Word of the day

Haecceity – the quality that makes something or someone what they are; that property or quality of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as ‘this’; a person’s or object’s thisness; the status of being an individual or a particular nature; the individualising difference between the general and particular; the quality that makes it what it is: its essence.

Sowell says

One of the key assumptions of the left is that statistical disparities are suspicious, if not sinister, especially if these are differences in income and wealth.

But if people differ radically in performance, why is it surprising that they also differ radically in the rewards…

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 11, 2024

Woman of the day

Woman of the Day Mary Fildes who was born sometime between 1789-1792 in Cork and died in Manchester in 1876. You might not have heard of her but you’ve almost certainly heard of the Peterloo Massacre which took place in 1819 in Manchester.

Mary played a leading role that day and… pic.twitter.com/pq4ZGnZ18U

— The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) April 7, 2024

Quotes of the week

I’m in it to make a difference. I know that sounds a bit cliched, but it’s genuinely true. I just see so much potential in New Zealand … And I’ll just go as hard as I can for as long as I can. – Chris Bishop

A man can never have too many friends. – John Bishop 

I said: ‘I will support you no matter what party you join, as long as it’s not the Nazi Party’ … he decided to join the National Party and off he went. – John Bishop

I personally don’t like urgency, but it exists for a reason. It’s not a constitutional outrage in and of itself. It’s there for urgent things and we will use it appropriately and we have used it appropriately so far. – Chris Bishop

Democracy is about lobbying.

Lobbying is first, not illegal. And secondly, it’s part and parcel of a democratic system … I think the connotations of it are, sometimes, misleading. – Chris Bishop

To be honest, I just reject the idea that is put out there sometimes that people with big pockets have access greater than anybody else. This is just actually not true. – Chris Bishop

There is a kind of dialectic at work here: First, the government makes people dependent on it; then the government becomes dependent on the people whom it has made dependent on it. From this infernal cycle, it is not easy to escape. The former head of the European Commission, Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, once said, of European politicians, “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” – Theodore Dalrymple

If National wants to be the party of lower taxes, setting a more ambitious expenditure reduction target and abolishing the structural deficit is the only credible way of getting there.

If you want to put the beast on a diet, you can’t keep using the credit card to feed it. – Eric Crampton

He is saying that right now the management of this country could benefit from more discipline around delivery and accountability.

Business is quite good at that stuff. It makes sense for Luxon to lean into it because that is what he is good at. It’s also what he won a mandate to do. – Liam Dann

It’s the nature of MMP that minor parts get outsized policy influence. The only way to neutralise that is for a prime minister to be popular and unafraid of returning to the polls.

Luxon is at his most charismatic when he displays the relentless positivity of a CEO.

That’s not easy in the political cauldron. He should try to stay out of it. If he plays his own game he’ll rise above it. – Liam Dann

Job losses always make for grim reading, especially in times as austere as these.

But compared with another number, those losses are more easily explained; by December 2023, the country had a public service workforce of 65,699.

That’s approximately one for every 79 New Zealanders and amounts to a 32% increase in numbers over the past five years. That’s more public servants per head of population than Australia where it’s one in 139, or the UK where it’s 128.

Which is why despite the grim reading, National won’t lose a polling point over the issue. – Janet Wilson

Missing from this week’s debate has been the as-important question of the public service’s capability and politicisation, and whether it’s fit for purpose. – Janet Wilson

When it came to political neutrality, more than 80% agreed strongly that they had a good understanding of it, but there were mixed results on the question of whether the public service was less politically neutral in 2022 than it used to be.

The biggest proportion, at 30%, came under the “don’t know/can’t say” category, with 19% mainly agreeing and 25% mainly disagreeing. – Janet Wilson

We all lose when the public service becomes politicised.

It destroys public trust and with it the public service’s social licence.

Spending and staff numbers may be the current cri de coeur in the public service, but the spectre of politicisation threatens it even more. – Janet Wilson

In my professional opinion gleaned over four decades and counting, it’s largely because social media has given a smallish group licence to go nuts with conspiracies, it’s because a lot of journalists are very young and very inexperienced with next to no institutional knowledge and as a result they parrot press releases as opposed to asking questions, and it’s because they also tend to be left-leaners who were more than open to the Ardern leadership of the day, which they fell for hook, line and sinker.

And so, the rot began.

In other words, they have dug their own grave.

Here’s the sad bit – these stats come at a time when bits of the media are on their knees. That, in part, explains why the TVNZ open letter petition at last glance got 12,100 signatures, which hardly a cavalcade of support for what those trying to save their jobs would argue is vital work that we will sorely miss when it’s gone.

My question – will we?  – Mike Hosking

Four years ago, half of us trusted the media. Today, only a third.

And this is not a blip, it’s fallen every single year from 2020. It’s gotten smaller in ’21, smaller in ’22, smaller in ’23 and then smaller in ’24.

And the main reason? Bias.

87 percent of respondents said the reporting in the news is biased and not balanced and many respondents shared the view that mainstream news was “clearly biased to the left”.

And that is not their imagination, because that backs what journalists say about themselves. There was a study a couple of year ago asking Kiwi journos which way they lean, and 81 percent said left-of-centre.

People aren’t dumb. They see it – and now we find out it’s the main reason why they don’t trust the media any more. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

And we are seeing it play out right now, with this new Government being given absolutely no honeymoon whatsoever because their conservative, liberal and centre-right ideas are an anathema to left-leaning journalists, who rail against it every single day.

