Kiwis used to do this sort of thing well; we would go out of our way to help people who needed it. As a country we have always prided ourselves on being small but efficient.
Have we lost that? And what else have we lost? – Tracy Watkins
So here’s my wish for 2023, though it’s the same as last year. That we have a serious conversation about this country’s future, and a pathway through; that we debate a future for our young people without resorting to soundbites, cheap shots and populism. – Tracy Watkins
I’m passionate about stories because stories reach out and help people to make decisions about their own lives.
It’s fiction and stories that are a unique human capacity. It’s only humans who can understand fiction. It’s only humans who can understand the metaphors of music or understand the way a movie can help you make a decision to change your own future. – Dame Miranda Harcourt
We all understand the power of great teaching and how that can lift somebody out of themselves to achieve their ambition and to be the best person they can be.
“That’s what I aim to do is use the tools of great teaching to help actors achieve an inspirational performance because then, of course, it reaches out and inspires people all over the world when they see it and creates change in itself. – Dame Miranda Harcourt
Since 2013, some 2800 medicines have been listed in Australia. That’s almost one a day. For New Zealand, we have funded a trifling 350 medicines for the same period. And yet in Australia there is very little fanfare accompanying medicine funding announcements, unlike Pharmac boasting it is funding a drug it considers “new”.
Why? Because in Australia, their governments see the public funding of medicines as a right, whereas in New Zealand, governments see it as a luxury. – Dr Malcolm Mullholland
All of this uncertainty and lack of transparency leaves patients wondering what’s changed. Pharmac’s arrogant and out-of-touch culture is still there for everyone to see, resulting in the Minister being left red-faced and having to provide media advice to the Crown entity he is responsible for, on how to make public health announcements. As well the minister overturned, in the lead-up to Christmas, the agency openly considering depriving children of cancer medicines.
Pharmac’s perverse culture aside, patients want to know what each political party is prepared to do with Pharmac as the election draws closer. Will Pharmac come under Te Whatu Ora, rather than continue to be a law unto themselves?
Will they heed the advice of the review and amend Pharmac’s statutory objectives? Will they instruct Pharmac to follow Treasury’s wellbeing framework? Will funding decisions have a timeframe that Pharmac will be held accountable for?
The biggest question is how much money are they prepared to give Pharmac? – Dr Malcolm Mullholland
It should also be clear that unless Pharmac is funded properly, its wish list of over 70 medicines will continue to grow with no plan as to how it might fund the other 280 medicines grinding their way through Pharmac’s notoriously slow process.
Even if Pharmac was able to reach the dizzying heights of putting a dent in trying to be average in the OECD by funding all 350 medicines that sit with the agency, we are still miles off funding every medicine in the world. That’s how far behind we are.
We should not have to wait another five years or so for a government to better fund Pharmac so that patients can access what are seen in other countries as a valued human right. That is, the right to life. – Dr Malcolm Mullholland
It is a rather curious feature of New Zealand universities today that they swarm with quite a lot of part-Maoris who share a set of common practices somewhat at variance with the free and open exchange of accurately established knowledge. – Bruce Moon
Falsely posing as the victims of British colonisation and harking back to a non-existent Maori paradise of the past has brought rich, and far too often, illegitimate, material gains to some people of part-Maori descent and great damage to democracy in New Zealand. – Bruce Moon
The genius of a horoscope is ambiguity. – Damien Grant
Alas, forecasts by newspaper pundits are as worthless as horoscopes. What we scribes for shillings lack is the ability to see the unseen, so we tell you the obvious. – Damien Grant
For myself, I believe we are on a turkey farm. It is my view that the economic path we have been following since the GFC has been setting us up for a massive economic correction on a scale similar to 1929.
I think that when this happens democratic governments will react in the same heavy-handed way they did then, in the same oppressive way they did in response to the pandemic, and that this will exacerbate the economic calamity into years of disruption and misery. – Damien Grant
How can you step back and look at the explosion of sovereign debt, unwinding of decades of monetary prudence combined with sustained disruption in the global supply chain and, oh, a massive war in the heart of Europe, and not conclude that there is risk of total economic collapse?
The west has been reduced to an economic model where business is sustained by consumer spending funded by debt and maintained by printed cash. It cannot continue and it will not continue. Something has to give. Of course, it is possible that we can navigate a path forward that does not involve wiping out the pension savings of two generations and eviscerating the economic fundamentals that sustain those on the margins of economic life; but isn’t at least possible that we can’t? – Damien Grant
I still consider being a school teacher is perhaps the most noble and ennobling career that anyone can have, especially the teachers of the smallest children …like kindergarten teachers, preschool educators and mothers. – Dr Sir Haare Williams
As we look into the New Year, there are a lot of crucial issues facing the country – how do we deal with the ongoing unaffordability of housing (notwithstanding the recent fall in house prices); how do we increase our rate of productivity growth so that we can afford the good things of life that wealthier countries take for granted; how do we improve the serious problems in our education and health sectors; how do we deal with the longer-term fiscal crisis caused by our ageing population.
But of all the problems we face, perhaps none is as important as this: do we want to continue to be one of the few democracies in the world where every citizen has equal political weight, or do we want to become a society where political influence is determined by who our ancestors were? – Don Brash
The increasing use of Maori words in official documents, on signs and in taxpayer-funded media is nuts if it is intended that most of the population understand what is intended. I have always supported taxpayers’ funds being used to support the teaching of the Maori language to those who wish to learn it. But it is crazy to imagine that the Maori language will ever be more than a curiosity, in much the same way that some Catholics still hanker after the continued use of Latin. New Zealand is hugely fortunate that English is our primary language, as it is the nearest thing there is to a truly international language. Using taxpayers’ funds to teach kids who can’t read and write English effectively how to speak a few words of Maori is crazy. – Don Brash
Before Europeans arrived in New Zealand, Maori society was very basic by any standard – no written language, no wheel, no metal tools, no concept of legal ownership, widespread cannibalism and female infanticide. The inter-tribal Musket Wars of the early part of the nineteenth century resulted in a massive loss of life – more deaths in the few decades before 1840 than in all the subsequent wars that New Zealanders have been involved in.
The Treaty of Waitangi was intended to put an end to that, and was eagerly sought by many of the tribal leaders as a way of ending those inter-tribal wars (and perhaps as a way of fending off a French conquest). It involved the chiefs accepting the sovereignty of the Queen, and being guaranteed in return the full possession of their property and “the rights and privileges” of British subjects. In other words, the Treaty unambiguously guaranteed all New Zealanders equal rights.
Indeed, if it had not guaranteed equal political rights, we would now have to discard it and start afresh because there can be no lasting peace in any society where some citizens have a preferred political status by virtue of birth. – Don Brash
Today, diversity in our formal cultural outlets, from gallery and libraries to publicly funded arts, is measured by identity much more than by social or economic class, lived experience or diversity of values.
Working people are seen in crises and crimes. Formal culture is about working class people more than it is of or for them. Those of us eating the wrong food, driving the wrong car, or having the wrong views apparently need to be corrected and educated. – Josie Pagani
Lest you think I am attacking straw people, there is a cultural purge in our elite institutions. – Josie Pagani
What is really going on is a form of cultural cleansing: Local is more valuable to us because it ‘’tells our stories’’. But our cultural institutions are telling only some of our stories.
Local is not always more relevant. The music of the Beatles, Adele, Mozart and Ed Sheeran is more relevant to us than Kāpiti driftwood art. The Rolling Stones and Beethoven are global because of their excellence.
Editorial choices will always be needed. Cultural collections need to be curated. My argument is not against selection, but against chauvinism.
If we want to understand which of our creators are genuinely excellent, we need to expose ourselves to world-class alternatives so that we can understand what makes the best as good as they are. – Josie Pagani
We are a culturally divided country. Trust in the media is dropping, particularly among people with more conservative views. You might not worry if your views are left, but it does matter in our democracy if a chunk of citizens don’t feel represented. – Josie Pagani
Today, 55% of New Zealanders regard the media as a “dividing force” in society, against 23% who saw it as ‘’unifying’’.
Intellectual conformity in our elite cultural institutions is leading to division in New Zealand. – Josie Pagani
It would be too easy, however, to attribute Britain’s manifold problems to one man’s incompetence and lack of principle. This would be to evade thinking about the deep cultural roots of the country’s present malaise, some of them traceable, it is true, to past political choices: but when policies are entrenched, they become cultural.
The opposite of frivolity is not seriousness but earnestness, which is, if anything, even worse than frivolity, for it persuades the earnest that they are working with the best of intentions and dissuades them from consideration of the actual effects of what they do. Earnestness is a kind of moral chain mail that protects against the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. It also encourages an unholy alliance between sanctimony and self-interest. It dissolves the distinction between activity and work.
In Britain, under the influence of earnestness, a collapse has occurred in the standard of public administration, such that it now inclines both to bullying and ineffectiveness, to making an immensity of shadow work and avoiding real work. Public administrators have found the secret of being frantically busy and doing nothing at the same time. Hypertrophy of rules and interference go hand in hand with anarchy and inefficiency. Those who work in the public administration or are paid from the public purse are assured of pensions of which those who do not work for it or are not paid from it can only dream: and they believe, of course, that they deserve this immense privilege, for, unlike others, they have worked all their lives for the public good rather than for private advantage. That the administrators are protected from the hazards of inflation by their index-linked pensions naturally gives the rest of the population the impression that the people are now there to serve the government, not the other way around.
Every day, one encounters evidence of the incompetence and unseriousness of the public administration, of activity without real purpose. – Theodore Dalrymple
At every turn in Britain, one discovers the same lack of straightforward intellectual and moral probity, a form of corruption worse than the financial kind, insofar as the latter is—in principle, at least—easy to correct. But to correct moral corruption, once it takes hold, is like trying to unscramble an egg. – Theodore Dalrymple
The investigation and adjudication of complaint in a quasi-judicial manner is the perfect instrument for increasing the powers of administrators. That is one reason it wants its workforce, those in subordinate positions, to be as supersensitive to racism and bullying as possible, defining both racism and bullying by the perception of the supposed victims, often requiring no objective correlative of the accusation. This creates an atmosphere of constant suspicion, mistrust, fear, and pusillanimity throughout the institution and promotes the very phenomena it is supposed to reduce or eliminate, for nothing intimidates as much as the threat of being found guilty if accused. While such an atmosphere is hardly conducive to securing the aims of the institution—in the case of universities, high-level teaching and research—one should remember that these are not the aims of the administration. Wokeness is the perfect ideology for the hegemony of an administrative class that it would be an insult to much of humanity to call mediocre. – Theodore Dalrymple
The commissars of equity, diversity, and inclusion had so insinuated themselves into every committee and every hiring decision that they were like spies. For a man who had achieved his eminence by dint of ability and hard work, at a time when, however imperfect, these things still counted for more than the dark arts of bureaucratic ascension, and who still valued the primary academic goals of universities, life became intolerable. He left the university, which he had tried to serve faithfully. It was now a place in which saying what one did not believe was obligatory and saying what one did believe was forbidden, as has always been the case in any totalitarian country: and this in an institution supposedly dedicated to the search for and propagation of truth! – Theodore Dalrymple
Before the professor left the university, the Department of Human Resources, already a horrible renaming of the Personnel Department (the humble issuer of employment contracts), had become the Department of People and Culture, a name that out-Orwells Orwell. One of its functions, presumably, was to prevent, sniff out, or punish thoughtcrime in the university and to eliminate culture as it was once conceived.
None of the above, alas, is in any way unexpected or unusual nowadays. On the contrary, it is the “new normal.” The atmosphere of suspicion, fear, querulousness, lying, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, denunciation, and paranoia, all in the name of some vaguely defined justice, that Conrad describes in Russia before its second revolution (which, of course, made all of it a thousand times worse), is now commonplace. In human affairs, there is no new thing under the sun, and examples of almost anything can be found in history: it is prevalence of things that changes. I do not recall ever having lived in so pervasive an atmosphere of untruth as that of the present. It is as if a demon of untruth had not merely insinuated itself into institutions but into men’s souls. The faculty of truth, like all other faculties, withers with disuse. A kind of cynical skepticism results, leaving power as the only reality—exactly as Nietzsche suggested. – Theodore Dalrymple
I suggest, though, that the incontinent expansion of tertiary education has much to answer for, producing graduates whose knowledge or skills are divorced from any real economic function. (I am not suggesting that the only purpose or function of education should be economic.) The economy must somehow absorb these graduates, despite their economic uselessness, or they would become dangerous, like the underemployed lawyers of the French Revolution. The easiest way to employ them is by expanding bureaucracy, and extending regulation serves this end. Wokeism encourages this expansion, for it can make indefinitely shifting and imperious demands in the name of righting wrongs, many yet to be discovered. – Theodore Dalrymple
These processes are not unique to Britain. In hospitals, schools, and universities in the United States, the overgrowth of bureaucracy has been startling. But Britain is peculiarly susceptible to the retarding effects of this frivolous but earnest bureaucracy. It has little industry left; it imports half its food and much of its energy. It has a large public debt, much underestimated in size because it does not include public-pension liabilities. It has run a government deficit for decades; its commercial deficit with the rest of the world approaches 10 percent of GDP. Private debt is astronomical. Both government and individuals are addicted to living beyond their means, the country consuming far more than it produces, a profligacy achieving the status of a custom. It is hard to think of strengths that might offset these defects.
This, then, is a time for seriousness—but what we will likely get is earnestness as the handmaiden of overweening personal ambition, the looting of the public purse, and a spiral of impoverishment. – Theodore Dalrymple
The biggest problems in New Zealand’s schooling system are poor literacy and numeracy. This results from factors such as too little direct instruction as compared to child-led learning, inadequate use of phonics, and “fads” such as modern learning environments. We also lack a knowledge-rich national curriculum that gives all New Zealand students a good educational start in life, and with this a basis for democracy and civil society. The evidence is that socio-economic background is the main determinant of differences between Māori and non-Māori educational achievement.
Given all this, it is surprising how much emphasis the Ministry of Education (MoE) is giving to race as a key variable in education. MoE seems more focused on promoting Māori racial and cultural identity than, for example, professional identities. “Māori succeeding as Māori” is a recurring trope. A wisely sardonic Māori kuia once said to me that New Zealand has too few Māori in the professions and too many professional Māoris (sic). This was decades ago, and she spoke in a whisper. By now the prevailing zeitgeist will have silenced her completely. – Dr Peter Winsley
In MoE documents references are made to te Tiriti creating an equal partnership between chiefs and the Crown. However, it is impossible for Māori to be both subjects of and equal partners with the Crown. The “equal partnership” argument is a modern invention absent from the 1840 documents and devoid of credible scholarship.
MoE contends that te Tiriti includes “a promise that Māori would retain their sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga)”. Equating ‘sovereignty’ and ‘tino rangatiratanga’ is invalid. Article 1 of the Treaty/Te Tiriti transfers to the Crown “sovereignty” (in English) or in Māori “kawanatanga” (governorship). Māori acceptance of Crown sovereignty is clear from records of debate among Māori at the Treaty signings in 1840, from the later discussions at the 1860 Kohimarama conference, and from many other sources.
Tino rangatiratanga protects Māori property rights and reflects Magna Carta principles. It could also mean economic self-determination at the individual, whanau and hapu level. However, it cannot mean sovereignty and the right to make laws as set out in Treaty/Tiriti Article 1. – Dr Peter Winsley
MoE assumes two major “ways of knowing” in New Zealand: science and mātauranga Māori. However New Zealand has long been a multicultural society. Every ethnic, racial or cultural group has a different body of traditional knowledge and belief. This is typically shaped by past learning, the wider physical, technological and social environment, and the influence of ideas, technologies and flows of knowledge from other people and from cross-disciplinary sources.
MoE documents show little real interest in the traditional knowledge and beliefs of New Zealand’s large Asian and other minority (non-Māori) cultures. However, people from these cultures tend to succeed through their own endeavours. – Dr Peter Winsley
All advanced countries invest substantially in science that transcends cultures and is universal. Science follows agreed disciplinary rules internationally rather than local and culture-specific rules.
As Diamond (1997) noted, people in Eurasia and parts of the Americas had the domesticated crops and animals to support economic surpluses, and the trade and other connections to learn from others. However, isolated and migratory groups were limited by their resource base and poor access to new technology and ideas. Some such groups became so isolated that their technological capabilities stagnated and sometimes went backwards. Aboriginal Tasmanians gave up bone tools and fishing gear. Polynesian societies lost pottery-making skills, and Māori whose ancestors sailed to New Zealand on multi-hull sailing canoes (waka hourua) reverted to single hull canoes and forgot how to build and sail larger ocean-going vessels. – Dr Peter Winsley
Before European contact, Māori had no trade connections with the outside world that could open up access to new ideas and technologies. As a result, New Zealand Māori delivered no significant innovation in 800 or so years of pre-European settlement. This had nothing to do with lack of curiosity or intellect. Had the Māori population included Thomas Edison, James Watt, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Ross Ihaka and Steve Jobs they would still be “sucking the cold kumara” in abject poverty because the conditions for science-based innovation were absent.
Science aims to continuously advance knowledge and seek universal truth. In contrast, much traditional knowledge or belief such as mātauranga Māori is local. MoE states that “a mātauranga Māori programme will be locally based, drawing on the knowledge and understanding of the iwi and hapū of the locality where the schooling is located. For an interface between mātauranga Māori and science to be successful, a science programme should also be locally derived.”
MoE’s support for a local focus for mātauranga Māori is intellectually limiting, hampers scalability, and reduces the generalisability of the learning undertaken. It also undermines the vision of a national curriculum that delivers powerful knowledge to all New Zealand students on an equitable basis. – Dr Peter Winsley
Mātauranga Māori is proposed to be woven into our national science curriculum. This may create risks when science and myths are confused. For example, no “mauri” or indeed any other “life force” exists within inanimate objects. Therefore, including such concepts in any science curriculum harms students’ education.
New Zealand graduates need to compete in domestic and international marketplaces. Our qualifications need to be respected internationally and remain portable to other countries. We may value mātauranga Māori, however we cannot expect it to be valued outside New Zealand.
Science involves understanding of how and why things work as they do. It is not limited to learning what is, but also why things have come to be. Knowing how to prepare karaka berries is knowledge; trying to find out why and how they are poisonous, and how preparation removes the poison, is science that can then be a platform for other applications It is these platforms that achieve scalability and leverage off rapidly diminishing marginal costs.
Traditional knowledge is rarely accompanied with a deeper understanding of causation. However, such knowledge can trigger rigorous scientific analysis that can lead to significant advances. – Dr Peter Winsley
Science needs connections to others’ research, and reliable ways of storing and disseminating information. Oral cultures require ways of organising knowledge so it can be transmitted through the generations. – Dr Peter Winsley
In Māori culture whakapapa became a means of structuring knowledge and facilitating its recall. Māori also encoded useful knowledge in memorable tales. An example is the story of Mahuika’s fury with Māui for wasting her nails and flame, with her last embers deposited in the kaikomako tree. This tale reminds future generations that kaikomako wood can be used to make fire.
Fundamental to New Zealand’s future is its capacity to engage with and learn from the wider world. We must be an open society and be part of the global “Republic of Science”. Our science must be delivered in the language and style appropriate to people overseas. If we talk only to ourselves no one else will listen and over time we will have nothing left to say.
Some argue that mātauranga Māori knowledge can only be known by those inside Te Ao Māori and skilled in kaupapa Māori. It is fundamental in science that no knowledge is protected from challenge, including from outsiders. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science. – Dr Peter Winsley
A risk we are creating is that some of New Zealand’s finest minds may be diverted into ideological “research” and political advocacy and fail to develop fully their skills in critical reasoning and rigorous scientific method. Society may reinforce this while it is the prevailing zeitgeist, and then it will walk away, leaving misled graduates in the wrong fields with devalued degrees and angry with a system that duped them.
Mātauranga Māori reflects what Māori have learned or come to believe through centuries of observation. Beliefs that are erroneous need to disappear and not be protected. While mātauranga Māori resulting from observation of environmental processes can be ongoing, modern scientific method has taken over from most traditional “ways of knowing and believing” internationally. Rather than funding mātauranga Māori we will get more value from applying modern science to the priorities Māori and other New Zealanders have and engaging more Māori in outwards-looking science that matters for the world. – Dr Peter Winsley
It is great that science and ways of learning are stirring increasing interest in the Māori community. We should manage science education so we deliver more people of the calibre of Shane Reti, Ross Ihaka and Garth Cooper. We must avoid creating a generation of embittered identarians who blame all that is wrong with their lives on “western science” and colonialisation. – Dr Peter Winsley
We are now at a point where we are not a rich country, we’re a country that needs to get rich if we’re going to have as many nurses per capita as Australia, for example. I do think that we’re in a fight to maintain being unequivocally a first-world country – David Seymour
As we watch the Chinese Government transition from its old, hardline, Covid-19 elimination strategy, characterised by long and uncompromising lockdowns, to a new, laissez-faire, wide open borders (and bugger the health system) strategy, uncannily like our own, we have confirmation that not even the totalitarian regime of Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can operate indefinitely without a social licence.
Not that our own government is returning the compliment by acknowledging the lack of genuine social licences for its own flagship policies – and changing them. There is more than a whiff of totalitarian indifference to public opinion in the Labour Caucus’s blunt refusal to change course on Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project. – Chris Trotter
Undeterred, Labour doubled-down. Constitutional conventions became confetti. The co-governance provisions of Three Waters became stronger and their likely impact on Māori-Pakeha relations even more divisive.
And this situation looks set to be made ten-times worse the moment the public cottons-on to the fact that the cost of borrowing the billions required to “fix” their drinking-, storm- and waste-water systems is to be extracted from the pockets of the poor schmucks who “own” – but do not control – the four vast “entities” at the heart of the Three Waters project. A bitter realisation, that will hit home about the time they open their new-fangled water bills. – Chris Trotter
Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has dealt what looks like being the final death-blow to the “international rules-based order” overseen by the United Nations. What we deplored, then ignored, in Syria, has come home to the cursèd bloodlands of Eastern Europe.
The global economic system, already rendered dangerously fragile by the financial measures required to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, has received a vicious kick in the gonads from Russia’s combat boots. Rising inflation has ignited multiple cost-of-living crises – even in the world’s wealthiest countries – precipitating social and political conflicts not seen for nearly half-a-century.
But Vladimir Putin’s aggression has done something else. It has stimulated martial feelings long thought dead and buried in the materially abundant (but spiritually impoverished) societies of the West. – Chris Trotter
When the heroism and sacrifice of war seem preferable, and more honourable, than an enervated peace, it is, truly, a terrible year. – Chris Trotter
2022 may have exposed the terrifying scale of Big Tech censorship, but events this year also reminded us of the incredible power of free speech – to unsettle, and perhaps even to topple, our authoritarian elites. So, here’s to 2023 – and to being the dread of tyrants. – Tom Slater
We were told: you have no other option but to surrender. We say: we have no other option than to win. – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
The march of moral relativism has not made a freer, more content society but an agitated, uncertain one. Post-truth, post-reality, even post-biology, the individual is not liberated, but lost, left utterly alone to ‘arrange things reasonably for himself’. – Brendan O’Neill
Nothing is good or bad in itself, everything depends on the consequences that an action allows one to foresee.’
We see this cult of calculation everywhere today. Industry and growth are judged not according to whether they will be good for us, but through the pseudo-science of calculating their impact on the planet. Human activity is likewise measured, and reprimanded, by calculating the carbon footprint it allegedly leaves. Parenting has been reduced from a moral endeavour to a scientific one – you must now follow the calculations of parenting experts and gurus if you don’t want your kids to be messed up. Benedict was right about our world of calculation – it chases out questions of morality, truth and freedom in preference for only doing what the calculating classes deem to be low-risk in terms of consequences. When everything is devised for us by a calculating elite, freedom suffers, said Benedict – for ‘our freedom and our dignity cannot come… from technical systems of control, but can, specifically, spring only from man’s moral strength’. – Brendan O’Neill
No, I do not share Benedict’s belief in God. I am an atheist. But Benedict’s agitation against the idea that humanity is a consequence of evolution alone was a profoundly important one. A key part of today’s functional rationalism is evolutionary psychology, a science particularly beloved of Dawkinites and the so-called Intellectual Dark Web. It holds that virtually everything human beings think and do can be explained by evolutionary processes, as if we are indistinguishable from those monkeys that first came down from the trees; as if we are propelled into tribal affiliations and warfare and sex by traits stamped into us by the ceaseless march of nature. This, too, chases out the small matter of morality, the small matter that we have risen above our nature and now really are ‘more than all other living beings’, in Benedict’s words. We are capable of choice, we are capable of good. Good – a terribly old-fashioned concept, I know. – Brendan O’Neill
What makes man wonderful?’, argued humanists and theologians in the past. ‘Why is man so shit?’, ask the rationalists of the 21st century. Against their technocracy, misanthropy and evolutionary fatalism, Benedict made a searing cry: human beings are special, human beings are good. This atheistic humanist, for one, found more to cheer in the reason espoused by that Pope of Rome than I did in the petty anti-religiosity of educated secularists. It is no surprise to me at all that some of the heavyweight ‘rationalists’ of the God Wars – Philip Pullman, Stephen Fry – have now fallen for the cult of genderfluidity, a religion infinitely more unhinged than any of the great world religions. This treachery of the rationalists confirms that their guide was not humanistic reason, but mere hostility to religion, especially the Catholic one. If you want to understand reason and truth and why they are so central to human exceptionalism, read not Fry, but Benedict. RIP, Your Holiness. – Brendan O’Neill
How easily we assume that the underdog has virtues, more or less ex officio, as underdog, despite the many times that we learn or discover to our dismay that the underdog, once he becomes top dog, has (at least incipiently) precisely the same vices as the people who previously and until recently persecuted him! The small nation that is liberated from the tyranny of a larger nation immediately begins to oppress a smaller nation. How often has the first fruit of freedom for some been tyranny for others! The drive to tyrannize is a strong one that requires conscious efforts to subdue. I feel it in some small way myself, and consciously suppress, not always successfully, it when I do.
That is why we often find egalitarians to be among the most determined of dominators, who espouse in theory and at a distance what they are unwilling or unable to practise near to themselves. – Theodore Dalrymple
As we enter 2023, we desperately need to cut the technocrats down to size. The great lie of technocracy is that the experts are best placed to make decisions in the national interest. That they somehow stand above the wayward passions of the electorate or the ideology of elected representatives. In reality, technocrats tend to simply pass off their own prejudices as superior insight. – Fraser Myers
The challenges of our times call for fresh and bold thinking, not plodding managerialism or discredited groupthink. What we need is for the public to be brought back into politics, not relegated to the sidelines or treated with suspicion. This year, we must take on the technocrats. – Fraser Myers
A tactical withdrawal is said to be the most difficult of all military operations. A commander has to take his troops backwards while maintaining contact with the enemy and not being pushed into headlong retreat. The challenge is to not lose discipline during the operation.
It can become necessary when the enemy is simply too strong and an army needs to leave the battlefield to avoid a crushing defeat, or it can be simply to pull back to reach an area that is easier to defend.
Trailing National in the polls, Ardern has decided to retreat and present a smaller target to opponents by postponing the implementation of contentious policies or reducing their scope. – Graham Adams
Despite the Prime Minister predictably painting a retreat as a result of her government having ambitiously taken on too many issues to deal with adequately, it is obvious she is making a virtue of necessity.
Alongside the government’s well-deserved reputation for being incompetent in delivering even the basics of what the public wants — including roads free of potholes — it seems to have a perverse desire to give them what they don’t want, not least an expensive unemployment insurance scheme and a merger of RNZ and TVNZ.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, but not everyone is convinced Ardern’s prescriptions will help. – Graham Adams
Having been humiliated by her own Minister of Local Government as well as being snookered by the leader of a minor party in short order, Ardern is looking like she belongs to an unfortunate group of commanders — a general whose luck has run out. – Graham Adams
My mother, Valerie Davies, used to remind me when my babies were crying or not sleeping that it was their only way to tell me what they needed. And babies need company and cuddles. Wriggling away from a nappy change or spitting out food wasn’t to annoy but to communicate their likes and dislikes before they could talk.
She had a simple rule: unco-operative or misbehaving children were usually either tired, thirsty, hungry or needed a cuddle and it’s amazing to this day how often it’s true! – Victoria Carter
Imagine not being able to say how you are feeling because no one in your family has helped you understand your feelings of sadness, anger, hurt or puzzlement. What would it be like to never hear regular encouragement or praise, just know a clip on the ear? – Victoria Carter
The police spend more time on family harm incidents than anything else. Every three minutes, on average, the police are called to one. And don’t forget it’s widely believed most of it is not reported.
The more reading I did the more I thought how bloody obvious it is: that if a small child is exposed to violence – either being hit themselves or seeing family members being hurt – moves house regularly, doesn’t get enough food, has no routine, their development is impacted. What was really disturbing was the new research on brain development or lack thereof from the home environment. – Victoria Carter
We need to restore the mana of parenting. We need a social movement for this purpose, it’s not a moral judgment but based purely on what we know from research and science. Emotionally responsive nurturing, especially from birth to around 3 is vital for the healthy development of the brain. – Lesley Max
Nearly 30 years ago the British Medical Journal identified parenting as the most important public health issue facing society … not much has changed in the intervening years. – Lesley Max
If we know this, when are government agencies going to develop strategies to better support good parenting? When are we as a community going to say stop the hitting, any kind of violence? When are we going to agree the most important job is bringing up healthy children and put in steps to make sure that the right support structures are there?
If it takes a village how are we going to get that social movement on the mana of parenting? It’s probably the most important job any of us will have.
I want to see political party manifestos that tackle this issue and offer genuine solutions for children and young people to thrive. Instead of the criminal focus this might do more to nurture good citizens. Which political party is going to focus on the beginning – the parenting – rather than focusing on the crime? – Victoria Carter
Perhaps this will come as a shock to purists, but parents — good ones, at least — do not always tell their children the truth. Preparing a person to live in the world as it is, as opposed to the one they might like it to be, does not always involve confronting them with harsh realities. You ease them in, making difficult judgements about what to reveal, what to withhold. This isn’t dishonesty or pandering; I consider it pragmatism. – Victoria Smith
Having grown up in a household where “just being honest” could be wielded as a weapon to make others feel ugly and stupid, I try to take care over what truly needs to be said. Thereare some truths which I consider important but which I know will not stick, at least not yet. I hold them in reserve. – Victoria Smith
My aim as a parent is not to create individuals who echo my own beliefs. I want them to be people whohave the confidence to be questioning in their own right. Plus, I have enough confidence in my own politics to think they can withstand said questioning without recourse to forced compliance. – Victoria Smith
When one person’s perception of reality (usually, but not always, the eldest male’s) is prioritised over everyone else’s, the family is patriarchal. I do not want my sons to grow up in a household in which everyone else either has to gaslight themselves into going along with one person’s truth, or must pretend to do so out of fear.
Young adults who boast of “schooling” their “bigoted” mothers are model patriarchs. They might have won the power play, but they have lost the moral argument. Maybe one day they will find a politics that can bear the weight of scrutiny, ceasing to treat others as mirrors reflecting their politics back at them at several times its actual validity. That is what I had to find for myself, and what I want my own children to discover, in their own time. – Victoria Smith
Were anyone to suggest incorporating the Genesis account of creation into the school science curriculum, it’s certain that such a suggestion wouldn’t even be listened to, let alone taken seriously. Yet the Ministry of Education considers that Maori creation myths should be woven into the NCEA science curriculum.
How can this be possible in a scientifically and technologically advanced First World country such as New Zealand? – Martin Hanson
To most lay people, science is a body of knowledge about how the world works. But to the scientifically educated, it’s the organised process by which such knowledge is obtained. It usually begins with an observation, leading to questions and a tentative explanation. If this can be tested by experiment, it becomes a hypothesis; if not, it remains speculation. If experimental results do not support the hypothesis, it’s back to square one and a new hypothesis must be tested by more experiments. Only if repeated experiments by other, independent researchers, have results that support the hypothesis, can such knowledge be said to be ‘scientific’. – Martin Hanson
Ironically, it didn’t seem to have occurred to Hendy, Wiles and their supporters, that in their extreme reaction to the Listener letter they were doing a far more effective demolition job on the scientific merits of matauranga Maori than the restrained and polite efforts of the seven professors. They seem to have conveniently forgotten that what most clearly separates science from myth and superstition is the challenging of established ideas in rigorous, public debate. In seeking to prevent criticism and debate they were unwittingly admitting it was not science, but doctrine, thus by implication proving the professor’s case for them. – Martin Hanson
It’s all too easy to despair of the extent to which New Zealand science has become suffocated by matauranga Maori. Certainly, it’s difficult to see how it can be brought back from its present state. –
As I see it, the only way of forcing kiwis to realise how ludicrous is the incorporation of Maori mythology into the teaching of science would be to engineer a new Scopes-type trial, for which we’d need a volunteer to put his or her head on the block. All it would require of the ‘kiwi Scopes’ would be a few carefully chosen words to a science class, such as:
“To say that rain is the result of tears shed by the goddess Papatuanuku is fine in social studies, but to say that it’s science is rubbish or, to use Richard Dawkins’ more colourful phrase, ‘bollocks’”.
That should light the blue touch-paper all right. The government would have to choose between two equally painful courses:
- take the red pill and accept scientific reality or
- take the blue one, kowtowing to the Woke Inquisition, thereby inviting international contempt.
Even without a latter-day Scopes trial, the government would have deservedly painted itself into a corner. Either way, those of us who have long despaired for New Zealand science education can look forward with keen anticipation to the outcome. – Martin Hanson
The country has not got enough eggs. Our dairy could not get enough bread. Since ancient Rome, food shortages are a way to lose popularity.
This time next year, Christopher Luxon will be prime minister. – Richard Prebble
To win, Labour would have to suspend Parliament, illegally put Opposition MPs into home detention, close magazines, commandeer the airwaves for government announcements, have the Reserve Bank flood the economy with printed money and have a massive taxpayer-funded advertising campaign. Would the Government do that again? – Richard Prebble
Hamilton West indicates none of the antivax parties will make 5 per cent.
Winston Peters will not be the kingmaker. For his own selfish reasons, he gave us this Labour Government. – Richard Prebble
2023 will be challenging. Next winter, the health system will be overwhelmed. School pupils will continue to vote with their feet. With 45,000 active P users, no neighbourhood will be crime-free.
Co-governance is unworkable. Centralisation cannot deliver the promised results. The polytechnic reorganisation, the broadcasting amalgamation, and trying to run health from Wellington will be a series of trainwrecks.
Election year is no time to implement a massive compulsory unemployment insurance scheme – the job tax. Labour may postpone or just pass the legislation and make it an election issue. – Richard Prebble
2023 will reveal there has been fundamental change. New Zealand has always been a destination of choice for immigrants. Not anymore.
InterNations surveyed immigrants’ experiences. Out of 52 nations, New Zealand was ranked the second-worst country. Only Kuwait is worse. Immigrants are shocked by our cost of living and low pay. Immigrants tell me our schools, health system and crime were unpleasant surprises.
The Government treated new residents appallingly. During Covid, parents were split from their children for years.
The biggest advertisement for immigration is the immigrants’ experience. Today, they are saying “do not come”. Many are planning to leave. – Richard Prebble
Labour is dropping the immigration criteria, but is failing to attract immigrants we need.
Not only are we failing to attract the skills we need, but skilled Kiwis are leaving. Those who are staying are the ones our schools failed to teach. New Zealand is de-skilling. – Richard Prebble
Sex-based data tells us, for example, that girls do better than boys in higher exams; that women earn less than men; that men are more likely to die by suicide than women. This information allows government to develop targeted policies — but once men can easily and legally become women, and vice versa, it ceases to have any value. A sudden spike in suicide rates among women, or in boys achieving A grades, might be the result of individuals changing their legal sex. How would we know?
It is remarkable that a government would knowingly choose to undermine its own ability to make good policy — and even more remarkable that MSPs would vote for it. – Kim Thomas
So here are two big reasons that free speech is always valuable, and a third that’s particularly relevant for 2023.
The first is that we are meaning-seeking beings. Free speech allows us to discover sources of truth and meaning so that we can organise our lives around them. If we don’t do this deliberately, through the free exchange of ideas and beliefs, it will happen to us by default, as when we simply absorb current ideological fashions or whatever institutions like the state and the market tell us to think.
Passively absorbing ideas also stunts our development. A fully human life involves agency, the ability to make decisions that matter, which is supported by the ability to share and receive ideas and information.
Yes, this includes making mistakes and getting things wrong – and learning and growing in the process.
The second reason to value free speech is that it helps us to realise when we’re wrong and to make better decisions. No-one’s right about everything, so we need others to tell us where we’ve gone astray even when that might offend us or challenge our deepest beliefs.
That’s why true viewpoint diversity leads to better outcomes. Unfortunately, New Zealand research reveals that too many academics are afraid to engage with sensitive topics like te Tiriti or gender, or even to raise differing perspectives. Not surprisingly, many Kiwi students are afraid to discuss similar issues in their lecture theatres.
Now consider that the media, which creates and maintains an essential part of the public square, are mostly drawn from the ranks of university graduates and increasingly see their role as “educating” rather than reporting. This creates a feedback loop or, less politely, an echo chamber which pushes questions underground and questioners to the margins of society, fuelling polarisation and social distrust.
The third reason to value free speech is that it helps hold us together as a society. This year we’ll have another general election. Some of us will get the outcome we want and some of us won’t. If we expect the losers to accept their loss gracefully or, at least, peacefully, we need to give everyone a fair shot at participating fully and making their case.
If some groups feel they have legitimate views that can’t be shared or that are met with hostility, they either won’t participate or won’t accept the outcome of the election. That’s how nations start to unravel.
Freedom has been described as “a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere.” In other words, freedom is not absolute; what it’s used for matters and there are limits to what we should tolerate. – Alex Penk
It’s important to debate the details of the Government’s bill and the Law Commission’s review. But we need to start by acknowledging not just that hate speech is bad, but that free speech is good. – Alex Penk
In 2023, political parties on the campaign trail will need to bear in mind that voters are newly sceptical of being promised something for nothing. And that if they were planning on fundraising by releasing NFTs, they should go back to the drawing board. – Ben Thomas
The benefit system was originally about providing secure income for those genuinely unable to work. That inability to work did not include causing one’s own incapacity or having dependent children.
It has since evolved to become a government tool for equalizing incomes between the employed and unemployed and advancing other ideological goals like the financial emancipation of the female parent from the male parent.
To some degree benefits have become an alternative source of income for those uninterested in the obligations and constrictions involved with being employed. Those who disagree with that statement argue nobody would willingly choose to live on a meagre benefit income.
That may hold water for single people. But the latest incomes monitoring report from MSD shows a couple on a benefit with two or more children receives over $800 weekly after housing costs. – Lindsay Mitchell
Until 2016 wage growth outstripped inflation hence the growing gap. Since 2019 benefits have been indexed to wages. Previously they were only indexed to inflation. Accordingly, the report notes the 2022 “main benefit increases reduced the gap”. That is, income from work became less attractive. – Lindsay Mitchell
So, the income support/benefit system is contributing negatively to the economy in that regard.
But worse, it is being used by the Prime Minister to achieve her primary goal of reducing child poverty.
According to the report, using Labour’s chosen measures which show percentage drops since 2017, she has been successful in this endeavour.
What is omitted from this report is the increasing number of children reliant on benefits.
Is this increase a reasonable trade-off for reducing child poverty? If the higher incidence of neglect and abuse for children growing up on a benefit is acceptable, then the answer is yes.
