Radio NZ report:

A new poll has found close to half of New Zealanders want the new Interislander ferries to be rail-enabled.

The government is still considering replacement options after ditching Labour’s iRex project citing a large cost blowout, in particular from upgrading port infrastructure, taking the pricetag upwards of $3 billion.

Horizon Research has found 48 percent of people preferred the new ferries to be ‘rail enabled’ – capable of taking roll on, roll off rail carriages.

This is unsurprising, but also of no value for decision making.

There was no mention in the question of cost. Who wouldn’t want rail enabled ferries if they could be done for the same cost (including port infrastructure) as non rail enabled ferries. I’d be in favour if they cost the same. I’m surprised only 48% said they were in favour.

It’s like asking people if they would like to live in a small one bedroom apartment or a large five bedroom house. Who wouldn’t choose the five bedroom house. But if you then introduce price into the equation, you would get very different results.

Radio NZ reports:

Labour’s spokesperson for prevention of family and sexual violence, Ginny Andersen, said the death of two children in the first week of this year is a reminder that New Zealand needs to closely look at frontline services for vulnerable families.

Two men are in custody facing murder charges in separate cases – the death of a child in Hamilton and another child in Auckland. …

She said the government’s cuts to frontline social services are very concerning, leaving providers struggling and vulnerable families facing the consequences.

“Frontline service providers warned of the safety risks if that funding was cut, and we’ve seen more than 330 services – ones like Family Start and women support, have those cuts that directly impact upon their service delivery,” she said.

Last August, Oranga Tamariki discontinued funding to 190 service providers, saying they were underperforming or operating at a surplus. Another 142 providers had their funding reduced.

Andersen said the cuts were risking the safety of whānau.

“This government has seen police step back from family violence, while also at the same time, cutting frontline services, and so we’re going to see some ramifications from those cuts, and I sincerely hope that it’s not more fatalities,” she said.

So in Hamilton a 34 year old man stabs a woman, child and baby and it is the fault of the Government.

Likewise the alleged murder of a child in south Auckland is also the fault of the Government, according to Labour.

I’m not even sure where to start with this disgusting attack. Firstly politicians should be very very careful about linking any homicide or murder to government policy or action unless there is very clear link such as a failure by government agencies or a law change.

Secondly if one is going to try and go down the path of blaming the government for homicides, well let’s look at the data. From 2009 to 2017 there was an average of 46 homicides a year. From 2018 got 2022 there was an average of 71. So 53% higher than under the previous Government. Even if you remove the victims of the mosque massacre from the data, it is an average of 61 compared to 46.

But this is all homicides. How about just stuff involving kids. Well I can’t find a data series for child homicides, but the Police do have data back to 2014 for all offences by age. We can assume almost all offences against under five year olds is violence. So what does that data say.

From 2014 to 2017, there were 1182 victims aged under five, or 394 a year. From 2017 to 2023, there were 7,248 victims aged under five, or 1,208 a year.

The Holywood Reporter reports:

“Hell, it must be like Los Angeles,” reads the poem “Contemplating Hell,” by Bertolt Brecht. The Marxist German playwright was largely critiquing the city’s culture. Yet in recent days, many images of wildfire devastation coming over the newswires made the City of Angels look every bit like Hades: raging infernos, charred skeletal remains of homes, a smoke-filled amaranthine sky, weeping residents. It was both shocking and all too familiar — haven’t we seen this episode before? During the Malibu wildfires of 1993, actor Mark Hamill told The Associated Press that the celebrity enclave “looks like a war zone.” Thirty-two years later, Hamill is again one of many stars being evacuated, this time calling the Pacific Palisades destruction “horrific” on Instagram.

Yet some aspects have changed. Fire hydrants running out of water — that certainly feels like a late-season writers room twist (aging infrastructure, dry reservoirs and too much simultaneous demand are cited as possible reasons for this). The frequency and intensity of fires statewide likewise feels new — seven of the eight largest California wildfires of all time have occurred in just the past four years.

The death toll is luckily low (so far) but over 1,000 buildings have been destroyed and the economic damage is estimated to be over $50 billion. Its the most destructive fire in LA history and over 4000 hectares has been burnt.

Donald Trump has said he wants the US to own Greenland and the Panama Canal, saying both are essential to US security. He has not ruled out the use of force to get them.

It is 98% likely Trump’s just trolling. By that I mean he is not considering using force, but he does want them. What is more likely is he may use trade sanctions as a way to pressure Denmark and Panama.

Wanting territory on the grounds of national security is of course what Putin uses as his justification to try and turn Ukraine into a slave state, so it isn’t a good reason.

