On crime and the news that retail crime is now so bad we experience almost 300 incidents a day.
Quite rightly when we talk about crime, our focus should be on the victims mainly.
But spare a thought for the police as well, because they are clearly so frustrated by what’s happening. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Every police officer I’ve spoken to will tell you you’re seeing more crime because they aren’t allowed to chase criminals and because the courts aren’t punishing them hard enough.
So unfortunately, we probably have to get used to those crime numbers. Because unless Coster and the courts harden up, this is life in NZ. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Last week, documents came to light under the Official Information Act, showing that the Ministry of Education has been putting pressure on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to make new literacy and numeracy requirements for NCEA easier to attain.
It’s not hard to see why ministry officials are worried. In trials last year, just a third of candidates demonstrated a basic standard of adult proficiency in writing. Two thirds met the reading standard, and just over half, the numeracy standard.
These are appalling results.
As of 2024, students will have to meet these requirements to achieve any level of NCEA. If this policy is implemented as scheduled, achievements rates for qualifications will plummet. – Dr Michael Johnston
The ministry wants NZQA to reduce the sophistication of vocabulary required in the literacy tests. Still others amount to reducing their reliability. The ministry wants to reduce the number of questions students have to answer.
NZQA, to its credit, has pushed back. It has defended its processes for setting the assessments and disagreed that they’re too difficult.
In another recent Newsroom column, Professor Gavin Brown of Auckland University pointed out other data indicating that the poor results in the trials probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
The fact is, the ministry itself has known for years that we have a real problem with literacy and numeracy. – Dr Michael Johnston
The ministry, it seems, would rather prop up the data by making these assessments easier than take the action required to fix the underlying problem. That would mean abandoning the misguided teaching ideology that has underpinned two decades of falling literacy and numeracy attainment. It would mean overhauling the way teachers are trained to teach these key skills. But the ministry seems to prefer dumbing down the tests to taking the action required to improve learning.
This scandal is just the latest in a litany of incidents in which the ministry has been exposed. Mismanagement, ideological thinking and downright incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of its stewardship of our schooling system. – Dr Michael Johnston
The ministry should be solving the problems afflicting our education system rather than contributing to them. In addition to our very poor literacy and numeracy attainment, those problems include shocking truancy rates, low teacher morale and a threadbare curriculum.
The malaise in the Ministry of Education is just one instance of wider problems in our public service. – Dr Michael Johnston
The Ministry of Education will not improve its stewardship of schooling until that reform takes place. Meanwhile, every year, about 65,000 young New Zealanders leave school, many of them having been woefully under-served.
Schools and their teachers, by-and-large, do the very best they can for their students with the knowledge and resources at their disposal. But few teachers have been equipped with the best methods of teaching literacy. And schools are massively under-resourced to support students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
We cannot wait for the ministry to help. We need to find ways around it.
Communities must take more responsibility for supporting the work of their schools. – Dr Michael Johnston
There are many pressing issues for voters, including the cost of living, rising crime rates and a crisis in healthcare. It’s easy for slower-burning issues such as education to take a back seat to these more immediate concerns. But we can’t afford to keep going the way we are. This year, education must be front-and-centre in election debates.
The ministry isn’t going to help. It’s time for all New Zealanders to step up and take responsibility for saving our schools. – Dr Michael Johnston
Early childcare education (ECE) and aged residential care providers both rely on government subsidies to operate; businesses in both sectors say they are struggling to keep up with rising wage costs, given the funding they receive – and that’s impacting both quality of care and commercial viability. – Andrew Bevin
Since his elevation to the role of Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins’s spin doctors and the compliant MSM are energetically pushing the “Chippy” narrative. Portraying him as a regular down to earth, focusing on the “bread & butter” issues, Cossie Club, Joe Average New Zealander.
But we must not be fooled by the Joe Average persona nor by the choir boy looks.
You don’t have to scratch the surface too deeply to unearth the same range of political ideologies that seek to achieve a skewed ethnic equality, the same “we know best” dogma and exactly the same innate ability to obfuscate and to equivocate as his predecessor. – John Porter
Further emulating his predecessor, Hipkins also has some serious failure marks on his report card.
