The Telegraph reports:

The Herald reports:

Prime Minister John Key says Andrew Little’s comments at Waitangi on Maori sovereignty were advancing “separatism.”

“I reckon he would be leading New Zealand completely down the wrong path,” Mr Key said at his post cabinet press conference today.

Mr Little told reporters the Waitangi Tribunal finding that Nga Puhi did not cede sovereignty should not be dismissed and that models of indigenous self-governance and law-making around the world should be explored.

“In 1840 when we singed the treaty, it strikes me we signed it for modern New Zealand, and that was a New Zealand where we co-habitated and ran the country together. It wasn’t about separatism. It was actually about community and Andrew Little is basically suggesting that we had down a path of separatism.”

He said he could not see New Zealanders supporting that.

As I said earlier, I look forward to Labour explaining what particular models of shared sovereignty they are thinking of.

Grant McCallum has announced:

Northland dairy farmer, Grant McCallum, has announced he will contest the nomination for Northland in the up-coming by-election.

His contribution to the local Maungaturoto community has included roles in Education and Sport. He now feels it is time to seek the support of the Northland National Party to be its candidate and to represent the people of Northland in Parliament.

“After careful consideration, my family and I have decided the time is right to put my name forward. This is an opportunity to work with all of Northland’s communities and serve the people of Northland –to continue the work of the John Key led Government in focusing on the opportunities in the North, both economic and social. If selected, I will be a strong voice for Northland in the National Government.”

Grant is a local and will be a strong contender for the nomination. He has been a member of the Party’s Board of Directors for some years, winning election at the annual conference.

I’m sure there will be other strong candidates also. The selection will be on 28 February.

“Politicians used to promise to build roads with new taxes. Folks noticed they didn’t build the roads… so now they say ‘infrastructure’.”

– Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform

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.

A thoughtful speech by Grant Robertson to Labour’s Future of Work conference. A part that struck me was:

In November received a visit from the joint winners of a prize I give to a local secondary school.  They had won the prize in 2013 and arrived at the end of 2014 to thank me and tell me how their year at university had gone.

It had gone well each in their respective disciplines of marketing and design. I asked them about their plans for the summer and holiday work. Thinking back to my glory days as an assistant in the fruit and veggie section of the local New World I expected to hear tales of bar work and retail.  Instead I was presented with two business cards, and a link to their design business that they had established during the year.  The summer was shaping up well with a client found through their on-line presence, and a sideline in stunning digital depictions of Wellington icons for sale at various market stalls.  

These two very capable young women did not see any boundaries between their study, commencing work, pursuing their interests or passions. They had the attitude, the skills and the security to do just exactly what they found interesting.  The future of work is bright, flexible, diverse and stimulating for them- and they will be a complete handful for anyone here trying to teach them.

I love this story. It is one of the things I love about the digital age, that so many young people are embracing the opportunities to do what they are passionate about, and are not dependent on an employer, or a degree. Such a story would have been near unthinkable 15 years ago.

The Commission’s mandate is to undertake a two year programme to develop a comprehensive understanding of the changing nature and experience of work and its impact on the economy, and to develop the policy responses required to meet the challenges and grasp the opportunities presented by these changes.

We believe that in order to be responsible leaders we must look to the future and prepare now. We owe to the next generation of New Zealanders that we are giving them the best possible chance to succeed.  We owe to a current generation of workers who feel insecure about their future and income that they can make transitions to new and fulfilling types of work.  We owe to businesses, small, medium and large that we have a plan for sustainable diversified, economic growth.

There is no room for complacency in such a period of rapid change, and by 2017 we must be in a position to tell New Zealanders what we are doing to face the future of work with confidence.  The Commission will be open to new and different ideas, to challenge our assumptions and policies. We will be prepared to change.  Our commitment is that with our core values firmly in mind, we are open to each and every idea that is put forward.

I will admit to a degree of scepticism that Labour will come up with anything more than their normal policies of payoffs for unions, extra costs on employers and less flexibility and choice in the workplace. But I hope to be wrong.

What Labour is doing with this two year programme of consultation and development on this issue is exactly what a good opposition should do. If they do it well, they’ll build credibility with stakeholders, show they understand the environment and issues, and come up with some genuinely new policies and solutions.

