those who just hate the companies involved in the industry they are targeting (gambling, alcohol, tobacco etc) and they devote all their energies to demonising the companies and industry.

The second are more focused on harm reduction, and will support any good initiative to reduce harm – regardless of where they come from.

It is interesting that a very senior former global health official is suggesting the former approach is no longer sensible, and they should focus on the latter. I think he is right.

Michael Field at Stuff writes:

It is not paradise out there in the South Pacific and while our friendly neighbourhood might be democratic and understand rugby’s off-side rule, corruption, self-interest and idiocy stalks their capitals. 

And dangerously surprising things like coups, civil war and mutinies happen, and they have a real and direct impact on New Zealand. 

The Snowden Papers suggest spying in the South Pacific is something new, but the reality is that we have been spying on Pacific countries for decades.

Back in 1914 London asked New Zealand soldiers to invade German Samoa. We said yes, but asked if they could give us some details of German defences. London replied we would look it up in an encyclopaedia.

These days acting like that is not on.

Time-shift to today and pick a Pacific country that suddenly finds itself with people being killed, buildings on fire and assorted bad people breaking into police armouries – as happened in the Solomon Islands. 

New Zealand’s Special Air Service was on the way to save lives – what are they expected to do for useful intelligence, Google it? 

Field makes the case that we need to do more than just collect metadata.

In the late-90s the Solomons was still known as the “happy isles” but some astute people were picking up whispers about dangerous people, one in particular, the little known Harold Keke. No one was spying on him but later he became a murderous warlord. 

So was Francis Ona, an obscure farmer who closed down the world’s biggest copper mine and sparked a decade-long Bougainville civil war. Much later into that civil war, New Zealand did a lot of spying there. 

We should have, because we were putting unarmed New Zealand soldiers on the ground.

The Snowden papers suggest we are massively collecting metadata across the South Pacific and sending it to the US. 

If this is the extent of the spying, then New Zealand’s tragedy is that we are not really listening at all to the Pacific.  

So often we have been taken by surprise. 

Foreign intelligence takes two forms. That you get by intercepts, and that you get through working networks, having conversations etc. We need both kinds.

Stuff reports:

The world was reminded once again of South East Asia’s tough stance on crime when two German men were sentenced on Thursday to nine months jail and caning for vandalism in Singapore. 

Andreas Von Knorre, 22, and Elton Hinz, 21, broke into a suburban train depot and spray-painted graffiti on the exterior metro (MRT) train cabin in November 2014.

They did graffiti in Singapore? And not spur of the moment stuff, but a deliberate break in. How moronic are they?

Both men expressed remorse in court when they were being sentenced at the Singapore State Courts.

“This is the darkest episode of my entire life,” Von Knorre said.

“I want to apologise to the state of Singapore for the stupid act.”

Hinz also promised the courts “he will never do it again”.

I bet they won’t.

Whale Oil has the story of Labour MP Su’a Wiliam Sio who made speeches condemning charter schools, yet also turned up to pose for photos at the opening of one in his electorate.

Did the good MP announce at the opening of the Nga Whare Waatea Training Centre that if his party becomes Government, he will be voting to close them down?

The Herald profiles former country cop Gavin Benney:

Gavin Benney has always liked to do things his own way, rules or no rules. When a beach house on his Northland patch was burgled, he knew the thief was a local man who had moved to Tapu, 19km north of Thames.

“I rang the Thames police and asked them to try and find this guy and it was just too hard for them,” says Benney.

“So I drove down there, went to this guy’s house, knocked on his door – no search warrant, nothing. He opens the door, couldn’t believe it, didn’t know how I’d found him. Got the stolen gear, which he had in the house, and took him to the Thames police and locked him up.

“And I did get in a little bit of shit for that because I didn’t get permission. But if I’d asked for permission to go, they’d say no. You’d send it to Thames, some cop would get it, they would sit on it … And the cops are busy, but to me that’s the important stuff to go and do.”

We need more cops like this.