I disagree. The increase may even be described as the exploitation of children to make the Prime Minister look good. There is no reason why the welcome downward trend for state-dependent sole parents would have reversed bar financial encouragement. – Lindsay Mitchell
Asian households feature the lowest percentage of children experiencing material hardship – around 4% compared to the Pacific rate of around 24%
And yet when it comes to income support:
Eligible families with Asian parents had low estimated take-up in recent years. The late 2010s was a period of rapid growth in the Asian population of Aotearoa New Zealand. Low awareness, uncertainty about entitlements, administrative, personal and cultural barriers to claiming, or reluctance to claim payments among recent migrants may be factors explaining the trends.
So the benefit system cannot be credited with low Asian hardship. Something else is protecting their children. Probably the self-reliance and work ethic of their parents.
The government can fiddle all it wants robbing Peter to pay Paul under the guise of ‘fairness and equity’. But the downsides to this interference are corrupting incentives which will continue to blight New Zealand’s future. – Lindsay Mitchell
Potatoes aren’t particularly good swimmers and don’t like being submerged in water for long periods. – Chris Claridge
Won’t someone think of the feelings of paedophiles? It seems some public bodies have, and they are willing to change the language of their output to accommodate the sensitivities of this most dangerous group. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Police Scotland were blasted for referring to those who abuse children as ‘minor-attracted people’, or ‘MAP’, in a report for a European Commission project. It seems that, just as fat people are now euphemistically referred to as ‘plus size’, and men in dresses have been rebranded as ‘transwomen’, child abusers are considered, by some, to be just another minority whose preferences deserve respect. – Jo Bartosch
Notably, MAP is the word preferred by groups who campaign to remove the ‘stigma’ associated with adults who want to sexually abuse children. It is a term often used by dangerous people who believe they have been victimised by a hostile society. It must be resisted. – Jo Bartosch
More recently, the odious euphemism has been given a veneer of scholarly legitimacy by academics. It seems fair to assume that organisations aiming to remove the stigma of paedophilia are influencing policy. Who exactly advised the European Commission to adopt this kind of language remains a mystery, but there are several organisations that push it. – Jo Bartosch
Perhaps universities are a soft target because people who work in the realm of ideas are more likely to be detached from their real-life consequences. In a lecture hall, to talk of paedophiles as a stigmatised, marginalised minority might simply sound edgy rather than dangerous. It might even attract grant funding. But for victims of child abuse, these matters are not simply theoretical.
The academic war on ‘stigma’ of all kinds makes it easier to sneer at anyone who tries to warn about the influence of paedophiles on public bodies. They can be dismissed as hysterical and backward. Ironically, to be seen as judgemental or morally absolutist carries the heaviest stigma today. – Jo Bartosch
This time there is a greater risk that paedophilia could be successfully rebranded. A cadre of queer-theory-addled academics seem to believe that all social barriers exist to be destroyed. Today’s abundance of pornography is also encouraging some people to seek out ever-more extreme sexual fantasies. Meanwhile, many dangerous communities have emerged online, where disordered and depraved individuals anonymously seek each other out and build cultures based on abuse.
It is hard to avoid the feeling that society is now primed for this last taboo to fall. And if it does, there will be those who cheer, and think the social acceptance of paedophiles is progress. Plain-speaking and honesty might be our last defence against this. We must reject the sanitising term ‘minor-attracted people’. This attempt to sugarcoat the reality of child abuse is profoundly dangerous. – Jo Bartosch
The one prediction I am truly confident in is that we will never know what the future holds.
Like those economists who’ve predicted six of the last two recessions, forecasting is a mug’s game. You might as well drive a car blindfolded and get instructions from a person looking out the rear window.
Best to focus on what we are uncertain about, and what we can fix today. – Josie Pagani
Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In 13th-century Germany, spontaneous dancing broke out and entire city populations danced until exhausted. But perhaps the best-known mass hysteria was the Salem Witch Trials, where people, seized by visions, accused others of bewitching them. Many were executed.
But hysteria episodes are not only historical. They have occurred in modern times as well. Remember the daycare panic of the 1980s, when daycare workers were accused of horrible crimes against children, including satanic abuse. Many falsely accused spent years in jail. Lives were ruined. The strangest thing about that mass hysteria is that it spanned continents. – Brian Giesbrecht
Could it be that some of us are even now victims of self-induced mass hysterias?
For example, what are we to make of the insistence that a man who chooses to live as a woman actually becomes a woman? To most of the world this claim is nonsensical. It is neither scientific nor factual. A woman has XX chromosomes, while a man has XY. Case closed. But to others, a man actually becomes a woman simply by stating that s/he is one. In the future, will this strange thinking be considered a mass hysteria? – Brian Giesbrecht
And are the most extreme of today’s anti-fossil fuel exponents caught up in some version of a mass hysteria? I’m not referring to people with legitimate concerns about global warming and the need to find cost-effective, non-polluting energy. I mean those who insist that everyone must give up all fossil fuels by a date they invent. Will history judge this to be a hysteria? – Brian Giesbrecht
If you never crowed in public that you have more hair than your baldy bro. If you wished your widowed dad joy with his new partner rather than begged him not to remarry. If you have more tact than to tell your sleepless sister-in-law she has “baby brain”. If you keep your drug and virginity yarns for private late-night laughs. If you didn’t miss your grandmother’s last moments because you were arguing about travel plans. If you can resolve a brotherly beef without an unseemly bundle or, having had one, not speed-dial your shrink.
If you disdain the wittering of psychics, can tell greedy sycophants from loyal counsel and, above all, cherish loving friends who sometimes tell you to shut up for your own good, then you are better than those who live in royal palaces. Take a bow. – Janice Turner
The final version of the New Zealand History Curriculum contained no significant changes in spite of widespread concerns. The consultation process was an exercise in window dressing. The review panel was stacked, dissenting historians were silenced, the terms of reference limited, the period of consultation constricted, and the outcome predetermined.
What has been produced is not a “history curriculum” as such. What has been produced is a perspective on history that is fundamentally based on Critical Race Theory. – Caleb Anderson
We should not be concerned that there are controversial ways of looking at history, debate is the lifeblood of the historical method. But alternative perspectives can be deliberately suppressed for personal or political gain, and in order to advance one perspective alone, creating the impression that alternative perspectives are not credible. As a consequence, critical knowledge is cast to the wind, perspectives become untethered from the events which gave rise to them, and the deliberate selection of some facts, and denial of others, can create questionable conclusions, unbalanced views, and unjustified causes.–
Being open to alternative perspectives forces the consideration of inconvenient facts. This is how ideas are sifted, shaped, refined, tested, some last and some don’t. Legitimate historical inquiry is a natural bulwark against extreme ideas and intentional manipulation. Of course, history practiced legitimately is something of a rough and tumble exercise, you can be confronted with perspectives you find offensive, and you may have to concede or modify a position in light of new facts. But there are nearly always reasons why some facts are left out, or understated, and why some are included, and sometimes overstated. When critiquing a historical perspective, it is often a very good starting point to ask yourself precisely which critical information is left out, there is always a reason for this. –
With respect to colonisation, we are never told that intertribal slavery existed in almost every colonised land prior to colonization, or that the earliest slave traders were not the nations of Europe, or that tribal groups often lived in perpetual fear of their more powerful and ambitious neighbours, or that colonisation was sometimes a lifeline to smaller tribes fearful of annihilation at the hands of larger tribes.
We are not told that traditional societies were generally highly stratified, with almost no upward mobility, that tribal life was often brutal and short, that cannibalism was sometimes practised, that pantheistic and spiritualistic religions made people fearful, that primitive and labour-intensive technology exposed people to a life of toil, and regularly to the vagaries of famine.
We are not told that sometimes the colonising powers were very reluctant colonisers, that a piece of land purchased by a settler may have been paid for at least a dozen times to multiple owners, that missionaries and foreign service officials were often the most ardent advocates for the protection of indigenous people, that the punishment of indigenous children for speaking their native language at school was often at the behest of their parents.
We are seldom told that the anglo nations were the first in the world to legislate against slavery, that colonisation brought advantages … more comfortable homes became possible with the arrival of nails, written language with the arrival of the alphabet, warm clothing and blankets with the arrival of textiles, better diets with the introduction of new crops, more accountability (and justice) with the arrival of a legal system, a more coherent set of propositional ethics with the arrival of Christianity. It is easy to trivialize these things from our twenty-first-century perspective, but these changes yielded no small gain, and help to explain the eagerness of many colonised people to engage with the colonisers. – Caleb Anderson
Colonisation was often, and ultimately, a brutalising process, and the impacts of colonisation endure. But the history of the world is one of constant colonisation, of the over-layering of people groups, of subjugation and integration, and worse, over and over again. There are almost no exceptions to this. People moved when they needed to, and displaced others when they could. Stronger tribes prevailed, and weaker tribes were assimilated, enslaved, or exterminated. Similarly, the nations of Europe emerged from tribal beginnings and, as a result of often protracted territorial conflicts between these tribes, national borders emerged.
Colonisation is a manifestation of the outworking of universal principles, and reflects powerful human instincts to survive at a minimum, and to thrive at best. Judgment of historical realities needs to be tempered with a realistic, and balanced, vision of human nature, not a myopic and idealised one, and not one which attributes vice almost exclusively to some, and virtue almost exclusively to others. The proposed new curriculum is not a balanced presentation of the facts, but a cut-and-paste justification for an unbalanced and agenda-ridden view of history. Its core assumptions are selective and highly challengeable.
If anything, history teaches us that we are not so different from those who have come before us, or from those who inhabit a different part of our planet. We have similar motivations, good and bad. Individually, and collectively, we repeat the sins of earlier generations, nuanced and rationalized to our time and context, and commensurate with our ability to do so. We can be cruel when the opportunity for gain presents, when our interests are threatened, or when we are fearful. We sin against others, not always in equal measure, but we sin against them nevertheless. The same precipitating motivational drivers exist for us all, adjusted only to scale and circumstance. This should create within us a reluctance to point our fingers. It is sometimes right to seek redress, but we should be honest about the actions of our forebears too, we should not rest our arguments on convenient facts alone, and sweep inconvenient facts under the carpet.
Radical re-sets, always accompanied by a historical cut and paste exercise, usually do not go well, and can be ultimately catastrophic. – Caleb Anderson
Perhaps worst of all, in the grip of something akin to a mass psychosis, people began to turn on each other. Knowing what happens when ideas are pushed to (or beyond) their limits (which invariably happens when competing perspectives are disregarded) gives us a taste of how badly things can actually turn out. We could never end in such a place, how sure are you of that?
Repeated comments by the Maori Party, and others on the left of politics, that Maori were subjected to genocide, and a holocaust, are an object lesson in where you can end up when you play loose with the facts of history, and when you can come to believe your own lies. What do they know, if anything, of the experience of the Jewish people throughout the ages? To equate the planned, systematic extermination of six million Jews with the colonisation of New Zealand is unforgivably ignorant. Loose-lipped commentators in the United States have been stood down, and forced to apologise, for anti-semitic comments of lesser magnitude than this, and yet the New Zealand media have barely commented, or challenged, such baseless assertions, it largely passed without notice, more than once
In short, history is impossibly complex, as are the people it seeks to represent. As there is no truth, but many truths, there is no history but many histories. Thus what makes history exciting, is also what makes it prone to abuse. The new curriculum is not a history curriculum in any valid sense. It is a selective view of the past, based on questionable assumptions. The new curriculum seeks to enshrine Critical Race Theory as the primary lens through which we make sense of past and present realities. It silences dissenting views, narrows perspectives, pits people groups against each other, attributes vice to some and villainy to others, and contaminates our national consciousness.
Perhaps worst of all it contravenes the duty of all educators to ensure that their students have a right to their own worldview, to question without fear, to seek the fuller picture, to ascertain motive, and to weigh in light of broader considerations. In short, our students have a right to be free from indoctrination by those who have no tolerance for those who see things differently or who are easily offended.
Critical Race Theory is cleverly hidden throughout this insidious document but it is there nevertheless, the subtle twists of phrase, and the occasional concessions to good sense, make it all the more dangerous. All indications are that this government will muster every mechanism at its disposal to see that this document is implemented to the letter. Instructions to schools have been clear, and problematic books have already been removed from libraries.
Three Waters will not be this government’s legacy, The Aotearoa NZ History document will be its true legacy. As they are consigned to the opposition benches, as they soon will, the left will console themselves that the seeds have been planted … in our institutions, in our schools, and in the minds of the most impressionable, and it is only a matter of time before they will get to water these seeds again. With the left, it is always the long game that counts. – Caleb Anderson
History done well is an adventure, if done poorly, it is best left alone! – Caleb Anderson
By now most of New Zealand’s public is aware of co-governance, Three Waters and efforts to normalize the Treaty of Waitangi as central to much of New Zealand life and society. In this multi-cultural nation that we have become, it is critical that we respect Māori, and value the good things that Matauranga Māori has achieved for Māori over centuries, but stand firmly against any movement that attempts to place one ethnic or cultural group above others. Our entire society cannot, and should not, be re-configured to enforce the world view of one small, self-identifying minority. Nor should we give ourselves over to the notion that traditional knowledge is somehow the equal of modern science.
How many of the general public are aware of what is happening in education right now? We should be deeply concerned about the refresh of the national curriculum currently in progress within the Ministry of Education and related organizations. The proposed new curriculum is referred to as Te Mātaiaho: A draft Te Tiriti-Honouring and Inclusive Curriculum Framework. We are told that Mātauranga Māori will sit at the heart of the learning areas and that key competencies, literacy and numeracy, will be woven explicitly into each learning area. (Ministry of Education, 2022a) – David Lillis
The entire initiative very frightening indeed, especially the dishonesty whereby we are being led to believe that a Treaty-based curriculum is for everyone and that all of us must get on board. The arrogance and, indeed, deceit and bullying of those three activists and others in forcing a retrograde agenda on all students in New Zealand, regardless of social, ethnic or religious background, for decades to come is more than astonishing and we must now stand up to them and to a Ministry of Education that is complicit in perpetrating a highly-dangerous falsehood. – David Lillis
Sorry – but the refreshed curriculum certainly does not better reflect the aspirations and expectations of all New Zealanders. Quite clearly, the agenda is to empower one ethnic group and bully everyone else into submission and we must not allow ourselves to be taken in by the accompanying misleading and, frankly, dishonest rhetoric. – David Lillis
Again, sorry – but the curriculum refresh panders to activists from a small minority and must be resisted at all costs. If we fail, then several generations of New Zealand students, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and cultures, are going to have this agenda forced on them every day of their primary and secondary education. Pacific students, Asian students, Pakeha students and indeed, Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, including those fleeing violence in Syria, the Ukraine and parts of Africa, will be forced to absorb the language and traditional knowledge of one self-identifying ethnicity and cultural group as a significant part of their primary and secondary education.
We are told that the current curriculum disadvantages Māori. Does it? Why? Where is the evidence? Māori underperformance in education does not emerge from the curriculum, but instead results mostly from unfavourable socioeconomics. If the curriculum disadvantages Māori, then does it not also disadvantage Pacific students and others? Why only Māori?
The issues for Māori and others are not hurt and pain because of denigration of mātauranga Māori, but rather the validity of indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, embedded across an entire curriculum, but especially as an alternative to modern science that can be taught in science class. – David Lillis
Always, socioeconomics emerges as a significant predictor of performance (and, indeed, underperformance), while ethnicity becomes largely non-significant. – David Lillis
We may or may not agree with the stated intent of the curriculum refresh to honour matauranga Māori, but should not the primary aims of any curriculum be to support learning for all and enable students to acquire and develop the knowledge, know-how and skills that will enable them to compete in the domestic and international marketplaces? Never should it be the function of a national curriculum to support the nation’s constitution, treaty or other founding document or, indeed, to ensure equality of outcomes. Instead, the objectives should be the support of equality of access and opportunity and to underpin first-class education that enables students to learn and succeed. – David Lillis
Teaching students of science that a special force exists within inanimate things constitutes willful neglect of duty on the part of Government and the relevant Ministries, compromises the education of future students and will bring our national science curriculum and, indeed, the entire NCEA system into disrepute.
Of course, in daily life today we don’t take myths and legends as truth but we do recognize that they are important for the descendants of indigenous people and are part of the great history of mankind. However, we are coming dangerously close to teaching such concepts as truth to young and impressionable children within our revised national primary and secondary curriculum. – David Lillis
Only good can come of teaching our children to respect the views of others. Some class time devoted to Te Reo and Māori culture and history will give all New Zealanders a greater appreciation of Māori culture, their history and their very significant contributions to the New Zealand of today. It stands to reason that we should also introduce students to Pacific cultures, Asian cultures, African cultures and the cultures of Islamic immigrants from the Middle East.
Both Te Reo and Mātauranga Māori should be treasured and preserved. However, imposing large proportions of class time to Te Reo and Mātauranga Māori to all learners, especially if presented as science, must be opposed, given other demands on children’s lives and given a noticeable decline in New Zealand’s recent academic rankings relative to those of other nations (see, for example, Long and Te, 2019). Our children must acquire not only qualifications, but the skills and knowledge that are obligatory if they are to compete in tomorrow’s New Zealand and international marketplaces. – David Lillis
The assertion of systemic bias or racism as a cause of disparity, and thereby providing justification for major policy and legislative change, is evident in domains other than education; for example, in public health and employment in the sciences and academia generally. However, the extent of systemic bias within these domains is difficult to determine objectively and could only be evaluated through research rather than anecdote. Possibly, in many jurisdictions systemic bias acts in favour of minorities, rather than against them, but indeed we must be vigilant in identifying bias and countermanding it wherever it occurs. – David Lillis
Nor should disparate outcomes provide a sole justification for significant change that clearly is intended to benefit one group disproportionately, when other demographic groups are also disadvantaged. Thus, not only Māori have poorer outcomes in education, but also Pacific people and, reviewing the official statistics on health and wellbeing in New Zealand, we see that Pacific people are even more disadvantaged than Māori on certain indices (Lillis, 2022). But Pacific people will not receive a dedicated health ministry within the foreseeable future and nor will anyone else who is non-Māori. – David Lillis
I repeat what I have said before – labels such as racism, systemic bias, conscious and unconscious bias and colonialism have some traction. However, not only may such labels be applied without justification, apart from anecdote, but possibly they may detract from our efforts to address the real causes. The true agents of disparity, principally socioeconomic in nature, may lie largely outside the jurisdictions of education, health and science, and we have duty of care to address those causes.
Finally, conferring special privilege to one ethnic or cultural group will not repair inequality; nor will consuming scarce resources to address structural racism and bias if these factors are small, or in practice no longer present, and if the core structural and systemic problems lie elsewhere.
We must resist the curriculum refresh with all our might. Future generations of New Zealanders are depending on us. – David Lillis
For most of the last century, the “progressives” have been taking over the nation’s education system at every level. Pick any teacher, professor, or administrator and the chances are high that he or she is utterly dedicated to the Leftist project of replacing our liberal (in the true sense of the word) society with their vision of a properly regulated one. By controlling education, the Leftists implant the ideas they favor into students (including collectivism, egalitarianism, and acceptance of authority) while at the same time repressing ones that work against them (such as individualism, skepticism of authority, and belief in the spontaneous order of liberty).
Due to the phenomenal success of that project, school and college curricula are saturated with hostility to Western civilization. Teachers are trained in “education schools” that promote failed pedagogical concepts while at the same time demonizing anything that’s remotely conservative or libertarian. Overwhelmingly, the people who work in state education bureaucracies have been steeped in leftist ideology. They are far less concerned about how well students learn to read, write, and do math than with turning them into zealous advocates for their pet causes.
And once students get into college, the drumbeat for “progressivism” continues. Not every student succumbs, of course, but the heavy leftist slant has a big impact on many of them. – George Leef
Conservative leaders need to wake up to the peril we face from control of education by dedicated Leftists. There cannot be any peaceful coexistence with them, for their intention is to radically transform the nation by indoctrinating its young people. As important as issues like taxes and regulations are, their most important (and most difficult) task is to restore control of education to people who actually want to educate. – George Leef
The speed limit on motorways should be reduced to 64mph. Restrictions could be imposed on going from one part of your city to another. Short-haul flights might be banned, and rings of cameras built around every major town to levy charges on anyone moving in and out. Almost every day brings calls for some kind of curb on travel. And yet, underneath them all is one simple force: a movement by green extremists to take us back to the dark ages. It is effectively a plot to reinvent feudalism, a time when people rarely left their own villages and were taxed if they dared do so.
That’s why, for all the temptation to ridicule the Great Unwashed, we have to take their politics seriously. – Matthew Lynn
The environment should be protected. Carbon emissions need to be brought down and air quality improved. It might even be sensible to encourage people to travel at different times to ease congestion, or to create more pedestrian zones to make urban areas more livable. But that isn’t what this is about. Instead, climate change is being used as cover to wage war on the very concept of travel.
Those wanting to restrict it forget that the economy, science, culture and health all depend on people and goods getting from one place to another. There are few forms of economic activity that don’t rely on the movement of these things. Science would make fewer breakthroughs without experts meeting at conferences. Music would be unimaginably duller without the cross-pollination of rhythms, melodies and beats between continents. Our language would be poorer, too.
It is surely not a coincidence that we began to emerge from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance and then into modernity when travellers started linking up Asia, Europe and America, carrying plants, technologies and, most of all, ideas. We risk shutting down that infinite channel of progress with foolish green virtue-signalling.
Working from home won’t save us, and nor can the internet replace real communication. The world of green extremism is closed and neo-medieval, offering about as much opportunity to people as that enjoyed by a 12th-century serf. Even the Great Unwashed couldn’t survive that. – Matthew Lynn
Amongst his assertions is a claim that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan. That’s not how you behave in the Army; it’s not how we think. He has badly let the side down. We don’t do notches on the rifle butt. We never did. – Colonel Tim Collins
From a security perspective, there is the unwritten assumption that nobody publicly discusses kill counts for the principal reason that it can have security repercussions.
There should be no pride taken in scalps accumulated in any battles. – Tobias Ellwood
The idea that soldiers are trained to see the enemy as chess pieces to be swiped off the board is wrong.
It’s not how we trained people. It’s potentially damaging to say this and the Taliban has exploited his words to accuse him of war crimes. – Colonel Richard Kemp
He has chosen a path that is alien to us in the UK and the Commonwealth, pursuing US identity politics and casting slurs or racism around where none exists in any manner comparable to the USA.
I wonder whose path he has chosen? In the end, I see only disappointment and misery in his pursuit of riches he does not need and his rejection of family and comradely love that he badly needs. – Colonel Tim Collins
Politicians almost universally believe that timely, appropriate and voluntary action to remedy structural economic imbalance should be avoided at all costs because it amounts to political suicide. Consequently, as studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show, in eight out of 10 cases over the past decade, reform was left until the developing imbalance had collapsed the currency or caused some other costly economic or social disaster. This is the point at which the government that failed to take timely action is normally thrown out of office, and a new party is elected to carry out reforms that could (and should) have been undertaken years sooner.
The idea that governments can retain power by refusing to make necessary and valuable structural reforms is, in fact, nonsense. It inevitably leads to the downfall of those foolish enough to believe it. Rather, it is quality decisions, which strengthen the economy and improve the medium-term prospects of the voting public, that are the key to any party’s hopes of re-election. – Sir Roger Douglas
Implementing quality decisions also provides an important insight into the nature of political consensus. Most governments believe they must have consensus support for reforms before they are enacted, otherwise the actions they take will not be politically sustainable at election time. The inevitable result is compromised policies. Our experience in New Zealand shows consensus develops progressively, after the decisions are made and deliver satisfactory results to the public. –
No party holds power forever. Sooner or later we all find ourselves out of office. That is the reality of life in a democracy. We may as well use the time we have to do something worthwhile. Genuine structural reform, carried through without compromise, delivers greater gains in opportunity and living standards in the medium term than any other approach to political decision making.
What the voting public wants most from politicians is the guts and vision to make decisions of real benefit to them and to their children. Their future depends on it. – Sir Roger Douglas
Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.
These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key. – Lionel Shriver
I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse. – Lionel Shriver
We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.
Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. – Lionel Shriver
There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.
Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next. Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. – Lionel Shriver
This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.
By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.
In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). – Lionel Shriver
We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. – Lionel Shriver
Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet. – Lionel Shriver
Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? – Lionel Shriver
Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. – Lionel Shriver
By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else. – Lionel Shriver
An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.
Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.
We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.
As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery. – Lionel Shriver
The pretence that we are each of one ethnicity only will not serve us well. It is encouraging racism by the government always choosing to describe people as Maori whenever bad outcomes are being discussed.
We need good and accurate information if we want race and ethnicity to play a reduced role in determining the future of a child in New Zealand.
Or we could focus on improving outcomes for all who are being held back by others and by societal choices, knowing and appreciating that this will benefit disproportionately those who identify at least in part as Maori. – Hilary Calvert
- Dreary, despondent headlines about pollution and climate change are the norm. But they are not painting a full or accurate picture.
- While Earth is still no Garden of Eden, many countries are making serious efforts to become clean and green. The results are scientifically notable but underreported by the media.
- Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource. In a world filled with bad news, that’s a fact worth celebrating. – Cameron English
Most people undoubtedly accept that climate change, air pollution, and deforestation are very real problems we ought to take seriously. What fewer of us seem to realize, however, is that the world has taken these issues seriously and made significant progress toward solving them as a result. This observation leads us to an important but oft-overlooked conclusion: Economic growth and technological innovation are making our planet a cleaner, safer place to live. – Cameron English
One of the best ways to bring a nation out of grinding poverty is to boost its agricultural productivity. The introduction of high-yielding crop varieties during the Green Revolution, led by plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, nicely illustrated how this phenomenon works. According to a July 2021 study, enhanced crops developed between 1965 and 2010 increased food production by more than 40%, saving the world a whopping $83 trillion. Addressing the environmental impact of agriculture, the authors didn’t mince words:
Our paper also sheds light on a concern, often expressed in the literature, that agricultural productivity improvements would pull additional land into agriculture at the expense of forests and other environmentally valuable land uses. We find evidence to the contrary… the Green Revolution tended to reduce the amount of land devoted to agriculture.” – Cameron English
Of course, climate change is the elephant in the room. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased in recent decades, which has led the WHO and others to warn about the looming public health impacts of heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters caused by global warming. Even here, though, the disaster projections that so often make headlines are out of step with the evidence.
For one thing, improved infrastructure (such as widespread air conditioning) has helped prevent a lot of weather-related mortality. Deaths due to natural disasters more broadly have also plummeted: A century ago, natural disasters commonly killed more than a million people annually. Today, that figure hovers somewhere between10,000 and 20,000 deaths per year.
Recent research has shown that fossil fuels have generated far fewer GHG emissions than projected by commonly used climate models, a divergence that “is going to only get larger in coming decades,” climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. explainedin November 2020. This means that the worst-case climate scenario grows “increasingly implausible with every passing year,” climatologists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters argued that same year in the journal Nature. These results led the New York Times to report in October 2022:
“Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.“ [Emphasis added] – Cameron English
Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource. We have always faced serious threats to our well-being, but we’re also very good at developing long-term solutions to those problems. In a world filled with bad news, that’s a fact worth celebrating. – Cameron English
Since I bought my eco dream car in late 2020, in a deluded Thunbergian frenzy, it has spent more time off the road than on it, beached at the dealership for months at a time on account of innumerable electrical calamities, while I galumph around in the big diesel “courtesy cars” they send me under the terms of the warranty. – Giles Coren
And if the government really does ban new wet fuel cars after 2030, then we will eventually have to go back to horses. Because the electric vehicle industry is no readier to get a family home from Cornwall at Christmas time (as I was trying to do) than it is to fly us all to Jupiter. The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking. Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage. It’s no wonder Tesla shares are down 71 per cent. It’s all a huge fraud. And, for me, it’s over. – Giles Coren
There are, of course, plus sides to electric ownership. Such as the camaraderie when we encounter each other, tired and weeping at yet another service station with only two chargers, one of which still has the “this fault has been reported” sign on it from when you were here last August, and the other is of the measly 3kWh variety, which means you will have to spend the night in a Travelodge while your stupid drum lazily inhales enough juice to get home.
Together, in the benighted charging zone, we leccy drivers laugh about what fools we are and drool over the diesel hatchbacks nonchalantly filling up across the way (“imagine getting to a fuel station and knowing for sure you will be able to refuel!”) and talk in the hour-long queue at Exeter services about the petrol car we will buy as soon as we get home. – Giles Coren
And then, as I inched off the dual carriageway at our turnoff, begging it to make the last mile, children weeping at the scary noises coming from both car and father: “Gearbox fault detected.” CLUNK. WHIRRR. CRACK.
And dead. Nothing. Poached elephant. I called Jaguar Assist (there is a button in the roof that does it directly — most useful feature on the car) who told me they could have a mechanic there in four hours (who would laugh and say, “Can’t help you, pal. You’ve got a software issue there. I’m just a car mechanic. And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.”)
So Esther and the kids headed for home across the sleety wastes, a vision of post-apocalyptic misery like something out of Cormac McCarthy, while I saw out 2022 waiting for a tow-truck. Again.
But don’t let that put you off. I see in the paper that electric car sales are at record levels and production is struggling to keep up with demand. So why not buy mine? It’s clean as a whistle and boasts super-low mileage. After all, it’s hardly been driven. – Giles Coren
As the self-satisfied laptop class never tires of telling us, misinformation is the kind of ‘wrong’ information that supposedly dumb people share online – usually something they’ve picked up from some scary populist. Disinformation, meanwhile, occurs when someone – a government official, say – knowingly disseminates something false, to sow confusion and discord, demoralise a target population or harm a political opponent. – Jenny Holland
As soon as the affirmative-care model came under rigorous expert scrutiny, its problems were there for all to see.
However, pushing back against this insanity will require more than just support from credentialed doctors like Hilary Cass. After all, a frequent tactic of trans activists like Levine is to co-opt the language of credentials and science.
We must instead simply trust our own judgement and common sense. When presented in plain English, the lunacy of ‘gender-affirming care’ is clear for all to see. It means pumping people (including children) with synthetic cross-sex hormones and cutting off healthy breasts, penises and testicles. I don’t need a doctor to tell me this is a dangerous course of action.
It is totally legitimate to question the wholesale acceptance and widespread celebration of such radical procedures, especially those performed on minors. It certainly doesn’t constitute ‘misinformation’, as Levine would have us believe. In fact, Levine’s attempt to discredit opposition to gender-affirming care is itself an example of disinformation from a government actor.
Governments, media outlets and tech companies talk constantly about the dangers posed by ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But it is clear that these are just the latest rhetorical tools in an attempt to control what the masses think. And what’s more, it is the same people who complain about these problems who are often the biggest culprits. – Jenny Holland
We’re witnessing the Californication of a Prince. The old bantering, streaking fun Harry who later signed up for military service has been replaced by a self-pitying celeb who squeals with glee when he gets a text message from Beyonce. Warring royals once marshalled armies and battled it out in muddy fields; now they write tear-stained tell-alls about their hurt feelings. God help us. – Brendan O’Neill
Pushing your brother is normal; making your brother a spectacle before the world is not. Harry has betrayed William in a way that will likely deepen their rift considerably. I reckon every man who has a brother is feeling for Will right now. – Brendan O’Neill
For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the real business of life, which is writing. We are apt to forget that reading in general, and of our work in particular, is not of the same importance to 99.99 percent of the population, including that part of it that has great power over our lives, as it is to us. It is a humbling thought (humbling, that is, for scribblers) that in many small towns it is easier to find an electronic cigarette or have oneself tattooed than to buy a book.– Theodore Dalrymple
I have long thought that entertainment, or rather the ubiquity of entertainment, is one of the greatest causes of boredom in the modern world. And boredom is itself a much underestimated state of mind in the production of human misconduct and therefore of misery.
The reason that too great a proportion of entertainment in a person’s life leads to boredom (though it is not easy always to decide whether the chicken of boredom comes before the egg of entertainment) is that reality can rarely complete with it for raw stimulation and excitement. Reality, the real world, moves very slowly by comparison with the world as depicted in entertainment, but people for the moment have still to enter the real world from time to time; they cannot lead wholly virtual lives.
When they enter the real world, therefore, they find it dull and boring by comparison with their entertainments; it takes mental discipline and training to find the real world of interest in an age of distraction. – Theodore Dalrymple
We’re sold this dream that marriage equals perfect happiness and conflict-free living. Too many of us haven’t seen our parents practise conflict resolution. In my case my parents divorced when I was young and for a long time in my early married years whenever my husband and I had a disagreement my immediate reaction was – marriage not working, we’re not compatible.
I know when I separated, I thought I didn’t like my husband any more. It was while we were apart that I began to appreciate who he was. I saw him caring for our children with different eyes. I began to appreciate what having two loving parents meant to our children. I began to look at my husband with fresh eyes or maybe it was old eyes, the eyes that had made me want to marry him. – Victoria Carter
Before you call time-out think about the cost of two homes, legal fees gobbling up your savings and the emotional and financial impact on your children. Talk to anyone in a long marriage and they’ll tell you about its richness and rewarding qualities and how it’s helped each partner be happier and more whole. – Victoria Carter
Here, laid bare, is the intolerance and priggishness of people who probably think of themselves as liberal yet can’t tolerate any departure from approved groupthink. – Karl du Fresne
There’s a lesson here: think carefully before you befriend a writer. They can be a spiteful, duplicitous and disputatious lot, and you can never be sure the friendship won’t come back to bite you. – Karl du Fresne
Of course, people generally don’t respond well to being embarrassed and exposed in public. And in the ensuing years, I’ve learned something about truth: It’s way more complicated than it seems when we’re young. There isn’t just one truth, our truth — the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well. – Patti Davis
Years ago, someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating I answered: “That’s easy. I’d have said, ‘Be quiet.’” Not forever. But until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a really long time. – Patti Davis
Silence gives you room, it gives you distance, and it lets you look at your experiences more completely, without the temptation to even the score. – Patti Davis
I’ve learned something else about truth: Not every truth has to be told to the entire world. People are always going to be curious about famous families, and often the stories from those families can resonate with others, give them insight into their own situations, even transcend time since fame flutters at the edges of eternity.
But not everything needs to be shared, a truth that silence can teach. Harry seems to have operated on the dictum that “Silence is not an option.” I would, respectfully, suggest to him that it is. – Patti Davis
While the term “gender identity” has exploded in popularity as a way for transgender individuals to express the feeling of “misalignment” with their bodies, a group of scientists says that there is no empirical evidence for its existence in biology.
According to an international group of over 100 clinicians and researchers, there is currently no biological evidence for “gender identity” and no laboratory test that can distinguish a trans-identified person from a non-trans-identified person. Despite this, the belief in “gender identity” is used as the basis for medically transitioning thousands of children and adolescents.
“The assumption of the core biological underpinning for ‘gender identity’ and ‘gender dysphoria’ remains an unproven theory: while biology likely plays a role in gender nonconformity, currently, there is no brain, blood, or other objective test that distinguishes a trans-identified from a non-trans identified person once confounding factors such as sexual orientation are controlled for,” (emphasis original) said the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) in an article debunking false and unproven assumptions used to medically transition children. – Christina Buttons
One of the myths is that “gender identity,” which underlies gender dysphoria, is a biological trait, according to the article. There is evidence that roughly 60–90% of children who identify as transgender but do not socially or medically transition will no longer identify as transgender in adulthood, and many will grow up to be gay adults. – Christina Buttons
Pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Quentin Van Meter has said that there is “zero point zero zero” evidence that the concepts of “gender fluidity” and “gender identity” have any scientific basis.
Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir says the motivation for attempting to prove that “gender identity” is an “innate, immutable trait” is for political and legal reasons. – Christina Buttons
What they want is a government to come in and turn things around and be able to get things done and that’s really why I think we’ve been having some success. – Christopher Luxon
It creates bureaucracy. It doesn’t create localism. It doesn’t create devolution. Those are big principles for the National Party that we hold dear to. – Christopher Luxon
We’ve had a government flat on the accelerator with massive stimulus spending – a billion dollars more a week, we’ve had a constrained economy with very little immigration, actually meaningful immigration, coming into the country and we’ve had a Reserve Bank that was printing an awful amount of money for a long period of time and actually creating massive asset price inflation and has only just recently taken the foot off the accelerator on to the brake.
But you’ve still got the Government going flat out on the accelerator, the Reserve Bank’s pumping the brakes real hard and the economy’s still very constrained, so you know that’s been the reality of it and I do say it’s been huge economic mismanagement. – Christopher Luxon
I’m more convinced a year into this job, two years into this place in Parliament, that we’re totally, utterly, completely going in the wrong direction. We need a big turnaround, and we need to be able to go get things done for the New Zealand people and that’s what we’re going to work hard to do. – Christopher Luxon
There has to be a better way of improving Maori literacy than jamming it down our throats whilst mangling the English language in the process. – Wendy Geus
In the story of Harry and Meghan, we see an uncomfortable truth. Not about the royal family or the state of modern Britain – but about the state of anti-racism, a once radical movement that has been warped beyond all recognition. It has become a plaything of some of the most privileged people imaginable – a means to demonise any criticism and burnish their moral status.
Where the old anti-racism was radical, brave and fought from the bottom-up, this new ‘anti-racism’ is hectoring, pompous, even aristocratic. No wonder our prince has taken to it so effortlessly. – Tom Slater
Our monopoly soviet health system has all the wrong incentives. All the school dental nurses go on holiday because the children are not customers who have a choice. It’s the school dentist or nothing. – Richard Prebble
The country is wrapped in the red tape of costly regulations.
Government departments regard the production of new laws and regulations to be a core function. Hundreds of civil servants spent their time producing new regulations.
There is not one civil servant whose job description is to stop unnecessary regulation. – Richard Prebble
What about a Regulatory Review Department whose task is to recommend regulations that should be repealed?
Every new spending proposal cannot go to cabinet until it has a treasury report. What if every proposed new regulation had to be assessed by the Regulatory Review Department? New regulations are supposed to have a cost/benefit review. The review is done by the proposing department. The departments never say “this regulation will cost far more than any possible benefit”.
What if before a department can propose a new regulation it has to find two existing regulations to repeal? – Richard Prebble
Let me declare myself. I am an orthodox Christian who welcomes criticism and satire, even ridicule of my faith. I welcome them because they sharpen my own thinking and they give me an opportunity to talk about what I believe.
Hate speech legislation will kill so much of what I enjoy. It will coerce self-censorship and encourage me and nearly everyone else to be a hypocrite, indeed it is remarkably close to making hypocrisy compulsory. And it does that because perpetrators are infatuated by the cult of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) and muddled about human rights. And in that fog of muddle and infatuation there is no fresh Nor ’wester permitted to clear the air. – Bruce Logan
Understanding “self-evident” is critical. It is peculiar to Western civilisation’s belief in humanity’s connection to the transcendent. For example, our dignity and consequently understanding of freedom, which we all claim to possess, is given to us by God and not by the state.
Self-evident rights include the right to religious belief and expression, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, freedom to assemble together and probably freedom to buy and sell. Once recognised they create the duty for the state to let people get on with them. Their definition does not depend on what the state says.
Then there are other “rights”; the right to education, the right to warm and dry housing, and most recently the right to be able to choose one’s gender. However, these are not rights, they are claims that must be delivered by the state and paid for by the taxpayer. – Bruce Logan
Progressives assert that hate speech legislation will enhance freedom when it will do exactly the opposite. They think that hate speech legislation will give us free “profanely sacred” choice. They assume that protecting one’s chosen identity is the self-evident good; equality for all after all. Hate speech, although without clear definition offends the Progressive’s dignity. Opposition is heretical. – Bruce Logan
Religion configures culture and for that reason it must always be open to satire and criticism. Race, ethnic or national origin are morally neutral. Hate speech legislation will give them political identity and power by default. Instead of ameliorating racism it will intensify it, identifying race or ethnicity above citizenship. Legislation censoring speech is an expansive industry because its foundation is political.