The Ministry of Health has released its survey of alcohol use in 2012/13. Now bear in mind we’ve had years of people claiming that things are getting worse in NZ and we need to ban some alcoholic products, ban advertising, ban sponsorship, close bars earlier and make it harder to buy a bottle of wine at the supermarket.

So what does this research find has been the trend in the last five years (since 2007/08):

• A 3% drop from 85% to 82% in the number of adults who drink
• A 2% drop from 32% to 30% in the number of adults who say they drank before age 15
• A 22% drop in spirits consumers from 49% of adults to 27%
• A 17% drop in wine consumers from 69% of adults to 52%
• A 7% drop in beer consumers from 66% to 59%
• A 5% drop in RTD consumers from 22% to 17%
• A trend of more moderate drinking with high frequency down from 29% to 28% and low frequency up from 39% to 42%
• A drop in those getting intoxicated from 59% to 57%
• A drop in alcohol caused self harm from 5.5% to 4.1%
• A drop in alcohol adversely affecting home life from 8.5% to 6.1%

There is of course still significant harm caused by alcohol abuse, just as there is also significant pleasure caused by non abusive consumption of alcohol. What is clear is numerous indicators is the trend is positive.

The EFF report:

New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States’ already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the “Mickey Mouse Act” as it was called due to Disney’s heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. Nations including Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Canada would all be required to extend their terms and grant Big Content companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason. This means that all of the TPP’s extreme enforcement provisions would apply to creative works for upwards of 100 years. …

These are the terms of the proposal, revealed by several leaks of the TPP Intellectual Property chapter: If the copyright holder is an individual, the minimum copyright term would extend to the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years after her death.

It is unclear if NZ has caved on just the length of copyright, or also on all the other issues in the intellectual property chapter. If it is the latter, that is truly bad as the US proposed text would be severely detrimental to the Internet, ISPs and users.

If they have only caved on the length of copyright, that is less bad but still undesirable. The current NZ law is for copyright to apply for life plus 50 years, and an extension to life plus seventy is not justified.

The reason we have copyright is to protect and encourage innovation and creative works. If there was no copyright at all, then we’d have few authors and movies. However no author or creator is encouraged to produce creative works by the possibility royalties will still flow 70 years after they die.

You could make a principled case that copyright should only apply for the life of a creator. However that could set up an incentive to kill authors to make their works public domain, plus if they have young children it is fair that royalties from their works should continue while their children become adults.

So I think a copyright term of life plus 20 years is what we should have. We should not be always extending the life of copyright to benefit some US corporations. Think if you could never put on a Shakespearean play without having to pay a large fee to the great great great great grand children of Shakespeare.

Copyright is an invented right, which seeks to balance the rights of creators and the rights of users. It is not an natural right such as free speech. It is an important intellectual property right, but extending the term to life plus 70 years will not benefit creators (they will be long dead). It will benefit a few large corporations.

The Herald reported:

Figures released under the Official Information Act reveal more than 5500 beneficiaries were issued with warrant-for-arrest notifications between July 2013 and September last year.

The policy was implemented as part of the welfare reform changes on July 15, 2013, with people with outstanding arrest warrants no longer able to receive a benefit.

It was estimated of the about 15,000 people subject to an arrest warrant, more than half of them – about 8200 – were on benefits.

And up until last year you could carry on claiming your benefit, despite being effectively a fugitive from justice.

Work and Income deputy chief executive Debbie Power said the Government was committed to stopping the benefits of people who had not resolved their warrant to arrest.

Excellent.

The Herald reports:

A landmark 1905 villa sitting on a $3.5 million piece of land in Herne Bay, the country’s most expensive suburb, is for sale for removal.

The Jervois Rd landmark was occupied by the Erawan Thai restaurant for more than 20 years, but in 2012, owner Jessica Woo got approval from Auckland Council to remove or demolish it.

Ms Woo also owns a villa backing on to the Erawan site in Lawrence St, valued at $1.42 million, which she has permission to remove or demolish.

Owners should be allowed to remove a building on their land, so they can build a new one – unless it has exceptional heritage value.

The building in 110 years old. Age alone does not make a building a heritage building. In most countries a building 100 years old isn’t even uncommon – their heritage buildings are the ones 400 years old.

The Western Bays Community Group has called the potential loss of the villa a shocker.