In 2010 he got a call from a man whose boat had been stolen from Whananaki 12 years earlier. The owner said the boat had turned up on Trade Me in an auction. Benney located the advertiser north of Kaikohe but found the local police “unhelpful”, so he drove north with the original owner and reunited him with his boat. He got an official bollocking for that too, he says. Another time he and a dairy farmer tracked down stolen stock outside his area without notifying local police. He got a search warrant but got told off again.

How dare he not get permission to solve crimes.

He is proud of the crime statistics that show he solved between 60 and 65 per cent of all reported crime, compared with the 50 per cent average for all New Zealand, and 50 per cent of burglaries, compared with only 10 per cent nationally.

Excellent.

In fact, even some of the villains rate him. The book’s foreword, by an anonymous local drug dealer and small-time thief, calls him “hard but fair”. It describes Benney walking into a room of “pretty serious crims” in his customary policing uniform – shorts, T-shirt and Jandals – and being treated with respect, partly because most of them played rugby with him.

Love it. Small town NZ.

This approach may have endeared Benney to locals but not to some of his bosses. Benney says he had regular run-ins over his slack dress code, using the police-issue 4WD for crayfishing trips with his friend Roger Ballard, the author’s husband, while he was on call, and often not answering his phone immediately because he was busy playing tennis or hockey.

Crayfishing is an excellent use of his vehicle!

The Herald reports:

John Banks is seeking to have a second trial for filing a false electoral return thrown out after the discovery of evidence which the Crown failed to disclose to his QC.

Not good for the Crown, if true.

This is at odds with evidence given at the trial, where the Crown contended the lunch was held on June 9, 2010 and the presence of the Americans was denied by the Dotcoms, as well as their bodyguard Wayne Tempero.

The defence was able to prove at the trial there was no lunch on June 9, because Mr Banks was campaigning and Mrs Banks was at work.

In finding Mr Banks guilty, Justice Edwin Wylie said Dotcom was a good witness but he was wrong about the date of the lunch and ruled it must have happened on June 5.

So Dotcom claimed the lunch was on 9 June, but the evidence was that this was not possible as Mrs Banks was at work, so they assumed it was 5 June.

But when interviewed by Mr Butler about the new affidavits before the Court of Appeal hearing, Dotcom accepted the evidence of the US businessmen – including that donations were not discussed at the June 5 lunch. Instead, he said there was a second lunch – again on June 9 – at which the donations were discussed.

You can’t have it both ways. If the lunch was on 5 June, then the Americans were there and their evidence is now accepted that no donations were discussed.

If there was a lunch on 9 June, then the evidence is that the Banks were not there.

“It has never been part of the crown case nor has there been any prior suggestion that there were two lunches within a matter of days of each other, at which both Mr and Mrs Banks were present,” wrote Mr Jones.

“How the Crown can now properly pursue this prosecution in the circumstances is unknown … the crown case will accordingly have to be completely recast in a way which, with respect, is utterly untenable.”

It does seem preposterous that there would have been two lunches within four days with Mr and Mrs Banks, and this was never mentioned at the original trial.

An interesting article from the Washington Post:

The Saudi government essentially puts each inmate’s family on welfare. The government gives them money for food, rent and school fees, and it pays airfare and hotel expenses for families to come visit – even for foreign prisoners whose families live overseas.

Escorted by guards, many prisoners (except those convicted of murder) are allowed to attend funerals and weddings of close family members, and they are given as much as $2600 in cash to present as a wedding gift.

After the presentation, we visited the Family Home, a hotel within the prison that is used to reward prisoners for good behavior. The hotel has 18 large suites, which can sleep as many as nine family members and have lots of fresh flowers, a well-stocked buffet and a playground for children.

Officials said the government spent $35 million last year on those perks.

“Just because someone is a criminal, we do not punish his family, too,” Ahmed said. “Our strategy is to take care of these people to make the community better. This is what Islam tells us to do.”