The desire for hate speech legislation in the present cultural context is deeply ironic. It is a critical tool for those who are in the process of wanting to establish a civil religion to replace a de-Christianised morality. Its focus is to place the new identity culture beyond criticism.
The irony is implicit because the progressive notion of human dignity is parasitic. Dignity, for the progressive, rests on a tautology. I have dignity because I’m human; I’m human therefore I have dignity. – Bruce Logan
Faith in the authoritarian state’s declaration of dignity replaces the freedom we enjoy and taught to us by the biblical notion of dignity. Hate speech legislation is simply an alternative way for the state to say that truth and consequently freedom begins and ends here. It is a necessary step in the development of a civil religion to reinforce the cult of “Diversity and Inclusion”.
The consequence is to make criticism of the rising civil religion too dangerous. We already have its avant-garde entrenching the cancel culture of its shock troops in the universities, media and virtue signalling commerce. In the wake of hate speech legislation dissenting debate will become impossible for everyone, but especially for a Christian whose understanding of dignity and morality absolutely confronts the progressive underpinning of the civil religion. – Bruce Logan
We live in an age of suspicion to a degree that I don’t remember from my youth—though I admit that my memory is fallible, and I may be mistaken in this. Perhaps we are no more suspicious of the motives of those with whom we disagree than ever we were, and we always thought that those who disagreed with us were not merely wrong, but evil.
Whatever the case may be, it’s now difficult to discuss anything contentious without the discussion swiftly descending into an examination of the motives of the opponents, as if the truth of what anyone said were dependent on his reasons for saying it: reasons which are themselves usually a matter of conjecture rather than of ascertainable truth.
I doubt that anyone is, or has ever been, entirely free from the temptation to resort to the ad hominem in argument, but name-calling is now a pervasive rhetorical device, especially in discussion of whatever touches on cherished political beliefs but which, on the face of it, should be a matter of objective fact rather than political viewpoint. – Theodore Dalrymple
One suspects that it’s belief that determines the evidence rather than the evidence that determines belief. – Theodore Dalrymple
Once motives rather than evidence and argument are made the focus of disagreement, one enters a labyrinth from which exit is rare. – Theodore Dalrymple
What is true today may be false tomorrow, without anyone having committed an error, let alone fraud. Human psychology isn’t like the trajectory of a planet, which is a natural fact unaffected by observation: it’s reflexive. For example, how I react to something depends on my expectations, and my expectations depend on a very complex number of factors. But psychology as a study seems often to treat the human mind as if it were the solar system, to all intents and purposes unchanging. – Theodore Dalrymple
The end can sometimes justify the means, but often it can’t: it all depends. And what it depends on is that great intangible, judgment. Most people prefer absolutely clear-cut principles that they think can assure them in advance of always being right, whereas judgment, being variable and uncertain, will often lead them into error or wickedness. Nevertheless, life requires judgment and not just principle. – Theodore Dalrymple
What has really happened is that belief in biological sex has been redefined as bigotry. Standing up for women’s sex-based rights has been rebranded as transphobia. So Rowling’s perfectly normal views, which are likely shared by most people out there, can be talked about as hate crimes when they are nothing of the kind.
This is deeply authoritarian too, this cynical repackaging of dissent as ‘phobia’. Let’s not forget what a phobia is — a malady of the mind, an irrational way of thinking. This echoes Stalin’s antics too, when problematic people were likewise written off as mad and consumed by spite. Rowling has nothing to be ashamed of, but her intolerant erasers do. – Brendan O’Neill
It must be discombobulating for those, here and in China, or even say Victoria or Western Australia, who fully accepted their government’s then-line that there was no cost too high in the pursuit of zero Covid, to experiencing the current position of those same governments. I know the likes of Michael Baker finds it very confusing.
To the rest of us, it proves one thing. The management of Covid-19, particularly once vaccines were available, was as much a political decision as anything else. Politicians were fond of declaring they were just following the science, but they weren’t especially.
The science didn’t change that much. What changed was the political calculus. Once it was clear that scaring the bejesus out of people and locking them down was no longer politically profitable, politicians quickly moved on to playing down the virus and normalising it.
All this underlines that there wasn’t only one way of doing things. We had choices, particularly once vaccines became available in early 2021. And particularly in this country the second half of 2021 could have been very different if alternative but equally valid political choices had been made to those that were. – Steven Joyce
There are those of course who think we should forget about going over the entrails of the Covid response. They think it is pointless to look in the rearview mirror. Except that it isn’t the rearview mirror.
We are still living with the impact of the decisions made during the pandemic and the huge financial cost of those will be with us for years to come. The billions lost through quantitative easing could have bought a bunch of new hospitals or paid for a fair few water pipes.
The decision, unique to New Zealand, to shut down massive transport projects during lockdowns has now likely cost billions of dollars and years in delays, as reported just prior to Christmas. The massive fiscal burden has only been reduced by an inflation-driven rise in the tax take, which adds to the cost of living squeeze on kiwi families.
And then there is the human toll. There seems little doubt that some of the anti-social behaviour we are seeing and our falling education performance are a result of people being told that what society previously signalled was important didn’t turn out to be so important during that long 2021 lockdown – like going to school.
In bestowing a knighthood on the Director-General of Health so quickly, the government appears to have already passed judgement on its own performance. The rest of us should be more thoughtful. As our changing attitude to Covid risk in the last year shows, it is possible to make different choices with fewer long-term costs in calmer, more rational times. This, surely, is a lesson we should take from the last two years. – Steven Joyce
Stanford University has published, to much-deserved derision, a kind of index of prohibited words, that is to say words that could possibly cause anyone, even animals, distress. Of course, if you treat people as eggshells, eggshells is what they will become, especially if they derive some kind of benefit, financial or other, from their fragility.
The university has almost as many administrators as students, in the way that the Bolivian navy had admirals; and in the absences of any other or higher purpose, administrators do not administer, they manufacture administration. They do so both to give themselves things to do and, if possible, to create a need for even more of their kind. A director of something or other soon needs a deputy director; he or she then needs an assistant deputy director, and he or she needs a personal assistant who will soon be so overwhelmed by work that he or she will need a deputy also. And all this, of course, requires the hard work of the human resources department, to ensure that the appointed persons are demographically representative of the general population—only more so, some groups needing special protection like endangered species.
One can just imagine the very hard work, so-called, by the committee that produced the list of prohibited words—breakfast meetings, hastily snatched lunches, and so forth, all to convince them that they were engaged upon something worthwhile and important. In the modern managerial world, no distinction is drawn, alas, between activity and work. – Theodore Dalrymple
Every day the language policing gets more and more ludicrous, but this example, from the School of Social Work of the University of Southern California, takes the cake. I can no longer say that “my field is evolutionary biology” because that is racist language. The connection, as outlined in the official letter below from the USC group, is that enslaved people went “into the field” in the antebellum South. That makes the word “field” off limits. But farmers were going into the field long before that!
Now the recommended verbiage is “my practicum is evolutionary biology.” At that point people will say “Whaaaat???” And, as several readers note below, the words “field work” for biologists is also unacceptable; I suppose the alternative is “ecological work in the great outdoors”. – Jerry Coyne
The thing that strikes me is that someone had to see the world “field” as racist, and then take action to expunge it from USC’s language. You have to be sniffing around very hard for offense to do something like that. And I suspect that their goal, in fact, isn’t any of the ones they state, but simply to assert power. How bizarre that these initiatives actually work in today’s America! – Jerry Coyne
There are good cases to be made for changing some language, but this isn’t one of them. – Jerry Coyne
I could not do now, the sort of jobs I’ve done in the past because New Zealand has become so prissy and so specific. I hate the term woke, but there’s an element of truth to it. I just wouldn’t bow down to that now. I’m just a bloke and I’m just calling it as I see it. – Paul Henry
You can avoid saying anything that may vaguely upset anyone, but then what you’re doing is avoiding saying anything at all — and you’re just becoming another script reader. – Paul Henry
Seriously, people, I get no pleasure from calling out wokeness (even using that word gets me excoriated), for along with that comes opprobrium from the ideologically pure. Even worse: I feel awful that academia, and especially biology, is being distorted and corrupted by ideologues.
One of the examples I used at the Stanford free-speech conference was the inability of people to recognize that, biologically, there are only two sexes in humans. Just two. In our species sex is effectively binary, with only a tiny handful of people who are “intersex” (these exceptions constitute about 0.018% of the species, or about one person in 5600). Sex is not gender, for the latter is a true social construct because there are far more sex roles or sexual identities than two, although even gender is bimodal, with most people identifying as traditional male or female. A frequency plot of sex would look like two huge lines, each about 50% of the population, with one of the lines at “male” and the other at “female”, and a few almost invisible blips between those lines. A frequency distribution of gender would look more like a bactrian (the two-humped camel), with more intermediates. But the humps would be high. – Jerry Coyne
I believed it was self-evident that sexual dimorphism lies at the heart of female oppression, and that it is the foundation for feminism — yet it is now controversial to claim that the oppression of women is sex-based. It contradicts the idea that women are not oppressed because they are female (many now consider it neither necessary nor sufficient to be female to be a woman) but on the basis of an internal gender identity. I have never understood how such oppression could work but felt that saying so would cause pain. So I remained silent and continued to read New Scientist, sure that the truth would clarify the conversation and heal the hurt.
Unfortunately, “the truth” has done no such thing, and New Scientist is no longer the safe haven it once was. I did not realise how much of my sanity relied on its recognition of the existence and importance of two sexes in humans until articles began to appear which seemed to deny this entirely. – Octavia Sheepshanks
After reading one article in which miscarried male foetuses were given a sex (“boys”) but the women who had suffered miscarriages were not (“pregnant people”) I wrote a long and passionate letter to the editor about how it had made me feel (not good). I received no reply, and I began to wonder if my strong belief in the significance of sexual dimorphism in humans was inaccurate and hateful after all. This was the most popular weekly science publication in the world, and it was reporting science as it was. I must be the problem.
Then I encountered the most befuddling article yet. A new form of contraception “for people” had been discovered. After a minor brain adjustment, I established from the sentence “a gel that is applied inside the vagina has been shown to block sperm injected into female sheep”, that this was a new contraception for women. The article was so strange to read that I sought out the original journal article to witness this bizarre wording in situ. When I read the first sentence of the abstract, “Many women would prefer a nonhormonal, on-demand contraceptive that does not have the side effects of existing methods”, I was astonished. Science had not changed; New Scientist had. It had lied to me. (Gaslighting is an overused accusation but resonates here. I intend to avoid one-sided love affairs with magazines in future.) – Octavia Sheepshanks
There is nothing trans-inclusive about pretending humans are a hermaphroditic species. If we were, trans people wouldn’t exist. Perhaps New Scientist, if it wants to include trans people in future(for example, trans men in a study on female contraception) could do so by writing about them? Just a suggestion! Accuracy does not have to mean using the words “women” and “men” — “males” and “females” would include those with all gender identities, including non-binary people.
The alteration of scientific studies to avoid naming the demographic previously known as “women” has serious consequences for anyone female. – Octavia Sheepshanks
Miscarried male foetuses are given a sex and make it into the headline, but the only mention of the women suffering these miscarriages is indirect: “stressful events may activate non-conscious evolved mechanisms in pregnant people to spontaneously abort fetuses that have less chance of thriving in tough environments”.
Presumably, anyone female has these “non-conscious evolved mechanisms” if they exist. – Octavia Sheepshanks
I look forward to a day when I have a place to read about the physical and social implications of research into women’s bodies and health, without limitation. In the meantime, I note that New Scientist remains happy to acknowledge gonochorism in other animals; it recently rejoiced over a study of female robins that discredited the sexist theory that only male robins sing. Maybe I’ll support the liberation of female songbirds until I can read about my own species. In fact, if there’s a rally for feminist robins, I’ll be there with a placard the size of my thumbnail, desperately seeking a new safe haven of sanity. – Octavia Sheepshanks
The respectful compromise would be to introduce a form of legal self-identification for gender identity for trans people while clarifying that this does not change someone’s sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. A clear distinction between gender identity and biological sex in law would balance the legitimate rights of trans people and those of women, protecting both groups against discrimination but establishing beyond doubt that it is lawful to provide female-only services for women as a matter of privacy, dignity and safety. But in Scotland and Westminster, self-described progressive politicians have proved too gutless to advocate balance and compromise. It is marginalised women – in prison, in domestic abuse services, and who require intimate care as a result of disability – who will bear the consequences of their cowardice. – The Observer
Harry and Meghan have gone to the right place. America laps up the celebrity milk that curdles in British stomachs, and the milk they are providing is perfectly flavoured for contemporary taste – sappy, vulnerable victimhood coupled with humourless ultra-sensitivity to the slightest reference to race.
This phase of public puritanism is relatively recent and the older royals will have made jokes they would not make today. Harry and Meghan are milking the zeitgeist for all it is worth in the celebrity market and they are making a fortune. – John Roughan
Is that how this Shakespearean tragedy ends, with a boring Duke and a botoxed Duchess living out their days in California while the British monarchy, modernized by Charles III, celebrates the enduring reign of William V and looks forward to George VII? Possibly. – John Roughan
The dying Stuff fleet of newspapers, purchased for the excessive price of one dollar and now fighting for survival, willingly prostituted itself to the government bribe in return for the taxpayer’s unwitting subsidy in numerous different forms, but mainly ridiculously unnecessary full-page government Department advertising and bogus news stories reflecting government policy. The government did this on the pretence of helping sustain the print media but in fact solely to sustain their own political support. Thus the Herald’s competent cartoonists during the disgraceful bribery time were pretty much confined to non-political topics, albeit no longer. Stuff on the other hand, couldn’t afford cartoonists and run ridiculously pointless humourless efforts that have absolutely nothing to say. – Sir Bob Jones
The buying of the print media, so cleverly summed up by Garrick’s cartoon, was nothing less than political corruption of a scale hitherto unknown in New Zealand. – Sir Bob Jones
Since Labour’s arrival in power in 2017 many billions of dollars have been spent on major infrastructure projects. The Government’s Wellbeing Budget 2022 advises it plans to spend a further $61.9 billion on infrastructure investment over the next five years.
In spite of Cabinet directions that Treasury should provide Cabinet regular reports on the performance of all significant investments, not a single major projects performance report has been provided by Treasury or reviewed by Cabinet in the last five years.
According to Treasury’s website, reporting on the performance of major government projects was discontinued in 2017 “due to changes in ministerial priorities.” The verbal version of this provided to us in 2020 was “Ministers have no appetite for this type of report”.
These reports are not supposed to be optional though, for Ministers to decide whether they want them or not. The reports provide important performance mitigation and public accountability functions. – Grant Avery
Large infrastructure projects are notoriously poor performers. The average government infrastructure project globally runs over budget by 40% and projects in New Zealand have been found in a high-profile performance survey to under-deliver their promised benefits by more than 50%.
Transparent reporting on the performance of projects is widely known to mitigate these issues.
Why are Treasury not complying with Cabinet’s directions on investment performance reporting? Why is Government not demanding this accountability? And why is the Auditor General not holding Treasury and Government to account for the absence of these reports? – Grant Avery
I was very, very resolute in what I wanted to do with my life and my career, to the point that the school called in various counsellors and my parents to have a meeting because they thought that, my aspirations were thoroughly unachievable and I should go and work at Tiwai Aluminium Smelter as fitter turner, because I was good with my hands – Peter Beck
I wanted to be able to build the rockets, because there was no way I could go to university and learn how to build rockets, and the engine bolting systems and construction systems and all those kinds of things. –
I figured the best way would be to have the hand skills to do that first. So that’s what I went and did. I ultimately ended up at Industrial Research, which is now Callaghan Innovation or the old DSIR. –
Engineering is cool, but the thing I like about space the most is just the sheer impact you can have on so many people.
“If you build a bridge in a city, the people use that bridge, and it obviously has a tremendous impact on that population group.
“But the wonderful thing about space is you can put literally a little box of electronics on orbit, and it can affect millions, tens of millions, even billions of people, whether it’s providing communication services or weather services or imagery, or whatever. – Peter Beck
I’m very sensitive to aesthetics. So if you look at Rocket Lab, whether it be launch vehicles or any kind of branding or materials, we really care about … we have a saying here, ‘we make beautiful things’….whether it be a rocket or spreadsheet. That’s one of the key elements of the success of the company and the reason why our stuff works, we take the time to make it functional, but also beautiful. – Peter Beck
I have tremendous admiration for an astronaut. I know every nut and bolt there is on the launch vehicle and I also know the risks with space flight, there’s not a lot of margin in the vehicle. And it takes tremendous courage.
When you know too much about something, then it depletes your courage. So, I would be the worst astronaut you can imagine. I’d be looking for wires on every single bolt.
Astronauts just have this amazing ability to turn all that off, focus on the mission at hand, and go and execute it. Some of us are made to do that, some of us aren’t – I’m not. – Peter Beck
In New Zealand … we don’t tend to think big enough. If you’re going to go and do something, it’s no more painful to do something really big than it is to do something really small.
If you’re building a company, you might as well just go and do the really big thing, and just go for it. And if it all doesn’t work, then well at least you had a crack and no harm, no foul.
So choose the thing that you’re really passionate about, then make it big are the pieces of advice that I would give to people.
You’re on this planet for an excruciatingly short amount of time. Choose something that you want to do, and something that you believe is going to have an impact.
At the end of the day … the question that ultimately you reflect back on is ‘well, what did I get done? What did I do with my life? What impact did I have?’
And nobody ever measures impact by the size of their house, or what kind of flashy car they’ve got or anything like that. The true way to measure impact is ‘what did I do for the world?’
Following your passion, and keeping that as a North Star is what I always challenge everybody to do, because ultimately that’s how you define how successful your time on this planet was. – Peter Beck
If a law is objectively evil, but backed by the majority, then the law cannot be questioned. Democracy grants legitimacy to the whims of the majority.
How this plays out in the United States is best answered by those who have a deeper understanding than some itinerant tourist, but in our own land the tyranny of the majority remains a central challenge to those who believe in the sovereignty of the individual. – Damien Grant
A king, de Tocqueville writes, only has physical power, but the majority has both the force and the power of morality to enforce its will on the minority.
He saw the perils of democracy. Sadly, we have perfected them. – Damien Grant
I really don’t have a lot of stomach for this. Most Māori are working and law-abiding like most non-Māori and the constant racial identification of people only feeds resentment and division.
BUT if the Prime Minister wants to crow about what she has achieved for Māori let’s look at what she hasn’t achieved for Māori. – Lindsay Mitchell
If this is the Prime Minister’s idea of achieving for Māori, then she is even more self-delusional than I’d previously entertained.
And if she is returned on this record then we are all deeply in trouble. All of us together. – Lindsay Mitchell
So perhaps New Zealand should adopt its own astrology calendar and make it the Year of the Farmer, a year-long — and beyond — celebration of the country’s food-producing champions. – Sally Rae
Let us not forget what side our bread is buttered on and how it was farming — not our previously greatly-lauded tourism sector — which kept the economy ticking through the global uncertainty and disruption of Covid. – Sally Rae
As well as a celebration of our food producers, may 2023 bring more co-operation, collaboration, communication and common bloody sense when it comes to the relationship between the Government and our rural sector.
2022 was another year of angst and frustration for farming folk, with more protests organised by farming advocacy group Groundswell New Zealand, in response to the raft of regulations. – Sally Rae
Solutions require collaboration — carrots, not canes — and regulations must be achievable, and involve proper consultation, proposals not solely dreamed up by city-based bureaucrats who have never set their squeaky-clean feet on a rural property and do not know a Hereford from a hogget.
Some recognition from the Beehive of the importance of the sector and acknowledgement of the hard mahi that goes on daily in the milking sheds, sheep yards, grain fields and processing plants around the country would not go astray.
Pride must be restored in being a farmer, otherwise there will be no incentive for the next generation — or even some of the current generation — to farm the land.
The urban sprawl — and a plethora of pine trees — will continue on some of the world’s best food-producing soils and New Zealand will be much the poorer for it, increasingly importing products from countries with far less stringent animal welfare controls. – Sally Rae
So bugger the bunny. Let’s make 2023 the Year of the Farmer; remember synthetic is just a fancy word for plastic, so clothe your families and clad your homes in natural, sustainable products, and support — and salute — your local food producers who are outstanding in their field year-round. Literally. – Sally Rae
Fast forward to 2023 and what do Smith’s awards shows that are ‘reflective of the society we live in’ look like? A testosterone fest. People with penises as far as the eye can see. The Brits took the knee to the cult of nonbinary and its awards have never been less reflective of society. It’s almost as if the trans ideology is anti-women. – Brendan O’Neill
There are some important points to make here. First, Sam Smith was not ‘excluded’ from the Brits. That’s just nonsense. It is demeaning to those who have suffered real oppression to describe a bloke’s infantile, hammy refusal to accept a gong with the word ‘male’ on it as oppression. A man saying ‘Ooh, I can’t accept that award because its wording will offend my outlandish identity as a “they”’ is about as far from Rosa Parks as you can get. Smith excluded himself from the Brits by being in denial about his maleness. He, and Corrin and D’Arcy and the other fashionably post-gender celebs, opted out of sex, and by extension out of sexed awards. It’s on them. Why should awards change to accommodate the faddish beliefs of a nonbinary clique?
That’s the other point – the staggering narcissism of the nonbinary ideology. These people really do believe that the entire world should mould itself around their ideology. Male and female awards must be scrapped. Female toilets, changing rooms and other private spaces must be thrown open to men who feel like women. Even language itself must be twisted and bent to these people’s identity feels. So we’re all expected to use ‘preferred pronouns’ and even to mangle grammar by using ‘they’ to refer to one person. My use of the he pronoun for Smith and the she pronoun for Corrin and D’Arcy will be judged by some a heinous act of bigotry. But I am not willing to sacrifice the sense and universalism of the language I use to appease the fever dreams of a minority movement. – Brendan O’Neill
So it is with the trans movement. It expects every realm of society – every awards ceremony, every woman’s space, every linguistic tradition – to bow and scrape before its post-truth, ahistorical belief that people are whatever sex they say they are. The truly oppressive force was not the Brits having male and female categories but the pressure put on the Brits to scrap those categories in order to flatter the narcissistic delusions of a few nonbinaries. This is the opposite of a civil-rights movement. Progressive movements in the past were concerned with changing the world to make it better for all. The regressive, navel-gazing cult of gender play is obsessed with altering the world so that its own adherents never have to encounter an idea or a space that dents their fragile egos. The irony of their misuse of the word ‘they’ is that they are myopically focused on me, me, me.- Brendan O’Neill
Many, I see, are predicting Winston Peters’ return – really? Haven’t we had enough of this showman and the games he plays with your vote?
Are we really going back there again? What is it we all think can be achieved that he hasn’t floated in the last 40 years in public life? I get concerned our memories are short.
At seven percent of the vote, he had 100 percent of the power to choose who governed. Your vote no longer counted. And in going for the untested Jacinda Ardern, knowing the economy was running into trouble, Peters put himself before his country. He ignored the man with the moral mandate and economic smarts and sent him into political retirement and he put in place an accidental Prime Minister, an experimental and vastly inexperienced Government that had made outlandish promises, so much so it wasn’t sure what it could deliver.
So it embarked on two years of working groups and did very little but fumble its way through until COVID hit. – Duncan Garner
And if Peters is back, he’ll likely lick his wounds on the irrelevant cross benches or personally opt out of heading to Wellington. But the last thing the country needs is Peters on the cross-benches with National, a minority Government, running to Peters for daily support on issues. If that doesn’t speed up the brain drain or even brain fade, then nothing will.
For further insight on Peters, go back up this column and see my earlier comments about him – if he hasn’t achieved his political goals over the past 40 years, will he manage to in the next 40 years? – Duncan Garner
If we look at New Zealand today, we just fought a kind of war: that was the war against Covid. For this war, we gave the state extraordinary powers: to lock us up, to close our borders, to support the economy. But now that we are leaving Covid behind us, we need to return to our liberal traditions. We cannot let the state plan our lives. We cannot let it run large parts of the economy. We need a free market, a free economy and free Kiwis to generate prosperity for us all. And to deliver opportunities for all New Zealanders.
That is what I have learnt from history. – Dr Oliver Hartiwch
A civilisation in which the law may be broken with impunity will not remain a civilisation very long. – Chris Trotter
Now, law enforcement may object that those engaged in such behaviour were later summonsed for their infringements. All well and good, but the public expects – and has every right to expect – that clear breaches of the law, not to mention “the peace”, are confronted as and when they happen. Because, if law enforcement extends no further than issuing summonses after crimes have been committed, and refuses (out of fear or lack of resources) to intervene as crimes are taking place, then the public’s faith in the Police will be shaken to the core.
Law enforcement’s inaction is dangerous for another reason. When the motorcycle gangs take over the streets and the highways, and the Police response is not to require them to observe the rules of the road, but to request that alarmed members of the public exercise patience and forbearance – what is the message being sent?
It is a message of weakness and fear. It is a message which reassures organised criminals that they possess more coercive power than the Police. It is a message that says: if there is nothing to stop gangsters taking over the streets and the highways, then there is nothing to stop gangsters taking over a hospital’s emergency department.
What’s next? If hospitals are no longer off limits to criminals, if medical staff can be intimidated and frail patients frightened out of their wits with impunity, then why not apply the same methods to witnesses, lawyers and judges? If the Police will not intervene to protect our hospitals, then what reason do we have to suppose that they will intervene to protect our courts?
Are those in command of the New Zealand state even willing to ask these questions? Or, are our politicians and public servants committed, instead, to a policy of appeasement? Certainly, there appears to be a general reluctance on the part of the state’s coercive instruments to exert their powers against individuals and groups who depict themselves as the victims of colonisation and white supremacy. Māori and Pasifika have learned that charges of historical and institutional racism have the effect of Kryptonite on the superpowers of the white settler state. – Chris Trotter
To aggressively assert the powers of the State in the manner of Rob Muldoon in 1976, or even of Helen Clark in 2004, is no longer seen by public officials as a clear-cut issue of protecting the equal rights of all citizens by the equal application of all the laws. As currently interpreted by state actors, te Tiriti o Waitangi interposes all manner of caveats against moving decisively against the sort of behaviour on display by the Mongrel Mob at Christchurch Hospital.
Were any New Zealand government – Labour or National – to embark on a rapid build-up of the state’s coercive forces, sufficient to suppress the anti-social behaviour of criminal elements, there would be an outcry. Such a policy would be denounced as irredeemably racist. Its critics would demand to know against whom our beefed-up Police, Corrections, SIS and NZ Defence Forces were intended to be deployed. Would these overwhelmingly white bodies of men and women be unleashed against Pakeha? Or, would they, instead, be held in readiness against the nation’s most exploited, marginalised and institutionally oppressed citizens – Māori and Pasifika? – Chris Trotter
Tax, tax, tax. That’s how Oxfam believes you will address skyrocketing inequality all over the world. It wants governments to introduce a one-off wealth tax and a windfall tax to end profiteering. It wants a permanent increase in tax for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population – taking at least 60 percent of their income, and an even greater percentage for multi-millionaires and billionaires. – Rachel Smalley
Ultimately, Oxfam says it wants to significantly reduce the number of wealthy people, and the wealth of those people, and redistribute those resources.
Here’s the issue I have with this, though. These huge taxes, almost $3 trillion if Oxfam’s plan became a reality, would be given to governments to redistribute. And that’s why I think this strategy is flawed.
Our governments and politicians have gotten us into this mess. It is their decisions, and their historic leadership, that led us down this path. And if you look at where the most entrenched hardship and poverty is, it’s also where you will find the most corrupt governments. – Rachel Smalley
Why would you take money from the world’s most wealthy people, and place it in the hands of the corrupt monsters who’ve overseen the devastation of their populations or, at best, have just failed to understand or strategise how to counter challenges like famine or drought?
There is a generalised view among some humanitarians and charities that anyone who is in possession of extreme wealth has acquired it through the oppression or exploitation of others. Sure. Historically, in some cases, that is true. – Rachel Smalley
But others with extreme wealth have revolutionised the way we live.
Love him or hate him, Elon Musk changed the way the world moved. Bill Gates changed the way we communicate – he connected the world. So did Larry Page with Google. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos made it easy to buy goods from anywhere in the world. Bernard Arnault made billions out of luxury goods. Gina Reinhart cashed in on Australia’s mining resources. And so it goes on. I’m not suggesting any of these people are great characters, but they’re disrupters and they’re leaders.
So are you going to take money from these squillionaires, are you going to tax them, and give those funds to the governments of Peru, or Ethiopia, or South Africa, or Bangladesh, or Yemen? Or worse, the bureaucrats at the UN? Or do you work with some of these super-brains, these entrepreneurs to try and solve some of the world’s problems? – Rachel Smalley
I’m over-simplifying the issue of course, but you get my drift. Let’s use the brain power of the likes of Musk and Bezos and Gates because they are mega-rich for a reason. They’re super sharp. They’re strategic thinkers. They’re disrupters. They’ve already changed the world in some way, so why not bring them to the table to fix some of the major issues born from historical exploitation, climate change, natural or man-made disasters, or globalisation? Gates is already trying to find a way to combat malaria.
Charities need to get smarter too. They are foolish to sneer and gripe at success. Charities rely heavily on so-called mum and dad donators. But if they’re going to fix some of the major, structural challenges the world faces today, charities need scale and strategy. And it’s the corporate world and entrepreneurs who provide this.
However, whatever we do, we should not heavily tax the most wealthy people in the world and hand over that cash to governments. Politicians have failed to foresee and address some of the greatest issues we now see in housing, education, inequality, health, child poverty, food insecurity and climate change. We’re in a mess because of them. Tax is not the answer. Tapping into the minds of the people changing the world, is. – Rachel Smalley
One of the biggest problem our country faces is the continuous supply of false prophets who have the ear of government.
They come with ideas that sound workable but in practise turn out to be well less so. Their greatest ability is to ignore the realities which contradict the theory.
This is never more the case than when the politics of the environment (see rural NZ) are dissected. Our Government overrides and/or ignores the overwhelming success of the primary sector’s capacity to produce at a level which supplies significant capital for our health, education and welfare sectors to meet much of the needs of our wider society.
This is a result of the constant rational application to change which now seems to have been set aside in favour of a more “natural” process without the use of science. – Gerrard Eckhoff
The folk who are the new experts live in the cities. They have never actually grown or made anything from a strawberry to a sausage.
All the right people with experience and knowledge are now the wrong people to listen to, or so growers are told. Something to do with other people’s values. The rise and rise of the environmental puritan increasingly influences those in authority.
In the past, synthetic fertiliser has provided nutrient aplenty to help the young plant to produce. We are now told such fertiliser is bad.
The natural way of growing things is best and more in keeping with nature — or so we are told by those who promote that the natural way of growing things is the right way.
Most people die from natural causes which is why we should steer clear of naturally grown foods as one wit once observed — and with more than a grain of truth. (See E coli O157 found in compost.) – Gerrard Eckhoff
It is correct that the Government’s preferred regenerative agriculture works but only if we are prepared to accept a 50% reduction in our productive capacity over the ensuing years.
Meanwhile, traditional pastoral farming continues to add organic matter (carbon) to the soil — only to be taxed for doing so. A 5000-stock unit property will be required to pay $8,500 at a time when lamb and mutton has fallen by 50%.
The use of any chemical sprays as bad for the environment is the common mantra of the environmental lobby group. This, despite killing off viruses that are even worse. – Gerrard Eckhoff
Transgenic is still a word spoken of in hushed tones in NZ society due to political allegiances wrongly insisting that the science behind GM is yet to be proven. The climate science is (apparently) proven but GM is not, so the fear of being ridiculed keeps most of us silent, but not all. (GM science has been contracted out by NZ to Australia and has been for years.) – Gerrard Eckhoff
Hydro electrical generation is totally important and at a reasonable price. Our Government owns around 50% of a lot of hydro electricity generators who naturally enough need lots of water in their rivers. The Government receives healthy dividends from the generators. Such matters were once called a conflict of interest, but what used to be called a principled approach to decision making doesn’t seem to apply anymore.
Should Government continue down this pathway to artificially created food shortages (eggs) — the parable of the little red hen comes to mind but then school children will likely have no idea of what a parable is, even those who bother to attend school. That is another story for another day.
Most understand well that monopolies are bad for a country’s economy, yet governments are absolute natural monopolies with no constraints on their authority, even over our fragile democracy. Ah well we get what we vote for. – Gerrard Eckhoff
I would like to recap some of the more notable, what I term “unnecessary cock ups”.
Why, in the middle of a pandemic would you push ahead with the reform of our hospital system in favour of two new overarching organisations: Health NZ and the Maori Health Authority. Who was behind this and just what was the perceived benefit?
The greenhouse gas reduction plan aims to reduce sheep and beef farming in New Zealand by 20% and dairy farming by 5%. This equates to approximately the value of the entire wine industry and half of the seafood being wiped out.
Jacinda Ardern’s Government have allowed pine plantations to be planted on any class of land: thus prompting investors to buy up productive sheep and beef farms just to plant pines, pocket the carbon credits and then walk away! These sorts of decisions are absolutely mind-boggling! – John Porter
A lack of acumen and competency is exhibited by too many government ministers. Impossible to change, I know, but those ministers who do possess a modicum of skill, need to step up and ensure government decisions are not based on an ethnic bias and that decisions are made only after exhaustive analysis of potential negative consequences.
How is this for ideology eclipsing the need for consequence analysis? The Government has paid out over $30m in clean car rebates to Tesla owners; now it’s recalibrating the scheme because it’s dished out too many discounts. The clean car discount was supposed to be a revenue-neutral policy; subsidies are meant to be paid for by a tax on heavy-emitting vehicles like utes.
I want a government that acknowledges the need for and practices fiscal responsibility. This Government has played a significant part in causing our record inflation, fuelling it with out-of-control spending. Consultancy costs are a classic example. Approximately $30m has been squandered on consultants’ fees for the 3-Waters merger alone! $300m is budgeted to be spent on the TVNZ/RNZ merger. A merger no one wants!
I want a government that ceases using fabricated, extreme climate modelling scenarios to construct doom-laden predictions that allow MPs and government lackeys to scare the public, all to justify outlandish and unnecessary government spending.
I want a government that is actually truthful, open and transparent. – John Porter
I want a government that does not bribe mainstream media to promote its fabricated “Treaty Partnership” agenda. MSM scrutiny no longer exists in New Zealand. They have surrendered their integrity, objectivity and neutrality. These standards have been massively compromised as a condition of access to the Ardern Government’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund.
I want a government that does not promote Te Ao Maori worldview; a decolonisation narrative, and the equating of matauranga Maori with modern science as absolute truths.
We need an education system that prepares our young to be global citizens, literate, numerate and grounded in science in a way that places myth and legend in an appropriate perspective. Our education system needs to teach truthfully presented histories, enabling students to acknowledge and understand both the positive and negative aspects of our history. We cannot afford for those who will inherit our country to have a culturally distorted and intolerant perspective.
I want a government that does not believe a desire for social justice and equality for Maori is justification for completely overriding the principles of democracy. –
I want a government that commands police to crack down hard on any criminal activity.
We need a Police Commissioner who does not buy into the philosophy that a return to “baseline level” of criminal activity is acceptable policing.
I want a government that will cease its separatist agenda and govern equally for all. We need to become a country respectful of not just Maori, but all cultures. –
New Zealand is entering a crucial, and quite possibly dangerous period of our history.
We are encumbered by an authoritarian government that is aggressively crushing our democracy. Plans are afoot, and government-cultivated and -abetted activists are determined to radically change our society.
For the New Zealand that we know and love to survive, New Zealanders need to start asserting that this government must go, and the foundation of democracy, one person, one vote must be the fundamental aspiration of a new government. – John Porter
If Peters cared what the voters want then in 1996 he would have gone with Helen Clark and in 2017 with Bill English. Winston will do whatever is good for Winston.
Peters could not go in coalition with either Clark or English because they are both very principled. Helen Clark would not have the Greens in her ministry, too extreme. Bill English would never have agreed to the pork barrel politics of New Zealand First’s Provincial Growth Fund.
Christopher Luxon may not know it but he could never work with Winston Peters. Luxon sacked his agriculture spokesperson because she made personal representations to the Minister of Agriculture. MPs have always been able to see ministers regarding their personal situation. The Minister himself said there was no apparent conflict of interest.
How would Luxon react if he found his Minister of Racing’s party was receiving substantial undeclared donations from wealthy businessmen with connections to the racing industry?
Any coalition between the non-drinking, early to bed, Luxon and the most famous late night customer of the Green Parrot would not last. – Richard Prebble
A coalition of the losers could steal the election. Will it work?
If the National caucus remains disciplined and has some sensible policy the party’s support will break 40%.
If Act continues to offer practical positive solutions Labour’s attempts to demonize Act will fail.
Political machinations have a marginal effect on elections compared to the economy. It is the cost of living, crime, failing health services and 7% plus mortgages that will sweep Labour away.
The two by-elections indicate there is a mood for change. Voters who want a change of government will not risk another coalition of the losers by voting for the man who crowned Jacinda Ardern Prime Minister. – Richard Prebble
Taylor also explains that, although perception is not reality, perception can become a person’s reality (there is a difference) because perception has a major influence on how we look at reality.
In this light, the statement that “fruit and vegetables at the supermarket are so expensive now, processed and junk food actually works out cheaper” deserves examination. – Jacqueline Rowarth
But fruit and vegetables are not the same types of food as “processed and junk foods”.
Fruit and vegetables are valuable sources of energy, vitamins, minerals and fibre. There is also increasing evidence of additional benefits from the range of phytonutrients they contain.
In contrast, processed and junk food (henceforth termed PJF) tend to be high in fats, sugar and salt.
This makes a cost comparison difficult because the basis of the comparison is unclear – choosing vitamins or fats would result in a different answer. – Jacqueline Rowarth
But fruit and vegetables are not the same types of food as “processed and junk foods”.
Fruit and vegetables are valuable sources of energy, vitamins, minerals and fibre. There is also increasing evidence of additional benefits from the range of phytonutrients they contain.
In contrast, processed and junk food (henceforth termed PJF) tend to be high in fats, sugar and salt.
This makes a cost comparison difficult because the basis of the comparison is unclear – choosing vitamins or fats would result in a different answer. – Jacqueline Rowarth
The CSIRO (Australia’s equivalent to New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes) has examined the typical Australian diet and come to similar conclusions about the cost of PJF but on the environment rather than the wallet.
Researchers estimated that discretionary foods (anything that isn’t an essential or necessary part of a healthy dietary pattern) were responsible for almost 30 per cent of the greenhouse gases (GHG) of an average Australian diet.
Of the core food groups, the two smallest contributors to total dietary GHG were fruit (3.5 per cent) and vegetables (6.5 per cent).
The CSIRO researchers suggested that reducing discretionary food intake would allow for small increases in emissions from core foods, particularly vegetables (from 2.5 to 5.5 servings a day), dairy (from 1.5 to 2.5 servings), and grains (from 4.6 to 6 servings). The nutritional benefit would be achieved at a 3.6 per cent increase in GHG, which the authors described as “small”. – Jacqueline Rowarth
Two interesting facts in these charts. The first is that retail thefts have gone from around 2,000 to 6,000 which is a tripling since 2018 (and was steady before that).