Christine Cavanagh, of Herne Bay 1011, said while the group understood the owner had consent to remove the building, “we’re extremely concerned that this is just the start of heritage destruction”.

She said just four doors away, two adjoining villas were for sale on the north side of Jervois Rd between Lawrence St and Sentinel Rd. They have no heritage protection under the Auckland Council’s proposed Unitary Plan.

This did not make sense, Mrs Cavanagh said, when adjoining streets were protected by a pre-1944 demolition rule in the draft plan – the new planning rulebook.

I have a solution. Why doesn’t Herne Bay 1011 buy the villa and spent their own money on keeping it?

If the villa was not listed as a heritage property when the current owner purchased it, it is grossly unfair to try and retrospectively change its classification, as this can massively affect the value of the property.

There are a number of properties in New Zealand that do deserve heritage protection. But just because a house is an old villa, doesn’t mean it does.

Peter Dunne has said:

Attempts by three Labour MPs, Jacinda Ardern, Christopher Hipkins and Grant Robertson, to stop changes to the National Library’s Service to Schools programme, which will see more students and more schools receiving an increased number of books from the National Library, would be comical if they were not so tragic, says Minister of Internal Affairs, Hon Peter Dunne.

The changes, which are fully supported by the Ministry of Education, are designed to reach about two-thirds of teachers who currently do not use the service. These include increasing the number of hard-copy fiction and non-fiction books sent to schools to support reading for pleasure and providing up-to-date information digitally to support curriculum topics.

“It has to be remembered that in New Zealand students are encouraged to explore the whole world of knowledge, which means the National Library receives requests to support a wide variety of differing curriculum topics.

“The current changes will ensure the National Library will continue to support these requests by providing the information digitally, rather than in hard copy, so that it is up-to-date and in formats the current generation of New Zealand students need -.

“It will also make it easier to share the same material to other schools and teachers. This is especially true when the information sought is highly popular or not even published in a book”, says Mr Dunne.

As far as I can tell this campaign is opposing the National Library moving into the digital age with its school lending programme. How backwards. As Dunne says, the advantage with electronic copies is more than one school or student can borrow them at a time, and there are no delays.

I do agree that there is a difference between physical books and e-books. I prefer a physical book. And parents and libraries should supply physical books to kids. However the national library supports several thousands schools, and a digital format is much more sensible for them.

“Labour’s attempts to keep the curriculum support out of the twenty-first century can only mean two things: they either expect the National Library to purchase in advance hard copy books on all possible subjects for all 90,000 New Zealand teachers, or they want to limit New Zealand children to learning about topics for which there are books within the National Library.

“Both of these options are untenable.

We should embrace the potential of technology for education, not oppose it.

Plenty of topics for the US cartoonists to choose from, anything from the US debt, to ISIS, the measles and Brian Williams!

The first cartoon I’ve selected is about the massive US debt and Obama’s attitude towards it.

© Gary Varvel: Found at Real Clear Politics

The other cartoon is for all the Cheney haters out there! It compares Brian Williams to Dick Cheney re Iraq. I’m not a Cheney hater but I can still see the funny side of this one.

© Nick Anderson: Found at Real Clear Politics

The spill motion was defeated 39 to 61. That is not particularly decisive. It suggests two thirds of the backbench voted for a spill.

Tony Abbott remains Prime Minister, but in my view the clock is ticking. The latest poll has them a massive 14% behind Labor. Their next Budget has to be a game changer and they need to close the poll gap within the next six months, otherwise inevitably there will be another spill.

I was amused that Sky News got texted the result by an MP around a minute before the Chief Whip came out to announce the result!

The Herald reports:

A New Zealand judge has been picked from 150 candidates, after a “robust” vetting process, to lead a mammoth inquiry into historic child sex abuse allegations in Britain, including an alleged political paedophile ring.

High Court Justice Lowell Goddard will chair the inquiry, which was announced in July last year by British Prime Minister David Cameron, following a string of scandals involving the abuse of children at hospitals and care homes as well as churches and schools.

Justice Goddard is based at the High Court in Wellington and told the BBC that coming from New Zealand was an advantage in that she came into the inquiry with no context or agenda “other than to work hard and get to the bottom of the allegations and to find answers”. She said the “robust” vetting process she was put through before being selected to lead the probe was “absolutely in order”.