The majority of the 3500 inmates in the five high-security prisons have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses, including al-Qaeda attacks inside the Saudi kingdom, that happened before the rise of the Islamic State last year.

General Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the powerful Ministry of Interior, whose Mabahith secret police run the high-security prisons, said taking care of inmates’ families is part of the Saudi strategy of trying to rehabilitate radicals.

The Saudis have a long-standing program of placing those convicted of terrorism-related offenses in an intensive program of education and religious study designed to try to alter their thinking and behavior.

Inmates in the high-security prisons start with months-long in-depth courses inside the prisons. When they finish their sentence, they are transferred to one of two large rehabilitation centers, in Riyadh and in Jiddah, for further studies.

“If you lose these inmates when they are in prison, they will come out of prison more radical,” Turki said, adding that supporting their families also helps make sure they, too, don’t “fall into the hands of the terrorists.”

Turki said that about 20 percent of those who have gone through the rehabilitation program have returned to terrorism-related activities.

If the recidivism rate is only 20%, that’s pretty good. I like the focus on education and study to try and change their views – plus keepng them in touch with their families.

The Daily Caller reports:

Fat kids are serious business. So serious, in fact, that the United Nations is urging countries to let its bureaucrats micromanage what foods are allowed to advertise on TV.

The European branch of the World Health Organization (WHO), the health arm of the U.N., is trying to stop childhood obesity by urging countries to adopt an international blueprint that would ban almost all food advertisements targeted at children and place substantial regulatory influence in the hands of the UN. …

With that in mind, last week, WHO’s Regional Office for Europe released a “nutrient profile model” that it recommends as the model for how countries go about deciding what foods should be locked out of advertising to children. Such a model is currently only used in a handful of countries, including Norway, the U.K. and Denmark, but WHO is hoping that with its nudging more countries will imitate these policies.

The exhaustive model breaks foods into 17 different groups, ranging from processed fruits and vegetables to cheese. Each category is evaluated on its nutritional content per 100g of food. Foods that exceed thresholds for sugar, fat, salt or calories would be barred from any marketing that would increase the food’s appeal to children. For example, a cheese would fall under the ban if it contains at least 20g of fat or 1.3g of salt per 100g.

If adopted, the model would totally prohibit all advertisements for chocolate, candy, cake, sugary soda, ice cream and fruit juice. The only foods subject to no restrictions whatsoever are meats fresh fruits, poultry and vegetables.

So at first they just ban advertisements for these foods. Then they ban the foods themselves.

Liam Hehir writes in the Manawatu Standard:

What do you know about Rwanda, aside from the fact that it was the scene of an infamous genocide?

Not much, I’d wager. I’d be surprised if you could name the capital city, the principal religion and the languages spoken or point to the country’s position on a map of Africa.

Well I was in Kigali in January so can name it!

Rwanda is only famous because up to a million people were murdered there in a killing spree of such barbaric ferocity that it shocked the entire world in 1994.

The most charitable interpretation of the West’s involvement in the matter is that it was caught unawares and so could not take any substantive measures to stop it from happening. Bill Clinton cites this as the biggest regret of his presidency (and, remember, he once had the chance to take out Osama bin Laden).

But let’s imagine that a Western coalition had deployed to Rwanda and averted the butchering. Would that action now be held up as a great vindication of liberal interventionism in foreign affairs? I have my doubts.

The things that do not happen do not tend to command our attention.

The building that didn’t catch fire yesterday isn’t front-page news. Nobody sees the jobs not created when businesses can’t afford the investment. The murder that doesn’t happen leaves no victims to weep over.

Had genocide been averted, the reality is we could never actually be sure we had prevented anything at all. There are no controlled experiments when it comes to human events.

Who could say for certain that the tensions would not have otherwise de-escalated?

That’s not to say that coverage of the intervention would have been neutral. You can bet your bottom dollar that there would have been plenty of grumbling and criticism about the West’s involving itself in the troubled region. After all, the presence of foreign troops would not have resolved the deep divisions in Rwandan society. There would have been no quick fix.