The second is that less than 8% of retail thefts have resulted in court action. This probably explains why retail crime is out of control – no consequences for the criminals involved. – David Farrar
- The Health Authority is a separatist institution designed to serve the interests of one ethnic group.
- Three Waters was opposed by the vast majority of Councils and was the subject of a massive petition against it. It gives 50% of the administrative control of drinking water, waste water and storm water to iwi. The latter represent 16.5% of the population.
- The seats for Maori on councils is undemocratic. No other ethnic group is guaranteed representation in local government. – Roger Childs
The Road to Zero: The ambitious aim of reducing road deaths to zero.
It’s an admirable aspiration, but delusional – and even the government’s spin doctors know it. That’s why the “zero” goal is in fact a 40 per cent reduction in death and serious injuries by 2030,
Even that is wishful thinking.
Slogans are not solutions but slogans epitomise the Ardern administration: “The team of 5 million”; “The Road to Zero”.
It’s mindless rubbish, but it’s also insulting. Clearly, those who are actually paid to dream up this “creative” nonsense, think we believe it. Sadly, they may be right enough to get away with it. – Frank Newman
But should we expect anything more substantial than slogans and puff from an undergraduate with a Communication Studies degree in politics and public relations, and work experience incubated within left-wing politics? Of course not. Clearly, in the make-believe world of Jacinda Ardern, words speak louder than actions.
The Ardern government has been little more than slogans and Orwellian contradictions tailored to a gullible audience: The team of five million – defined by race. A Public Interest Journalism Fund – that prioritises government policy before public interest.
And so it is with the Road to Zero. In December 2019 the Government published the strategy for 2020–2030 and an initial 3-year action plan that expired on 1 January. – Frank Newman
Maybe 151 fewer people will die on our roads each year by 2030 and just maybe no one will die on our roads by some unknown year in the future. Or maybe it will just be more huff and puff like Kiwibuild which promised 100,000 homes and has delivered 1,366 to date. Maybe the Road to Zero is just more political hot air.
Here’s what the Road to Zero has achieved. It has produced a strategy document.
The problem is words and pictures don’t save lives – they don’t even fill potholes! – Frank Newman
Minimising deaths on the road is a very commendable goal and would be very achievable, if no one were to actually use the roads.
The real world is always about minimisation and trade-offs, and in that regard one can have more faith in the very smart car makers coming up with solutions aimed at eliminating human error.
What can be expected from our politicians is that they provide roads that are safe, but then, these are the same people that are challenged by potholes, so expecting safe roads may be a bit ambitious and their Road to Zero is a road to nowhere. – Frank Newman
You cannot and should not do the job unless you have a full tank, plus a bit in reserve for those unplanned and unexpected challenges that inevitably come along.
Having reflected over summer I know I no longer have that bit extra in the tank to do the job justice. It’s that simple. – Jacinda Ardern
Politicians are human. We give all that we can, for as long as we can, and then it’s time.
And for me, it’s time. – Jacinda Ardern
She never appeared to grasp that announcing policy is not the same as implementing it. Press releases do not build houses. Speeches do not end poverty. In the end, it was Jacinda’s constant failure to deliver that made it impossible for her to go on.
If you say “Let’s do this!”, then, Dear God, you have to do it! – Chris Trotter
So credit to the PM for realising that despite having more time left than most world leaders, she was not going to realise her cherished goals for New Zealand.
What might send a shiver down the spine of some older and more time-limited world leaders (as well as her own successor) is that her problems – even if rhetorically more polished – are quite similar to their own.
And seem equally intractable.
Just run through a list of potential policy-reality clashes: ending relative poverty when statistically poor people show little desire to model your own sensible behaviour; reducing carbon consumption without confronting the truly enormous welfare costs; paying for more health and social welfare without robust long-term market-led productivity growth; building affordable houses without substantial environmental modification and painful disruption to ossified local practice; increasing opportunity and outcomes for indigenous people without creating privilege and double standards. – Point of Order
Barring an economic miracle, it will be hard for the government to slip out from under the burden of Ardern’s policy indecision. It looks more likely to slide softly out of office on the back of disappointed supporters and disillusioned middle-of-the-roaders.
Meanwhile, the world’s leaders will be asking themselves if Jacinda has made a wise move in beating them to an early shower.
Some will envy her opportunity to reinvent herself and leave behind problems she and her supporters thought she was particularly well-equipped to solve.
Others may take it as a sign that perhaps she wasn’t quite such a world leader – let alone a defining one – after all. – Point of Order
Jacinda Ardern was a dreadful prime minister of New Zealand who failed in substance but succeeded wildly in image.
All her economic instincts were bad, all her strategic instincts were bad. She had a great desire to undo productive economic reform and remove or shut down the engines of economic growth for what should be a nation of limitless opportunity.
Nonetheless, for a time, she was very successful politically.
She had one genuine achievement. She reacted with dignity and moral seriousness to the appalling Christchurch terrorist massacre. – Greg Sheridan
Nonetheless, as a leader you can’t fake it, you have to do it. She certainly did it and she deserves credit for that.
After that, well, the achievement cupboard is pretty bare. Ardern did keep Covid at bay for a significant amount of time. That’s because New Zealand is an isolated island. We got much the same outcome for much the same reason. So did the leaders of Fiji, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. – Greg Sheridan
Of course Ardern, from the left of her party, instituted one of the most draconian lockdowns outside China itself. Sometimes she made Dan Andrews look like a Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand libertarian. – Greg Sheridan
In substance, Ardern was a flop. She didn’t do the things she promised to do when first elected in 2017. She promised the government would build 100,000 homes, it built barely 1000.
She was a big cheese on climate change, but New Zealand’s emissions, before Covid, went up.
Public service emphasis was meant to focus on the regions of the country. Instead, all power, and many more public servants, went to Wellington.
Ardern talked a good game on human rights in the abstract, but under her leadership New Zealand was a tiny, frightened mouse when it came to Beijing. – Greg Sheridan
But her failure in substance did not much dim Ardern’s international star, for we live in an age of political cryptocurrency, paid out in celebrity bitcoin. Ardern was a perfect princess of woke.
She was young, unmarried, had a child in office and her partner was a stay-at-home dad, and she spoke the woke dialect with a native fluency. Naturally, Manhattan swooned. – Greg Sheridan
But actually doing real stuff in the real world butters no parsnips in the virtual reality of celebrity land. In that strange universe, Queen Jacinda for a time reigned without challenge. – Greg Sheridan
History will record this government as by far the worst in the post-war era. They’ve been disastrously incompetent, financially reckless and brought terrible damage to the social fabric and our democracy with their nonsensical co-government outrage based on sheer lies. – Sir Bob Jones
This is one of the under-appreciated things about cancel culture: its broader chilling effect. The way it shaves the edges off public life, the way it stymies creativity, the way it incentivises everyone to carry on like a career politician, terrified of saying anything interesting. – Tom Slater
So, he has done everything that the cancellers have demanded of him. Retraction? Tick. Grovelling apology? Tick. Promise to ‘do better’? Tick. And yet of course it won’t be enough for them, ever – because, whatever the chattering classes say, cancel culture isn’t about accountability, it’s about vengeance. –Tom Slater
I wish he hadn’t apologised. Apologies only gin up the cancellers and feed the whole infernal dynamic. Ultimately, I don’t think Jeremy Clarkson had much to apologise for, beyond being Jeremy Clarkson and making the sort of outrageous, not particularly funny joke Jeremy Clarkson tends to make. But at the same time, what a sad state of affairs it is that even genuinely contrite individuals might as well not bother now. Cancel culture not only stifles free speech and creativity, it renders genuine apologies pointless. It makes admitting fault a mug’s game. Our culture is so much worse for it. – Tom Slater
Our duty as adults is to safeguard our children. There is a reason we have legislation in place to prohibit children from doing certain things that may cause them harm. Unfortunately, there are organisations and individuals, including those in positions of power, who seek to dilute these safeguards when it comes to matters of sex and gender. This should worry us all. – James Esses
Jacinda Ardern has made the right decision. If she doesn’t have enough in the tank, and if she doesn’t feel that she can lead the country, she is 100 percent right to stand down. I felt sorry for her yesterday. She had just returned from a summer break and she looked stressed, emotionally exhausted, and vulnerable.
Ardern’s biggest critics will no doubt feel a sense of relief but in the coming days and weeks, that will likely turn to anger. There can be no doubt Ardern has gifted National the election, but in her wake, she has left a hotch-potch of huge, expensive and impactful policies that can only be described as half-baked, or half-finished. And every one of these policies looms large on the horizon.
Three Waters, He Waka Eke Noa, the TVNZ-RNZ merger and the restructuring of our health system are all multi-million-dollar behemoths. They form the backbone of an enormous and controversial body of work, and Labour has just lost its most effective political weapon. If Ardern isn’t there to push these through, who will? And what becomes of the billions of dollars we have invested in these policies so far when they all collapse in an ugly heap? – Rachel Smalley
Labour will come under enormous public pressure to bring forward the election. It is unthinkable that we can sit in a rudderless void with Chris Hipkins or Michael Wood at the helm of the Government, lurching our way through a recession, and waiting for an election in October. Neither of those people, neither Hipkins nor Wood will make any decisions, we’ll just sit and tread water. Now the country, this is the reality, it needs a war-time leader and Labour does not have one waiting in the wings.
If that happens, it will be 2024 before National and ACT can begin to right the ship, and what an even bigger economic mess this country will be in by then. – Rachel Smalley
New Zealand is precariously balanced economically. The country is facing huge headwinds in a year when no one in Labour is truly qualified to make economic decisions, and I don’t believe Labour can stand up and say ‘we have a public mandate to continue to lead.’ Legally they do, morally they don’t.
In 2020 we didn’t elect Labour, we elected Jacinda Ardern, make no mistake about that. We gave her a single-party majority leadership government. There is no doubt we elected her, not Labour.
Our new Prime Minister, whoever that is, whoever Labour chooses, will have no option but to channel all of their energy into retaining power. The economy will have to wait. – Rachel Smalley
The party cannot appoint a new Prime Minister on Sunday and expect the country to accept its decision.
The only solution is to bring the election forward. Labour must seek a new mandate from the public.
Neither Chris Hipkins nor Michael Wood is students of the economy. And that’s what we need. Someone who can lead the country’s economic response.
Labour, as I said, should not choose our Prime Minister this weekend, we should. Our democracy depends on it, our economical survival does as well. – Rachel Smalley
But while her exit is understandable on a human level, it is confounding on a political one. Labour MPs and supporters have every right to be furious. – Henry Cooke
She leaves the party in far worse shape to fight this election than it would have been under her leadership. Worse, her decision appears to have genuinely surprised the party, meaning succession-planning has not been thought through. – Henry Cooke
Her legacy will be for historians to figure out. Some will see her as Labour’s greatest postwar leader – a strong leader through massive crises who also gave the party its largest win in decades. Others will compare her unfavourably with someone like Helen Clark – a soldier for the party who stuck around through two losing election campaigns and three winning ones, remaking New Zealand significantly in her nine-year term of power. Ardern has lost the chance to really embed her vision of social democracy into the country with another win. – Henry Cooke
Even if the party was doomed to defeat either way, there is a difference between a close loss and a big one, a difference you can measure in fresh new faces to revitalise your party, and the parliamentary funding desperately needed for research staff.
Ardern’s exit will come as a shock to many international fans, who saw her as a beacon of progressive hope during the Trump years. But it proves a lesson this same movement should have taken from Barack Obama, or indeed Bernie Sanders: investing an actual person with this much political importance is always dangerous. If your plan to win an election hinges so strongly on an individual, you always run the risk of them leaving the field. – Henry Cooke
It was meant to be the most transformational government ever. Now, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government has ended. There was no transformation. – Josie Pagani
I hosted a group of political strategists who came here to learn lessons about how she won in 2017. No one really found an explanation other than her personality and ability to communicate our values.
For everything accomplished, we must weigh what wasn’t. – Josie Pagani
She leaves a divided country.
Sixty-four percent of Kiwis, across all ages, believe New Zealanders are more divided than ever. Particularly problematic for the Prime Minister, women feel this more than men.
The priorities of traditional Labour supporters, working people on low incomes, were put lower on the agenda than Three Waters and merging TVNZ and RNZ.
Jacinda Ardern was willing to spend $678 million to subsidise businesses to decarbonise, but says free dental care is an unaffordable dream. The 2020 estimated cost of free dental care was $648 million.
We are a more unequal country than when she was elected. – Josie Pagani
When challenged on her government’s priority list, the PM ‘’refuted’’, and ‘’rejected’’. The irritability was getting worse. It jarred with kindness.
Labour will be at much longer odds to be re-elected now.
The new leader will need to turn the narrative around and reset the agenda. Re-focus and sort out the underperforming public sector, jettison the identity politics, and deliver a greater share of the economy to wage earners. – Josie Pagani
There’s an old saying that all political careers end in failure. Both John Key and Jacinda Ardern have looked ahead and bowed out on their own terms.
It’s healthy to walk away.
This could be the chance that Labour didn’t take in opposition to do the work of thinking about what they are there for. Only then will they deserve another go. – Josie Pagani
Ardern stopped short of endorsing a successor – Key made that mistake with English. But denied a real contest, the ambitious and desperate in caucus will white-ant where the new leader falters.
Her popularity, so inextricably linked to the fortunes of the party, leaves a vacuum which her successor will struggle to fill, and in which chaos and restless egos will thrive.
Although her heart wasn’t in it, she was still Labour’s best hope against National. – Andrea Vance
It’s going to get worse, it’s going to get more painful and they need a government that’s going to get things done for them so they can get ahead. – Christopher Luxon
We can have robust debate and discussion; we maintain civility for each other; we disagree strongly; we don’t have to be disagreeable with each other personally.
And that’s a choice we all get to make here in New Zealand about how we want to carry ourselves and model that out to each other and our teams. – Christopher Luxon
She wasn’t just Prime Minister of New Zealand – and a popular one at her peak – she was a global pin-up for progressive values. She was the beacon of hope among those on the Left who had been destabilised by Donald Trump, Brexit and Boris Johnson. For many, she was seen as a breed apart among global leaders: one who was untouched by the fatal brew of ego, arrogance and self-interest which they saw as inbred into many male politicians.
Ardern’s undoing was in that she appeared to believe that herself. I don’t claim to be able to read her mind, but I would guess that her real reason for resigning ahead of New Zealand’s general election later this year was not primarily that she wanted to collect her daughter from playgroup every day, as she has intimated, but that she could no longer cope with her halo having slipped. When you have been built up into a living saint it must come as a shock to find yourself under attack for failing to address the same old problems which afflict less-progressive national leaders. Inflation, a stuttering economy and rising crime are hardly unique to New Zealand, but they showed that there was nothing magical about Ardern’s politics – the only difference is that in her case she lacked the toughness to weather serious adversity. – Ross Clark
The danger now is that in resigning before what was beginning to look like an inevitable defeat at the polls, she will come to be seen by progressives as a political martyr, reinforcing their belief in her greatness, as a female leader who willingly gave up power to be with her family. The reality is that she failed in much that she tried to achieve, and the hero-worship which she enjoyed around the world made things worse by adding to her hubris. – Ross Clark
There was once a time when climate change was about science. No longer.
It is now about money and politics. Not just some of it. All of it. – Barry Brill
Like COP meetings, the Davos meeting is the very epitome of hypocrisy. – Barry Brill
Private jet flights are by far the most emissions-intensive mode of transport per passenger-kilometre yet invented. Every Davos flight averaged CO2 emissions equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week. – Barry Brill
There will now be a week of fine dining: air-flown filet, frenched cutlets, truffle ice cream, the very best cheeses. Despite this, Davos Man will continue to staunchly advocate veganism – and eating proteins from insects – to “save the planet”. – Barry Brill
The only rational conclusion to be drawn from from all this cognitive dissonance is that these wealthy people do not really believe a word of what they constantly preach about climate change.
They demand pain and sacrifice rules “for thee but not for me”. They say one thing and do another. As the old cliche has it: their actions speak louder than words.
So, they must have some other underlying objective. But what is it? – Barry Brill
The favourite fantasy of the Western upper class is that the end of the world is imminent and can only be averted if we fundamentally change the way we live. But “we” does not include the seriously wealthy. No. Their heroic role is to make all this change happen. To be leaders. History will record that it was their vision and grit that ensured the future of the human race.
Prof Schoellhammer says it doesn’t matter to them that every alarmist prediction has proven to be wrong – because facts can be trumped by “morality”. Extreme predictions pander to an ersatz-religion that allows the super-rich to simultaneously enjoy their wealth and lecture the rest of the world from a position of moral superiority.
Inter-generational guilt also plays a role. The Newsweek article reveals that the unspeakable “Just Stop Oil” group, who throw ketchup over priceless paintings, are on the payroll of Aileen Getty, the granddaughter of legendary oil-tycoon Jean Paul Getty. Who knew? – Barry Brill
John Kerry is quite open about financing the political campaigns of candidates who support draconian climate policies. No left-wing candidate anywhere in the developed world could get elected in 2023 without first prostrating themselves before the shrine of climate change alarm.
But buying politicians is not enough unless they can get re-elected.
Public opinion has to be bought as well, and that is a long hard grind : the press, the electronic media, government officials, celebrities, pollsters, academics, trade unions, bloggers, social media gatekeepers, teachers, influencers, the entertainment industry, etc – in every region and district in the English-speaking world. It all adds up to serious money. – Barry Brill
The numbers of NGO employees funded by wealthy individuals and charitable foundations worldwide runs into the millions[2]. @SDGaction, an NGO, boasts that its members accumulated 100 million ‘transformative actions’ and stunts in 2021 alone, and thereby changed the world.
These activists work all day, every day, on lobbying everybody, everywhere, to demand more extreme and extensive climate policies. The planned outcome is to overwhelm and control the public debate – or to ensure that there is no public debate – and to spread cultures and politics of chronic self-deception in respect of all issues that are related to climate change. They have been remarkably successful. –
You might think that this barely-imaginable cataract of cash could buy almost anything in this money-conscious world. Can it buy scientific research grants? Access to scientific journals? Resolutions at conferences of public-sector scientists? The sympathetic ear of UN officials? Consensus at Davos?
What would happen if all this billionaire philanthropy was to be withdrawn from politicians, bureaucrats, environmental organisations, newspapers, broadcasters, etc?
Would there be anything left of the climate change emergency? Or would it quietly fade away? – Barry Brill
Man might be defined not as the rational animal, but as the meaning-seeking animal. We invest events with meaning because we prefer to think that there is some purpose behind them rather than that there is none. This is the reason why conspiracy theories are so popular. A malign purpose is better than no purpose at all, for it not only encourages a belief in the possibility of human control over events, and that if only the malign conspirators could be eliminated (the contemplation of the destruction of fellow beings being always delightful to a certain kind of person), the world could be much improved, but it also flatters and inflates the importance and powers of mankind in general. – Theodore Dalrymple
Since World War II, every Prime Minister who has taken office in between elections has gone on to lose.
Holyoake from Holland, Marshall from Holyoake, Rowling from Kirk, Palmer then Moore from Lange, Shipley from Bolger, English from Key. They have all lost. Some, Holyoake and English, put up a fight. Most were swept away in big landslide defeats.
Yesterday, Jacinda Ardern forming a coalition of the losers after the election, despite Winston Peters’ denials, was a real possibility.
Now, nothing can save Labour. – Richard Prebble
If you cannot face meeting the voters you cannot lead an election campaign.
It is nonsense to blame social media and claim things are different today. I went as a student during the Vietnam war to a campaign meeting in the Town Hall that Holyoake addressed. It was a riot. I came away impressed with his courage.
I attended some of Muldoon’s meetings. To say they were hostile is to fail to convey the atmosphere. Muldoon gave what he got back with vigour.
I have had to walk through picket lines of seamen and wharfies to reach public meetings that were stacked with hostile voters.
Yes, I received many threats including death threats. The police insisted on prosecuting two, one who physically attacked me outside a public meeting and another who sent a white powder through the post claiming it was anthrax. – Richard Prebble
In a democracy you have to accept not everyone will love you. Some will hate you. In the country, there are some people who are certifiable. I am sure they all rang me. – Richard Prebble
We all love the Titanic examples. Jacinda Ardern, as captain of the Titanic after it has hit the ice, has said she does not have it in her to try and save the passengers, crew or ship and has taken the first lifeboat.
Regardless of what they are saying publicly, the Labour caucus will be very angry. – Richard Prebble
Theft in supermarkets is common. It has increased dramatically since someone decided that criminals would not be stopped if they had got passed the checkout and that police would not be notified. Staff are not allowed to interfere at all. Security can only intervene if culprits can be caught prior to checkout. We are not talking about women with large coats nicking a few items in their inside pockets – it is loaded trolleys pushed out the door in full view.
It is one reason for higher grocery prices – we are subsidising petty crooks. Retail theft amounted to $1.2 Billion last year. That’s the recorded stuff only. Double it at least. Its over $800 a household and maybe well over a $1,000 if unrecorded crime is added in. – Owen Jennings
Gang numbers increased 50% between October 2017 and June 2021 to well over 8,000. The tough end of gang land operates in hard drugs monopolising the trade and pulling serious profits. The newbies run the car thefts, ram raids, shop thefts and nick stuff from supermarkets.
Police are now caught up in more and more welfare work, dealing with mental healthissues, court time and endless paperwork. Labour is quick to point out extra police on the beat but the workload is up over 60% and the numbers barely 10%. More and more of the ‘low level’ crime is simply ignored because of a lack of resource. – Owen Jennings
Those who say jail is not the answer and that more needs to be done to rehabilitate miscreants are losing both ways. No jail and no rehab. And so are we. The anti-jail lobby is working well with lots of help from the bench. Community service is a very sick joke with limited supervision, no penalties for “no shows” and guys just sleeping it off in the corner. Ankle bracelets and home detention means more porno movies and Maccas delivered by courier.
The answer? Education and heavy intervention taking control through mentoring and tough love. That is another story for another time and, sadly, avoided like a plague. – Owen Jennings
I don’t think women are in a unique position here.
What I think is different for Prime Minister Ardern is that social media is a much bigger factor than it was for Prime Minister Clark or myself.
What happens is if an abuser then has a voice, others amplify that voice. – Dame Jenny Shipley
Democratic government is about our parties and our nation and our best prospects. – Dame Jenny Shipley
This is not new.
To some extent, you have to accept that. It doesn’t make it right. “It’s not good for New Zealand, it’s certainly not good for leaders, and I don’t think it’s a reflection of who we are.
We can debate policy and disagree, but we do need to respect the people who step up and take the leadership responsibilities.
Stick to the issue, not the person. You demean yourselves as you try and demean others. If you can’t win the argument, shut your mouth and get off social media.
We should watch what’s good for New Zealand, rather than putting personal pressure on the individual leaders, whether they are women or men. – Dame Jenny Shipley
Sad to say, Chris Hipkins has been a key figure in an incompetent government that has pushed up almost every bad social statistic. And I haven’t mentioned this government’s very destructive racial policies that might well do more than any of the failures listed above to finish off his time as Prime Minister on 14 October. A few hardy souls think he could pull Labour up, but after a probable momentary blip in the polls, I suspect that six years of a mostly dead-loss administrative record will sink the Hipkins Ministry. It’s a pity. With more able, less dogmatic colleagues, he might have had better prospects. – Michael Bassett
We are facing Chris Hipkins as PM, who is firmly identified with Ardern’s failed policies.
More importantly, we are living in a broken society. Our health system is overwhelmed. Excess all-cause mortality is at record highs. Our school system is in crisis. Social cohesion is at a low ebb. Crime is rising. The cost of living has skyrocketed. More of the same policies are not going to solve these crises. If nothing is changed, the coming year will bring a harvest of bankruptcies and mortgagee failures. – Guy Hatchard
In the Lebanon, everything depends on which religious community you belong to, even your water and electricity supply (both intermittent and unreliable). Overseeing the whole polity are corrupt, kleptocratic, oligarchic leaders of various religious, political, and territorial fiefdoms, who dispute hegemony among themselves but nevertheless display a certain class solidarity so that nothing should change fundamentally and they remain permanently in charge. Protests and revolutions come and go, but the elite go on forever.
The potential for violence is always there, and indeed often breaks out; but most of the population, accustomed to chaos and breakdown, has become adept at survival. Life for them is a question of overcoming everyday obstacles, combined with evading the conflicts around them. Meanwhile, the elite live well.
No analogies are exact, but Western societies seem to be fracturing into various confessional communities each of which, like the Maronites, Druzes, Shiites, Sunni, and others, claims its share of the politico-economic spoils. They struggle like worms or grubs in the tins in which anglers keep their bait, while an unchanging elite preside, or at least glide, godlike, over the whole. In the meantime, public administration deteriorates, infrastructure rots, and inflation rockets. – Theodore Dalrymple
Go to the ant, thou sluggard, advises or even demands the Bible, addressing itself to the idlers among us, consider her ways and be wise. If I were revising the Bible today, I might write, “Go to the Lebanon, thou citizen, thou investor, consider its ways and be wise.” But the problem is that no one learns from the experience of others, and quite often not even from his own, let alone from valid deductions from self-evident premises. Man is the rational animal that somehow manages never to learn, at least not how to live. – Theodore Dalrymple
It’s just a bit of admin. That’s the line given by the SNP and supporters of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRR) which the Westminster government blocked this week. Letting a male person obtain a female birth certificate just by making a simple statement is no one else’s business. So keep out, shut up.
How maddening when women won’t. But equality law — a confusing, contradictory mess which needs urgent revision — is a delicate ecosystem: rights of trans people set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) are balanced against women’s rights in the Equality Act 2010. The GRR lands in this like dynamite lobbed in a fish pond. You can only support the GRR getting royal assent if you’re happy to forsake women’s rights. – Janice Turner
For starters emergency housing is in the social development portfolio. The take-over of motels leading to social mayhem (think Rotorua) has been a tragedy for those housed in them and those in their surrounds. The waiting list for public housing has sky-rocketed since Sepuloni has been Minister. – Lindsay Mitchell
Worst of all Sepuloni has overseen a rise in children living in unemployed homes. The damage to their outcomes is well researched and documented. But unheeded by this government whose sole focus has been to lift incomes with their fingers firmly in their ears over the unintended consequences of paying people to do nothing … except have children.
If all of the above is “excelling” I hate to envisage what failing looks like.
Sepuloni has not been a great Minister. That the media are painting her as such demonstrates ignorance and bias. The only thing that has kept the social development portfolio largely away from the headlines is the comparatively worse performance of police, education and health. – Lindsay Mitchell
It’s all well and good that they [World Athletics] are putting restrictions in on the testosterone levels, and extending the number of years to qualify and so on… but none of that matters. They’d still be miles ahead.
I mean, the women’s shot is half the weight [of the men’s]. Apart from all the strength they’ve gained over the years, there is the height advantage, the wingspan, all the things hormones can’t replace… hip angles, lung capacity etc. Training would be easier for them. That’s just a fact.
If this happens I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a lot of world records fall to trans athletes. – Amelia Strickler
Basically all governing bodies right now are under pressure to issue guidelines. We’ve basically been waiting for it. The fact that World Athletics, one of the biggest, has not [put] its foot down, I think it is really, really upsetting. I think these rules really could open the floodgates.
There will be a lot, I think, who say ‘Well, I’ve waited. I’m ready to compete. What do I have to do?’ And you know, women will be out of a job. Even if there are only a handful, do you put the feelings of a few above an entire sex? – Amelia Strickler
I haven’t come across anyone who is like ‘Oh, it will be fine.’ Even the guys are like ‘Yeah, you’re screwed’. There are jokes made [in training] like ‘Oh yeah, I feel like being a woman today.’ –
I’ve got no problem with trans women competing in a different category. Sport should be for everyone. This is about protecting women at the end of the day. I hope more of us band together to prevent this because it’s going to be the end. – Amelia Strickler
Some of the headlines have been ridiculous. There was one headline I saw the other day about the Prime Minister being driven from office by online trolls. I mean, that is so melodramatic.
It’s just bizarre because, one, it assumes that she’s reading all of the online troll messages from the misogynists and whoever. And second of all, it kind of undermines the fact the polls weren’t going well – Ryan Bridge
Any smart politician will look at that and they will say, ‘Do I have another campaign in me? Do I really want to be scrapping with Chris Luxon over the cost of living when I’ve just got us through COVID? I might be going on to some international job after this. The longer I am here, the worse my reputation will be tarnished as I go through a very bloody campaign. Wouldn’t the smartest thing to do would be to pull out now?’ And I think that’s what the Prime Minister’s done. – Ryan Bridge
I think it’s a little bit condescending and perhaps a little naive to say that this [online hate] played a role.
Nobody gets to be Prime Minister without having a thick skin, nor does any Prime Minister have the time or inclination to spend their time scrolling through Facebook or Twitter comments. – Brigitte Morten
Watching Jacinda Ardern’s departure speech, I reflected that even though I invented the word cry-bully – ‘a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper, duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political’ – in this very magazine way back in 2015, it’s never had so many adherents as in the past couple of years, especially in the political arena. From Trump refusing to accept he’d lost an election to Matt Hancock ‘looking for a bit of forgiveness’ from his jungle camp-mates, the age of the over-emotional politician is upon us.
And now here was Ardern – the Adele of Antipodean politics, every trespass against her public judged more in sorrow than in anger because she really did mean well– quitting her role as prime minister of New Zealand after five years and fighting back tears as she delivered her dying swan-song. – Julie Burchill
So much for the crying bit – but what about the bullying? Ardern’s velvet glove concealed a pretty heavy iron fist. She promised to reduce migration, with disabled migrants getting particularly short shrift. Her Covid policy was draconian, preventing New Zealanders abroad from returning and punishing unvaccinated citizens. In a speech at the UN she stressed the importance of not letting climate-change sceptics have freedom of speech on social media. Her hijab-cosplay in the wake of an attack on a mosque was yet another grim example of a privileged western woman showing off by wearing what is for millions of non-western women a living shroud worn under threat of death, as we see most recently in Iran.
But none of this stopped her from dazzling the useful idiots of the liberal press after she became the youngest head of government in the world when elected at the age of 37. – Julie Burchill
If it was any other politician, her desire to escape a spotlight she seemed to find quite enjoyable as she posed for selfies in shopping malls might cause cynics to speculate that there was a dirty great scandal on the way and that this was just a politician looking to get the hell of out Dodge before the storm broke. But this is the hallowed Jacinda, who must not be confused with your average nasty politico when her public image seemed more in line with that of a religious leader; as the usually tough Beth Rigby tweeted ‘I’ve only ever seen political leaders forced out or voted out… but in Ardern we find a rare exception, who again shows us how to lead differently’.
But impersonating the Dalai Lama butters no parsnips with an electorate who are wondering whether they can afford the price of a pat of Anchor. In 2020 Ardern’s Labour party took more than 50 per cent of the vote – the first time a single party has achieved this since 1951 – but it’s likely that it would now poll less than 25 per cent. And it might be the ladling on of the virtue-signalling which has made former admirers of Ardern even more disillusioned than they would be with regular politicians. – Julie Burchill
Ardern – Big Sister with a side-order of saint – has been used frequently as a weapon with which to beat other unashamedly tough female politicians by Woke Bros who believe that females should happily surrender everything, from toilets to trophies in the name of #BeKind. – Julie Burchill
Once more, the demise of a female political leader has made me feel something I’m sure I’m not meant to feel – and that’s nostalgia for the sheer inappropriateness of Margaret Thatcher, barging her way into the twentieth century global village and behaving as no female politician ever behaved before or since. Though I was fascinated by Mrs T, I never once voted for her – I pretended I did, but the tribal pull of my Communist upbringing was still too strong. But watching Ardern shuffle moistly off of the world stage, I do wish that Attila the Hen was still here; how no-nonsense she was compared to the trans-maids of Labour and the Tory dullards May and Truss who sought to imitate her style. I’d love to see her reaction when faced with the idea that women can have penises or that policemen can work from home. Or indeed, the equally outrageous idea that a woman who reaches the top of the political greasy pole at the age of 37 can be some kind of secular saint – rather than just a fresh take on a carpet-bagger, whose shtick is now revealed as wearing perilously thin. – Julie Burchill
The abuse that has been directed at Ardern is horrific and it has escalated dramatically since the Delta lockdown. There can be no justification for it. None. It is vile, gendered, and intimidating. Let me state, on the record, that what Ardern endured is beyond unacceptable.
However, if you want to address a problem, you have to look at what’s causing it. Some of the vitriol and abuse is from a deeply ingrained misogyny in our society. It’s prevalent in our communities, in some demographics, and the abuse comes from women too. Sit with that for a minute. Many feminists – and I am one of them – don’t want to confront the existence of female misogyny in New Zealand, but it’s there. Female misogynists live among us. In decent numbers.
But the volume of abuse that has been directed at the Government and Ardern is enormous, and it has escalated. And that’s because of some of the decisions this Government has made. Some of those decisions have left normal, law-abiding people feeling caged, controlled, judged, fearful and trapped – and when people feel controlled, and they can no longer determine their own destiny, income, or their ability to provide for their family – they rise up. Anger becomes rage. Rage becomes abuse. – Rachel Smalley
Ardern lost her way this term. She went from being a very good communicator in the first three years, to talking ‘at’ us in her second term. Not to us, or with us. It was at us. Ardern’s communication style changed with the arrival of Delta – it centred on control and fear.
If you, as a Government, tailor your communication so that it divides society and pits the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, if you split families and deny New Zealanders the right to come home, if you make Kiwis enter a lottery to return to their country, if you use the COVID death count as the only method by which you judge the success of your response, and if you don’t listen to people when they arrive on the steps of the Beehive in their thousands and call for change, people get angry. Really angry. – Rachel Smalley
If Chris Hipkins takes away one learning from Ardern’s leadership, it is this. You don’t have to have all the answers. But you do need to listen to the people you govern.
Ardern, perhaps believing it was a sign of weakness, never engaged with some of the brilliant corporate and entrepreneurial minds that offered to help with our economic recovery. The Government never listened to the health sector as they pleaded for more nurses. It didn’t listen to the people running our hospitality and tourism businesses who had come up with ways to protect us, and at the same time enable their businesses to survive. Instead, desperate people who had spent years building a business, had to stand by and watch it collapse. It is people like this who got on social media and raged at Ardern. – Rachel Smalley
There can be zero tolerance for the abuse that has rained down on Ardern. However, to ignore the factors that have helped to fuel the escalation of abuse against her and the Government means we have learnt nothing.
This Government, led by Ardern, sat in a silo and listened only to those who supported their narrative. People’s lives and livelihoods crumbled. That fuelled a rage like we have never seen before.
We can learn from it, or we can spend the next year yelling at each other that Ardern was driven from office because of it.
Here is the uncomfortable truth for many. Ardern walked away. It was her choice to do so, and I applaud her for doing what’s right for her and her family. But Ardern wasn’t driven from the job. Ardern ‘is’ human. She likes to be liked and there’s nothing wrong with that. But make no mistake. Ardern chose to walk away from the job. – Rachel Smalley
Ardern knew better than anyone that she couldn’t win this year. She had more critics than supporters. The adoration that gave her a single-party majority government, had left the building. It’s a bitter pill to swallow if you’re one of her backers. I know. Why? Because I voted for her too.
So if you’re a politician, sit up and take note. You aren’t the only humans. Stop thinking of us as nameless, faceless people in polls. Stop thinking of us as numbers. Stop thinking of us as your voter base, or swing voters, or some other way you chose to categorise us. Instead, find better ways to listen to us. Truly hear us.
Because guess what? Just like you, we’re human too. – Rachel Smalley
He can say what he wants but the reality is, it’s the same staff, same team, same people, same outcome.
It’s a party that is frankly out of touch with New Zealanders. When you see rapidly rising food prices, you’ve seen business and farmer confidence at all time lows, interest rates going through the roof, schools costs, this is a party that has actually lost touch and is out of touch with New Zealanders – Christopher Luxon
We are going to have a very close election, no doubt about it.
We need to change this country and we need a government that can get things done and that’s what I am going to do. – Christopher Luxon
But neutralising unpopular policies won’t be a game changer; finding a connection with voters with a message that resonates is what sets leaders apart from politicians. That’s the political hoodoo bit – and it can’t be learnt. Just ask Phil Goff, David Cunliffe, David Shearer, or Andrew Little. – Andrea Vance
Ardern’s cult-like status, and the legacy of Labour’s remarkable turnaround under her leadership, was enough to hold the party machine together in the face of such huge problems. Hipkins won’t have that backstop.
If voters fail to deliver him the hoped-for political honeymoon he might find that the runway has suddenly got a lot shorter. – Andrea Vance
Ultimately, though, Hipkins’s prospects will be determined by how much New Zealanders paid for their groceries, Christmas presents and holidays at the end of last year, and how firmly the Reserve Bank responds in February.
If any recession is modest or avoided, unemployment stays low, inflation falls back towards the mandated 1-3 per cent band and the All Blacks thrash France at the World Cup opener in Paris on September 8, then Labour should scrape home for a third term. If any of those go wrong, Hipkins is toast. – Matthew Hooton
And lo, it has come to pass. The rise of gender ideology — which for too long was dismissed as too niche and irrelevant to discuss by those too sexist or just too cowardly to listen to women’s concerns — has now exploded into a constitutional showdown, with the UK government blocking Nicola Sturgeon’s wildly unpopular gender recognition reform bill.
For those of us who have been writing for years about the insanity of rewriting the law to accommodate something no one can even define (is gender a feeling? A soul? Simple masculinity or femininity?), this feels a bit like watching your local cult band play at Wembley. Or, to put it from the perspective of those who desperately tried to pretend no problems could possibly arise from a philosophy that tries to rewrite the human experience, insisting being a woman is a mere feeling rather than a fact, this is like having a stain on your ceiling which you tried to ignore, only for it to then cause your whole house to collapse.
It was inevitable the fantasies sold by gender activists would crash on the hard rocks of reality, and not just because of the endless internal contradictions (if gender is different from biological sex, and given that sport is segregated by sex, why are trans women now on women’s sports teams?). The movement is increasingly underpinned by a frothing misogyny that is becoming all too visible to even the most casual observers. – Hadley Freeman
Gender activism has become the permissible face of misogyny for a certain kind of allegedly progressive man. It gives them latitude to call women derogatory names and make spittle-flecked videos, insisting that anyone who has a problem with male-born people in women-only spaces is on the wrong side of history. The effect is men’s-rights activism, but the energy is very incel — shorthand for people who are “involuntarily celibate”. Incels rage online about women who selfishly refuse to have sex with them; gender activists rage at women who won’t just bloody well shut up about their concerns about safety and say what the men tell them to say.
One of the sadder fallouts is the wedge it has driven between women and gay men. Once they were natural allies, not least during the Aids era, when so many women stepped in as caregivers to men with HIV. – Hadley Freeman
Sturgeon is making a big mistake in thinking that by denying science and trashing women’s rights she looks progressive, because the public are smarter than that. And as with all the angry “passionate” men, women won’t forget what she’s done, and they won’t forgive. – Hadley Freeman
In just over a year, we have witnessed the disintegration of a leader whose 2020 tenure of absolute electoral driven power started with overwhelming public support, gratitude and reverence but descended into a myopic and confused authoritarian rule. We have graphically endured a lesson of incoherent government and state overreach which has been on a march of portentous marginalisation through the private sector. It has elevated a ballooning and unproductive state sector of ‘bourgeois’ excess.