Justice Goddard has been a NZ High Court Judge for 19 years, and is the former chair of the Independent Police Complaints Authority.

It’s nice to see a NZ Judge selected for what will be an incredibly challenging and high profile role in a much larger country.

Antony Green of ABC blogged an interesting list of how each Australian Pm has left office. 11 have been defeated at an election, six defeated in Parliament, six deposed by their party, three retired, three died in office three were temporary and one sacked by a Governor-General.

I thought I would do the same for New Zealand Prime Ministers. I’ve only done those from Seddon onwards. The list is:

Defeated at Election (11)

• Gordon Coates
• George Forbes
• Peter Fraser
• Keith Holyoake (1)
• Walter Nash
• Jack Marshall
• Bill Rowling
• Robert Muldoon
• Mike Moore
• Jenny Shipley
• Helen Clark

Died (4)

• Richard Seddon
• William Massey
• Michael Joseph Savage
• Norman Kirk

Deposed by Party (4)

• Keith Holyoake (2) (effectively)
• David Lange (effectively)
• Geoffrey Palmer
• Jim Bolger

Some may dispute if Holoyoake and Lange were deposed. I go for form over substance. They both wanted to carry on but had lost confidence, even if no formal vote.

Defeated in Parliament (2)

• Joseph Ward (1) (effectively)
• Thomas Mackenzie

One could dispute Ward but he resigned as he was facing a confidence motion, and his successor lost a confidence vote months later.

Resigned for ill health (2)

• Joseph Ward (2)
• Sidney Holland

Temporary (2)

• William Hall-Jones
• Francis Bell

Still in office (1)

• John Key

The average of the public polls since 2012.

The monthly newsletter was published yesterday. The summary is:

There were two political polls in January – a Roy Morgan and a 3 News Reid Research.

The average of the public polls has National 23% ahead of Labour in August, up 3% from December. The current seat projection is centre-right 65 seats, centre-left 46 which would see a centre-right Government.

In Australia the Coalition is 8% behind Labour as Abbott battles to remain Leader and Prime Minister.

In the United States Obama’s approval rating has improved but is still negative. Clinton remains the dominant Democratic frontrunner while the withdrawal of Mitt Romney sees no front runner for the Republicans. 

In the UK Labour’s lead over the Conservatives has declined to just 1%.For the first time in some years they are no longer forecast to get a majority.

In Canada the Liberals remain in the lead over the Conservatives, but are projected to win slightly fewer seats.

The normal three tables are provided comparing the country direction sentiment, head of government approval and opposition leader approval sentiment for the five countries.

We also carry details of polls in New Zealand on summer holiday dates and leadership attributes plus the normal business and consumer confidence polls.

This newsletter is normally only available by e-mail.  If you would like to receive future issues, please e-mail [email protected] with your name, organization (if applicable) and e-mail address or go to http://listserver.actrix.co.nz/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/polling-newsletter to subscribe yourself.

 

Correspondence and feedback is also welcome to the same address.

A hilarious thread on Reddit when someone asked on Reddit “Are there a lot of spiders in NZ, compared to the US?”

The most popular and hence top answer was:

There are quite a few but during the summer months when they’re breeding you’re allowed to catch the adults if they’re more than 12cm (five inches) wide.

In my experience it’s best to warn tourists before they eat a dish with them in it because some people can be fussy when it comes to what they’re used to eating. TBH it’s mainly older people who have them, younger people would rather have McDonalds or something.

This then led to scores of further comments, all keeping the theme going.

You got the recipe for Katipo fritters? I remember we used to have them down at the batch. Nana and grandad would turn up in the Morris with a chillybin full and we’d fry them up on the beach with kea eggs and sheep’s milk. Never found the recipe.

Damn things are endangered now. The Katipo, not the sheep.

And

To that end, it is common for New Zealanders to travel out to the beaches and forests of New Zealand during summer (peak breeding season) to help keep numbers down, walking through the bush and fossicking through the dunes in an effort to help out our native populations by thinning numbers of non-indigenous spiders while getting a really good feed.

I don’t think I’m out of line in saying it is many New Zealander’s most treasured part of our national day, Waitangi Day, which commemorates Maori and the Crown reaching agreement on the management of our spider population, and then sitting down to a shared meal of roasted spiders, a tradition that lives on to this day.