His ineffectiveness and incompetence were there for all to see in his previous ministerial role.
We must not forget Hipkins, as Minister of Education from 2017 until he became Prime Minister in January, had oversight on the Ministry of Education.
This is the ministry, which on Hipkins’ watch, and ostensibly with his endorsement, has given the nation’s schoolchildren a radical, “decolonised” history curriculum.
New Zealand’s education system is already in a parlous state but we are busy installing the vision of a minority into the centre of our education system.
All conducted under Hipkins’s watch and all without formal approval from the public.
This can only be acknowledged as a radical and serious step with far-reaching and extreme long-term consequences.
A step too far in an effort to correct some perceived ethnic disadvantage or simply a minister not assuming responsibility? – John Porter
If you want to influence and change thoughts or actions, where do you start? Education and in particular, the most impressionable, the younger generation.
This curriculum refresh makes it clear that local iwi will collaborate on what is taught. Recommending that, “Leading kaiako [teachers]… incorporate te reo Maori and matauranga Maori in the co-design of localised curriculum with whanau, hapu, and iwi.”
Given New Zealand’s current mediocre ranking in international educational standards, how can involving “whanau, hapu, and iwi” while undertaking such a prominent and important role improve our children’s education?
Hipkins must believe it will help, otherwise why allow the refresh to be structured so? – John Porter
The sad saga of Hipkins’s (in)competence continues with him covering himself in failure by being responsible for the disastrous centralisation of polytechnics. So far this has cost the education sector around $200 million! – John Porter
Only in a Labour government would this level of ineptness be tolerated!
There was any number of experts warning Hipkins “that his centralised model wasn’t going to deliver better educational outcomes and be more financially viable” but the “we know best” philosophy kicked in and Hipkins pushed ahead with it anyway, leaving the polytech sector in total disarray! – John Porter
For five years, incompetence, failure and deceit have pervaded this Labour government and there is absolutely no reason to believe this will not continue under Hipkins’s leadership.
Do you want more of the same? Do you want our country to sink further into a mire of debt and skewed ethnic ideology? No? Then –
Don’t be fooled by the choir boy looks! – John Porter
After nearly six years in Government the only thing Labour has delivered is a cost-of-living crisis hurting New Zealanders – Christopher Luxon
After six long years of Labour’s tax and spend-a-thon, Kiwis deserve to keep more of their own hard-earned money. They also deserve a Government that can manage the wider economy to make sure every Kiwi can get ahead, not just have millions of dollars poured down the drain. – Christopher Luxon
Let’s be clear – Labour recklessly spending an extra $50 billion since 2017 has got New Zealand and Kiwis into the position we’re now in.
Today’s moves are no more than a rounding error – pocket change in Labour’s grand scheme to spend, spend, spend with nothing to show for it except Kiwis struggling to feed their families with food prices spiralling.
Labour has no real economic plan to tackle New Zealand’s skyrocketing inflation and help Kiwis get ahead. – Christopher Luxon
Having an inquiry asking why banks seek the safest most profitable investment is like asking why scorpions sting, it is what they do.Having an inquiry asking why banks seek the safest most profitable investment is like asking why scorpions sting, it is what they do. – Richard Prebble
To create a pre-election economic boom Robertson granted the Reserve Bank a taxpayer guarantee to continue printing a billion dollars a week. The result was near-zero interest rates, an economic stimulus, rocketing asset and house prices, an election win and today’s inflation. – Richard Prebble
At its heart banking is risky. It is borrowing short money from depositors that can be withdrawn at any time, and lending money out long, on loans like 20-year mortgages. Every bank fears that depositors might demand their money back.
The history of banking is the history of capitalism. The gathering of savings by banks and lending it to business funded the modern economy. It is also a history of banking collapses.
It was the failure of hundreds of banks in the US that triggered the Great Depression. The GFC was triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers bank.
Bank failures have brought down whole countries.