The descent to implosion started with the alienation of the vulnerable rural poor, sole traders, the unvaccinated, small business and economic sectors that could not adjust to lockdowns and the downstream consequences of dislocation. Then bewilderingly the whole rural sector was signalled as the primary target of climate change ideology that was more like an atheistic religious purge. This however was only ‘opium’ to the urban green economic activists in a Wellington bubble. Not content with this tirade of totalitarianism and messing with the means of production the Labour government drove the ‘out of control’ train of 3 waters, a dual racially divided health system and the continued and extending legislative requirements of ethnic consultation. Indigenous elites can increasingly demand influence and potentially equity before any progressive economic or environmental change can occur. – Alistair Boyce
The structure is elitest and tribal. This is opposed in its very nature to ‘western’ democratically structured governance with potential equitable redistribution of wealth (i.e. Democratic socialism in action).
This Labour government have significantly eroded the NZ democracy and its sovereignty by caving into an apologist academic elite whose catch cry is to blame all society’s ills on the effects of post colonialism without acknowledging economic, social and political progression and benefits. The prevailing Treaty of Waitangi analysis is opportunistic as opposed to realistic.
Indeed, under this Labour Government the rich and propertied have prospered while by any measure the disadvantaged pains have dramatically increased. Buying a house for most socio-economic demographics is now an impossible dream. The egalitarian socialist democratic ideal has been replaced by a new totalitarianism where ethnic and economic elites prosper, the state sector is elevated in a new realm of ‘woke’ privilege and the disadvantaged now have no hope or aspiration to climb out of the mire of socio-economic depravity. Lawlessness is endemic, on the rise and set to remain, becoming the next government’s problem. – Alistair Boyce
Any balanced debate of ‘co-governance’ has been actively stifled through control of the messaging through mainstream media by NZ on AIR and the State Journalism fund to the point where mainstream media business models are no longer sustainable without government funding. Any alternative view or debate on the government led version of co-governance is ridiculously labelled as racism. Most New Zealanders under 30 and substantial other socio-demographic segments no longer trust the simplistic homogeneity of mainstream pro co-governance ‘propaganda’.
The people are not fooled and were never consulted in the 2020 election campaign on the radical policies to come. Consequently large, marginalised segments turned into an active fifth column which proceeded to personalise, taunt and harass the government and in particular the leader responsible. Mainstream media analysis is missing the point. The reaction of the people is an effect of the cause, a betrayal by state sponsored totalitarianism, and they have been marginalised in greater numbers than arguably any NZ constituency ever before. It was a battle of wills. Jacinda Ardern was faced with the impossibility of taking the blame and directing a recourse going against both ethnic and academic elites and still losing an acrimonious and unforgiving election. The PM raised the white flag choosing to leave the field of battle than capitulate in a spiteful and vicious public election campaign.
Now Chris Hipkins inherits the battle and the impossible plan without a compliant and grateful mandate, but still with the power of absolute government. Without political restraint and in the absence of strong and coherent leadership, unrestrained power has been a poisoned chalice for Labour. How Hipkins deals with the Maori caucus and co-governance not only in practice but through the power of the state will determine the fate of Labour and himself. A double down on existing policy will result in an acrimonious division of NZ society and electoral annihilation. The choices of restrained continuance or a ‘cup of tea’ with a modified agenda probably won’t be enough to win the election but it might prevent a 4-term government tenure of the centre right. – Alistair Boyce
It appears the dangerous and impossible experiment is over and unwittingly, naturally market led Liberal Democracy is winning the battle, reverting it to a skirmish and hopefully avoiding a damaging and unwinnable social war.
The likelihood is Chris Hipkins will hang on uncomfortably until October 14, fighting fires. Hipkins will get burnt like Labour leaders before him. Being a boy from the Hutt with another ‘westie’ (no matter how diverse) for deputy will not save him, as Grant Robertson could probably predict. That story could be breaking news and will wait for another day. In the meantime, Robertson has carefully removed himself and the economic equation from the immediate reckoning leaving the new PM the poisoned chalice and nowhere to run.
The lasting legacy will hopefully be a nonapologetic restrengthening and re-correction of an effective, equitable and democratic policy framework based in proven Western Liberal Democratic traditions. An ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ that might help working kiwis, the disadvantaged in equal measure and small business get through the imminent recession, believing a better future is to come. But for the near future that will be in the hands of Hipkins, Robertson and the dynamic of direct democratic power…hold on to your seats, it will be a wild ride! – Alistair Boyce
The menace of misinformation has been used to threaten free speech everywhere, from Nigeria to Russia to New Zealand to France to China. Nowhere, however, has the debate been as heated as in the United States, where Russian dis- or misinformation is widely believed to have influenced the results of the 2016 election which put Donald Trump in the White House.
However, a stunning article published earlier this month in a leading science journal, Nature Communications, suggests that the Russians probably wasted their money. The misinformation gushing across Twitter and Facebook made hardly any impact on voters’ views. After studying election activity on Twitter, a group of American and European experts in social media and politics found that there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior”.
This doesn’t mean that Russia didn’t work hard to sway public opinion – simply that its Internet Research Agency failed. – Michael Cook
The hysteria about the Russians sowed the seed of distrust amongst American voters. If Trump had been elected in a manipulated election in 2016, it was entirely plausible that Biden was elected in a manipulated election in 2020. The researchers conclude:
Indeed, debate about the 2016 US election continues to raise questions about the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to engender mistrust in the electoral system, which in turn may be related to Americans’ willingness to accept claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election … Russia’s foreign influence campaign on social media may have had its largest effects by convincing Americans that its campaign was successful.
In short, where Russian saboteurs failed, the American media succeeded – they spread discord and division throughout the nation. There is a straight line between gullibility about Russian bogeymen and the “stop the steal” invasion of Capitol Hill.
The question of how much toxic misinformation on social media influences public opinion is far from settled, as the authors of this article acknowledge. But it seems sure that Jacinda Ardern’s dream of censoring the internet deserves to fail. – Michael Cook
I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years, and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing. – Christopher Luxon
I think about Kōhanga Reo, I think about Whānau Ora, innovations that were delivered within the coherency of a single system of delivery of public service.”
We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like health, education, and justice, and critical infrastructure like three waters.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with Māori, we have a principal objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.”
While we oppose co-governance of public services as just discussed I want you to know the National Party wants a New Zealand where Māori success is New Zealand’s success. – Christopher Luxon
Absolutely, a 50 year plan would be fantastic. One that couldn’t be hijacked by ideology or some blue sky thinking. 93% of our goods are delivered by truck and you can talk all you like about how that needs to change, this is what’s happening right now. You want your bread, you want your milk, you want your chicken, you want your furniture. Basically, you want anything that makes your life a life a lifestyle. It’s delivered by truck. And while we have that level of goods being delivered on the road, and while we have this level of degradation on our roads, it’s costing you and me. When the trucking companies have to repair their trucks because of appalling potholes, they don’t wear that themselves. They pass on that cost. And so we all have to pay for the degradation of our roads. – Kerre Woodham
Much has been written about Jacinda Ardern having to deal with the Christchurch terror attack, the White Island eruption and the Covid-19 pandemic. It is worth remembering that dealing with crises and disasters is part and parcel of being a Prime Minister. During his time in office, John Key had to deal with the Global Financial Crisis, two Christchurch earthquakes, the Pike River Mine disaster, and the Swine Flu pandemic.
But he could also point to his government’s significant record of achievement in managing the country from recession to a “rock star” economy – by reducing government spending, lowering the debt, freeing up the labour markets, and reforming welfare to support more long-term beneficiaries out of dependency and into work.
And that’s the problem for Jacinda Ardern. When she looks at her legacy, what has she achieved?
She claims to have improved child poverty, but the record shows otherwise. She claims to have built houses, but 1,500 is not the 100,000 promised.
Instead, tens of thousands of families are living in motels, crime is rampant, immigration failure has created a nation-wide shortage of workers, union control has removed flexibility from the labour market, the welfare system has again become a trap for long-term beneficiaries, and the inclusion of employment and house prices in the Reserve Bank’s mandate has taken the focus off inflation, leading to the serious cost of living crisis that is now enveloping the country. – Dr Muriel Newman
On balance, she deserves credit for knowing when to throw in the towel if her heart is no longer in it. But Ms. Ardern leaves with much of her promised agenda unfulfilled. It’s been thrilling to be on the world map. But in the end, her years in power were like those maps that left New Zealand off: flawed and incomplete. – Josie Pagani
In the wake of Ardern’s abrupt resignation, the mainstream media are determined to convince us she was hounded from office mainly because she is a woman and had to fall on her sword to escape unrelenting “gendered abuse”.
The fact Ardern has overseen a bonfire of what was a vast store of political capital just two years ago and was facing a resounding defeat at this year’s election has mostly gone unremarked among the flood of columns defending her as the unfortunate victim of trolls and misogynists. – Graham Adams
Well, journalists and commentators are angry — but not at her. The object of their ire is mainly the allegedly mean-spirited, stupid and ungrateful public, who apparently refused to sufficiently acknowledge and respect her virtues as Prime Minister. – Graham Adams
The increasingly visceral reaction to her steady undermining of democracy, and her government’s general incompetence, seems to be interpreted by many commentators as a case of voters failing her rather than the reverse.
Against reason, we are effectively asked to believe that a nation that gave Ardern an unprecedented majority in 2020 — alongside personal popularity ratings in the 70s that outshone anything John Key achieved — has become a deeply misogynistic nation in just two years.
And this despite the fact Ardern herself has denied that misogynistic abuse played any part in her resignation. As she told Newshub when asked whether misogyny influenced her decision: – Graham Adams
It is evident from many reports that women in politics do receive more personal abuse than men but there is nevertheless a glaring imbalance in the type of abuse each sex gets and how they are expected to deal with it. Male politicians are personally abused in ways that would be unthinkable if directed at females. – Graham Adams
Usually, a captain abandoning a sinking ship ahead of the officers, crew and passengers in the first lifeboat available is regarded as an unforgivable act of cowardice. The fact he or she might be tired, or stressed, or overworked never trumps their duty to those in their care.
Astonishingly, in New Zealand, most journalists have preferred to blame the passengers for losing faith in their captain despite the fact she has recklessly steered the ship of state, and her party, onto the rocks. The media appears to believe the passengers are at fault for objecting to the fact Ardern was taking them on a voyage they mostly hadn’t agreed to be on. – Graham Adams
Ironically, Ardern has been complicit herself in an extraordinary legislative move to make misogyny official government policy.
The passing of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act in 2021 — which introduces a self-identification process for changing the sex shown on a person’s New Zealand birth certificate — effectively makes being a woman a state of mind.
By making the definition of a woman a moveable feast that includes biological men she has helped erase the scientific and common-sense definitions that underpin women’s sex-based rights.
Now that’s misogyny. – Graham Adams
Those who continue to ferociously support Ardern, are those who can’t see beyond the health response. Yes, the decision to lockdown in March 2020 was a life-saving and unprecedented decision. The failings came afterwards. The management of our economy, and the failure of the leadership team to horizon-scan on issues like accessing the vaccine, rolling it out, the economic response, and the crucial role that immigration was going to play in lifting our productivity. That was lost, it seems, on Labour’s leadership team who went back to the text books — they opted for ideology as opposed to responding to the dynamic reality we were living in.
Now, that’s what Hipkins has to shoulder. Policy, policy, policy. What is he going to do? – Rachel Smalley
And that’s what Hipkins has inherited. He is going to have to face into the policy and reform vacuum that Ardern has left in her wake. What to keep? What to ditch? And what of the hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, it will be over a billion, that has been invested in some of these policies that he will shelve. In a country with significant child poverty and inequality issues, that will be a very uncomfortable pill to swallow for Kiwis. – Rachel Smalley
I am sure Hipkins is sincere in his belief in state education. His allegations regarding charter schools were reckless. An independent report found they were wrong. Māori and Pasifika pupils greatly benefited from charter schools.
Hipkins has announced he is doing a review of Labour’s policies. Reviewing Labour’s opposition to charter schools would be a good start. New Zealand’s ranking in the international educational comparison tests are the lowest ever. Māori and Pasifika pupils are voting with their feet and fleeing state schools. – Richard Prebble
The most reliable predictor of election results is the right way/wrong way poll. For around 18 months the polls indicate most of us think the country is going the wrong way.
Hipkins can only win an election if he can produce a new agenda to take us in a new direction. He has no mandate for a new direction. He can only get a new mandate from an election. I do not know if Hipkins can win a snap election. I know if he waits until October Labour will be swept away. – Richard Prebble
The Budget is due in May. With Robertson at the helm, Hipkins has an experienced Minister of Finance in budget processes. But that Minister of Finance is also experienced in spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money. Hipkins has promised to address the ‘inflation pandemic’ but high fiscal spend doesn’t help with this.
Perhaps the hardest thing for Hipkins to be able turn the boat around, is all the Government has said on its reform agenda. Being a senior member of Ardern’s team, he has been rolled out numerous times to defend government policies, thus providing plenty of file footage for use in the media and in Opposition attack ads.
Hipkins’ biggest selling point as the new leader is the experience he brings to the role. But he cannot distance himself from the Ardern era. He received the two-thirds majority needed to get leadership within 48 hours of Ardern’s announcement, which is likely to mean he needed to make a lot of concessions to his caucus colleagues.
Hipkins may be speaking a big game of going back to ‘bread and butter’ issues, but the logistical and political costs are likely to impede any ambitious U-turns. – Brigitte Morten
Ihe Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighbourhoods by John McKnight and Peter Block led me to realise that we, as citizens in the broadest sense, had ceded our power to central and local government at great cost to our sense of agency as communities. And that’s what the aftermath of the earthquakes had restored for a moment in time.
These writers warn us of the dangers of the dependency that results from governments fixing our problems for us; robbing us of our capacity to problem-solve, and reducing our ability to build resilience. And that is something we are going to need in spades as we confront the challenges we know are coming our way. – Lianne Dalziel
Do we want to be consumers of government services, or citizens active in our neighbourhoods and communities, helping to solve problems that affect us all? – Lianne Dalziel
To anyone living with a rare disease, there are new, promising medications being developed constantly, so… don’t give up. Don’t give up on hope. There are always things being developed that can be life-changing. – Judy Knox
Imagine if mainstream British politicians were photographed at a demo at which someone was holding a placard that said ‘Decapitate coconuts’. A demo at which there were open, horrendous expressions of violent contempt for black people who hold the supposedly wrong views. A demo at which it was stated that such sinful ethnic-minority people should not only be executed but eaten, too. ‘I eat coconuts’, one of the signs might say. There would be uproar, rightly so. It’s unlikely the politicians would keep their jobs for long.
Well, the sexist equivalent of this scenario did happen, for real, in Glasgow on Saturday. Politicians were seen standing in front of protest signs that fantasised about visiting bigoted violence, not upon morally disobedient black people, but upon morally disobedient women. TERFs, as they’re called, which literally means ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, but which really means witch, bitch, scold, hag. Anyone who has witnessed a hardline trans activist spit out the word ‘TERF’ will be under no illusion as to the misogynistic menace that underpins that four-letter slur. Yet while there is concern over what happened in Glasgow, there isn’t as much public fury as one might expect. – Brendan O’Neill
Not seeing two hateful placards is kind of forgivable – not seeing that trans activism now seems to consist of little more than angry men bellowing ‘witch’ in the faces of women who have the temerity to disagree with them is not.
We need to talk about the hatred for ‘TERFs’. It is out of control. It is the most vehement form of bigotry in the UK right now. Over the past few days, we haven’t only witnessed gender-deluded men in Glasgow saying ‘Decapitate TERFs’. We’ve also had Reduxx magazine reveal the identity of the Scottish trans activist – a man – who wrote despicable violent tweets about someone driving a car into one of Kellie-Jay Keen’s gatherings of gender-critical women, so that we might see TERFs ‘exploding like bin bags full of baked beans on your windshield’. The same gender jihadist spoke about murdering Rosie Duffield with a gun and JK Rowling with a hammer. – Brendan O’Neill
A political party that harbours men who dream of battering women, and whose elected representatives are seen next to banners calling for women to be beheaded, and whose councillors compare women who defend their sex-based rights to the people who oversaw the industrial slaughter of Europe’s Jews has a very serious problem, doesn’t it? – Brendan O’Neill
Sexist hate is a daily reality for women who question the idea that you can change sex. Witness those clips in which mobs of masked men yell ‘fucking scum’ and ‘fucking piece of shit’ at Kellie-Jay Keen and her gender-critical friends. See the rape and death threats visited upon JK Rowling every week. ‘You are next’, a lowlife said to her when she expressed sorrow over the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Or just behold the low-level intimidation that attends virtually every gathering of ‘TERFs’. There will always be gangs of men outside gender-critical meetings; men horrified by the idea of women speaking among themselves about their rights; men who ridiculously believe that their feeling of ‘womanhood’ and badly applied lippy makes them women, too. Better women, in fact. As India Willoughby tweeted at the weekend, ‘I’m more of a woman than JK Rowling will ever be’. That’s misogyny, too. The idea that a man – yes, India’s a bloke – even does womanhood better than women is testament to the low view of womankind that’s been whipped up by the trans cult.
Any movement that attracts so many bigots really should have a word with itself. Any activist set that helps to make it fashionable again to call women witches really should engage in some self-reflection. For here’s the thing: while it might be the outliers of the trans cult who scream witch and issue death threats and say ‘suck my girldick’, their tirades only express with greater ferocity and spite the misogyny that is inherent to modern trans activism. The root idea of the contemporary trans movement – that ‘transwomen are women’ – is itself misogynistic. Its reduction of womanhood from a biological, social, relational phenomenon to a costume that anyone can pull on, even people with dicks, is profoundly sexist. It dehumanises women. It denies the specificity of their experiences. It turns womanhood into a feeling, something flimsy. – Brendan O’Neill
The mantra ‘transwomen are women’ underpins the resurgence of misogynistic thinking. There is a traceable line from this mainstream chant to the fringe cries of ‘cunt’ aimed at any woman who says transwomen are not women; that there’s more to being a woman than feeling and image. The violent hatred for ‘TERFs’ might mostly come from unstable individuals online, but it expresses the sexism and intolerance that are absolutely key to trans activism more broadly, and in particular to its belief that a man can be a woman. We need a firmer fightback against the hatred for ‘TERFs’ and in defence of the things that are threatened by this new witch-hunt – women’s rights, freedom of speech and scientific truth. – Brendan O’Neill
Recently, the private schools and in particular some of the more established public schools, remind me of the iceberg that has melted over time, weakened by their misplaced love of child-centred learning and rejection of adult authority over decades. In such a fragile state, when the woke brigade comes searching, these schools flip right over, suddenly and without warning, bowing to the incessant cry against the privileged.
Once upon a time, public schools were bastions of traditionalism, setting the standard for the rest of us. The richer in society used to have a sense of duty towards those less fortunate and these schools made it their raison d’être to inspire young men and women to serve others. Many graduates from these schools would seek careers that would allow them ‘to give back’ and live out their duty. – Katharine Birbalsingh
Help out at the local soup kitchen? Join the army? Become a teacher? Why do that, when all you have to do is join a Twitter mob that will cleanse you well enough to earn a quarter of a million a year in the City and read the Financial Times – Katharine Birbalsingh
Hipkins’ actions so far have been positive, enthusiastic, and polished, further encouraging a hitherto increasingly anxious caucus that the party’s fortunes may be about to change. With Parliament resuming in three weeks, this is all good news for Labour. However, the rapture notwithstanding, Labour’s electoral mountain remains as high as ever.
In addition to all the usual problems facing a government in election year, Hipkins faces three potentially insurmountable challenges to conquer before election day – time, the deteriorating economy, and the “Jacinda factor”. – Peter Dunne
Even if he manages to successfully overcome these hurdles, Hipkins still faces the biggest one of all – history. Since Peter Fraser succeeded Michael Joseph Savage in 1940, six prime ministers – Holyoake, Marshall, Rowling, Moore, Shipley and English – who have taken over during a parliamentary term have lost the next election. While Labour’s delight in the smooth way in which this week’s dramatic transition has been handled is understandable and justified, it is but one step in the confirmation process. The final, decisive word rests with voters, who will have their say on election day. – Peter Dunne
We are very conscious that lower-income New Zealanders are being absolutely smashed by inflation.
The great shame is that Labour increased the minimum wage so much in previous years, but what you’ve seen has happened is that they have not been able to increase it as much in these inflationary years because they know it will be passed on. – Nicola Willis
Now, every year National was in government we increased the minimum wage – we think that is the right thing to do – but how much you do that by is a very careful balance.
Because what we don’t want is workers on the one hand being paid more, but on the other hand having to pay so much more in costs at the supermarket, on rent and other things that their wages just get eaten up. – Nicola Willis
Starmer has unwittingly revealed what ‘Davos Man’ is all about: he’s about escaping the irritating plane of democratic decision-making in preference for the rarefied company of the 21st century’s self-styled philosopher-kings. He’s about liberating himself from the constraints of democratic politics – especially the constraint of being answerable to the masses – in favour of chumming about with the better-educated, better-dressed better people of the World Economic Forum. For Starmer to dismiss Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, the one institution over which British citizens have some direct and meaningful control, as just a ‘tribal, shouting place’ is depressingly revealing. It reveals his contempt for parliamentary democracy, and it reveals Davos Man’s belief that politics is better done away from us pesky plebs.
The World Economic Forum has been taking place at Davos in Switzerland every year since 1971. It’s an ‘annual jamboree for plutocratic banksters, avaricious industrialists and superannuated spongers to come together in an orgiastic eulogy to global capital’, in the apt words of the Spectator. – Brendan O’Neill
In Britain, a democracy, aspiring PM Starmer is constantly bombarded with tough questions, like ‘Do women have penises?’. He’s forever torn between the Remoaner instincts of probably every single person he knows and socialises with and the Brexit beliefs of vast numbers of ordinary people, including Labour-voting people. He has to go into the House of Commons, that tribal hellhole, and submit his vision for the country to the criticism and even ridicule of his fellow elected representatives. What a nightmare! Far better to be in the cushy surrounds of Davos, far from the madding crowd, in polite, agreeable meetings with polite, agreeable people, where you’ll never bump into a Brexit voter or a ‘TERF’ asking you yet again if women can have penises. Davos is sweet relief for a political class that likes politics but not the public.
This is what Davos has always been about. It is nearly 20 years since the political scientist Samuel P Huntington popularised the term ‘Davos Man’ to describe an ‘emerging global superclass’ of ‘gold-collar workers’. Huntington nailed Davos Man. He’s part of a powerful ‘class’ that is ‘empowered by new notions of global connectedness’, he said. Davos Man is ostentatiously ‘post-national’, said Huntington. These elites ‘have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations’. – Brendan O’Neill
This is the key dynamic in globalist politics. Globalism is not a plot by sinister rich people, even if the WEF’s use of phrases like ‘the great reset’ and ‘global redesign’ are a tad chilling. Rather, it is the outward, physical manifestation of national elites’ turn against nationhood; of their search for new forums beyond borders, and beyond public accountability, in which they might make decisions. For much of the postwar period, and with real vim since the 1970s, insulating political decision-making from public pressure has been the great cause of the modern political establishment. Hence, we’ve had the rise of the European Union, the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, annual gatherings like COP and Davos – all justified on the basis that there are some issues that are so large and complicated that it is preferable for them to be discussed and decided upon by clever people untethered from the low-information urges of ill-read national populations. Davos is less the cause of the crisis of democracy than its beneficiary.
The end result of this cult of political insulation, of elevating policy from the national sphere to the global one, is the rise of a new elite that views itself as borderline godly. – Brendan O’Neill
There’s a religious fervour to nutty comments like these; a fantastical vision of oneself as the messianic deliverer of humankind from doom. Now we know what happens to the political elites when they free themselves from public pressure, from us: they go mad.
It’s time to bring them all crashing back down to Earth. Back to the terrestrial world of nations and politics and accountability. Back from Davos to London and Washington and Paris. So what if they’re bored with the institutions of national democracy? These are the institutions through which the rest of us can express our interests and keep politics fresh and responsive. The gold-collared superclass might have little need for national loyalty and national government, but the working classes still do. – Brendan O’Neill
Prior to Ardern’s resignation, Willis said “It’s well past time for the government to present a real economic plan.” And she said the government had to come back from the Christmas holiday and deliver one. They didn’t. It’s now January 26th, and the government came back from holiday and delivered a resignation. There is still no plan. Inflation is static — a stonking 7.2% – and we can feel the cool winds of a recession blowing in.
The pomp and ceremony is over for Hipkins now. He has to get on and deliver – something his Government has never really achieved in five years. And when he puts forward his economic plan, he does so knowing that a student of one of our most effective Finance Ministers is watching on, and she’s waiting in the wings. – Rachel Smalley
Now, in his first speech as incoming PM, Chris Hipkins said his focus would be on the economy & cost-of-living. It constitutes a full re-branding of Labour. Why do that? To answer that question, let’s first define former PM Ardern’s legacy.
In a line, it was a focus on non-economic and moral issues. If you read Ardern’s Harvard address, it refers to the likes of abortion, gun-control, “misinformation” on the Web, future of democracy & her “kindness” agenda. She never spoke a word about economics. Of course, Harvard students & professors would not take well to being lectured on that subject – but loved every word of her class on the morals – giving her a standing ovation.
But that’s not where it ends. Ardern also tried to be a climate change leader & championed minimizing Covid-related health issues during the pandemic by imposing strict rules, which led to large economic costs. Those economists who advocated quantifying the benefits of these rules against the financial costs were branded cold, heartless types at the time – folks who callously put a monetary value on human life. – Robert MacCulloch
Ardern’s leadership only saw an ad-hoc, stitched together set of reactions to put out the many fires blowing up in the Kiwi economy. However, with no guiding economic model behind her, I believe her sincere & earnest attempts to put out those fires proved immensely stressful and over-bearing.
Today, Kiwis are too busy paying food, petrol & mortgage bills to philosophize about trade-offs between freedom of speech and disinformation on the web with kids at Harvard. Surveys show the cost-of-living is our chief concern.
That’s why Hipkins first act as PM was to rebrand Labour. He thinks Ardern’s reputation as a global leader righting the world’s wrongs has morphed into a domestic liability. Hipkins is branding himself as “chippy”, an ordinary Hutt Valley kid who needs to save his own finances before he can save the world. – Robert MacCulloch
Many commentators are now suggesting that Labour will abandon identity politics and move to the “bread-and-butter” right.
But there’s a deeper problem our new PM must contend with; the issue of trust in institutions, particularly in the government. A recent Herald poll showed that 32 percent of respondents found the government untrustworthy, and 15 percent found them very untrustworthy. The Herald also found that 64 percent felt the country had become more divided.
It is important to remember that leadership choices and decisions have far-reaching consequences. Leaders are responsible for the environment they create. Cheerfully saying that you are happy to create a two-tier society with vaccine mandates after consistently rejecting the idea erodes trust. Trying to vote through an entrenchment clause in the already controversial Three Waters bill does the same. As do financial stimulus packages that exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. – Jason Heale
But here’s the thing; as a representative democracy, it is ultimately our responsibility as citizens to hold leaders accountable by voting. During their time in office, we also have the privilege of providing feedback in various forms, whether through writing to them or protesting if we feel we are not being heard. The way we do it demonstrates the trust deficit that many are seeing.
Given that a week is a long time in politics, the election is quite far off. A Curia Poll of people who voted for Labour in 2020 shows that many key policies are unpopular. In fact, our new leader’s primary challenge is rebuilding our trust in the government. That will heal divisions. As Thomas Simpson has written, “there is evidence from the US that political polarisation is now affecting the ability of ordinary citizens to engage with each other on issues which are politically significant.”
The trust challenge is a big ask; Ardern turned her party around within weeks in 2017; Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has to turn the country around in a matter of months. – Jason Heale
Politics has become a struggle between those with knowledge capital, versus those with financial capital. The people left out are those with neither. They used to be called the working class, and I’m on their side. – Josie Pagani
AI is picking up the way ‘’progressive left’’ voices present to the world. Thomas Piketty calls it the “Brahmin left”, those who see their mission as clerics instructing the masses. The goal is not necessarily growth or affluence for the many, but a society shaped by their own beliefs.
When did the left stop talking about poverty first, and the hope implicit in lifting people out of it? – Josie Pagani
The left mimicked by AI is not hopeful, it is catastropharian. We are close to extinction, not the authors of a world within reaching distance of being free from poverty for the first time in history.
We were once nation-builders, whose pitch was hope. Norm Kirk put it into poetry at a time when politicians were more preacher than party. He believed everyone wants someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, something to hope for.
Robots see a left in which optimism and red-blooded moral crusade have been replaced by a professional political class whose 10-point plan beats a 5-point plan. –
The educated class supports a version of ‘’diversity’’ that manages to exclude diversity of opinion or life experience.
I’m not so interested in the horse race of politics – who is up or down. Politics for me is the joyfulness of life, or why bother? – Josie Pagani
Labour, I believed, needed to face some uncomfortable truths. I am not qualified to unpack the origins of misogyny in New Zealand – that needs to be explored by a team of psychiatrists and social anthropologists. However, I do believe the escalation in generalised online anger is fuelled by New Zealanders who, for two years, didn’t have a voice.
The Government didn’t so much run a tight ship through Covid, it ran a submarine.
It engaged only with those who supported its narrative, and never critically appraised its decisions or strategy. For months, we saw only Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield, and Grant Robertson. Progressively, we saw Chris Hipkins too, but our lives were shaped by four people who, collectively, didn’t engage with or listen to the people they governed.
If you deny people their freedom – even if you believe it’s in their best interests – and you don’t provide an opportunity for open communication, you will ultimately create angry, caged animals. This doesn’t in any way justify the horrific abuse that Ardern has received, but it hopefully suggests that New Zealanders can pull themselves back from the horrible, polarised place we find ourselves living in today. – Rachel Smalley
Words are lovely. Saying the right thing is great but doing something, anything, shows you really mean it.
I have no doubt he’ll get there eventually, but if you’re sworn in as Prime Minister on the same day the annual inflation rate is announced and it’s stubbornly stuck at 7.2 percent, you should be asking your finance minister for something, anything that’s in the works or relatively easy to hustle together to announce at your first big, official public moment in the job. – Tova O’Brien
This new regime is promising change in the weeks and months ahead, promising greater support for low and middle-income earners and small businesses.
Getting out there and listening as the PM is doing with businesses here in Auckland today is important, statements of intent are important.
But when people can’t afford crumbs, throwing a morsel their way will fill bellies and petrol tanks far more than words and meetings ever could. – Tova O’Brien
One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for being proficient at acting or music, for instance? — but it is one that persists, regardless of continual pushback from those in the public gaze. The reason it does so is not just down to the power of the media but also because it offers a sense of justice, or at least morbid satisfaction, to the public. We can look at the rich and famous, with wealth, status and lifestyles beyond our wildest dreams, and assure ourselves that there has been a terrible cost to their integrity, privacy and ultimately wellbeing, and suddenly the world seems just a little bit more balanced and just. Even the paparazzi, hated and courted by celebrities, have this Mephistophelean quality. – Darran Anderson
What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.
The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).
It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract. – Darran Anderson
The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out. – Darran Anderson
Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch. – Darran Anderson
Accuracy is the cornerstone of journalism, especially when it comes to news reporting. If a man appeared in court, claiming to be a brain surgeon when he was actually a hospital porter, we wouldn’t expect a headline announcing ‘brain surgeon convicted of rape’. The same rule should apply to other obviously untrue claims.-
At a time when it has become routine for male defendants to be referred to in court reports as ‘she’, such a high-profile case presented newspapers and websites with a stark dilemma. The judges’ bench book, which consists of guidance rather than law, says it is a matter of ‘common courtesy’ to use the personal pronoun and name that a person prefers. Many women and some lawyers, however, think it is ridiculous — and insulting to rape victims — to enforce a pretence that a male defendant is female. – Joan Smith
The state the courts have got themselves into by submitting to the demands of gender ideology is vividly illustrated by the judge’s remarks to the defendant in this case: “Ms Bryson, you have been convicted of two extremely serious charges, this being charges of rape”. A woman cannot be convicted of rape, which is an assault involving the use of a penis. In a bitter irony, the prosecutor described Bryson’s evidence as “entirely incredible and unreliable” — yet the court accepted his claim to be a woman.
No one who has seen pictures of Bryson arriving at court in skin tight leggings believes that for a moment. Accepting his claim at face value has dire consequences, because it has been reported that he will be housed in a women’s prison while awaiting assessment, despite being convicted of violence against women.
Journalists should be calling out this nonsense, not going along with it. If editors feel it is being imposed on them by the justice system, why aren’t they campaigning against a blatant attack on press freedom? If it’s trans activists they’re afraid of, they need to get a backbone. Distrust of the media is widespread and this practice of ‘misgendering’ rapists is making it worse. – Joan Smith
It’s often difficult to distinguish the cunning from the stupidity, the foolishness from the evil, of the political class.
In Scotland, a bill has been passed to make it easier for 16-year-olds to change their gender on official documents and to be recognized as their chosen gender (the word sex has, of course, been expunged from the discussion, and will soon be as redundant as the word “unhappy,” which has now been replaced in common parlance by “depressed”). – Theodore Dalrymple
The multiple confusions of all this need hardly be pointed out. The term “gender assigned at birth” makes it sound as if the sex inscribed on a birth certificate was decided by the flip of a coin, that it was completely arbitrary and had no basis in objective reality independent of anyone’s will (it’s sex, of course, not gender, that’s assigned at birth). Moreover, to live as someone of the chosen different, that is to say opposite, gender suggests that there’s an essential difference between male and female, which difference it’s the ultimate object of transgenderism as an ideology to deny. If there weren’t such a difference, how could it be recognized that someone had lived as either of the genders? There would be no need for certificates. – Theodore Dalrymple
Naturally, not everyone in Scotland is opposed to the bill and there have been demonstrations (not very large ones, it’s true, but noisy and attention-receiving) in favor of it. I think this must be the first time in recent history, at any rate, that there have been demonstrations demanding what amounts to the abrogation of adult responsibility towards, and manipulation and abuse of, immature young people.
The most important question, perhaps, is what’s next on the progressive agenda, once the right of children to change gender (with present technology, they can’t yet change sex) has been granted? There will surely come a time when progressives will grow bored with the issue and seek another to give meaning to their lives. – Theodore Dalrymple
Apparently, political agendas are okay in science so long as it’s your politics being promoted. The sad part is that so much of science is being damaged by the failure of advocates to understand that science is supposed to be largely free from political slants, and when a political viewpoint has permeated science, as in the Lysenko affair, it has always been harmful. And make no mistake about it—the conception of DEI being promoted as the future pathway to “inclusive equity”, both here and in other science societies, is indeed an ideology, and one that can be rationally debated instead of being taken as a given that must be enforced. – Jerry Coyne
A child’s wishes must be taken seriously, but can be only one factor in reaching an overall decision about their best interests, in a highly charged and complex situation. Given the uncertainty surrounding diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria, the UK should, like Finland, Sweden and France, follow a more cautious path; we should end medication and medical transition for children and adolescents now. – Dr David Bell
The city has been badly let down: by a calamitous lack of under-investment in critical infrastructure, a mayor who lacks all the right qualities for leadership. Local emergency management, and critical transport agencies were caught napping. – Andrea Vance
This Government is already on thin ice with Aucklanders. There is no coming back from mishandling the emergency response.
And let’s not get carried away by a promising start. Hipkins is just a fresh coat of paint. The same weaknesses remain – competence and delivery. – Andrea Vance
Shuffling the chairs around the Cabinet table, and dumping a couple of policies, won’t be enough to convince a grumpy electorate Labour has really changed. – Andrea Vance
And so it ends. A most remarkable premiership has run its course and all we have left are the memories.
Well. We also have $60 billion of additional sovereign debt, an expanded social welfare roll, inflation, a generation locked out of homeownership, expanded restrictions on free speech, and a container-ship of social meddling, from a ban on plastic shopping bags to a law preventing the sale of cigarettes to anyone born during or after the reign of Sir John Key.
Ardern’s zenith was in the weeks after the Christchurch terror attacks.
Her leadership was powerful and sincere. The collective response to her genuine and empathetic reaction ensured that anger, both domestically and internationally, was directed at the one place it belonged: the terrorist. – Damien Grant
However, this brief season of national unity was used to force through a prohibition and compulsory acquisition of a range of firearms with minimal engagement with the usual democratic processes. – Damien Grant
Much has been written about the Covid response and the merits of the decisions taken. We are now in a position to reflect on the costs; both economic and social.
Under Ardern’s guidance we became a nasty team of 5 million.
We hounded the unclean out of their employment and our cafes. For anyone whose understanding of history is more extensive than whatever is taught in our schools, the sight of citizens having to show their papers to board public transport or attend a lecture was dispiriting. As was the public’s uncritical compliance.
Worse was to come. The Fourth Estate cowering on the balcony of the Third Estate as the marginalised, disenfranchised and desperate ranted in impotent rage on the lawn below is a metaphor for how civil society evolved under Ardern’s guidance.
Those protesting were not rivers of filth. They were driven by desperation and often delusion into an act of insanity no more deranged than demanding that a man languish in managed isolation as his father died in a nearby hospital. – Damien Grant
As we look back, it becomes clear that we were in the grip of hysteria that was being used by the state to drive compliance.
What was done was done with pure intentions by those who believe with certainty that sacrificing the individual for the collective good is not only just but necessary. It is a rationale with a troubling legacy.
Yet the real gift Ardern has left the land of the troubled long white cloud is in the area of race relations.
Like most Pākehā I am not that interested in the Treaty. I have read the various versions, written columns on the topic, but like our current Prime Minister I’d struggle to rattle its principles off if put on the spot. And yet I, like most of my contemporaries, am perfectly happy with the process of dealing with historical grievances.
If land was taken, it should be returned, and if it cannot be then compensation paid. – Damien Grant
I am suspicious about the elastic and ill-defined principles of the Treaty and believe that the Tribunal itself is operating outside its statutory remit.
Equally, I am aware that those whose lands were taken and ancestors attacked and killed by colonial forces breaching the Treaty’s undertakings feel that the regime is far too parsimonious, slow, and the compensation inadequate for the wrongs committed.
If you look around the post-colonial world, New Zealand has navigated these issues far better than most. The cost, in terms of our GDP, has been trivial, and the advantages of having a robust if imperfect process for resolving historical grievances far outweigh any errors at the margins.
Into this delicate balance crashed Ardern and her progressive thoughtlessness. – Damien Grant
We are moving from a regime where historical wrongs are being addressed, to a state where one ethnic class has an inherent and enduring political status that is based on their ancestry. This cannot end well.
It is possible that the reform remains in place amid a growing resentment in the wider population.
There will also be disenchantment when it becomes clear that this change does not benefit the rank and file within Māoridom but only those with the skills connections to capitalise on the opportunity. – Damien Grant
Ardern will forever be popular among those who are delighted not by what she did, but who she was.
In this she was the perfect post-modern prime minister for a generation who believe your identity matters more than your character, and where your intentions carry more weight than the outcomes of your actions. – Damien Grant
People have stopped listening to Labour and simply don’t believe their promises. He can cancel a few things – but are they cancelled or just postponed?
Hipkins has been an integral part of the Ardern Government. As a senior minister and a close confidant of hers, he has approved and led much of the work that has been proven to be very unpopular.
Will people believe that he has changed his mind? More likely they will think that he is only cancelling some projects because he wants to win the next election. What happens if they do win? – Paula Bennett
Hipkins has already stated that he wants to see changes to our tax system. That he doesn’t believe the current system is fair, but he won’t make changes before the election. What will those changes be if he is PM after October 14?
We do know what Hipkins stands for. He has led much of the unpopular policy work over the past few years and he has not changed his ideology overnight. At a personal level I wish him well. However, this change of guard will not be enough to change the minds of the majority of New Zealand voters. – Paula Bennett
New Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ most urgent task is to convince Labour-sceptical voters his Government is different to Jacinda Ardern’s.