So there would be claims from some quarters about the whole mess being caused by Western colonialism in the first place – and that further intervention was only making things worse.

Some would question why Rwanda was being singled out for this imperialist adventure when there were so many other ethnic conflicts in Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkans going on at the same time. Others would claim that the Tutsis were as bad as the Hutus and that, since the Rwandan Patriotic Front was hardly perfect, we had no business dirtying our hands by getting involved.

Had New Zealand got involved, you can be sure there would have been accusations that the prime minister was toadying to the United States in the hopes of winning some elusive trade deal, as if any contribution we could make would be sufficient to exact any meaningful concessions from the protectionist US Congress.

In other words, there would have been all the same objections we hear about Western intervention in the fight against the Islamic State (Isis) today.

A good point that we rarely know the counter factual. In Kosovo though it is safe to conclude intervention saved tens of thousands of lives.

So in such a situation, what can one do? I know that political columnists are supposed to effect an air of world-weary cynicism – but there is always the option of trying to do the right thing.

Isis makes no secret of its plans for the Christians, Jews and moderate Muslims who fall into its clutches. Every day brings more news that the organisation’s deeds are more than a match for its words.

However morally corrupt and compromised the Iraqi regime is, it cannot be worse than the satanic caliphate banging on its door.

Those who claim we should do nothing because it means some of our allies are less than perfect ignore history. Was it wrong for the UK and US to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Of course not.

The Parliamentary Library has published an interesting analysis of the 2014 election results.

A couple of graphs from it:

Some big changes over time.

Interesting that the proportion of female electorate MPs is increasing, while decreasing for List MPs. Electorate seats tend to be longer lasting for MPs than list seats, so that is a good thing.

Parliament actually has a great proportion of Maori as MPs, than the overall population does. It’s good to see the House of Representatives is quite representative.

3 News reports:

The [Internet] party spent more than $1 million on election related advertising, including $122,000 for a YouTube parody of Prime Minister John Key and US President Barack Obama.

$122,000 for that lam parody video? My God – someone did well out of it.

The election returns reveal the party’s explosive press secretary Pam Corkery was paid $15,000 for her 15 weeks’ work – that’s $1000 a week.

Worth every cent!

Party Leader Laila Harre was paid $66,000 – more than $4000 a week.

$4,000 a week. I guess that makes you the 1%, not the 99%. The Greens obviously couldn’t match that pay scale.

A reader e-mails:

I’ve been thinking about the overheated Auckland property market, which must be driven by to some extent by speculation, and the intent of the tax law. I reckon IRD could take a test case along the following lines: 

Mr and Mrs X purchased a two flat property in central Onehunga in 2009 for $480,000 to add to their rental property portfolio. They borrowed 100% of the purchase price so therefore the rent was well short of the required mortgage repayments and the property always made a loss for tax purposes. They had to ‘top up’ the mortgage payments with around $100 a week of their own money (they privately told their friends they were happy to do this because the property was well located and would give a good capital gain). In 2014 they decided to restructure their portfolio and sold the property for $680,000. They declared no taxable capital gain because they considered the property was held for rental purposes and they had no history of buying and subsequently selling rental properties. 

IRD could propose that when they bought the property they did so with the clear knowledge that the rental income was less than even the interest on the mortgage used to fund the purchase, and with rent rises in Auckland averaging about 5% a year they would be required to top up the mortgage repayments from their own money for the foreseeable future. The purchase was therefore only a viable proposition if the property was to be sold at a later date for a substantial capital gain. It therefore must have been purchased with the purpose or one of the purposes being resale. The $200,000 gain on sale should therefore be treated as taxable income.

There are various provisions in the income tax act relating to the sale of land – the one related to the business of dealing in land is CB 7 and the one related to buying land with the intention of resale is CB 6. The tax law does not say landlords have to have the intention of trading in property to get caught. Case law has limited the circumstances in which CB 6 or predecessor section have applied but judges can create new precedent, and judges’ interpretation of tax avoidance provisions has moved to a more purposive approach in the last 10 years or so.