Now the real question is, can the media turn this around?

And I’m going to make a prediction- no.

Because this isn’t a revelation to you and I, but I genuinely think newsrooms up and down this country don’t believe this is true. That is my experience of talking to editors in various media. They don’t see it, or they do and they make excuses.

If if they wanted to change it, the bias is so deeply ingrained it’ll be very hard to undo.

So really, the benefit of this research is probably not for the legacy media, because they probably can’t change things. It’s for you and I- to tell us we’re not imagining it. – Heather du Plessis-Allan 

The Commission advice is bordering now on nutty. No petrol cars to be imported is now a real policy.

A renewable energy base that we don’t stand a hope in hell of achieving, given we can’t build a thing in this country to budget or time and no one wants a wind farm in their backyard? That’s not a real policy.

The advantage of this is as we draw closer to 2050 the advice will get weirder, and the outcomes will become clearer. In other words, they will be increasingly obvious as to how undoable they all are.

Then what? That’s your next big question

And how alarmist do the ideologues become before their heads explode. – Mike Hosking

The day will inevitably come when our museums feature a cone room containing photos of the current madness and explanatory material, as a record of a crazy period in our history. Visitors will gaze in disbelief, much like they do now at displays of past eras lunacy. – Bob Jones 

Newshub – Stuff – OneNews – and most of the rest are certainly not diverse – they support similar left-views of the world. So who cares if one of them goes?  The crux of the problem is that NZ Big Media despises diversity. The journos say they support diversity but its only at a superficial level. Its not about supporting the diversity of beliefs. And that’s what we’re talking about. – Robert MacCulloch

Why argue that when an elected leader questions the independence of our journalists it is a democracy-shattering “attack on the media”? Isn’t the problem that NZ’s Big Media companies have become the true threat to democracy – first & foremost by ignoring the General Election outcome and trying to brainwash everyone so we never elect National-ACT-NZ First ever again? Who elected these journalists? What God-given right does Big Media have to argue that it should be able to hold anyone it so wishes to account but that no-one has any right whatsoever to hold them to account? Who the heck do these journalists think they are? Judge, jury and executioner? – Robert MacCulloch

So why do I think there’s rising distrust of NZ media? It’s for none of the reasons outlined in the AUT report: our journos just don’t get that the problem is them. The best studies about how the media industry works argue that it’s like any other industry: there are “consumers”, most of whom want to reinforce their own views, so leftists tend to watch leftist outlets & rightists watch rightist outlets. Let’s say over time Big NZ news outlets have gone from being half left and half right – to 100% left (which is close to the truth). Then whereas before we were once all pretty happy since we could find points of view supporting our own, now when we see the Big News channels, at least half of us are hacked off since they in no way reflect how we feel. That’s why distrust has risen. – Robert MacCulloch

While Green and Labour Party activists may share their leaders’ hostility to business it is not a view shared by the electorate. . .

Reminding us that Christopher Luxon is the former CEO of Air New Zealand is PR gold. When Luxon was CEO, Air New Zealand was judged top in the Kantar Corporate Reputation Index for trust, leadership, fairness, and responsibility in five out of the eight years of his tenure. – Richard Prebble

Luxon has never exploited his huge advantage. We tend to devalue the skills we have and envy the skills we do not have. Luxon gives the impression he would like to be a politician. He should not.

No other MP has Luxon’s experience. – Richard Prebble

The Prime Minister should emphasise his business experience. Speak to us as if we are shareholders and to the press gallery as if they are analysts. He could not get worse press. What it would gain him is respect for not being a politician.  – Richard Prebble

Labour and the Greens are advising Luxon to stop being a businessman and become a politician so they can defeat the coalition. Politics is what Labour and the Greens are good at.

Luxon only needs to read Swarbrick’s Herald article. She has political skills he will never have. Her article demonstrates she can do invective, one-liners and has mastered the art of sounding profound while saying nothing.

Luxon should not even try to do politics. If the Prime Minister were to run the country as if it were a company and he is the CEO, New Zealand will have never been better governed. – Richard Prebble

Two-thirds of people do not trust the news. Surely to God that sends a message to all mainstream, media that their approach to journalism has to change. – Gavin Ellis

One test for New Zealand’s news media this week will be how frank they are about what the numbers say about their own performances. Another test will be the internal analyses to which they subject the JM&D and Acumen Edelman surveys and how much they take them to heart. If they treat the numbers seriously, they will embark on soul-searching reappraisals of their respective news values and news judgements.

Some need to be more soul-searching than others but all need to ask themselves what they can do to restore the public’s trust. – Gavin Ellis

The best place to start for the media might be to realise that there is actually a problem, and that it’s not enough to just blame this on others – such as social media, disinformation, politicians, or the public’s lack of media literacy. Real soul-searching should mean the media reflects on how it has allowed itself to be perceived as distant, elitist, and conformist. – Bryce Edwards

I’m coming from a CEO background, I make no apologies about that. Because it hasn’t worked for us the last six years. Having career politicians isn’t delivering results or improved results for New Zealanders. – Christopher Luxon

My view is that a set of massive reforms that would make the Coalition Agreement look like a tea party are now required or NZ will become a failed state. Their nature would be to transform our economy along the lines of the Singaporean model. NZ First’s “2023 Election Planks” state that the party “has studied the Irish Celtic Tiger success along with the successes of Singapore & Iceland and believe these are much more sound models than economic experimentalism”. What is it waiting for? Do it. – Robert MacCulloch