To do that, he needs to cut Three Waters immediately.
Nothing else would signal change as clearly as ditching Three Waters.
This policy is radioactive to voters. It is a symbol of how distracted and arrogant the Ardern government became.
Nothing screams “distracted” more than Labour pouring huge amounts of energy, money and time into water reform while Kiwis struggle to pay their mortgages and grocery bills.
Nothing screams “arrogant” more than Labour forging ahead with a policy voters hate. Hatred is not a strong word in this case. Voters filled town hall-style roadshows opposing it, they erected signs along rural roads begging the Government to drop it. Sixty per cent of Kiwis opposed it. Only 23 per cent supported it.
Few Labour policies generated more negative headlines. From the early dirty-tricks TV advertising campaign designed to scare voters with nonsense threats of filthy water, to Nanaia Mahuta’s attempt to entrench part of the law behind her colleagues’ backs. It’s been a dog from start to finish. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Hipkins will have a Herculean task on his hands convincing Mahuta to kill her darling. She has 14 other Māori MPs backing her up.
The power behind the throne stays the same. Ultimately, a change in leader changes little.
This will test Hipkins’ mettle. How badly does he want to win the election?
On currently polling, he will lose. He can do any number of other things to try to win over voters: crackdown on crime, relieve cost-of-living pressures, wipe student debt. But, those things take time. Weeks, months, years. If he starts his prime ministership defending and pursuing a deeply unpopular policy, he’ll have lost the argument already. The phone – as they say – will be off the hook. What comes after that is defeat.
This is his chance to prove to upset voters that a Hipkins Government is not more of the same. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a “robust” risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe? – Janice Turner
It is a sobering reality that among the many pressures young people encounter today the constant barrage or doomsday predictions is taking a devastating toll. Being told the world will end removes the will to live especially if accompanied by a plethora of other negative impacts.
Many of the predictions are simply rubbish, a product of scientists desperate to hang on to funding or a tenure combined with a media using sensationalism to try and stay profitable.
The psychological pressure is becoming worse. Not content with playing havoc with young vulnerable minds by piling fear upon fear using unusual weather events as weapons the climate change monsters are now setting impossible targets that they already know full well will be missed creating greater panic and feelings of hopelessness.
This manipulation of impressionable minds is unforgivable.
‘Net zero’ by 2050 is blatantly unreachable. – Owen Jennings
Having aided and abetted the Extinction Rebellion nonsense the catastrophic propounding scientists and their media lapdogs are now teasing the fearful with unobtainable goal setting. It is evil mind games. – Owen Jennings
Allan’s reform proposals will criminalise Folau’s critics. Are new blasphemy laws really what the Minister of Justice wants? – Roger Partridge
The decision by Sport Northland to deny ‘Stop Co-Governance’, a community group, use of their Whangarei venue to hold a public meeting is illegal and defies the rights given to all Kiwis to voice their political opinions. This case, yet again, illustrates the contempt held by many for the foundational liberty of free speech, and it cannot be allowed to stand, – Jonathan Ayling
Ardern was the target of an extraordinary amount of abuse, but the toxicity extends further than the outgoing prime minister. Over the last decade or so, any public figure or politician – regardless of their politics, gender, and ethnicity – has become increasingly targeted for abuse, especially online. It began well before Ardern’s prime ministership.
Any sober observance of John Key’s time as prime minister shows the incredible hatred and abuse directed his way in the eight years he was at the top. This included his family, and Max Key claimed in 2016 that he received “death threats twice a week”.
Some of the aggression towards Key wasn’t even widely condemned. When gallows and death threats were cartoonishly made in leftwing protests, they were generally contextualised as expressions of anger and contempt for some of his policies as Prime Minister.
But a line was crossed in Key’s time – encapsulated by leftwing rapper Tom Scott’s “Kill the PM”, which spoke of assassinating Key and raping his daughter. At the time, the song and its artist had plenty of defenders on the left.
Since then, New Zealand society has become much more polarised. A survey published by the Herald in December showed 64 per cent of New Zealanders believe the country has become more divided in the last few years. – Bryce Edwards
Yes, there were and are huge numbers of vile, sexist putdowns directed at Ardern. But the story of her rise to great heights has shown that her gender or becoming a mother while in office haven’t held her back in the slightest. If anything, New Zealanders strongly celebrated the progressiveness of having a prime minister become a mother while in office.
And the fact that the New Zealand Parliament now has a majority of women says something very striking about how gender is not the barrier for electability that it once was in this country. It could be argued Ardern’s gender and motherhood have been an electoral asset rather than a liability. – Bryce Edwards
The leveraging of Ardern’s personality and star power epitomised the trend in politics for election manifestos, policy, and ideology to be de-emphasised. In fact, politics has become “hollowed out”, and substance and depth are now missing in democracy.
Few people join political parties, and the historic ties between parties and traditional constituencies have been eroded. Without the social anchors of strong ideologies and ties to social class and other demographics, elections are more about personality and the attributes of leadership than ever before. – Bryce Edwards
The unfortunate flipside of having one personality embody and represent a party and government so entirely is that when the popularity of that institution plummets, it’s the personality at the top who becomes the magnet for all the discontent. Unfortunately for Ardern, by having her personify the Labour Government so totally, this has meant that she has been the recipient of, first the adulation, and now the blame.
Labour’s spindoctors might well have been smart to push Ardern to do the cover shoots, and develop a big media presence around her personality and charisma, but ultimately it became a double-edged sword.
The lesson is that the hyper-personalisation of politics is deeply harmful and unhealthy for all involved. The antidote is to shift away from personality politics. New Zealand political parties must rediscover their soul and substance, and not be based so much around leaders. They need to recruit members again, encourage their participation, and focus on policy development. Politics should not be an elite activity.
The media, too, could learn to focus less on personalities. The total concentration on Ardern’s star power was such easy journalism. But it came at the expense of a policy debate. – Bryce Edwards
We need a debate about polarisation and toxicity in New Zealand politics. An increase in toxicity, and especially the gendered and racial nature of it, is likely to increase. We need to find a better way forward.
But this is very different to presenting Jacinda Ardern as a victim. As some commentators have pointed out, this desire to turn her into a victim of abuse is somewhat paternalistic and patronising. Former prime minister Jenny Shipley has warned, for example, that “If we overemphasize the abuse question, it implies women can’t do this job and that’s not true.”
Even worse, is if partisans and liberal-leftists attempt to use Ardern’s departure to provoke a culture war. By painting a picture of “the deplorables hounding the Prime Minister from office”, such voices are just increasing the toxic polarisation in a way that prevents a sober discussion of the problems.
An unsophisticated condemnation of political opponents just drives up tensions and looks like petty opportunism rather than a genuine concern to help find a solution for a real problem. Instead of reducing the hate and rancour, such “call out culture” methods tend to be counterproductive and are a dead-end.
Instead, what is urgently needed is a better understanding of what is driving social divisions, and an acknowledgement that the increased abuse of politicians comes largely from our unhealthy personalisation of politics.
This focus on individual politicians and New Zealand’s shift away from collective ways of doing politics is fuelling a hyper-individualisation by which political careers live and die, leaving us all the poorer. – Bryce Edwards
One can well imagine the Prime Minister going through the Christmas briefing papers with care, then looking at the family, at the unread books, at the sun and the possibility of going fishing – and contemplating resigning. – Brian Easton
It can’t, obviously, be that people get more enjoyment about some things than others, and that making your own mind up about what you’re going to enjoy, and in what measure, is part of the joy of being part of a free society.
The last thing we would want to do, of course, is to organize a whole economic system around that idea.
The advertising of junk food is, to quote Jebb one final time, ‘undermining people’s free will.’ What we need to do, and fast, is to crack down on the office profiterole-profferers and Schwarzwaldkuchen-suppliers and put an immediate ban on all advertising of nice, tempting things.
Only then will be truly free of the scourge of office cake. – Dr James Kierstead
The Government giving itself only three days to choose a new Prime Minister seemed, at least initially, heroic. If you take them at their word, pretty much nobody except Hipkins knew until Ardern rocked up to caucus and shared the news on Thursday. And yet, magically, consensus candidates for both PM and deputy were arrived at by Saturday morning. It was almost like they knew the answer to the question before they asked it.
The second one still has me scratching my head. Why would the outgoing Prime Minister announce the election date and then promptly resign? Isn’t that one of the most obvious things you’d leave to your successor?
It only made sense if Ardern’s successor and their campaign chair (Megan Woods) were all in on the plan, and everyone had agreed on the new team ahead of time. And my strong hunch is they were.
Third, Grant Robertson was remarkably relaxed about not becoming the leader and sacrificing his Deputy PM role. Now we know why. By jettisoning his Wellington-based electorate yesterday, he signalled he has his eye on the exit sign as well. – Steven Joyce
All this might be considered trainspotting except that it highlights that Chris Hipkins is very much the continuity choice for PM. These are the same people rearranging the deckchairs to make room for the fact that one of their number (quite reasonably) wanted to retire, but to leave everyone else’s position broadly intact.
There was no public debate about policy, no discussion about who best to lead the party and whether it should go in a different direction, just a “Jacinda’s going, you’re up Chris” agreement.
Sure, they will talk about changing things and Hipkins has done little else for the past few days. He of course can read the polls. Ardern was doing the same before Christmas, so even that is continuity. – Steven Joyce
And that’s the problem. From Hipkins down, these are the people who, for better or worse, have made all the decisions over the past five years which have landed us where we are. Robertson is responsible for monetary policy settings and the re-signing of Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr. He’s responsible for the huge increase in the tax take that is squeezing Kiwi families and the gargantuan levels of inflation-stoking government spending. He’s allowed his colleagues to go nuts with the regulatory burden on businesses, and the convenient pandemic-driven curb on immigration is straight out of his “Future of Work” playbook.
New Deputy PM Carmel Sepuloni has overseen the explosion in the use of motels as emergency housing and the rise in the number of working-age people on a benefit despite low levels of unemployment.
Hipkins himself has driven a massive expansion in the size of the public service, a poorly executed centralisation of the polytechs, and shrugged off some of the poorest attendance records our school sector has ever seen. To say nothing of obstinately refusing to alter some of the most egregious settings during the Covid lockdowns and border closures which left such a sour taste with so many New Zealanders.
Even if the four at the top really wanted to repudiate some of their previous decisions in order to win re-election at the end of the year, will the key factions within the Government allow that to occur?
There are two big decision drivers in this Government, the unions and the Māori caucus. The unions bring the money and the volunteers, and the Māori caucus can count. Not only do they have the biggest bloc of votes in the Government, they are the only group in parliament which can at least theoretically side with the Opposition and defeat the Government in a vote. None of that has changed. – Steven Joyce
There is nothing wrong with continuity when the people are broadly happy with their lot. In 2016, continuity was the imperative. But when the polls are dropping and the public says you are heading in the wrong direction, continuity is not what you need. If those at the top of the tree can’t shed some of their pet beliefs and deliver real change, the public will no doubt deliver it themselves.
So when the new Prime Minister talks about a re-set, are we talking about change to the core belief systems that landed us where we are today? Or are we being set up yet again with more of that pre-eminent skill of the sixth Labour Government, its sophistry, albeit this time delivered in a more folksy, self-deprecating manner? – Steven Joyce
Auckland’s floods are not our Chernobyl disaster. But they are a devastating disaster nonetheless. We will have to reckon with billions of dollars of property damage, disrupted lives and, worst of all, the loss of irreplaceable human lives.
And while the bureaucracy did not cause the flood, it does seem that a bureaucratic mindset impeded swift decision making and an effective response to protect the public. Which is no surprise because that is the deadening effect that bureacracy and officialdom has on leadership. – Liam Hehir
Bureaucratic structures, like the ones that failed Auckland so badly, are characterised by hierarchical structures, set rules and procedures the and division of responsibility. People with a rationalist mindset love these structures because they think they deliver efficiency and accountability to government operations. In practice, however, they create a diffusion of responsibility through impersonal forces, leading to people refusing to take accountability.
One of the major issues with bureaucracy is that it can create a culture in which people are more concerned with following rules and procedures rather than taking immediate action to address a problem or situation. After all, you can’t be criticised for following the rules. Because responsibility is shared, with no responsibility for the outcome, a sense of detachment sets in even in the midst of suffering. – Liam Hehir
Populists often campaign on promises to shake up the status quo and disrupt entrenched bureaucracy, but once they attain power, they often find the comforts and excuse making of bureaucracy too easy to hide behind. This is particularly true in situations where difficult decisions must be made and accountability is required. – Liam Hehir
How much confidence should the public have in authorities managing natural disasters? Not much, judging by the farcical way in which the civil defence emergence in Auckland has played out.
The way authorities dealt with Auckland’s extreme weather on Friday illustrated how hit-and-miss our civil defence emergency system is. In particular, the communications failures made the crisis much worse than it needed to be. – Bryce Edwards
Although the mayor, as well as the emergency systems and authorities, obviously didn’t create the disaster, they had a responsibility to mitigate its worse effects, which they did not do. Lives have been lost, the public has faced significant disruption, and there have been billions of dollars of damage to property. The failures of authorities mean that these consequences have potentially been much worse than they needed to be. – Bryce Edwards
Jacinda Ardern quitting seems like a long time ago now given all the news we’ve had since. But I can tell you my first thought was not – oh dear, misogyny forced her out. The true reason of course was the polls, the research, the divisiveness, the polarisation, the fact Labour was on a hiding to nothing with her at the helm.
Epic failures to deliver on so much, the arrogance that had crept in, the fact she clearly couldn’t stand the reality of not being popular anymore. Those jumping to assert that it was misogyny only discredit all women in leadership positions. We’ve had female leaders in this country for years, they hold their own, they don’t need coddling and defending and protecting.
Ardern just didn’t like the idea of losing. She wasn’t up for the grind of election year on the hustings with people giving her a hard time. And fair enough, that’s on her. I don’t begrudge her wanting to pull the pin on her ‘team of 5 million’ when it didn’t suit her. But even she didn’t want the misogyny defence. Even she argued that wasn’t a factor. She just didn’t want to do it anymore. Fair cop.
Although the whole thing did remind me of an Air B&B guest who trashes the place, in our case the country, then leaves without cleaning up. It was not – as may’ve been inferred – some late summer holiday revelation she had either. We now know it was all planned and arranged back before Christmas. – Kate Hawkesby
Canny and clever of the Labour party? Or Machiavellian? It doesn’t really matter, the point is she’s gone, and somehow the media got sucked into thinking that a new leader means a whole fresh new Labour.
How? It’s the same old government with the same old policies with the same spending habits and dysfunction that we’ve seen all along. Nothing’s changed. The guy who wouldn’t listen to dairy owners over ram raids, or fix the Police portfolio when he had it, or improve our woeful education or sort our Covid response in a way that didn’t divide the entire country, is now in charge. – Kate Hawkesby
Well last night’s two polls tell us it may be better optics for voters – who also seem sucked into the fiction that a new leader means a whole new approach to governing.
So a honeymoon bump? Or can Chippy turn it around for the party? I mean he doesn’t grate the average Kiwi the same way Jacinda Ardern did, but he’s still Labour, and they’re still useless.
So, my biggest surprise over the holidays was not Ardern quitting or Hipkins coming in, but the sycophantic response to it where he’s been painted as some kind of Messiah, and her as a dearly departed Saint. – Kate Hawkesby
The good news is there is no need to worry about Co-Governance anymore! Co-Governance is a thing of the past now!
The bad news is, we are now entering the stage of governance according to the Maori world view, and that is governance according to Te Ao Maori.
Te Ao Maori means respect and acknowledgement of Maori customs and protocols, it means embracing the Maori story and identity and recognising what that means, not just for Maori, but for all New Zealanders. – John Porter
New Zealand’s education is already in a perilous state. Why are we installing the vision of a minority at the centre of New Zealand’s secondary education system? This, without formal approval from the public, can only be described as a radical step with far-reaching and long-term consequences. – John Porter
If you want to influence and change thoughts or actions, where do you start? In education of course. In particular, the most impressionable: the younger generation.
Using education to influence and change thoughts or actions can be described as employing soft power.
Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one prefers or desires. That can be accomplished by coercion and payment or attraction and persuasion.
Soft power employs persuasion and attraction to obtain the preferred outcomes. – John Porter
Very quietly and with no public debate (I can’t find any record of public debate), we see rollout starts in 2023.
To me, this simply continues Labour’s sponsorship of the Maori caucus and activists’ coup-by-stealth strategy.
Say nothing or very little and, lo and behold, we have governance according to Te Ao Maori! – John Porter
And so — pouff! — five and a half years after that interview, Ardern reached the end of the political road as Prime Minister of New Zealand (or “Aotearoa New Zealand” as she prefers to call the country).
Her sudden political irrelevancy was confirmed by polling taken after her resignation. It’s what anyone quitting a job, or a relationship, secretly fears most — that their colleagues or lover will be much, much happier without them.
That appears to be the case for Ardern. Two polls on Monday evening had Labour rocketing up the charts. – Graham Adams
Yesterday’s darling, Jacinda Ardern, plummeted to just five per cent — a figure presumably composed of loyal voters who either hadn’t heard she had resigned as prime minister or didn’t want to believe the terrible news, in much the same way the bereaved sometimes can’t believe their loved one is no longer going to walk in the door again.
Despite the brutal confirmation that she had become a liability to her party, and that voters prefer a Labour government without her at the helm, few doubt that Ardern will fall on her feet.
In fact, Ardern’s resignation and political death has undoubtedly been sensible in terms of her future — bringing to mind US writer Gore Vidal’s quip about the death of his literary rival Truman Capote as “a wise career move”. – Graham Adams
Ardern prudently jumped ship before what promises to be a messy and possibly incendiary election campaign year kicks off in earnest.
And one that would have likely been humiliating for her as well given the intense animosity towards her had already prevented her from campaigning publicly in the Hamilton West by-election in December, which saw the Labour candidate win only 30 per cent of the vote.
By leaping for the lifeboats before the election wrangling gets properly under way, she has at least protected her battered reputation from further damage. – Graham Adams
Curiously, commentators — both here and overseas — have told us that Ardern left “on her own terms”. This is a new and interesting use of the phrase given the polls for both Labour and her personally had previously been in freefall.
In fact, for a Prime Minister faced with a bruising and bitter election campaign when the peculiar diet of empathy and kindness she had recommended as a panacea for the nation’s ills had mostly made things worse, her choice of whether to continue in high office must have seemed to her to have been devised by Hobson himself.
Very few commentators have been unkind enough to point out that Ardern had become Prime Minister in name only — as the entrenchment debacle last November showed.
Has there been a more pitiful sight than a Prime Minister abasing herself by claiming a late-night deal stitched up between her own Minister of Local Government and a senior Green MP to entrench an anti-privatisation clause in Three Waters legislation was a ”team” mistake?
It was painfully obvious that Ardern had to prostrate herself before Queen Nanaia, who remained entirely unrepentant about the humiliation she had visited on her boss (and her new boss, Chris Hipkins, as well, who was obliged to go along with the charade).
Everyone could see who held the whip hand — and it certainly wasn’t Ardern. – Graham Adams
The good news for Ardern is that much of the wider world doesn’t view her as the liability she had become for the Labour Party in New Zealand.
There has long been talk that, as Prime Minister, she was always conducting herself with one eye on the possibility of a plum job at the UN to take up post-politics, but she undoubtedly has other lucrative options as well. – Graham Adams
Ardern’s “values” will make her a shoo-in for addressing any “progressive” organisation keen, like her, on crimping free speech, and for those in favour of a “tweaked” democracy where the principle of “one person, one vote of equal value” is seen as “overly simplistic” — as she told Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q&A last July.
And she will be prized by any organisation, of course, that wants to hear paeans to kindness and empathy, or jeremiads about misinformation and disinformation.
New Zealand has clearly had enough of all that, but the world will soon be Ardern’s glistening oyster. – Graham Adams
Somehow or other we need to rub together and live lives which are productive, where we co-operate with each other, where we compete with each other but we don’t do terrible things to each other. – Judge John Brandts-Giesen
There is no point in you playing the colonisation card and saying that it’s all being caused by other people.
Ultimately you make your own luck. – Judge John Brandts-Giesen
Economists write about the “wealth effect”, how rising house prices make us feel wealthy. The average Auckland household has been amazed to discover they are millionaires. Of course, it is only on paper unless they sell their house.
But the wealth effect is real. People feel wealthier; they are more willing to invest and spend.
The poverty effect is just as real. Many Aucklanders have lost 20 per cent of their wealth in the last year. Despite Mayor Brown’s cost-cutting, the Auckland Council faces huge costs. The weekend’s rain event confirms that the city’s infrastructure deficit is enormous. – Richard Prebble
One of the advantages of our housing market is the willingness of Kiwis to move home. It makes for a flexible labour market. Downsizing in retirement means our housing stock is better utilised. A slowing housing market slows the whole economy.
For those forced to sell in a declining market, such as a divorce settlement, the house sale could be a life-changing loss in wealth.
As house prices have fallen all over the country, the poverty effect is countrywide.
There is nothing Hipkins can do about the poverty effect. Every month as the price of houses fall, home owners will feel poorer. Those with mortgages will have a double whammy, higher mortgage costs and a house that has lost value.
No matter how skilfully managed, it is events that overwhelm governments. – Richard Prebble
The Cabinet reshuffle yesterday was all the confirmation we needed, as I said yesterday, that this is the same old government doing the same old stuff.
Which is to be expected because they were never going to be able to just bring in fresh new experienced faces to shake everything up, because they don’t have any. – Kate Hawkesby
But here’s the biggest scandal in the whole thing, the most absurd, bizarre and inexplicable thing out of yesterday – well actually there’s two. But let’s start with the first one, the main one.
Michael Wood being made Minister for Auckland.
On what planet did Chris Hipkins look at the what Michael Wood’s been doing and go.. you know what? Awesome for Auckland. Let’s give him that.
I mean, come on, this is the guy that Aucklanders hate. And I mean loathe. And it smacks of a Wellington-based politician not to know that and be so disconnected from the real Auckland that he went so far as to put this guy in charge of it.
This is the guy whose genius idea was to build a cycle way across the Harbour bridge, which could not have attracted more protest and fall out before it got so unceremoniously canned. He’s also the guy who wants to lower the speed limits on all our roads. Thus grinding to a halt any productivity left in Auckland at all.
He’s also the guy wanting to dig up Auckland for light rail. As Transport Minister he’s done absolutely nothing about the woeful state of the roads, the potholes, the public transport, all of it’s a shambles.
Not only that – to make matters even worse, he’s also Immigration Minister. The very guy who has kept workers that very sector has been crying out for out of this country. Same guy.
The greatest irony of all was Hipkins comment on it which bordered on farce when he said, “When Auckland succeeds the country succeeds.” And yet, inexplicably, he thinks the guy who can help make that happen is the biggest impediment to success and productivity that Auckland’s ever seen. It beggars belief, doesn’t it? – Kate Hawkesby
What is Hipkins seeing in these guys that we are not? Or is it, as I said at the start, that the Labour party just doesn’t have any talent and that’s now been laid bare for us all to see. – Kate Hawkesby
In a cost of living crisis, does none of this not concern us?
Are there not better uses for the money? Is it not a lesson in working out what you want to do, how you want to do it and how determined you are to actually deliver, before you open the wallet filled with money you don’t actually have anyway?
I just don’t see how a bloke, and they are all blokes, can take a job that doesn’t exist, in an entity that may never exist, accepting tax payers dollars – to twiddle your thumbs in a transition group going potentially nowhere. – Mike Hosking
Events has also taught us another lesson, a potentially dangerous one for a consumer society that requires for its functioning the constant renewal of desire: namely that a great deal of what we covet, desire or think necessary for our happiness is of very marginal or no importance at all to our well-being. But this, too, is a lesson that is likely to be soon forgotten: for if we had truly understood it, we should not have needed to be taught it in the first place. Normal shallowness will be resumed as soon as possible, as power is restored after a brief interruption. – Theodore Dalrymple
The emotion caused by an intimation of mortality is difficult to disentangle completely from sorrow in itself at the death of someone whom one has known and esteemed. So long as they lived, I could deceive myself, at least partially, into believing that nothing fundamentally had changed since retirement: that life would go on for ever and that age could not wither us. It can, it does, and it must. – Theodore Dalrymple
The mental picture when that legislation was passed was of someone who would not cause any upset in a women-only changing room, toilet, ward or prison, because everyone would just accept he was a woman. Events of the last few days should have made it vivid to everybody that that is not the cohort we are dealing with now. The trans umbrella is now taken to include people . . . who cross-dress for erotic purposes. – Naomi Cunningham
The proof in the pudding that if you hand out free stuff people become addicted, is to be found in the already alarming concerns being expressed as to how life will continue at the end of this month, and then again, at the end of March when the fuel subsidies come off.
The warning is already out from the transport people over the price of everything that’s transported, which is, well, basically everything.
Costs will have to be passed on – it’s the phrase of the age.
It was always going to be that way even though petrol is cheaper now than it has been – oil is at $85 or so a barrel.- Mike Hosking
We do of course still have a cost of living crisis, which the subsidy was supposed to offset.
But as the figures have shown at 7.2 percent, it is clear we don’t have the slightest idea how to reduce inflation and giving out subsidised stuff so that costs can be passed on only leads to more and more inflation. Which leads to us asking for pay rises, which leads to more inflation and so it goes.
The only way out of inflation is to bite the bullet and soak up some pain.
But Governments aren’t into that, especially in election year, and we aren’t into it any year. Especially if we can simply cry that we are poor and we’ll pass the cost on anyway.
False economics aren’t hard to understand, but they are dangerous to dabble in and almost impossible to get out of. – Mike Hosking
You can’t understand the economy unless you understand human nature and human circumstance.
The conversations that resonate with me are when I meet with families, and I talk to them about the sacrifices they’re having to make in order to make their mortgage payments; when I talk to small businesses and I understand what their priorities are and what’s driving them nuts and what would actually help them turn the dial.
And you have those conversations when you’re on the ground and when you’re talking to people.
And so I think the hours I spend talking to mums and dads on the doorstep, talking to educators, talking to small business owners will be crucially important and making sure I’m in touch with the real economy. – Nicola Willis
We believe that we are not getting enough value out of the spending that’s currently occurring.
And we put that down to a lack of discipline and the way that that public service has been both instructed and held to account for performance.
We want to have a return to targets, clear, measurable, specific targets that both give clarity of where performance is, but also being encouraging collaboration and encouraging a focus on single issues.
We think this Government’s had a tendency to throw the kitchen sink at public agencies, and they are left wondering which bit to pick up and which bit to relax, and the result is that not enough gets done.
So we want to bring back targets in focus and more discipline and getting execution out of money. – Nicola Willis
There is no question that New Zealand, in order to be able to afford the living standards New Zealanders rightly expect, like the continued progress in improvement in frontline education and health services, then we will need to grow our capacity to pay for those things.
I think the best way to do that is by growing the productive capacity of the economy, and that’s where we have stood historically as a party; that if you want better services, you want to be able to afford the things that we all want, you grow your economy.
You have to back the productive sectors and businesses. – Nicola Willis
We think there are some things that are easily forgotten and that I fear the current administration is forgetting that are critical to growth and investment.
And they are business confidence, business certainty and a stable fiscal and regulatory environment, and by that, I mean some of the orthodoxies matter.
We think the Reserve Bank mandate measures should be focused on price stability.
We think having the willingness to review their performance with the amount of stimulus they did is really important.
We think that having a really laser focus on what is the cost of the regulatory burdens being imposed on our productive sector. “We think it’s important that you have capital flows working so that people can access funding.
We think it’s important that people can access labour; I think there’s been a tendency to think that the current immigration challenges are short term, are momentary, but I tend to think that we’re going to see a medium term demographic pressure where the rest of the world will be competing for skilled workers.
And we in New Zealand are going to have to make sure we’ve got our citizens and our offering right if we’re to have the people needed to fuel productive growth.
And I do think this question of being disciplined about the way the Crown does its part of the economy, how it delivers outcomes is also important. – Nicola Willis
I think New Zealand does get debt, and we are seeing now that a huge part of what’s driving our increase in costs are interest costs.
We are a small country; we are exposed.
We need to be prudent about debt but equally, and this is important; we do see the case for investment in productive infrastructure and infrastructure that supports good growth.
And we do need to make those long-term investments and consider New Zealand’s overall wealth position and not just not just the operating position.
And so those are the things that we’re weighing up.
But will we remain careful? Well, we remain fiscally orthodox. Yes, this is the National Party. – Nicola Willis
The extension is an extremely dumb economic policy; it gives three times as much support to those on the highest incomes who don’t need that much support, compared to those on the lowest incomes who need the support the most. – Brad Olsen
New Zealand is the second least corrupt country on earth according to the latest Corruption Perception Index published yesterday by Transparency International. But how much does this reflect reality?
The problem with being continually feted for world-leading political integrity – which the Beehive and government departments love to boast about – is that it causes complacency about the existence of real corruption and shortcomings in our democracy.
For example, one of the biggest failings in New Zealand’s political system is our entirely unregulated system of corporate-political lobbying. Unlike similar countries, we have virtually no laws and regulations to keep the political power of vested interests and the wealthy in check. This means that the lobbying industry is booming, and corporate lobbyists are able to move back and forwards between senior government positions and private businesses with almost nothing to prevent conflicts of interest. – Bryce Edwards
Lobbyists running the Beehive have become quite a recurring theme since Labour came to power. When Jacinda Ardern became prime minister in 2017 she immediately got rid of her existing Chief of Staff, Neale Jones, who straight away became a lobbyist. She then employed another well-known lobbyist, GJ Thompson, who helped set the Government up, employed the staff, and then shifted straight back to the private sector to help corporates lobby the Beehive.
Yesterday we learned PM Chris Hipkins has hired another lobbyist to run the Beehive – Andrew Kirton. The new Labour prime minister has therefore followed Ardern’s democratically dangerous precedent of bringing in someone from the world of corporate power and influence, who is likely to eventually go back to lobbying afterwards. – Bryce Edwards
The conflicts of interest involved in having corporate lobbyists come in and run governments are immense. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here in New Zealand, unusually, there are no rules preventing lobbyists from coming in and out of top political rules.
While lots of media analysis is given to the ministers running the country, especially when there are reshuffles, there is a lack of acknowledgement that it is the unelected officials in the Beehive who often have much more power and influence over what happens.
Therefore, it is disappointing that Kirton’s appointment is not receiving much publicity or scrutiny. So far, the news items about his appointment don’t even mention that he is a lobbyist, and instead there is a vague mention of him being a “PR man”. – Bryce Edwards
It’s time to have some clear rules about ministerial jobs and the lobbying industry. Currently, there is nothing in the Cabinet Manual to prevent the likes of Kris Faafoi or the various lobbyists from moving in and out of the Beehive. And of course, once Kirton finishes his job as Chief of Staff, perhaps in October, he will be free to go straight back into the corporate world lobbying government again.
At the very least, when lobbyists come into positions of political power they should have to manage their conflicts of interest with full transparency. If lobbyists are to be allowed to take on jobs running the Beehive, a condition of employment should be the full public disclosure of the clients of their lobbying firm. But don’t expect to find out who Kirton’s Anacta worked for anytime soon. This isn’t the culture in the Beehive.
When she was prime minister Jacinda Ardern was frequently lampooned for the promise that her government would be the most transparent government ever. We are yet to see how transparent Chris Hipkins will be, and how much he is willing to allow decision-making to be tied up with vested interests. But he is off to a very poor start by giving his top position to a corporate lobbyist. – Bryce Edwards
This Government, and the ministries that operate under it, have become far too comfortable with telling people to remain at home, and put their lives on hold.
Telling us to keep our kids out of school for a week is not a solution to a political problem.
It shows a frightening lack of critical thinking – an attribute that every senior leader should possess. – Rachel Smalley
You don’t stop kids in Otara from going to school because you want to clean up the streets in Herne Bay. Thankfully, the order to close has been lifted.
However, it also revealed just how reliant some of us have become on bureaucrats to tell us if our world is safe or not.
Know this. If you are a parent and you’re relying on a civil servant in an office in Wellington to tell you whether it’s safe for your child to go to school in Auckland, then you are doing it all wrong.
You, as a parent or caregiver, are your child’s first and last line of defence. You decide. You do a risk assessment of your family’s circumstances, and you make the call. You know your child, you know your school, you know your suburb. It’s what we do as parents – we respond and react to the world and environment around us, to help our children learn and grow and negotiate life.
And at the same time, every day we place our trust in our child’s school. We trust them to make the right decisions. To protect them. To respond to a wide set of ever-changing circumstances and to ensure they are safe. That’s why the Ministry should have passed the decision over to Principals to decide if their school could open or not. – Rachel Smalley
Parent. Look around you. You know what to avoid and what to do to keep your child safe. And it may be, in your area, that the safest option is to keep your child at home. Or your school may choose to stay closed. But that’s because you, as a grown-up, have made informed decisions about your child and the situation you’re operating in. You’re not waiting for a government ministry or the local council to tell you how to think.
What else irks me about this? Decisions like a blanket closure teach our children to avoid adversity, and to shy away from any situation that, God forbid it might help them build resilience. We’re teaching them that if it’s a bit challenging outside, stay at home. If you come across a few roadblocks on the pathway of life, step back from them and wait for someone to clear them away for you. Don’t try and find a solution.
And we are also teaching children that they are not in control of their own destiny….that there is no such thing as self-determination, and if in doubt they should always look for an institution or an organisation that will tell them what to do.
Instead, we should be teaching our children that every problem provides an opportunity for a solution. Yes, it’s wet outside. Yes, there are slips and challenges. And yes, it might be a bit scary. But this is how we’re going to mitigate those risks and concerns. It’s called life. And sometimes, it ain’t easy.
Let’s stop living in a nanny state. This is New Zealand, for goodness sake. So if you think it’s safe and you have the means to do so, put some gumboots on your kids, and get them off to school. – Rachel Smalley
That New Zealand has not been out of the top two places for a decade is testament to our commitment to being a transparent and honest democracy.
However, I note that over the years, New Zealand’s score has declined from 91 to 87. It is also concerning that Transparency International has pointed to a ‘gradual decline’ in three of the eight indexes that contribute to our global ranking. – Peter Boshier
We live in a world where opinion can pass as fact and misinformation can be easily spread. Now, more than ever, we need a public service, judiciary and government beyond reproach, – Peter Boshier
You can’t provide a clean car subsidy AND subsidise petrol at the same time. That’s like David Lange banning nuclear warships, and at the same time he’s enriching uranium in Eketahuna.
Honestly, can anyone in our revenue and tax entities in Wellington think critically? Was there another solution? Can’t we support our most vulnerable kiwis in another way?
If you lower fuel prices, it will increase consumption and isn’t it extraordinary, that the same party who told us five years ago that climate change was our nuclear-free moment will now consider it a vote-winner to subsidise a fossil fuel.
If you believe in climate change, then live your truth people. You can’t yell at society to act on climate change, and then drink from a subsidised fuel pump.
There are better ways to provide targeted relief to kiwis – it just requires the Government to implement policy, instead of chasing populism. – Rachel Smalley
Social discourse is the tool of social interaction that acts as a carrier of meanings, ideas and values in society.
Wrapped up in that are manners and etiquette.
Etiquette is the set of norms of personal behaviour in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviours that accord with the conventions and norms observed and practised by a society.
Manners are a way of behaving towards other people. – Steve Wyn-Harris
I know I’m not alone in thinking that what seems like an old fashioned idea – that good manners are important – is still as relevant today as always.
I’m not religious but the Bible’s Golden Rule, “so in everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you …” (Matthew 7:12) is a sound principle. So sound that all other religions have similar rules of conduct.
I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable about the change in social discourse in recent years. Not just in this country but all around the world.
Social media is not the primary cause but it certainly allows keyboard warriors to express their outrage and nastiness, often behind anonymity. – Steve Wyn-Harris
When you hear that your prime minister – whoever that may be – has protection because of the number of death threats but, worse, so do her partner and four-year-old child, also because of threats, a rational and sane person has to believe that this is not the country we want it to be.
The threats need to be taken seriously because the mosque shootings show there are individuals even within this society who go beyond being keyboard warriors.
It’s not just the likes of politicians and journalists who have hate and unpleasantness directed at them in these times. – Steve Wyn-Harris
None of us is ever going to agree with everyone else’s ideas or policies, and there are some people we may not particularly like.
But don’t we all want to live in a civil society that functions peacefully and where manners are important and other people aren’t threatening our own family members or directing public hatred in our direction?
Well, I do, and it may be a naïve position to take but we as a society should learn from this recent experience and as individuals do everything to discourage this behaviour. – Steve Wyn-Harris
But history will record the Ardern government as our most incompetent with a legacy of disastrous decisions. Not only was Hipkins a key player in those hugely damaging blunders but he lacks any leadership imagery and instead oozes an uninspiring scout-masterly zeal. – Sir Bob Jones
White privilege is a myth. There are white people who are dirt poor and white people who are filthy rich. The racism of the Oscars is a myth, too. Witness the recent stunning successes for Latino directors, Korean directors, black-themed movies. As for Riseborough’s ‘privilege’ – this brilliant, chameleon-like actress has now been brutally reduced to her skin colour alone and there is virtually nothing she can do to push back against that. If she protests, she’ll be accused of ‘white fragility’, of shedding ‘white tears’, of using her power as a ‘white woman’ to harm others. She has been racialised and silenced. Some privilege that is. It’s clear as anything now: the new elites use the shaming accusation of ‘privilege’ to protect and extend the true privilege they themselves enjoy. – Brendan O’Neill
The great irony of the current political landscape is that without a viable centre party, Labour and National’s race towards the centre risks being undone by the parties to their extreme. – Thomas Coughlan
This week I see with horror a headline online ‘Three Waters appoints three CEOs’ and my worse fears were realized… Business as usual.
So, this was the kind of bread and butter stuff affecting struggling New Zealanders that Hipkins our new PM was referring to addressing? Fine words Chris, but behind the scenes nothing has changed.
Same circus different ring master – Wendy Geus
Through her great wit, expressed through her characters, Jane Austen offends everyone in her novels. She is the mistress of offence. That’s why we love her work. Students love her too.
But some academics still seem to think their students are snowflakes and need coddling. How often do we have to remind them, and university management, that students are adults? They must stop infantilising them. – Professor Dennis Hayes
There are deep problems with “kindness” as a political philosophy. If kindness is the answer to all problems, then the problems must be caused by unkindness. And people who disagree with you must be unkind people. Obviously you don’t have to listen when unkind people try to tell you anything. And you certainly don’t have to offer them the same concern or compassion as other people. Their unkindness is their own fault. You don’t have to do anything for it, or for them. And so “kindness” ends up being without empathy, the opposite of inclusion. Adern’s inability to deal with people who disagreed with or were disadvantaged by her government’s policies was striking. She seldom even attempted to speak to them and seemed incapable of winning over anyone who opposed her. In the end, her promise was empty. When policy problems could not be solved by having good intentions or meaning well, she had little more to offer. About a month before Christmas she announced that from now on she was going to concentrate on the economy, which begs the question: what had she been doing before then? Once she felt the need to grapple directly with the issues that most other responsible politicians concentrate on and struggle to solve, it seems that her motivation ebbed away. A fairy tale is over. Let’s hope there is going to be a happy ending. – Ian Thorpe
Journalism hinges on words. Used properly, they are precision tools. But a generation of journalists has emerged which doesn’t hesitate to use ideologically loaded terms of denigration to discredit people they don’t approve of.