It would be an interesting test case,if the IRD went this way. It could have a big impact, if successful.

My personal preference is for NZ to have a land tax, with reductions in income tax rates to make it overall fiscally neutral.

Stuff reports:

Thousands more cellphone antennas and roadside cabinets could be installed without community consultation under a proposed environmental rule change.

Telecommunications firms would be allowed to install 3.5 metre-high cellphone antennas on street lights, power poles, multi-storey buildings and on any rural structure without resource consent, the Government has proposed.

Excellent. The safety issues have been proved 1,000 times over, and just adding them onto existing structures shouldn’t need a resource consent.

Green Party environment spokeswoman Julie Anne Genter said the Government appeared to have little regard for environmental outcomes or community input.

“We support National Environmental Standards but they need to be used to protect the environment, not to override the right of local communities to have a say,” she said.

Do they want their cellphones to work, and to have Internet access?

This is basic essential infrastructure. If a tower is going to block someone’s view etc, then they should have a say. But this is just about adding them to existing structures.

Environment Minister Nick Smith said they would “reduce by thousands” the number of resource consents required to install wi-fi panels, street cabinets, light pole antennas and cabling.

Tens of millions are spent on an entirely wasteful process, as they inevitably gain the consent.

The Herald editorial:

New Zealanders are not vigilantes by nature. When they start taking the law into their own hands, something is seriously wrong. A spate of accidents involving tourist drivers this summer has led to several incidents in which South Island residents have stopped drivers and confiscated their keys. The first two, at Franz Josef on Monday of last week and near Lindis Pass last month, were relatively innocuous and the vigilantes feel they did the responsible thing, handing in the keys at the nearest police station.

But the police expressed concern at where this sort of citizens’ arrest could lead and last Friday in Greymouth, their concerns were realised. A motorist signalled the visitor to pull over on the town’s Main South Rd and punched him in the face as he seized the keys of the rental car. Police said the tourist had moved to the right and moved back left in a manoeuvre that did not amount to dangerous driving.

The driver suffered bruising to his eye, his female passenger was shaken and police are seeking their assailant.

If every citizen could be trusted to act only when they had good cause and to do so with restraint, such actions could be applauded. But any unauthorised infringement of the rights of others is likely to give people of poor judgment the idea that they have a licence to do so. That is why observers of dangerous driving should confine their actions to a *555 call to the police.

While the authorities warn against vigilantism though, they must be concerned that it reflects a real problem on our roads.

Or maybe the vigilantism is because some media have spent the last few months running high profile stories about every driving accident involving a tourist, while giving almost no publicity to those that do not. Is it a surprise that after months of media scare-mongering, that some NZers become vigilantes?

Stuff reports:

Principals’ Federation president Denise Torrey has criticised the Principal Recruitment Allowance scheme through which five schools have received a $50,000 boost to their principal’s salary.

Torrey warned that “more money in a principal’s pocket” would not help kids learn better, or make a better principal. 

Excellent. I look forward to the Principals’ Federation accepting a zero pay rise for the next five years or so.

1. If Winston wins, then NZ First will have their Invercargill candidate enter Parliament which will effectively mean one fewer MP in Northland and one more MP in Invercargill.
2. NZ First care so much for Northland they failed to stand a candidate there not only in 2014,but also in 2011 and 2008. Winston was list only for the last two and could have stood there but chose not to.
3. If Winston did win the seat, Parliament would lose the proportionality it had on the general election results, and United Future (which got 0.22% of the vote) would then hold the balance of power in Parliament.
4. NZ First policy is to remove $300 million funding from roads of national significance (such as Puhoi to Wellsford) and spending it on trains.
5. Winston doesn’t even know the boundaries of the electorate. He said on Q+A the Puhoi to Wellsford road of national significance “doesn’t get to the Northland electorate at all” but Wellsford is in Northland, not Rodney.