Greenland is a simple case. Just as I support the Falklander Island residents deciding who governs the Falklands, the same goes for Greenlanders and Greenland. It is a territory of Denmark, but has been inhabited by Norsemen and Inuit for many centuries. It has voted to remain part of Denmark and has its own Government.

The Panama Canal is a bit more nuanced. It was constructed first by France and then by the US on territory controlled by Colombia, France and the US. It was controlled by the US until 1977 when a treaty handed over control to Panama from 1999.

However the treaty allows the U.S. the permanent right to defend the canal from any threat that might interfere with its continued neutral service to ships of all nations.

The two 1977 treaties were ratified by Panama with a 67% vote in favour in a referendum and a 96% turnout.

The US Senate ratified both treaties by a 68 to 32 vote, legally binding the US to them. There was significant opposition to the Treaties, but the Senate ratified them by a 2:1 margin.

Denmark is a member of NATO, so I don’t see anything will happen with regard to Greenland except possible trade sanctions against Denmark. This could lead to retaliatory sanctions from the entire EU though.

With the Panama Canal it is possible the US House and Senate could pass a law nullifying the Treaty and demanding control be handed back. This would not be legal under international law, but could provide a pretext for Trump to seize it. More likely though is the Panama Canal drops its fees, which appear to be driving some of the rhetoric.

Mark Zuckerberg announced:

In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do. 

We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal.

Great to have Meta acknowledge this.

When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.

That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.   

This is not the sort of revelation you expect to hear from the CEO – that their fact checking was biased and became a tool to censor. He is right, of course.

We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.

I love community notes. For them to appear, the community note has to be endorsed by a larger number of users who are not homogeneous in their views. Generally only those tweets that are clearly factually wrong get noted. Also you get some good humour with some of them also.

For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies).

So hundreds of thousands pieces of contents were removed despite not being in violation. As an example of this, a friend yesterday posted a summary of my blog post on the EU over regulating things to Facebook, and it got censored!

We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms. These policy changes may take a few weeks to be fully implemented. 

Also a huge change. No more being suspended for using the wrong pronoun.

This is a massive massive change. Some of it no doubt is due to the results of the US elections, but hopefully it is also genuine self-reflection that they got it wrong.

The BBC reports:

Elon Musk has called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, just weeks after reports the multi-billionaire was in talks to donate to the party.

In a post on his social media site X, Musk said Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party – but did not explain his reasoning. 

Farage suggested this was due to a disagreement over Musk’s support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

He said Musk’s comment was “a surprise”, but that he would “never sell out my principles”.

It is about Tommy Robinson, and I have to say that Farage is in the right here.

Musk has tweeted:

Musk is conflating two seperate issues here. Robinson is not in prison for exposing the horrific grooming gangs scandal. In fact he didn’t expose them. He is in prison for contempt of court.

It was Andrew Norfolk of The Times that exposed the child grooming and abuse. I agree that what happened hasn’t had the media exposure it should have, and that too many in authority failed to act, because they were too focused on the perpetrators instead of the victims. It is a good thing to have people demanding that those in power should hold a high profile national inquiry into what happened (there have been a number of more targeted inquiries).

What Robinson is in jail for all comes from what was probably pretty typical school bullying. A 16 year old assault a 15 year old. The video went viral with a narrative that it was racially inspired as the victim was a Syrian refugee. It got viewed millions of times. It is worth noting that the Judge in the defamation trial said there was no evidence the attack was racially or religiously motivated. It was just a 16 year old being thuggish (sadly quite common).

Robinson took the side of the assailant and repeated claims by the assailant that the victim was in fact the bully, that it was self-defence, that he had attacked others. These were seen by millions also. The victim sued for defamation and a court found that what Robinson said was untrue. He found the statements by friends of the assailant to be unreliable and not backed by school evidence. Robinson was ordered to pay 100,000 pounds plus costs.

Robinson then made a film repeating the allegations against the victim, which had been found to be false and defamatory by the court. He then fled the country and only returned due to an arrest warrant. He was then jailed for contempt of court.

If you lose a defamation case in court, and you then make a film repeating the claims that had already been judged defamatory (and not to be repeated) then you will face contempt of court. It had nothing to do with the grooming scandals.

I think you can certainly make a valid criticism that the length of jail sentence for Robinson is excessive for a contempt of court ruling. But that is very different to claiming he is in prison for telling the truth.

Farage understands this, and that is why he refused to endorse Robinson, which then led Musk to say Farage should be replaced as UK Reform Leader. Just a few days earlier Musk was talking of possibly donating 100 million pounds to Reform – this shows the pitfalls of mercurial billionaires.

This week the US Congress certified that Donald Trump won the Presidential election. He is now officially the President-Elect.