The regulators’ solution is to require banks to have larger reserves. The safest reserves are government bonds that can readily be sold for cash. – Richard Prebble
Our Reserve Bank Governor knows what is far worse than banks making excessive profits, it is banks losing money. He points out the cost of the central bank’s policies is chump change compared to the cost of an economic collapse.
This column warned against money printing, zero interest rates, special loan facilities for banks and allowing banks to deposit money with the Reserve Bank at 4.75 per cent.
As we said at the time, if money printing is so risky that the Reserve Bank needs a taxpayer guarantee, then it is too risky for the country. The guarantee is now costing the Government billions of dollars, money not available for the cyclone recovery.
The best thing would have been never to have printed the money.
Now we must deal with the consequences. – Richard Prebble
While the Reserve Bank has now closed its special facility and stopped printing money, it has not withdrawn the surplus cash from the economy.
It is why the banks pay an interest rate less than inflation even for long-term deposits. Seeing the value of their retirement savings fall is not chump change for the elderly. It is encouraging retirees to make risky investments to preserve their savings.
We do not need a banking inquiry. We just need the Reserve Bank restore its balance sheet and stop subsidising the Aussie banks. – Richard Prebble
Not since 1989 have food prices risen this fast in New Zealand. Food prices have increased more in the past three years than they did in the entire nine years of the previous National Government,” says Ms Willis.
“Labour has failed to address the underlying drivers of inflation in our economy and Kiwis are facing the consequences every time they shop.
“Soaring food prices can’t just be blamed on international factors. New Zealand food producers have had it tough under Labour: new farming regulations, worker shortages and additional business costs are all showing up in the prices Kiwis now have to pay at the supermarket. – Nicola Willis
PIt is becoming increasingly difficult to see how the Greens can support another Labour-led government if they are able to do so after this year’s election. Already, co-leader James Shaw has warned Labour not to take it for granted that the Greens will automatically support Labour again (even though by ruling out ever working with National the Greens have left themselves nowhere else to go if they want to remain a party of government.) – Peter Dunne
But it is also a problem for Labour. Having so emphatically abandoned so many of the policies dearest to the Greens’ hearts as distractions and too expensive, Hipkins will have no credibility if he seeks to re-introduce some or all of them after the election as the price of a coalition or new confidence and supply agreement with the Greens. To do so, would be the ultimate act of duplicity, which voters would take a long time to forgive.
Yet, if Shaw’s comments are to be taken seriously, and not just treated as pre-election shadowboxing, Hipkins will have to offer some significant concessions to the Greens if he wishes to remain Prime Minister after the election.
Voters can therefore be rightfully suspicious that policies abandoned now as unaffordable, or undesirable, and a few more besides, will re-emerge after the election as the price of a deal with the Greens. – Peter Dunne
National’s Luxon makes the point that if the policy bonfire is a genuine scrapping of unpopular policies, then the Labour government is left with very little to show for the last five and a half years in office. He now needs to hammer home this point – that, by its own admission, Labour’s cupboard is bare, and therefore that the last five and a years have been largely a waste of time. National also needs to constantly harry Labour on what policies are gone forever and which ones will return after the election, as the price of doing a deal with the Greens.
In a nutshell, it comes down to this. Labour cannot stay in government without the support of the Greens, notwithstanding their current grumpiness and threats not to support Labour. Each knows the only outcome from that would be a National-led government, which would be political anathema to both. Therefore, some sort of deal will have to be done between them.
Consequently, voters will be rightfully wary about how credible, Hipkins’ self-proclaimed “bread and butter” policy reset is, or whether, as is looking increasingly likely, it is no more than a cynical stunt to save Labour’s electoral bacon.
The Greens may well know the answer already. – Peter Dunne
Academics have to have preserved for them that freedom of being able to express views that they have, and it’s absolutely inappropriate for them to be shut down by the chief executive. – Penny Simmonds
A crucial role of academia is as critic and conscience of society, which means having (Shock! horror!) political opinions. Sheesh. Dude needs to pull his head in and get a grip. – Rebekah Graham
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