With Waitangi day being tomorrow (Feb 6th) I’m really looking forward to my family’s traditional spider cook-up! This year we are trying a variant of pavlova that utilises spider eggs! Yum!

And quite cleverly:

It’s a bloody outrage they reduced the size limit to 12cm IMO. Back when I was a kid, you used to be able to find heaps that were over 20cm! We sold them to the local fish and chip shop, they made fritters out of them. After all the lobbying to reduce the size limits, the proper sized ones are so much rarer. I think the commercial companies have just over foraged, and we might see a real reduction in our stocks in time. That said, I can’t see it happening in the next decade or so.

Some politics:

This is why I voted National. They were the only party to promise to completely revise the Arachnid Harvesting Act so that every day New Zealanders can enjoy an eight-legged feed like the old days. Spiders and snapper were the most important election issues last year imho.

And:

But remember when Simon Bridges opened up the Spider Sanctuary to oil drilling? An oil spill would be catastrophic for our spider-based economy.

Best of all:

New Zealand actually has the most spiders per capita (SPCA it’s called in official documentation). We signed a treaty with them to give them the sovereign nation of Hamilton. …

Shortly thereafter, they died of chlamydia. …

Not ALL of them died. A lot moved to Gore.

Read the whole thread and enjoy.

Stuff reports:

A man who tracked his stolen iPad is disappointed police could not obtain a search warrant to recover it.

The Napier tradesman had the iPad and about $7000 of equipment stolen from his van on Monday evening.

Using the Find My iPad feature, an application that uses GPS to track the device, he tracked it to the suburb of Onekawa. Police applied for a search warrant for a specific address but a police spokeswoman said this was declined “on the basis that there wasn’t enough evidence”.

“While it did “ping” in the [address] vicinity, that is only regarded as a general area and not a specific location. Often with these tracking cases we have found items not in the locations specified by the apps, but nearby,” the spokeswoman said.

She could not say whether police took any further action concerning the man’s complaint, such as making inquiries of the property’s occupants.

This isn’t good enough.

Yes sometimes the GPS location is slightly off by 10 metres or so. In built up areas this could mean a different house.

But surely the Police can still make inquiries. Go knock on the door and ask questions. Check if known criminals are at the address or nearby. Ask for permission to check the house. Use the Find My iPad feature to get it to make a loud noise.

From Matthew Steele on Twitter.

Patrick Gower has gone global and viral for the Waitangi Day pub crawl in London. I love it.

Stuff reports:

Senior Anglicans have been forced to apologise for one bishop’s inflammatory comments at an inter-faith gathering.

Bishop John Gray shocked visiting Jews in Christchurch last month when he told them the Holocaust “should have taught you a lesson”.

This man should not be a Bishop. He shouldn’t even be a priest if he thinks that Jews somehow deserved the Holocaust and hence should have learnt a lesson from it.

The Herald reports:

Girls living under Isis (Islamic State) rule may legitimately be married from as young as nine, and should have a husband before they are 17, according to a semi-official manifesto aimed at winning new recruits.

Their education should continue no later than the age of 15 and “most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17”, according to the document published by the all-female al-Khanssaa Brigade’s media wing.

And if that is not bad enough for any kids who live in an area taken over by ISIL, there’s more:

A report released by the UN on Wednesday also detailed how Isis militants are using children as suicide bombers and human shields. The report, which reviewed the treatment of children across Iraq for the first time since 1998, drew attention to what it said was the “systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by Isis, including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive“. It said militants were selling some abducted children as sex slaves.

Yet Labour and the Greens still say this is nothing to do with us. We should do nothing more than make speeches denouncing ISIL at the UN.

The Herald reports:

Labour leader Andrew Little has proposed looking at giving Maori greater self-governance, possibly including the ability to make some of their own laws. …

He said it was time to look at what would happen after the settlements were completed.

He said some Native American tribes had law-making powers over their territories in the United States where recognised tribes were exempt from some laws – including taxation – and could create their own laws in many areas. Mr Little said allowing separate law-making was “highly problematic”.

“But we shouldn’t be so dismissive of any claim by iwi over what they do. We do have to function as a nation-state and we don’t want to compromise that. But let’s have a look at it.”

I encourage Labour to clarify their thinking and be very specific in their 2017 manifesto as to what law making powers they think Iwi should be given.