It is worth noting what has not happened since election day.

• The losing candidate conceded defeat
• There were no outlandish claims of hacked voting machines at the behest of Nicaragua
• There were no claims of massive voter fraud
• There were no phone calls to election officials asking them to change the results
• There were no fake slates of alternate electors
• There was no secret meetings of fake electors on the day set for the Electoral College to meet
• There was no pressure campaign for the Vice-President to unilaterally reject the election results
• There were no objections in Congress to the electoral votes

This of course is how it should be. A peaceful transfer of power is a vital part of democracy. However if the result had gone the other way, sadly we would have had more of the usual nonsensical claims of widespread electoral fraud – which only occurs it seems when they lose, not win.

Trump clearly won (as did Biden in 2020) and in two weeks his second term will start.

Inspire Net has advised clients:

This is a brief update to let you know what’s happening to our Network here at the moment.

Inspire Net received a threat from an International Hacktivist group on Tuesday morning threatening a large scale Denial of Service attack on us.

We regularly get Denial of Service attacks aimed at single customers that we have many options for dealing with in place, however the scale of this one is like we have never seen.

Wednesday was a “warning shot” supposedly, with a full attack threatened to us in the near future.

We are working with our upstream providers to see what can be done to weather the storm as best we can, but the scale of this group is very large.

We are also in contact with the National Cyber Security Centre (www.ncsc.govt.nz)  for support over what is happening to our network.

We are unsure why we are a target, these kinds of groups normally target political targets like Governments rather than Internet Service Providers.


What is a Denial of Service Attack.

The internet works by our customers connecting to us via various means, and us connecting to many other locations around the world to get to the traffic / things they want back  to them

Normally we only get traffic that you request and send it to you (eg: you go to www.amazon.com  and our network goes to Amazon and Amazon send traffic back to you)

During a Denial of Service attack, bad actors send traffic to our network that was not requested, it is normally targeted at one person / connection that annoyed someone online

We can easily deal with these style events, and do so almost every day of the week, where we blacklist the target customer upstream for a period of time and stop the attack.

In this instance, the Denial of Service attack is massive (at least 45,000 hacked devices / computers from all around the world being used to target us), but additionally the bad traffic is being sent to all our customers networks at once, rather than targeting a single customer. This fills up all the connections we have to the world with bad traffic, and stops normal traffic from being able to be sent / received.

We are unsure how the future will play out, so we are sending out this email to all our customers to give you a heads up that it might be a difficult time for a while. Our Network team is working around the clock to put measures in place to mitigate any further attacks, however, your Internet might be very slow and patchy while we deal with upstream providers to block the attack as it happens.  Additionally our helpdesk will likely be swamped with callers.

This is an event beyond our control, and I assure you we will do our very best to get through it as quickly and painlessly as we can. We will post updates to our Facebook page here as we know more.

A number of readers said they had problems connecting yesterday, and this is why. My thanks to Inspire Net for their work in dealing with this attack, and hopefully things get back to normal in a few days.

This is one of the many reasons the UK voted to leave the EU – sovereignty. Regardless of the merits of the particular issue of gender quotas for boards, there is no reason the should be a rule for this across the entire EU.

Why would British firms have to comply with a decision made in Brussels, as opposed to one made in London.

The EU does many many good things, but one of its failings is it regulates far too much from the centre.

NewstalkZb reports:

The derelict Reading Cinema complex on Wellington’s Courtenay Place has finally been sold, with a local developer snapping up the 1.5-hectare plot.

The property was at the centre of a controversial deal between Wellington City Council and Reading International last year, after the council tried to buy the land under the quake-prone building to incentivise development.

After that deal fell through, the site was listed for sale in July, with Wellington-based Primeproperty Group now the new owner.

Excellent – a commercial deal between two companies, without ratepayers providing corporate welfare.

Ironically this sort of deal would probably have happened years ago if the Council hadn’t kept offering wads of cash to the owners to reopen the cinema.

An excellent submission by Liam Hehir on the Treaty Principles Bill. He proposes a number of ways you can achieve the aims of the bill.

Jerry Coyne writes:

When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no idea that what I wrote was being removed by the FFRF at that moment! …

One part of what Coyne wrote resonated with me:

The first is to insist that it is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

I regard myself as socially liberal. I have championed and been involved in campaigns for civil unions, same sex marriage, euthanasia etc etc. I can’t think of a group that has done more to damage social liberalism than the radical trans activists who have demanded that there is no such thing as binary sex (as opposed to gender which is a spectrum) and try to shut down debate. The backlash to their extremism has meant that the natural goodwill most people have to allowing people to live their lives as they want has been eroded.