Some of this can be put down to sheer ignorance – the inevitable result of an education system that produces journalists with only a rudimentary grasp of the English language and which does little to encourage respect for the accurate use of words.
To read any newspaper, even some of the more reputable ones, is to gasp at the amateurish writing and the frequency of solecisms that would in the past have been intercepted and corrected by sub-editors. – Karl du Fresne
Ignorance, however, only goes so far as an explanation for the misuse of words. A lot of it is attributable to prejudice and malice, most of it ideologically based. Hence the frequency with which we see the use of conveniently vague but disparaging terms such as far-right, alt-right, racist, fascist and misogynist – labels used to discredit any political position that doesn’t align with those of the political, bureaucratic, academic and media elites. (It’s another striking paradox that while we supposedly have a proliferation of malignant groups on the right, it’s almost unheard of for the media to describe any person, group or political party as “far left” – still less to suggest that anyone qualifying for that description could have less than wholly noble motives.)
The absurd and dangerous term “hate speech” should be seen in the same light. In the woke glossary adopted by the mainstream media, “hate speech” means any expression of opinion that upsets someone. But the term is used very selectively, because those pushing for the adoption of so-called hate speech laws are not remotely interested in protecting the feelings or opinions of people they dislike. On the contrary, they freely indulge in vile and repugnant invective against them. Hate speech laws are intended by their backers to run one way only: to shield people and ideas they approve of. – Karl du Fresne
Perhaps more to the point, the loaded phrase “hate speech” has been promoted with no regard for the real meaning of that word “hate”, which describes an emotion so extreme and intense that historically it has led to genocide and other atrocities. By applying the term to the expression of opinions that do no more than offend sensitive minority groups, the language activists have grossly misappropriated its meaning. But it serves the valuable purpose, for them, of providing a pretext for the outlawing of ideas they don’t like.
All this has implications for public trust in journalism. When readers can no longer rely on words being used with accuracy and respect for their established meaning, and when derogatory labels are used as lazy substitutes for accuracy and considered analysis, with not even a fig leaf of substantiation, journalism loses its moral authority. It risks being reduced to the level of propaganda, vilification and simplistic sloganeering. – Karl du Fresne
It’s grimly ironic that the same techniques are now used in the Western media by people who smugly think of themselves as liberal. The “othering” of dissenters is an inevitable (and make no mistake, intended) consequence.
I wonder, do those impostor journalists who so freely use damning terms such as “misogynist” stop to think what the words actually mean? – Karl du Fresne
That such accusations are self-evidently preposterous doesn’t stop those who make them. And the frightening thing is that this virulent bigotry appears to have permeated the highest levels of the news media, where editorial gatekeepers decide what stories to cover and which opinions New Zealanders should be exposed to. – Karl du Fresne
Inflation is high and the government says we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, with groceries and building materials front and centre. But those Korean companies’ roofing steel, along with galvanised wire from Malaysia and China, are hit with anti-dumping duties. So you’re protected from affordable building products. Doesn’t it warm your heart? Tariffs are love. – Dr Eric Crampton
https://twitter.com/PronouncedHare/status/1621238368129662976
It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will are not likely to be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.
Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world. – Pamela Paul
Most important of all, though, is that the bill has made clear that deadly violence of this sort and words are all on the same spectrum. Making a joke about someone’s God, saying that there are only two sexes – there’s little, of course, to distinguish such things from terrorist atrocities.
This is crucial, since our society has previously been acting on the assumption that speech and violence are significantly different, and that it’s precisely our ability to discuss things that allows us to avoid ghastly violence.
What fools we were! – Dr James Kierstead
When violent crime has increased by nearly a third, ram raids are continuing largely unchecked, and when Kiwis continue to face unacceptably long delays in the courts, any sensible Justice Minister would focus on effective responses to those challenges.
Hate speech legislation by contrast is not needed, and it will unnecessarily narrow free speech and expression in our country. – Paul Goldsmith
A fallacy that may have relevance this week is argumentum ad novitatem (‘appeal to novelty’). This fallacy is committed when a claim is made that a new thing is better than an old one, simply because it’s new.
Like other fallacies, the appeal to novelty has intuitive appeal. People like shiny new things and are biased towards thinking they’re better than old ones.
Two political polls were released last Monday evening. They were the first out since Chris Hipkins’ elevation to the Premiership. In both, the Labour government enjoyed increases in support of about five percentage points.
On Kiwiblog, pollster David Farrar listed the change in support for both major parties in the first poll following each leadership change since 1974. Following 17 of the 20 changes, the relevant party’s support rose. Yet only three of those new leaders went on to win the following election. –
Whether or not appeal-to-novelty has anything to do with this week’s poll results, Farrar’s data suggest that it often influences voters’ views of new leaders.
Democratic elections work most effectively if people cast their votes rationally. But the pattern of new leaders enjoying an initial rise in support only to go on to lose, is just one of many phenomena that challenge that assumption.
Even so, free elections entail the freedom to vote irrationally. And despite our all-too-human flaws, democracy has yielded the most prosperous societies in history. – Dr Michael Johnston
As a libertarian when a government cuts taxes I am pleased, even ones that are purportedly a user fee, because in fact so much of what is collected from those user fees is not directed to services consumed by the users – in this case fuel tax and road user charges. It would, after all, be much better if the amount collected was what is needed to pay to maintain and upgrade the roads, rather than be directed to pet projects designed to “change behaviour” (subsidise transport modes you aren’t willing to pay to use),.
However, it reeks of hypocrisy, as the Ardern/Hipkins Government proceeds to undermine a land transport funding system that once was seen as a shining example in a world where political pork barrelling is so often the order of the day (see Australia and the United States). It’s much more than that though. – Liberty Scott
So you have a Labour Government that says tax cuts (proposed by National and ACT) will threaten health and education…. but then implements tax cuts, completely blanking out the fact that this either means less money for other spending or it means more borrowing – for tax cuts. How “sustainable” is that?
It says tax cuts will benefit the rich the most, and then implements tax cuts that do just that.
It says cutting fuel tax will jeopardise spending on transport, and then implements tax cuts on fuel.
Finally, it claims climate change is the great crisis that especially needs New Zealand, the country that emits 0.09% of global CO2 emissions must radically change how it lives, by constraining private motoring, but then subsidises road use like no government in recent history.
Votes are much more precious that policy objectives though, as is leaving a fiscal bomb for the other side if the election is lost, although if it were up to me, the next government could think long and hard about whether it subsidises public transport and rail from general taxes anyway (assuming it wants to do that), and leaving fuel tax and RUC for roads only. – Liberty Scott
In my experience, everyone supports the right to freedom of speech, as long as it’s their own speech or the speech of people they agree with. But most speech falls outside that category. Most people would ask: why support the right of people to say things you hate, or fear or that you regard as dangerous?
That’s an intuitively reasonable question. I like some of what some people say, am indifferent to a lot of what is said and think we’d all be better off if some of what is said was never said. – Ira Glasser
Why defend the right of people to express views when such people, if they gained the power to do so, would eliminate my views, and maybe eliminate me?
For me, the answer is strategic. I can never be certain who will have political power. I can never be certain that the only people who get elected will agree with me. I know – because it has happened many times – that people will gain political power who will, if they can, act to punish me or people I agree with, because of our views. So what I need is an insurance policy. I want insurance against the probability that people in power will suppress or punish me for my views. – Ira Glasser
Sustainable energy, infrastructure, climate change mitigation and the continuation of modern life as we know it relies on mining,” Vidal says. “This is why the world is demanding more mining, not less, and certainly not bans on new mining or anti-mining rhetoric to politically play to a few.
“It would be concerning if by taking an anti-mining stance in this Bill, ideology isolated New Zealand from the rest of the world in the quest to resource a better future with minerals, responsibly mined in an employment environment that values worker health and safety, working conditions, and remuneration.
“The way we mine in New Zealand, within strict employment laws and stringent environmental rules and regulations is a benefit. It is not the case the world over. When people start looking at the provenance of their mined minerals, we are a country that stands out on the side of good. – Josie Vidal
It’s been over a week, and it’s remarkable that Jacinda Ardern has simply disappeared from the politics of a country she exercised almost unprecedented levels of power over, for the previous few years. The (leftwing statist post-modernist identitarian) world has cried out “why”, and far too many have come to the conclusion that it’s no doubt sexism (in the country that gave her the greatest electoral mandate of any Prime Minister since 1951, and had previously had two female Prime Ministers).
However, Ardern’s resignation appears on the face of it to reflect two things:
- Fatigue from someone who isn’t intellectually or emotionally able to handle the time and the stress of the position
- Fear of an election campaign during which scrutiny will be its highest and the chance of defeat the strongest yet. – Liberty Scott
Of course in this neo-identitarian political age (a variation on classic chauvinistic identitarianism), Ardern’s age and sex were notable as an “achievement”, enhanced by her clearly being someone who never seemed to covet the role (which is now born out by her fatigability), made her a darling of international media. The Anglosphere in particular is dominated by mono-linguistic types who pay little attention to the likes of Sanna Marin, the Finnish (young female) Prime Minister who chose to ignore the wrath of Vladimir Putin and seek Finland’s membership of NATO. –
Ardern was notable for embracing an explicitly sympathetic and emotional image to leadership, and for declaring how kindness in government is a virtue. This is extraordinary from a politician who has led a government that, by and large, has sought to take more of people’s money, borrow more from future generations and to direct and centrally manage and control more intensely than any government since the Muldoon era.
I suppose Ardern will regard the generosity of her government with welfare benefits to be “kindness”, which of course is really kindness with other people’s money. That “kindness” certainly will have relieved some poverty, but also contributes towards a dependency on other people’s money, and the labour shortage that has emerged since the end of Covid restrictions. – Liberty Scott
New Zealand has both a critical skills shortage, a restrictive approach to immigration and is generous to those who don’t want to work, but Ardern can’t connect the dots. At no point has this government noted that being too “kind” with other people’s money encourages people to be economically idle.
The reality of the “kindness” narrative is no joke to the victims of ramraid attacks, and the growth in crime, because the “kindness” is interpreted as there being an easy ride for perpetrators. The fact so many of the victims are recent migrants who own businesses is a community that maybe sees less kindness in the rhetoric, particular the notion that the reason some young people drive cars to steal stuff is claimed to be poverty, rather than opportunistic nihilism.
Another group not feeling the kindness includes immigrants who invested time and money into New Zealand and have been told to fuck off back home leave. – Liberty Scott
Ardern’s Government was kind to the “right” kind of people, such as people working in horse racing, international film producers, America’s Cup syndicate employees, minstrels performing and businesspeople with stands at the Dubai Expo. Average New Zealanders don’t have that sort of “pull”.
Then there are the Afghans who helped New Zealand forces not getting automatic visas to move to NZ after the Taliban took over. What could be less kind that for people who worked with foreign forces not being granted residency when their psychopathic totalitarian enemy takes over? However, the Ardern Government’s attitude to foreign policy was more about signalling virtue than substance. Calling for a ban on nuclear weapons is the sort of naive student politics that demeaned Ardern, as was calling climate change her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”. Then again if she meant New Zealand taking action that would have no impact on a global issue or problem (which is what the nuclear ban achieved) then she might have been right.
A lot of money has been spent by the Ardern Government, yet the performance of public services continues to be woeful, not least because the incentives of prioritising the interests of vocal professional unions are not on consumers of those services. – Liberty Scott
The narrative now being conveniently trotted out about Ardern is the abuse she receives from critics, and certainly no one can justify threats of violence against her and her family. Yet her main opponent in 2020 was Judith Collins, and abuse of her is largely brushed to one side, and of course many of those who decry abuse of Ardern are more than happy to tolerate abuse of male politicians as Graham Adams wrote in The Platform. I’m old enough to remember the constant references to Robert Muldoon as “piggy”, and the idea that somehow people shouldn’t be able to throw pejoratives at women in power any less than men is rather chilling. People have the right to call their leaders names and be rude about them, even if it is puerile and they don’t like it, what they don’t have the right to do is to threaten them. Ardern undoubtedly gets some nasty threats, and different ones from men because she is a woman, but it’s intellectually lazy polemics to claim that the country that granted Ardern a remarkable mandate in 2020 is also dripping misogynistic hatred of women in power (despite having also granting a mandate for Helen Clark to govern for nine years), when hatred of men in power is just brushed over as part of the game.
It’s good for Ardern to give up, nobody should be in the job if they find it too difficult, but just over a week on, and it is clear that Hipkins has just tweaked the dials, and done little other than give the impression he’s a bit less woke-authoritarian, and he’s more than willing to extend unfunded tax cuts (fuel tax/RUC discount) and say he’s “reviewing” policies that Ardern and her whole government were dead keen on hanging their hats on. – Liberty Scott
My observation of the week is a lot of people didn’t really perform the way they should have.
But as I have said several times this week, I wasn’t expecting them to.
This country has been littered over the years with various disasters that weren’t dealt to properly because the people who frequent the emergency and civil defence offices are fairly mediocre.
You can add the Ministry of Education in this time around. Blame Wayne all you want but their performance was spectacular in its level of incompetence. – Mike Hosking
Wayne is a cantankerous old sod who doesn’t suffer fools. But here’s the thing – we knew that.
I think I might have had the advantage over many who got all agitated, given I wasn’t expecting much from anyone, I wasn’t disappointed.
You see, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t ignore local body politics the way most people do and then get grumpy when they don’t perform, it’s a two-way street. – Mike Hosking
Which brings us to the media. He doesn’t like the media and the media don’t like him.
Add also the fact the media in general take themselves too seriously. So when he calls them drongos, 1) he is right but, 2) they shouldn’t get so tetchy about it.
Wayne isn’t setting the world on fire but equally there is no doubt in my mind the media are out to get Wayne because they wanted Efeso Collins to win and they can’t believe the rest of the world doesn’t think like they do. – Mike Hosking
Which brings us back to the start of this – if we all actually participated in democracy a bit better this whole week might have been a lot different. – Mike Hosking
Journalists fawned over Jacinda Ardern and never highlighted her well-documented capacity to say one thing (“He Puapua hasn’t been to Cabinet”) while her ministers were busy implementing its recommendations. When the change came, journalists were happy to accept Chris Hipkins and laud his past achievements without being too specific about what they were. It was left to others to point out that under his watch as Minister of Education 50% of Kiwi kids were now wagging school. – Michael Bassett
Nor has any media outlet that I’ve seen probed the new Prime Minister’s confusing early utterances on co-governance. Yes, journalists informed us that neither Ardern nor Hipkins seemed to know the three short clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi, something in itself I’d have thought warranted comment? Hipkins tells us that he thinks co-governance hasn’t been explained adequately to the wider public who find the concept confusing. One might therefore have expected journalists to delve into what, precisely, the government meant when ministers incorporated this “misunderstood” concept into lots of Acts of Parliament over recent years? It might well have carried different meanings in different Acts. How will we ever know? – Michael Bassett
But of course, if the term “co-governance” can’t be adequately understood by the wider public, how on earth can “mahi tahi”? Constant use of improperly translated Maori words for everyday concepts in a world where only 3% of the overall population can speak Maori fluently lies near the heart of the public’s current unease with this government. The rush to re-name government departments, health facilities, universities with Maori names that almost nobody understands, not to mention the errors of fact that lie behind much of the New Zealand history curriculum signed off by Chris Hipkins as Minister of Education, and now taught in schools, is deeply worrying. People have a right to be able to comprehend the world in which they live and pay taxes. The nuts and bolts of co-governance must be spelled out by Labour’s ministers. – Michael Bassett
The longer this government is in power Maori demands keep ratcheting up. A clear explanation of co-governance is urgently needed. It is the responsibility of the Prime Minister to provide that. It shouldn’t be left to the unelected Judiciary. Nor can it be left to interested parties to provide their own versions.
What is becoming clear is that this Labour government is swimming out of its depth. In their determination to empower Maori with legislative authority and resources beyond what their population warrants, the wider public sees a growth of racial division throughout the land. Even if the new Prime Minister manages to redefine what he means by co-governance he won’t succeed in convincing 83% of the population of New Zealand that enhancing the rights of a small minority of the population over the rights of everyone else will do anything more than keep irritating the political scene. The reality is that Maori, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, Asians and those from other parts have equal rights if they are citizens of New Zealand. Article 3 of the Treaty that neither Ardern nor Hipkins seems to have read guarantees “the same rights and duties of citizenship” to all.
As they go about their jobs, media editors would be wise to remember that they owe a greater loyalty to the words of the Treaty than to the Labour government that is paying them out of the Public Interest Journalism Fund. It is public money, not a party political handout. Keep on behaving as you are and you guarantee that the PIJF will soon come to an end. – Michael Bassett
Note to trans activists: no amount of cosmetic surgery turns a man into a woman. – Brendan O’Neill
Just when you thought the trans ideology couldn’t get any crankier, here comes the face reveal. This is when a man who’s becoming a woman, or thinks he’s becoming a woman, takes to social media to unveil his surgically ‘feminised’ face to the world. Gone is his square jaw and big nose, fleshy giveaways of maleness, and in their place is a thinner, more dinky nose and pert cheekbones. Behold my womanly visage! It’s like a woke version of PT Barnum’s museum of freaks. Barnum pulled back the curtain to reveal women with beards – the face reveal invites us to roll up, roll up and gawk at the man who turned into a lady. – Brendan O’Neill
The cult of the face reveal tells us a lot about the woke moment, none of it good. First, there’s the staggering and sexist double standards when it comes to cosmetic surgery. For decades now, the cultural elites have sneered at women who’ve gone under the knife to get a smaller nose or bigger breasts. Whether it was the Baywatch beauties of the Nineties getting silicone implants or even the Essex girls of the Noughties going for a less invasive vajazzle (Google it), the verdict was always the same: what shallow, self-obsessed broads! Yet now we’re meant to fawn over men who undergo insanely more meddlesome surgery in the mistaken belief that it will make them women. The same kind of talking heads who were aghast at vajazzles think a penectomy followed by vaginoplasty is absolutely fine (Google it. Actually, don’t.) – Brendan O’Neill
The language our society uses changes dramatically when it comes to male-to-‘female’ surgery. Women’s cosmetic procedures are always jobs: ‘boob jobs’, ‘nose jobs’. Words like ‘plastic’ and ‘fake’ are bandied around. Magazines publish lists of celebs rumoured to have fake boobs. Trans surgery, in contrast, is ‘healthcare’. ‘Gender-affirming healthcare’, they call it. One outlet described Mulvaney’s FFS as a ‘trans-healthcare milestone’. It would be a brave soul who referred to a transwoman’s breasts as fake or plastic. They’d be cancelled in an instant. Which is ironic, because transwomen’s breasts are fake. The likes of Pamela Anderson are accentuating their real breasts when they have cosmetic surgery, whereas men who identify as women are basically giving themselves glorified moobs when they take ‘titty skittles’, as Grace Lavery refers to progesterone supplements.
These double standards expose one of the most sinister elements of the trans ideology: its belief that transwomen are not only actual, literal women but are better women than biological women. They’re the truest women. Embrace ‘your true self with gender-reassignment surgery’, surgeons say. We’re told that, through radical surgery, men who want to be women can ‘become their real self’ and find their ‘true identity’. Real, true – it’s about as far as you can get from the ‘fake tits’ discourse that swirls around women who have cosmetic procedures. The implication is that the body of the man who ‘becomes a woman’ is more authentic than the body of an actual woman, because he had to suffer so much to get it. His ‘femaleness’ is hard won, and thus holier. – Brendan O’Neill
The entire idea of FFS – as I will be calling it from now on – is misogynistic. It really does reduce womanhood to costume, to performance, a mask that can be pulled on by anyone, including those of us who have penises. – Brendan O’Neill
The belief that some hormones, a bit of face chiselling and a name change are all it takes to become a woman is profoundly chauvinistic. It robs womanhood of its biological, social and relational truths and makes it mere garb, to be donned by all who desire – Brendan O’Neill
This is trans activism summed up: the entire category of woman undemocratically reimagined and rebranded to make it inclusive of men. They really are happy to overthrow millennia’s worth of science and truth, especially the truth that women don’t have dicks, just to make themselves feel better when they’re strutting around the pool in a two-piece. – Brendan O’Neill
Here’s the thing, though: Mulvaney is only a zanier expression of the sexist self-delusion that underpins the entire modern trans movement. Dylan, you raised Frankenstein, and now it falls to me to tell you that just as Frankenstein’s monster never became human, so people born male never become female. No matter how much FFS they have. – Brendan O’Neill
The policing of harmless language is becoming more ridiculous by the day. –Simon Evans
The Associated Press (AP) had a good deal of oeuf on its mush last week, after one of its Twitter accounts warned journalists not to refer to the French as ‘the French’, as this could be dehumanising and offensive. – Simon Evans
The French were not singled out by the AP as a sensitive, easily diminished race. They were in a list of categories, with whom equal caution was advised. Most of the others, however, would be more universally pitied or condemned, such as ‘the poor’, ‘the mentally ill’ and ‘the college-educated’. So you can see why the French got le hump. After the French embassy in the US mockingly changed its name to ‘the embassy of Frenchness’, the AP apologised and deleted its tweet.
The AP’s general idea is that when the definite article (‘the’) is used to, well, define articles, to create sets, it can feel restrictive and even narrow to those who find themselves inside those lines. They would like to think they have more to offer to the world than their shackles. And I do understand that. Especially when those words gesture to a stereotype. – Simon Evans
The AP’s view is that one should find softer terms that suggest any given category is just a shade or perhaps a footnote in a person’s life – almost an afterthought, rather than a hard outline. Rather than ‘the poor, the mentally ill and the college-educated’, we should say things like: ‘Those living without funds, those facing mental-health challenges and those burdened by delusions of competence, aka bleeding know-it-alls.’ The problem is that this is only a mincing step away from the knowingly ridiculous, absurdly genteel variations you sometimes hear, such as ‘animals of the canine persuasion’. – Simon Evans
It’s all very depressing. And this, remember, is not some deluded student body or a small municipal committee that has been captured by the woke. This is the AP – by some distance the largest and most authoritative news agency in the English-speaking world, and the source of the default style guide to writing elegant journalese. This is the guide hacks resort to in order to avoid getting hacked up by the sub. This is going to affect the copy you read (elsewhere at least).
While it’s obviously delightful, as a rosbif, to see insinuations of Frenchitude treated as if they were as intrinsically insulting as a ‘your mum’ joke, there is a wider if rather joyless point that needs making here, too – about the pointlessness of policing language.
The reason this nonsense is ever coiling around our ankles is very similar to the reason that we have, every day now, some fresh outrage in the name of trans rights or diversity, equity and inclusion. It speaks to a determination to overthrow the tyranny of language. It arises from a suspicion that language itself is to blame for human behaviour – that language has not so much described the world, but has created it.
It is possible, of course, to dehumanise a group by focussing on one aspect of its character, whether it is a nationality or something morally freighted. But you are not going to stop people making assessments of people, and noticing how groups vary. Nor – within limits – should you. Pattern recognition is a key human trait. It’s part of what makes us so adorably goofy. – Simon Evans
It might be hoped that this little French embarrassment alerts the AP to the folly of its Grail quest of creating a more sensitive lingua franca. Every so often, I like to hope that institutions like this, when captured by some mutant form of political correctness, will one day catch sight of themselves in the mirror, and like B-movie zombies – sorry, people living with being dead – recoil with horror. – Simon Evans
Comment on the merger of polytechnics and industry training boards was conspicuously hard to find when the virtues of new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins were laid out.
No doubt, Labour was keen to give minimal mention to the unwise changes and the costly and delayed transition that was taking place under Mr Hipkins’ watch as minister of education.
The media, in the traditional honeymoon period for new prime ministers, had other focuses. Mr Hipkins, at least for now, received a free pass.
But the merger, ill-thought-out from the start, has been a dog.
It has taken towards four years, has already built an expensive bureaucracy and it will do little to help those who really matter, the “learners”. The establishment budget from the Government to the end of last year was $121million (although costs also have been put at $200million), and a lot more is going to be needed. – ODT
The Government has told New Zealanders that the primary goal of the Three Waters reform is to deliver good water services and related infrastructure in an efficient and financially sustainable manner. And the Auckland floods have certainly underscored the importance of reliable water infrastructure (though whether it is advantageous to wrest the responsibility for stormwater away from local councils, where it sits rather logically alongside urban planning, and centralise it, is an open question). The problem is that next to nobody believes that the plan that’s on the table is going to do the trick.
The WSEs will be so encumbered by a toxic combination of debt and dictates and directives that there is a risk that good water services in New Zealand are never delivered at a reasonable cost. And moreover, there is also considerable risk that one or more of the entities staggers under its massive debt and falls foul of the attendant covenants while in the midst of a multibillion-dollar build programme (recall that the plan is for these WSEs to quickly shoulder debt that amounts to some 8x their Ebitda, a load which S&P describes as “highly leveraged”). – Kate MacNamara
The competencies on the boards will need to include mātauranga Māori, or traditional Māori knowledge. And it’s not hard to imagine how a contemporary interpretation of Māori knowledge might find itself in conflict with some of the other public goods the WSEs are supposed to pursue: efficiency for example or financial discipline.
And there’s more. All iwi and hapū in the area covered by each of the WSEs will have the right to formulate directives, known as “te mana o te wai statements”, for their respective WSE. The scope of these is very loose and could extend to anything from employment and investment goals to environmental protection. We have little idea of how these directives will be used, only that the cost of improving the skills of Māori to participate in guiding the delivery of water services is, according to the DIA, an uncalculated cost and one that it will be borne by the new WSEs and therefore paid by water ratepayers.
There are hundreds of iwi and hapū in each of the water services areas (with the possible exception of area D, the lower South Island), and there may be hundreds of such directives, possibly conflicting one with another or with Wellington’s Government Policy Statement for the entities, or with the strategic direction from the Regional Representative Groups, or with the priorities of local councils and ratepayers, or with the stipulations of either of the two water regulators (economic and water quality). – Kate MacNamara
Hipkins would need a powerful spell to get it past his Māori caucus, but it could earn him a new desk plaque. A cursory search of the internet’s novelty shops for options throws up: Suck less. It’s not much of an election slogan but in the age of aspirational goals in politics, it’s a start. – Kate MacNamara
Trust the Italians to know what a woman is. The land where the twin peaks of femininity are the mamma and the sex bomb has a separate jail exclusively for ‘transwomen’. – Julie Burchill
In the current trans debate, both sides see their humanity and dignity disrespected by either of the options on offer (make people with penises use male facilities even if they answer to ‘Penelope’ / allow female facilities to be swamped in male genitalia). Yet whenever a third way is suggested, like the Italian prison solution, it’s notable that the trans activists get very cross indeed. This is telling. If they really fear male violence in public conveniences or other sex-segregated spaces as much as they claim, a third option would be perfectly acceptable to them. But if their desire is to gain access to women’s private spaces, then they will hold out for that option.
Only a very silly person indeed believes that transwomen are only ever shrinking violets who just want to press wild flowers and urinate sitting down. Many of them are dirty great bruisers who could easily work as bouncers if the bottom fell out of the sissy-porn market. Make no mistake, trans ‘rights’ is the first ‘liberation’ movement both inspired and fuelled by pornography. Various ages and trials of a woman’s life can be sexualised, from the trans predilection for dressing up as little girls to the ghastly fake babies (don’t ask), which allow men to ape gestation and childbirth. Lesbians, of course, are the most loved and hated targets of these autogynephiles, which is thoroughly in line with porn-scored desires. – Julie Burchill
Incarcerated women have been failed by society every step of the way. Now, to take their wretchedness to another level, they are asked to meekly submit to an experiment in which convicted rapists are placed among them.
The fact that privileged female MPs who call themselves feminists put the porn-fuelled desires of men, even of rapists, over the rights of the most vulnerable women in society is a very bad look indeed. – Julie Burchill
A visitor to New Zealand who read the Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills would assume our country was populated largely by Māori tribes whose customs and traditional knowledge could solve resource management challenges. In reading the Bills in more depth she would infer the tribes were impeded in using their knowledge by a powerful, yet unhelpful entity termed “the Crown.” To her relief she would then “learn” that 183 years ago the tribes and Crown had signed a Treaty which stipulated principles and the Crown’s obligations in relation to Māori. Legislation based on these principles and obligations was being enacted to ensure Māori had adequate input into natural and built environment and spatial planning issues. – Dr Peter Winsley
However, when reading the Bills in isolation she would not realise that self-identified Māori make up only about 16% of the New Zealand population, and almost all have some non-Māori blood. Furthermore, few live on tribal land or live in tribal ways. If our visitor then read the Treaty itself, she would learn that the Crown obligations and principles stated were not actually from the Treaty and had in fact been invented from the 1980s on by judicial, political, and tribal activists. She would be surprised to learn that the Bills largely ignored 84% of the New Zealand population.
However, the biggest surprise of all would be the argument legislators seemed to be making that resources are best managed using Māori tribal customs (tikanga) and traditional knowledge (mātauranga Māori) rather than modern scientific methods and disciplines such as ecology, geology, planning, surveying, architecture, building, infrastructure, and property and contract law. – Dr Peter Winsley
The Natural and Built Environment and the Spatial Planning Bills are part of a wave of New Zealand legislation that departs from the progressive arc of history and are regressive. These Bills create new race-based rights and privileges that further divide New Zealanders.
The 1986 New Zealand Constitution Act marked the point where the Crown’s role was reduced to the symbolic and procedural, and our democratically elected Parliament became sovereign in New Zealand. In a Parliamentary democracy power comes from people’s votes not out of the barrel of a gun, or from tribal, judicial or political activism. Authentic democracy can only function in an open and informed society where people have equal rights and exercise them. This is what we are rapidly losing. – Dr Peter Winsley
Instead of treating all New Zealanders as equals regardless of race, this legislation confers extra rights on Māori. Despite some implausible Crown legal advice, the legislation seems to clearly breach section 19(1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 that ensures freedom from discrimination based on race.
Compared to the current Resource Management Act the proposed new system erodes democracy and accountability to voters. It shifts much decision making to non-elected tribal representatives who may wield power far beyond what their numbers justify. While many of these people will be knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated, the overall impact is to reduce the pool of available (non-Māori) expertise that can be brought to bear in natural environment protection and resource management.
Good law needs to use unambiguous language, be clear in intent, provide certainty, and be workable. That is, people must understand and be able to respond to it. Common law has been built up over many years as precedents have been established and shared understandings have been widely adopted.
Terms such as ‘tikanga’, ‘kaitiakitanga’ and ‘mātauranga Māori’ are core elements of the legislation. Precise definitions of these terms will be needed for the legal system to function effectively. – Dr Peter Winsley
Inevitably there will be conflicts between tikanga and mātauranga Māori assertions and evidence from modern, universal science. The former may depend on custom and authority and the latter on evidence, and it is evidence that must prevail in a modern, open and secular society.
The legislation seeks to make Māori custom or tikanga sources of law within New Zealand. – Dr Peter Winsley
The resource management reforms are more about instituting a race-based system than creating a more efficient resource management system. It may be appropriate to intervene to overcome barriers to Māori engagement in resource management or any other such fields. However, the Bills do not remove barriers so much as create powerful new race-based institutions and regulatory processes that privilege Māori over all other New Zealanders.
The government would be wise to withdraw the proposed Bills and replace them with enabling legislation that does not discriminate on race lines. This legislation should vest decision-making in local communities and focus on improving the speed and lowering the cost of local decision-making processes. Decision-making must be accountable to affected communities, including but not limited to Māori. – Dr Peter Winsley
We’ve always considered ourselves a good society, and rightly so. But we’re struggling to maintain that position. The reality is that every aspect of a good and decent society requires serious improvement in our special little country. We may be sliding, but that slide is reversible.
You could say that this is merely a list of issues with little in the way of solutions. However, you can also read it as a list of aspirations or priorities. Aspirations to do better across a variety of areas where we’re currently not doing well. A shopping list for our future leaders if you like. Would you rather spend one billion dollars on helping overseas countries deal with climate change or on three new hospitals? – Bruce Cotterill
One thing you learn when entering public debates in the modern era is that you should be prepared for a trashing if you choose to defend people who speak out against those who set the rules that govern our society.
It isn’t hard to work out that the aim is to silence those who have, because of their own life experience, formed an opinion which may differ from the popular narrative.
And, as if to deter any support for these renegades, you yourself will become subject to similar character assassination simply because you have chosen to bat for the other side.
It becomes a disgraceful exhibition of what happens when journalists have sold their soul to the highest bidder – the popular woke agenda. – Clive Bibby
Imagine that you’re a young white man, and that your lifelong ambition is to be a pilot. You put in hours of swotting up and apply to join a Royal Air Force (RAF) training programme. You sail through the aptitude tests, only to be knocked back after a Skype interview. You’re told it’s because you lack leadership skills – even though the course was intended to train you up in precisely this area.
Then, months later, you learn that women and minority-ethnic candidates had been ‘fast-tracked’ for the role. You learn that ‘around 160 cases of positive discrimination had taken place’ at the RAF. All, apparently, in an effort to meet ‘aspirational diversity targets’. You’d be forgiven for concluding that your gender or your skin colour was what led to your rejection. – Joanna Williams
In the UK, ‘positive action’ is exempt from the usual rules against employment discrimination. Employers are allowed to assist groups of people considered to be ‘under-represented’. This is supposed to be limited to removing obstacles in order to create a level playing field for selection. But where removing barriers stops, and providing unfair advantages starts, is far from clear. Indeed, so blurred is the line between positive action and discrimination that even major employers – such as the RAF – can come a cropper.
This week, the House of Commons’ Defence Select Committee heard that ethnic-minority and female pilots were recruited to training programmes over better qualified white pilots in around 160 instances between 2020 and 2021 – all in order to improve the RAF’s diversity profile. That’s 160 men who had worked hard to fulfil their ambition, but failed on account of their sex and skin colour. We need to stop with the euphemisms: this is not ‘positive action’, it is sexist and racist discrimination.
This discrimination is not just a blow to the rejected applicants – it is also bad news for society as a whole. The public can be put at risk if key services are staffed by people who are not best qualified for the job. – Joanna Williams
A police officer should be able to complete a crime report. But this week it emerged that the Metropolitan Police have been accepting ‘functionally illiterate’ applicants in a bid to meet diversity targets. In 2021, Dame Cressida Dick, then Met commissioner, promised that 40 per cent of the force’s new recruits would be black or ethnic minority by 2023. In order to meet this seemingly random goal, entry requirements have been lowered. Back in November, a review of recruitment and vetting by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services found that nearly 10 per cent of police officers should never have been admitted into the force.
Perhaps most troubling of all is the way that positive discrimination breaks the unwritten social contract that says through working hard, studying and playing by the rules, you can get on in life. It sends a message to certain people that their sex and skin colour will count against them, no matter how much effort they put in or talent they have. Racism and sexism are then legitimised.
This doesn’t just create new prejudices against supposedly privileged groups. It also breathes life back into outdated tropes. The efforts of qualified, capable women and black people, fully deserving of the jobs they have, are also undermined. When positive discrimination becomes the norm, people start to assume that success can only be achieved through a helping hand, rather than on merit. – Joanna Williams
Labour announced this week that if it wins the next election, it plans to introduce a new Race Equality Act. This would make it legal for black-led businesses to be given extra help to procure lucrative government contracts. Turn this on its head for a moment and the problem is immediately clear: white-led businesses will not be treated in the same way. They won’t be given extra help. The playing field will not be levelled, but tipped according to skin colour.
Tackling inequality is important. But it must not come at the cost of fair recruitment practices or getting the best people into public-service roles. If it is a lack of qualifications holding people back from getting the jobs they want, then we need to look at improving our education system, not selectively lowering entry requirements. Whether we call it positive discrimination or positive action, this grossly unfair practice benefits no one. – Joanna Williams
Parties generally have to win Auckland to win the election. But for Labour – and for this year – it’s more true than in most elections.
That’s because Labour’s short of options. Rural NZ is out. Farmers and conservative county voters are too irritated. Three Waters, the climate levy plans, winter grazing rules, the ute tax. Labour’s bracing itself to possibly lose even the Napier electorate, a seat that’s spent more time in Labour’s than in National’s hands. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Generally speaking, Auckland is fed up with Labour.
It is hard to overstate the frustration and anger that developed in the city during Covid.
The lockdowns kept coming. They went on longer than Aucklanders thought was necessary. Jacinda Ardern was too patronising. She gave Aucklanders the freedom to picnic at friends’ houses but the instruction not to wee in their indoor loos. It would’ve been funny if nerves weren’t frayed. Then the city felt abandoned. Ardern didn’t visit. Then she was pressured, but when she came she flew in and out faster than the average international traveller spends in transit.
So last year, for the first time in the super city’s history, it gave the Labour candidate for mayor the finger and voted for someone else. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
He’s the man who thought spending $785 million for cyclists to get across the harbour was a good idea. Most of Auckland didn’t. It was so unpopular he had to kill it. He also thinks spending up to $29b on a light rail project to the airport is a good idea. He might soon have to kill that too.
As Transport Minister he personally made the call that led to roading authorities dropping speed limits on 1600 roads around the city. As Immigration Minister, he’s the guy keeping out the migrant workers that Auckland businesses keep telling the Government they desperately need.
It seems unlikely he’s the perfect man to win Auckland back for Labour. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
HOW OFTEN do politicians apologise? Sincerely apologise? Not offer voters the weasel words: “If my actions have offended anyone, then I apologise.” That’s the apology politicians offer when they don’t believe they’ve done anything to apologise for. The question is: how often does a politician offer voters an apology like this?
I dropped the ball on Friday, I was too slow to be seen …The communications weren’t fast enough – including mine. I’m sorry for that.
The politician speaking those words is Wayne Brown, the Mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Justifiably criticised for his inadequate initial response to the torrential rainstorms that deluged his city on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 January 2023 (since described by meteorologists as a one-in-200-year weather event) Brown has publicly owned-up to his personal failings and said “I’m sorry.”
Not that Brown will receive the slightest positive acknowledgement from his many media critics for stepping-up and accepting his share of responsibility for the multiple failings of public agencies that occurred on the night of Auckland’s devastating rainstorm. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward: Brown is male. Brown is white. Brown is over the age of 65. Brown is also known to be openly contemptuous of journalists. And, most importantly, Brown defeated Efeso Collins, the mayoral candidate many (most?) Auckland journalists wanted to win. – Chris Trotter
It is remarkable how adept – and shameless – young and supposedly well-educated New Zealanders have proved to be at discriminating against their fellow citizens on the grounds of age. Journalists who would lavish barrels of ink on any person writing disparagingly about the personal appearance of a female politician, nevertheless feel free to dwell upon the ravages time has wrought upon the features of a “grumpy old man”.
That discrimination on the basis of age is outlawed in New Zealand cuts almost no ice with the sort of journalists who glibly describe Brown as “The Boomer King”. It is almost as if the journalists responsible for such ageist slurs are unable to recognise in themselves the same, deeply-ingrained, discriminatory impulses that they condemn so bitterly when manifested by racists, sexists and homophobes.
One can hardly avoid the conclusion that these ageists’ hatred for older human-beings is every bit as visceral as the racists’ hatred for people of colour, and the misogynists’ hatred of women. That they nevertheless feel free to express their prejudices openly is as worrying as it is shameful. Where is the Human Rights Commission when the “hate speech” it condemns so vigorously – and promptly – when directed at Māori, women, Muslims and the LGBTQI community is aimed, instead, at older New Zealanders?