Take what has happened here with the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It is basically the largest atheist organisation in the US. By signing up to censorship, they have lost Coyne as a member. But the damage doesn’t stop there.

Steven Pinker has resigned also, and he is the Honorary President of the Foundation. He points out:

With this action, the Foundation is no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics.

And the world’s most well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, has also resigned.

None of this would have happened if they had simply allowed debate. But when you censor, it backfires.

Newsweek reports:

The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday suggesting the White House had to manage Biden’s energy and availability as early as 2021, this time citing conversations with former aides to the White House teams.

The aides and witnesses, many speaking to the paper anonymously, help paint a picture of a man who needed handling to get him through the typical burdens of the presidency. Biden reportedly relied on a “tightknit inner circle of advisers” that helped him execute his vision and limit gaffes, according to the Journal.

One aide recalled a conversation with a national security official, who said that Biden “has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.” The aide claimed the conversation occurred in the spring of 2021, just months into the Biden administration.

So three years of covering up.

Ruth Richardson’s submission on the Treaty Principles Bill is excellent. I’ve copied it below.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is resigning this week, in advance of a no confidence vote in his Government he was going to lose. The majority of his MPs had called for him to go.

It will be interesting to see if a change of leader means the no confidence motion still goes ahead. But regardless of whether the election is early 2025 or later in the year, the Liberals look to lose more than half their seats.

Stuff reported:

More Kāinga Ora tenants have been evicted for disruptive behaviour in the first four months of this financial year than over the previous two full years due to an improved system to tackle problems.

The improved system is a new Government that told them it would not tolerate tenants who abuse and terrorise their neighbours.

In the 2022-2023 year there were 57 warning issued. That jumped to 202 in the 2023-2024 year.

A whopping 375 warnings were issued between July 1 and October 31 this year.

So the number of warnings is around 20 times higher than two years ago. Again a good thing that abusive tenants now face consequences.

Newsroom reports:

A letter sent by Opposition leader Chris Hipkins to BlackRock asking for assistance to ensure 160 terminated SolarZero staff are paid what they are owed has been met with silence.

Hipkins sent a letter to David Giordano, BlackRock’s managing director of climate infrastructure, on December 4, one week after news broke that NZ’s leading solar panel company was going into liquidation. 

Hipkins’ letter outlines to Giordano the substantial role SolarZero had played in adding capacity to the energy market and his own government’s work with BlackRock to develop climate infrastructure, before broaching the topic of the solar company’s collapse.

“Due to the closure of SolarZero, close to 200 people have lost their jobs right before Christmas. They are concerned they have not received their holiday pay or notice period and several contractors are worried that they will not be paid,” Hipkins wrote.

It was Hipkins’ Government that poured taxpayer money into SolarZero, so maybe Labour should help out the staff?

If they had not put $150 million of corporate welfare into the company, it probably wouldn’t have taken on so much debt, and collapsed. The same happened with Mt Ruapehu. The board would have probably made different decisions, if they didn’t have $150 million of free money.

I support the principles of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, but suggest an alternate way to achieve the desired outcomes.

I think it is useful to approach the issues this bill covers in steps. The first step is whether it would be a good idea for there to be a legislative definition of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

I think Parliament would be derelict in its duty, not to provide a legislative defintion. If Parliament is to pass dozens of laws referring to the Principles, it should provide certainity on what it means in doing so.

The next step is whether the three proposed principles are the correct interpretation of the intention of those who signed the Treaty. This is very challenging, as there is legitimate disagreement and debate on this. The historical record can be intepreted in multiple ways, and the dominant interpretation has changed massively over time from Sir Apirana Ngata to today. This actually makes the case for why there should be a legislative definition.

While I personally like the proposed principles in this bill, I favour certainity over personal preference. I would challenge opponents of the current version of the biill to propose alternate wording for the principles, rather than have Parliament provide no guidance at all. Then there could be an informed debate between two versions of the Principles.

I would much rather have a legislative definition of the Principles that I 75% agree with, than no legislative definition at all.

An alternative approach to this issue, if providing a legislative definition of the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi is not possible is to take the principles of this bill and entrench them in the Bill of Rights Act as principles of a liberal democratic country – and note that no interpretation of the Treaty can override entrenched human rights such as equality of suffrage.

A possible wording could be:

No policy or action by the Government (including Treaty of Waitangi issues) can over-ride the following:

* The Executive Government of New Zealand has full power to govern, and the Parliament of New Zealand has full power to make laws in the best interests of everyone; and in accordance with the rule of law and the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
 
* Everyone is entitled, without discrimination, to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law; and the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights including equality of suffrage and the rights of Citizenship by birth.

NB – Submissions are open until 11.59 pm Tuesday. You can submit here.