The oddest thing of all about ageism is that every single person who indulges in it will one day (absent the worst sort of bad luck) grow old. How much racism would there be if every White person slowly became a Black person? How much misogyny, if every man turned gradually into a woman? When old age is humankind’s common destiny, ageism makes no sense at all. – Chris Trotter
That Wayne Brown proved the accuracy of the aphorism, by soundly defeating his younger opponent, Efeso Collins, in the mayoralty race of 2022, did little to improve his already poor relationship with “progressive” Auckland journalists, many of them a whole generation younger than himself.
Jacinda Ardern’s “Politics of Kindness”, and her Government’s strong support for Māori and Pasifika, encouraged the Prime Minister’s generation to look forward to Collins becoming the Auckland super-city’s first Pasifika mayor. If Auckland voters had been willing to elect Labour-endorsed has-beens like Len Brown and Phil Goff, then surely, Efeso would be a shoe-in? That Aucklanders might elect a “grumpy old man” like Wayne Brown struck Ardern’s generation of activists as preposterous. They were confident that their assumptions about the nature of contemporary politics and the shape of Aotearoa’s political future were unassailable.
That Brown won the mayoral race easily – principally by applying basic electoral principles to the structuring of his campaign – threw into sharp relief the organisational deficiencies of a generation encouraged to accord bold declarations and positive intentions the same ontological status as actual achievements. As an engineer, Brown is only interested in what works. So instructed, his advisers told him to target only those Aucklanders with a proven track-record of participating in local government elections. These tended to be older, and considerably less tolerant of political dreams and visions, than the younger, typically non-voting, Aucklander.
As it became increasingly obvious that Brown’s pragmatic, non-ideological, “Mr Fix-It” pitch to the active Auckland electorate was going to overwhelm Collins, the active dislike of “progressives” – most particularly those located in the younger generations – grew. Among the least successful at hiding their animosity towards Brown were the city’s journalists – a failure that convinced the newly-elected Mayor that he would be better off not engaging with them. – Chris Trotter
The reaction of the New Zealand news media – especially those elements of it based in Auckland – was depressingly similar to the United States’ news media’s reaction to Donald Trump’s “impossible” presidential victory of 2016. Unable to accept that it was the political incompetence of “their” candidate that made a Trump victory possible, the American media instead abandoned completely its cherished principles of fairness and balance. Henceforth Trump was the enemy to whom no quarter should be given. Brown, who had also won on the votes of “deplorables” and, like Trump, held most journalists in contempt, would be treated as a reactionary interloper.
It should not be thought, however, that journalists were alone in their animosity towards Brown. Across the entire Auckland City bureaucracy similar misgivings were growing at the prospect of Mr Fix-It telling the Council’s highly-paid managers and professionals how to do their jobs. It would certainly explain why, when the deluge struck, and many of the Supercity’s bureaucrats failed to respond effectively to the emergency, their first instinct was to make the Mayor the scapegoat for what was clearly a system-wide failure. And why the first instinct of the city’s “progressive” journalists was to help them.
Hence Brown’s all-too-public frustration and anger at his inexplicable early exclusion from a number of crucial informational loops. That exclusion in no way excuses Brown’s failure to be seen and heard by Aucklanders as the floodwaters rose and the crisis deepened, but it most certainly does explain them.
And Brown, at least, has had the decency to say he’s sorry. It would be most unwise, however, to hold one’s breath in anticipation of Auckland’s anti-Brown journalists and bureaucrats doing the same. – Chris Trotter
After every downpour, the desert flowers. It is a beautiful thing. Seedlings that have lain in stasis, sometimes for decades, spring to life.
So it is with climate change enthusiasts after each storm, cyclone, or howling gale. These earnest, gentle folk emerge from whatever chrysalis they have been sequestered between storms to bask in attention and relevance, before retiring back to their academic sinecures until the next scheduled photo opportunity or select committee hearing. – Damien Grant
Given the weight of water that fell from the heavens, what is remarkable isn’t the instances of flooding, but the lack of them. – Damien Grant
For generations, engineers, civil and electrical, have designed, built and maintained the roads, powerlines, culverts and drains that were tested to their limits and, in a small number of cases, beyond them.
We are in this fortunate position because Auckland is a first-world city and has been able to afford to invest in its infrastructure and its people. – Damien Grant
In this we are not an outlier. One of the features of humanity’s recent history is that deaths from natural disasters have been falling, especially in the West, even as the population has been rising.
The primary reason for this is wealth. Rich nations built better and this matters when disasters hit. This isn’t controversial, but into the mix comes the complexity of global warming. – Damien Grant
The explanation for last week’s floods is that global warming results in the atmosphere being able to hold more water, which means that we can expect heavier and more prolonged rainfall going forward.
I can accept this without understanding it. What I cannot accept is that the solution to this problem is for New Zealand to reduce our standard of living in an attempt to placate the weather gods. – Damien Grant
We are bringing agriculture into the Emission Trading Scheme, and we now have the Carbon Zero Act that will provide a drag on economic growth over the coming decades.
The thing the environmentalists fail to address is the cost of their policy prescriptions. It is massive.
In the Regulatory Impact Statement for the Zero Carbon Bill, the cost was projected at between $7 and $12 billion per year, each year between now and 2050. This is cumulative and, almost certainly, absurdly optimistic. The overall cost of this single climate policy alone is around $300 billion.
We use carbon to power our cars, improve the productivity of our farms and heat our houses. It is the lifeforce of this country and we use it because it is cheap.
If we use alternatives we become poorer and – here is the kicker – the climate changes will continue.
The carbon that we emit isn’t the carbon causing the flooding. We are enjoying the pollution generated in New Delhi, New York and Beijing. –
We can make ourselves poor. We cannot stop the rains. – Damien Grant
We need to generate income in order to raise taxes and rates in order to build infrastructure. We need high incomes so homeowners can purchase quality buildings that will withstand the worst that mother nature throws at us.
Some estimates put the cost of last Friday at half a billion dollars. This is ugly, but it is a fraction of the cost we are imposing on ourselves in a futile effort to turn back the tides.
The solution to the problem of climate change is not simple and it cannot be achieved by the sacrifices that we make on these shores.
Those demanding we curtail our dairy industry, cease oil and gas exploration and pay ever-heavier carbon taxes do not confront the problem that these noble aspirations will have no impact, other than to reduce the ability of their fellow citizens to build the quality of infrastructure needed to cope with the increasing variability of weather challenges that their own models predict are in our future. – Damien Grant
There is nothing that says an inquiry means politicians can suddenly take the fifth and avoid responsibility for the duration of the investigation.
There is no right to remain silent for politicians and officials. – Tova O’Brien
There was Dame Annette King, a political mother to Ardern and Hipkins from their earlier years. Now the High Commissioner in Australia, she stood among the media enjoying the show while Hipkins was speaking – occasionally offering her own running commentary on questions. At one point, he was asked what advice she had given him. “Heaps,” she said, not quite beneath her breath.
Hipkins’ start has meant he has not yet had time to invest in the wardrobe for such events – so she might want to advise him to invest in a tidier pair of shoes. – Claire Trevett
So another Waitangi weekend done and dusted.. and what did we learn?
Well, not much. I think part of the disconnect around it these days is the coverage of it. Why does it always have to get so petty?
What we learned was – who spoke with notes and who didn’t, who spoke te reo and who didn’t, who attended what and who didn’t. How is that taking us anywhere or telling us anything or bringing us closer as a nation?
We are not being well served here when we let the sneerers on the sidelines get news headlines out of their pettiness. – Kate Hawkesby
One of the arguments around our National Day is how we engage and involve people more in it and I’m not sure scaring them away from participating by judging everyone on how they participate is the answer.
I personally could not care less who spoke from notes and who didn’t, I’m not sure off the cuff speeches are necessarily any better than ones with notes. Off the cuff speeches can get rambly and long winded.. and if you’re someone with a message to get across and want to make your points well, then having the foresight to prep and make notes on that seems like the right thing to do.
So another day of petty point scoring and judging and in that is the lesson as to why Waitangi Day is something many people are choosing to ignore, rather than participate in. – Kate Hawkesby
Chris Hipkins is, at his best, a genial, funny and laid-back leader with strong relationships with the Parliamentary press gallery. He was often touted by the media as a “fixer” for the Ardern government, tasked with handling difficult and sensitive ministerial portfolios. As is so often the case with politics, however, the reality is different. – Liam Hehir
It is unlikely that this track record will really hurt Hipkins. As a new prime minister, voters will give him the benefit of the doubt. The press gallery also seems in no mood to apply the blowtorch to the man they affectionately call “Chippy”.
Hipkins has talked a big game in terms of reorienting Labour away from controversy and towards everyday concerns.
If he can deliver on lower inflation without increased unemployment then Hipkins may well be set for two terms (or more). But if not, then that will be something voters will not forgive.
But if past is prologue, his ministerial career is not encouraging. – Liam Hehir
It is now Islamophobic to talk about anti-Semitism. Dare to comment on anti-Jewish racism and you risk being called a racist yourself.- Brendan O’Neill
The women who spoke at the Glasgow rally are not just a wee a bit miffed about this – they are burning with righteous rage. This anger has made them effective and eloquent mouthpieces for an emerging women’s movement – a worldwide campaign against men who treat female bodies as fetish-wear. Representative of every sector of society, Standing for Women supporters are not moaning about ‘manspreading’ or penning articles in Gender Studies journals, they are demanding the rights back that the trans lobby has taken from them. – Jo Bartosch
It was hard to escape the impression that these were well-intentioned young people looking for a worthy counter-cultural cause. Inadvertently, they had somehow found themselves dancing on the side of both the establishment and of convicted sex offenders. – Jo Bartosch
It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that New Zealand is rapidly approaching a crisis point.
There are now two fundamentally different views of our future and there is no way to reconcile them.
On the one hand, we have the view implicit in the Government’s programme: that New Zealand is not a single country with citizens having equal rights irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in New Zealand, but rather a country with two classes of citizen. In one class are those who chance to have one or more Maori ancestors, always now with ancestors of other ethnicities, often indeed with those other ethnicities being in the majority. In the other class are all the other New Zealanders. And those with one or more Maori ancestors have, by virtue of that ancestry, inherently superior rights. – Don Brash
That ignorance has been fostered by the partisan advocacy of the Waitangi Tribunal which, contrary to the long-agreed interpretation of what happened when the Treaty was signed in 1840, has recently taken to asserting against all the evidence (of the speeches made by the chiefs who signed the Treaty and again subsequently at the Kohimarama conference in 1860) that the Treaty did not involve Maori ceding sovereignty to the Queen. – Don Brash
It is certainly true that turning back will be incredibly difficult. The notion that Maori chiefs did not cede sovereignty in 1840, with all the dangerous implications of that, has become deeply imbedded in the public sector – in our schools and universities, in local government (at least in Local Government New Zealand), in the taxpayer-funded media, and in government departments. In this view, those with Maori ancestors have a fundamentally superior right in the governance of the country. It is a view which is, of course, totally inconsistent with any notion of democracy.
But despite the assertions of what might be called the “anti-democrats” there are still those who believe in a society where every adult citizen has the same political rights. Indeed, I suspect that numerically they are in the substantial majority.
Apirana Ngata, perhaps the greatest Maori leader we have seen since 1840, asserted in 1940 on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty that “Clause 1 of the Treaty handed over the mana and the sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria and her descendants forever, that is the outstanding fact today. – Don Brash
David Lange gave a seminal speech in 2000 in which he said “democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.”
In his valedictory speech on leaving Parliament in December 2000, Simon Upton said “I must express grave misgivings about those who would attempt to build a constitutional debate around an assertion that the Treaty involves a partnership. Not only is that not what the Treaty says. The idea perpetuates a fiction that we can solve our differences through negotiations between Maori and an abstract entity called the Crown.”
In a major speech in 2002, Bill English asserted that “the Treaty created one sovereignty and so one common citizenship.” – Don Brash
It would be nice to imagine we can gloss over the chasm between those who believe the Treaty provided for co-governance and those believe in a democratic society where every citizen has equal rights by translating co-governance as “mahi tahi” (working together). We can’t. It is simply not possible to believe that the Treaty created a partnership between those with some Maori ancestry and the rest of us, and simultaneously believe in democracy. The two are fundamentally inconsistent.
In my view, the meaning of the Treaty is very clear: it involved chiefs ceding sovereignty to the Crown, having their property rights protected, and being guaranteed the same rights and responsibilities as the citizens of England. It was an extraordinarily enlightened document for its time – indeed, for any time. Nothing like it happened in Australia, or North America.
And for the most part, we have all behaved as if this is what the Treaty meant – Maori New Zealanders have served in the Army and in the Police, have gone overseas with passports issued by the government of New Zealand, have accepted social security benefits from the New Zealand state, and have voted in general elections for more than 150 years.
If it could be shown that the Treaty did not provide for equal citizenship, we would have to abandon it: there is no future for New Zealand – none at all – if some citizens are accorded superior rights based on their ancestry. – Don Brash
Former Covid minister Chris Hipkins’s prolonged public argument with, and humiliation of, pregnant journalist Charlotte Bellis, stranded in Afghanistan, the land of the Taliban, is one of my most ghastly memories of the debacle which was the Covid response. – Wendy Geus
Hipkins cornered proves to be a very dangerous animal who reverts to lying, obfuscation and personal attack (note his latest comment to Luxon over Three Waters), as he did also with the two women who went, it turned out, legitimately, to Northland but were labelled by his Government as “prostitutes breaking the law”.
For him ‘sorry’ really was the hardest word, and he didn’t issue an apology until legal action (by Bellis) forced him to. Dozens of other women also wanted to come home to have their babies, but Hipkins and his Labour Government viewed, for example, 66 DJs’ reasons to enter NZ as more legitimate than vulnerable NZ citizens, and there are many other heartbreaking stories of families kept apart during bereavements, sickness and milestones such as weddings and birthdays by this Government’s cruel, twisted policy.
Targetting a vulnerable woman stranded in a war-torn and dangerous country in such a blatantly public way surely was misogynistic of Hipkins. However for Labour and the media the ends justify the means for their victims and there was no mention that this could be misogyny. – Wendy Geus
I bring up the subject of misogyny as the media have been reverting to it a lot in an attempt to protect the reputation of Ardern, who resigned, basically, because she had screwed up big time and knew ‘it was time’ to resign (before she was pushed or lost the next election).
According to media she attracted such criticism and hatred due to her sex. They prefer to ignore the reasons behind it. They are determined to turn her into a martyr and label any criticism of her as misogynistic in order to shut down conversation; they conveniently ignore her egregious behaviour, not least her lack of success in all public service delivery areas and being the first PM to introduce He Puapua – a separatist regime based on race and driving division in our society, and then denying or ignoring its existence. Hipkins is leaving it bubbling away in plain sight and behind the scenes whilst he does a sleight of hand to try to fool us he is dealing with it. – Wendy Geus
Then there was former National leader Judith Collins who got regular, cruel, vicious cartoons and nasty comments on her demise: no kindness there based on her female status. She bravely, correctly, called out He Puapua’s racist, separatist intent early in the piece, but was abused and called ‘racist’. (Of course!) This was misogynistic, but condoned by most too scared to speak out. – Wendy Geus
Censorship definitely exists in NZ with a small incestuous cabal of bought and paid for news media deciding what is acceptable, funded by the former PM’s PIJ scheme and dependent on their acceptance of her Government’s radical interpretation of the Treaty.
Totalitarianism. Not misogyny.
I am hopeful that Christopher Luxon attempts again to state his views calmly and clearly in the incendiary environment of the Waitangi celebration. Expect the word ‘racist’ to be freely tossed about by those who have no legitimate argument to counter his words.
He might be a bit ‘vanilla’ (compared to the departed ‘media star’ PM), but his calm, composed, temperament worked well at Ratana and is an advantage in standing up to the bully media. Labour is led by a new leader who is already reverting to personal attacks on Luxon in the absence of a good argument to counteract National’s simple need not race approach to the delivery of public services – an approach which puts all New Zealanders on a similar footing.
Sounds fair to me. – Wendy Geus
One of the things that may be revealed out of the weather mess is the fact we are woefully underinsured as a country.
It’s these sorts of things that mark you as first world, or otherwise. – Mike Hosking
It is overdue for us to make some big calls around building and location. –
We live next to rivers and hear the tale of despair on the news of the person who hired a rug doctor for the sixth time. Why live there?
If we can’t get the basics right, and clearly we can’t, what hope do we have in making big, bold, futuristic calls on things like build quality, location, planning and insurance.
Maybe we will focus a bit more clearly when the insurance premiums arrive and we are shelling out for our lack of foresight. Mind you, you can only focus on that if you get a bill.
And that, as we have seen and will see, is a major part of the problem. – Mike Hosking
“Is he a racist like you” asked my seven year old moko.
We were watching a CNN news item about President Biden.
Shocked, I asked “Why do you say that?”
“Is the President of America white?” he said. “White people are racist”.
I explained President Biden is white but he is not a racist. Our discussion revealed my grandson has no idea what is a racist. Perhaps he heard Mr. Tuku Morgan of the Iwi Leaders Forum on TV saying “the attack dogs of the National party and Act as they fan the flames of racism and anti-Māori sentiments”.
The Prime Minister had the opportunity to distance himself from Mr. Morgan’s statement. Instead Chris Hipkins said:
“People can form their own judgments about that but I certainly think the opposition, National and Act have, as they’ve done in the past, they’ve used uncertainty to try and stoke fear.
The selection of Mr. Tama Potaka for Hamilton West is evidence of Mr. Luxon’s desire for National to represent all New Zealanders.
David Seymour is proud of his whakapapa. He leads a caucus with three Maori MPs.
Chris Hipkins knows that neither Christopher Luxon nor David Seymour is a racist. – Richard Prebble
Co-government arises from Labour’s decision to put a radical revisionist version of the treaty at the heart of all its decisions. The revisionists claim the treaty is an agreement between Queen Victoria and 500 or so native chiefs to govern in partnership forever.
To meet this revisionist treaty Labour is establishing co-government with unelected, unaccountable, self- selected, hereditary tribal elites. It is the opposite of everything Labour used to stand for – Richard Prebble
Here is the heart of the issue. New Zealand has been since 1853 a Westminster parliamentary democracy. Those who rule us are under the rule of law and accountable to us, the electorate.
Parliamentary democracy is fundamentally at odds with being governed in partnership by hereditary tribal leaders. It does not matter whether the Prime Minister calls it a partnership, co-governance or mahi tahi,(working together); it is incompatible with democracy.
New Zealand is not a democracy when one partner is accountable to the electorate and the other partner is not.
Even if the revisionists are right and some chiefs misunderstood the treaty they were signing, it is not a reason to abandon 170 years of parliamentary democracy.
The treaty granted rights not just to the chiefs but to all Maori. Article three of the treaty grants Maori full citizenship rights. Maori have had voting rights from the first election in 1853. To reinterpret the treaty as a partnership is to reduce everyone’s citizenship rights, including the citizenship rights granted to Maori.
No doubt it was galling to some chiefs to discover that the treaty means every Maori has an equal vote. The treaty is why no New Zealand court has ever upheld slavery. While it did not happen immediately, the treaty freed Maori who were slaves and gave them full citizenship including the right to vote. – Richard Prebble
Good on Chris Hipkins for holding a review of Labour’s policies. A top priority must be to decide whether Labour stands for democracy.
Here is my thought. No wonder my seven year old moko thinks white people are racist when our government judges him on his race.
Why not a New Zealand where what is most important about my moko and I is not our different tribes, which is no business of the government, but us as individuals?
It is a powerful message to send to all seven year olds. One person, one vote, values us all equally. – Richard Prebble
The rule, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ creates incentives to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. The inevitable result is poverty. – Richard Fulmer *
Almost everyone who has had to deal with the RMA knows it is a terrible piece of legislation. For 20+ years politicians have tried to improve it, but failed to do more than modest improvements.
So I was excited that the Government was going to not just amend it, but replace it entirely with entirely new legislation. I thought nothing could be as bad as the RMA.
I was wrong.
What Labour is pushing through Parliament is so deeply flawed that it is unfixable. It would be not just worse than the RMA, but worse by an order of magnitude. Why?
Well the pithy one-liner is “co-governance for your deck”. But it goes well beyond that. – David Farrar
Federated Farmers have done an example of what this new law would mean in terms of someone wanting to do some commercial fishing and someone wanting to milk a cow.
The commercial fishing boat has simple rules. They buy some quota and they can catch fish. Their petrol supplier buys some ETS units, and they can burn petrol on their boat. Fairly simple.
But if you are a farmer who wants to milk a cow you have to get a resource consent with decision makers considering water, cultural heritage, biodiversity, te mana o te wai, greenhouse gas emissions, natural features of landscapes, the need for highly productive soils to be maintained, te oranga o te taiao, the mauri of the land, plus the intrinsic relationships of local hapū. – David Farrar
Yes, you read that right: 16. At an age when boys are eating boogers and lighting farts, getting more tattoos than the average sailor, and having sex with high school girls. At an age when girls (they’re not even close to being “women”) are pondering sex change operations and seeking out abortion services and getting even more tattoos than the average hooker. And these are the unformed humanoids with whom the Democrats (unformed humanoids themselves, to be sure) want to entrust the nation’s future?
So yes: repeal the 26th. And then restore the status quo ante, to 21. – Michael Walsh
The level of retail crime incidents has doubled over the last four years. You could call it a pandemic of retail crime. – David Farrar
This week’s bonfire of policy was also a bonfire of cash. The Hipkins-led Government finally ditched the RNZ-TVNZ media merger, but only after wasting about $23m on consultants to design the failed project. Other ditched policies also incurred millions of dollars in business consultancy fees.
Much of this was spent on the “Big Four” management consultants: Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). External contractors have become an increasingly large part of Labour’s public policy-making process. Critics say they are superseding the role of the public service in designing state programmes.
A Billion dollars a year on business consultants
In everything from health to water infrastructure, the Government has become reliant on these private sector consultants to come up with new ways to do things and tell the politicians how to sell it. And they’ve been charging huge amounts. We now know that the public broadcast merger consultants were being paid up to $9000 per week, per consultant.
The most recent figures released by the Public Service Commission show that the Government now spends $1.244 billion a year on such contractors. And it’s rising fast – last year the consultancy spend was up by a third ($300m). Much of this was spent on health reforms, the polytech centralisation, and Three Waters. – Bryce Edwards
The Three Waters reform programme has been particularly lucrative for the management consultants – three of the Big Four have been employed – PwC, EY and Deloitte together charged a big chunk of the $21m of consultancy work up until February last year, as revealed by the Herald’s Kate MacNamara. She found that EY was the biggest contractor, billing for $5.2m. In addition, consultancy firm Martin Jenkins – closely linked to Doug Martin, who chaired the water working group – charged $2.5m.
PR was also a big part of the Three Waters bill. The firm Senate Communications seem to be the main biller, receiving $616,281 for advice to the Beehive on selling the reforms to the public. Unfortunately, the PR campaign ended up being perceived as “propaganda” and garnered a telling-off from the Public Service Commission.
The advertising campaign using cartoons of slime-covered children and sick ducks failed to win public support, and had been concocted following the advice of another PR specialist that the Government should employ the use of “emotive marketing” instead of “information first” public service-style advertising. – Bryce Edwards
More money for “consulto-crats” than delivery of public services…
So, although many of Labour’s reform proposals have failed, they have been a real winner for the business consultants employed on them.
The “consulto-crats” have also become a big part of the health reforms. DHBs were already spending a lot on management consultants prior to Labour’s centralisation. But this has ballooned under the new model. According to health commentator and former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Ian Powell, “In the over 30 years I’ve been involved in the health system I’ve not seen a government more dependent on and influenced by business consultants”. –
Conflicts of interest abound. There are just so many links between the different consultants used in government. Just one example – Labour contracted former New Zealand director-general of health Stephen McKernan to head its health reforms Transition Unit. Kate MacNamara reports that EY, where McKernan is a partner, then became the “single largest beneficiary of the contractor spending”. Apparently, 80 per cent of the Unit’s consultancy spending of $2.27m went to EY.
Management consultants are the new powerful vested interests – Bryce Edwards
The “Big Con” of consultancy
So, is the new consultant-bureaucratic industrial complex good for democracy? Is it in the public interest? And what does it mean for our political system to be so strongly dominated by private sector management consultants?
In New Zealand, journalist Dileepa Fonseka wrote last year that “Consultants have become an entrenched part of the machinery of Government.” He says that there’s a Wellington joke about the modern structure of government: “There are three branches of government: the legislature, the judiciary and MartinJenkins.”
Although this trend seems to be particularly well-advanced in this country, it’s part of a global problem. – Bryce Edwards
“The ‘Big Con’ describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by both the neoliberal right and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks – as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers – and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. To make matters worse, our best and brightest graduates are often redirected away from public service into consulting. In all these ways, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies.” – Bryce Edwards
Of course, the current government won’t welcome debate. Prime minister, Chris Hipkins, once railed against the use of consultants by the last National Government – criticising what he saw as the ballooning use of business contractors. But since he became Minister of Public Services in 2017, their use has only skyrocketed.
Part of the increased use of contractors has been due to the arrival of the Covid pandemic, which stretched the public service in certain areas. But this lucrative new opportunity shouldn’t be simply allowed to turn into a permanent state of affairs.
The “bonfire of policy” occurring at the moment is a good time to examine the dominance of business consultants in government. Some say the public service has become bloated, and others that it has been hollowed-out by the entry of management consultants. Either way, this culture of consulto-crats poses huge questions about vested interests, and brings the integrity of policymaking into question. – Bryce Edwards
*Hat tip: Not PC and Not PC again
Few of us who live in modern countries can see the stars at night, or more than a few at most. This is because of light pollution, the production of artificial light at night that is not strictly necessary (though what is not strictly necessary is probably itself incapable of strict definition—what is unnecessary for you is necessary for me). A recent article has suggested that 80 percent of Americans and 60 percent of Europeans never see the stars. – Theodore Dalrymple
The thought of our own insignificance when we look up at the stars is potentially a dangerous one, though I do not go so far as to say that it has actually been responsible in practice for any of the great crimes of mankind; for if we are totally insignificant, what does anything really matter? If nothing really matters, what does it matter how I behave? And if it does not matter how I behave, then I might as well do whatever I can to achieve my ends, to take maximum pleasure from my fleeting existence. If that involves harm to others, so be it; after all, nothing matters and everything will be the same in the end, indeed very soon by comparison with the age of the universe. Eat, drink, and rob and steal, then, for tomorrow I die.
Wrongdoers often turn philosopher as soon as they are accused of having done wrong. Their philosophizing is always post facto, but they may nevertheless by instinct have mastered rhetorical devices. For example, if accused of theft, they will immediately ask for what they have never asked for before, namely a defense or justification of the system of private property, so unequal in the distribution of its largesse. Since the person thus apostrophized has probably never considered the question himself, he suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage, in an awkward spot. He can only stutter an answer, which makes him look unsure of himself. Thus, the wrongdoer secures a rhetorical victory.
Anyhow, the fact, or supposed fact, that nothing matters is an excellent and reassuring excuse for those who would behave badly to secure an advantage to themselves. Looking up at the stars, then, if they were visible, might conduce to the spread of amoralism.
On the other hand, not being able to look up at the stars, thereby being made aware of how tiny we are, might conduce to self-importance and small-mindedness. Our own affairs then grow in significance and occupy the totality of our minds. We lose the habit, and therefore the ability, to judge the size of our concerns with anything else. We have no sense of the order of things, especially if, at the same time, we do not study history; and minor inconveniences then become for us tragedies of the first magnitude. Thus we become egotistical, self-obsessed, ill-tempered, self-absorbed, and trivial-minded.
As is so often the case, we need a happy medium, or rather the ability to hold two opposite things in our mind at the same time: We are everything and nothing. We are the only beings in the universe (so far as we know) who, or that, can assign importance or significance to anything; but at the same time, we are very small. – Theodore Dalrymple
We are, of course, nothing by comparison with infinite magnitude and glory of God; yet we are of special and unique significance to that being infinitely greater than we, who has created us in His image. Hamlet expresses this perfectly:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in capacity! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!
The paragon of animals, the quintessence of dust: What a perfect summary of our existential situation!
And yet, for all its perfection as an understanding, Hamlet, as we all know, ended badly, as did all those who surrounded him. Man could be defined as the creature who is capable of making the worst of anything! In Russia, they say, all roads lead to disaster—but not only in Russia, perhaps. – Theodore Dalrymple
Thanks to PM Chris Hipkins’ reshuffle, transport minister Michael Wood is going places. Shame about the rest of us.
Transport in New Zealand – both public and private – is poked.
Commuter services (buses, trains and ferries) in our towns and cities are under huge strain, making life a misery for anyone trying to get to work or children to school. Or even a concert.
The road network is collapsing.
At the minor end of the scale, the country’s road surfaces are in desperate shape. No need for the Government to officially lower speed limits, the potholes are bone-shakingly effective judder bars.
More scary is that arterial routes are regularly compromised by slips and subsidence in severe weather. – Andrea Vance
Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated all these problems. But most predate the virus.
In part, they are due to chronic under-investment (higher taxes and road tolls are not popular policies).
But also, the way transport and its infrastructure is delivered and maintained is fragmented and dysfunctional.
Waka Kotahi, the land transport agency for which Wood is responsible, is currently one of the Government’s most problematic departments.
It is under fire because the road network is in a mess, and it can’t seem to deliver major projects on time or on budget. – Andrea Vance
The agency also has a deserved reputation for being wasteful. From the $51 million squandered on the abandoned cycling and walking bridge project across Auckland’s Waitematā harbour, to the $70m-plus spent on the doomed light rail project.
Let’s Get Wellington Moving (which WK oversees with the local authorities) has spent $83 million – $47m on consultants – and delivered only a pedestrian crossing. In EIGHT YEARS. And the walkway cost an eye-watering $2.4m.
It also has one of the largest PR teams of a central government agency – at last count 88, more than three-quarters of which are earning more than $100,000. If only we paid bus drivers the same salaries as comms staff. – Andrea Vance
Around $15m was allocated to an advertising campaign to make roads safer, but recently officials admitted their ‘zero’ target is unrealistic. It missed a target to build 100km of median barriers per year, managing just 13km last year. – Andrea Vance
Councils with large urban centres are driving climate change policies to get people out of their cars and onto public transport.
The trouble is they are neither responsible for the network (in the hands of regional councils, other agencies and private operators), nor have successive Governments funded, nor allowed them to raise money to build, new infrastructure. – Andrea Vance
Not all these problems are Wood’s fault – but they are his to solve. How then can he take on another, hefty job?
Climate change makes transport one of the most important portfolios. Resilience needs to be built into the system – and quickly – as storm events increase. Public transport is also one of the most important elements in the drive to build a net-zero emissions economy.
If the Auckland portfolio is to be anything more than symbolic (or a cynical move to soothe the city), it should command much of a minister’s attention.
The city deserves more than a part-timer, especially now.
And to get transport back on track, Wood can’t really afford to take his eyes off the road. – Andrea Vance
You’ll no doubt be familiar with the term “jumping the shark”. It was coined in 1985 by the American radio personality Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode of the US sitcom Happy Days, in which The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler, jumps over a shark while on water-skis. It’s a creative – if pejorative – term to describe when something has dissolved into so much farce that it signals it is well past its best and in decline – if not on its way to oblivion. And it could not be a better descriptor for Nicola Sturgeon’s absurd political performance over the past few months.
In the aftermath of the UK Government vetoing her gender recognition law, Scotland’s First Minister has had her head in Jaws’s mouth for several weeks now thanks to her ludicrous stand on Adam Graham, the transgender double rapist. – Camilla Tominey
In a victory not just for common sense but for women’s safety, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) confirmed that all newly convicted transgender prisoners will initially be placed in a jail based on their birth sex until a wider review is completed. – Camilla Tominey
So what we have here is essentially a complete rejection of the founding principle of Ms Sturgeon’s hare-brained Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which stated that anyone over the age of 16 can self-declare their gender, without a medical diagnosis and with few or any legal protections. – Camilla Tominey
I cannot be alone in thinking the world has gone stark, raving mad when a political leader, a supposedly highly educated person, cannot identify an adult human male double rapist when they see one.
Notwithstanding her own political fate, however, Sturgeon’s reality-defying obstinacy has actually done us all a favour.
For the complete implosion of her transgender policy must finally have opened millions of people’s eyes not only to what’s been going on in Scottish prisons, but also to the wider spread of extreme gender ideology in hospitals, schools and companies across the UK.
For far too long these organisations have unthinkingly pandered to the extremists at the fringes of this debate out of some politically correct quest not to hurt people’s feelings, with big corporations insisting that employees state their pronouns and NHS websites providing guidance on menstruation while omitting the word “girl”.
But as we have learnt with cases like Graham’s, feelings don’t matter more than facts. – Camilla Tominey
We should, of course, show compassion to all human beings, whether they be male, female or indeed transgender. But that should not mean denying biological sex, or jeopardising the safety of other groups, including women. Transgender people have rights under the Equality Act – but then so do women, as several recent cases have clearly established.
It is the job of our politicians to ensure that these rights are balanced and that the interests of one group are not allowed to trump another.
Not that the extreme gender ideology crowd think like that. It’s a scandal that the “if-you-stand-up-for-women-you’re-a-Terf” brigade of illiberal progressives won’t acknowledge the truth of this matter.
It’s even more outrageous that they portray those who do so as “transphobic” bigots when “biologically correct” would be a more apt description. And they have had some success in recent years in bullying or guilting people into going along with their agenda. – Camilla Tominey
And now, Sturgeon’s blundering policy failures have opened millions of people’s eyes to the fairy tales that they had been led to believe were true.
The only species thought to be able to change their biological sex, besides clownfish, are sharks, funnily enough. Some scientists believe that the big sharks change sex when they reach a certain size, with males becoming females. The switch may ensure survival by allowing the largest, most experienced sharks to give birth to young.
But humans aren’t fish and never have been – although some humans are undoubtedly clowns.
What should be a factual, calm debate has been turned into a theological question about whether you “believe” transwomen are women. In revealing the farcical nature of her flawed arguments, Nicola Sturgeon has given us the chance of a reformation. – Camilla Tominey
A survey of Canadian opinion carried out for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute found that the majority of Canadians still think that prisons should remain segregated by sex: to which one is inclined to add, amen to that.
All surveys of opinion are subject to caveat, of course; one can rarely be sure that they’re representative of the population as a whole, or that respondents weren’t trying to please the inquirers, or that the wording of the question asked didn’t affect the outcome.
For me, however, the most significant finding of the survey was that 28 percent of respondents believed that male-bodied prisoners who identified as women should be imprisoned with women, 6 percent more than those who thought they should be imprisoned with men. The rest thought they should have separate facilities of their own.
The evolution of opinion is probably impossible to estimate with any certainty, though it’s possible to guess. The question was never asked 20 years ago, and indeed couldn’t have been asked, so bizarre would it have seemed. The answer probably would have been a laugh rather than a verbal answer, and the very fact that it wouldn’t or couldn’t have been asked 20 years ago is itself highly significant. The question wasn’t then even a question, at least not for the general public: and the year 2003 isn’t yet ancient history. – Theodore Dalrymple
My surmise is that they were younger and more educated than average or than the 72 percent of the people in the survey who thought that prisoners with male bodies should not be imprisoned with women. The sad fact is that, as George Orwell once remarked, it’s necessary to have a higher level of education than average to believe in a certain type of absurdity. This is even more the case today when so much of our education seems to fall into two stages: indoctrination by others followed by auto-indoctrination.
One might have thought that educated people in general, and intellectuals in particular, would be less susceptible to evident absurdity than the uneducated and the great mass of the population: But one would be mistaken. And there’s a good reason for this.
The status of intellectual requires that one has thoughts that aren’t those of the great mass, or at any rate the majority, of mankind (and even with the massification of the intelligentsia as a result of the expansion of tertiary education, the intelligentsia remains a minority). For the modern intellectual, the search for truth becomes the search for rationalizations for whatever strange beliefs distinguish the intellectual from the hoi polloi. Ideology is to the intelligentsia what superstition is to the mass of mankind; and not to have opinions that clash with those of the majority is, for an intellectual, to lose caste, like a Brahmin who crosses the sea. What’s the point of being an intellectual, after all, if you come to a conclusion that everyone already believes to be the case?
The majority isn’t always right or intellectuals always wrong. What was regarded as perfectly normal, acceptable, or even virtuous in one age is regarded as self-evidently monstrous by another, often as a result of the efforts of intellectuals to alert the population or powers that be to the moral monstrosity of what they accept without question. – Theodore Dalrymple
It’s the undoubted fact that the majority has often unthinkingly subscribed to a horrible or vile morality that gives the intellectuals their opportunity to promote destructive certainties. A false syllogism goes something like this:
The majority thinks that prisoners with male bodies who identify as women shouldn’t be sent to women’s prisons. The majority is often wrong. Therefore, prisoners with male bodies who identify as women ought to be sent to women’s prisons.
What’s surprising, perhaps, and deeply significant, is that a proportion of the population that’s far from tiny—more than a quarter, if the survey I have quoted is accurate—can be brought to believe something so counterintuitive in so historically short a time. A view that not very long before would have been considered absurd and even unthinkable has become almost an orthodoxy for a certain proportion of the population.
And while it rests a minority view for the moment, it’s the view of what in the long run is the most important part of the population, the intelligentsia: for democracy notwithstanding, the vote of the intellectual has at least quadruple the weight of that of the average citizen, who will either follow him in the end or have his views imposed upon him. – Theodore Dalrymple
Instead of admitting that the Treaty was a contract that established the Queen as our Sovereign, protected private property rights, and gave Maori the same rights and privileges of British citizenship as every other New Zealander, the tribal elite are undermining democracy by promoting the lie that Maori are in a ‘Treaty partnership’ with the Crown to elevate themselves into a ‘power-sharing’ ruling aristocracy.
As an ardent disciple of Marxism and identity politics, Jacinda Ardern’s ignorance about the true meaning of the Treaty led our former Prime Minister to embrace the tribal elite’s agenda, dividing New Zealanders by race and introducing Apartheid into the delivery of public services.
Former Labour Prime Ministers did not allow themselves to be ‘captured’ in this way. – Dr Muriel Newman
Even though the Treaty is clear that Maori ceded sovereignty to the Queen – and that it is constitutionally impossible for a partnership to exist between the sovereign and the governed – the ‘Treaty partnership’ fabrication has flourished under Labour.
Critical public services are now controlled by Maori. As a consequence of the health system being under the influence of the tribal elite, we now face the intolerable situation where health care is no longer being prioritised on the basis of clinical need, but by race. Indeed, warnings are now emerging from those working within the sector that some areas are in such a mess, they are in danger of collapse.
Then there’s the universally hated Three Waters scheme that not only confiscates services and infrastructure from councils, to put control firmly into the hands of Maori, but it forces ratepayers to underwrite the massive debts that these new mega agencies are expected to accumulate.
As a result, Chris Hipkins needs to understand that it’s not just co-governance that should be scrapped, but the whole scheme – including the devious Te Mana o te Wai provisions, which effectively give local Maori full authority over the management of water in each catchment area.
New Zealanders need to reject any cosmetic changes the PM is likely to introduce, and strengthen the call for Nanaia Mahuta’s entire scheme to be thrown out. – Dr Muriel Newman
In true Orwellian style, iwi leaders have the audacity to claim that those who want every New Zealander treated as equals are racists, while those who want the country divided by race, are not!
For most people, the concept of their skin colour being used to determine their rights, is utterly abhorrent. Kiwis have never wanted to be divided by race, which is why the on-going attempts by separatists to establish Maori seats in local government, failed in almost every referendum.
It is therefore unsurprising that the public is now objecting to enforced racial categorisation. And that’s the bottom line: Kiwis want to be treated as equals, united as one people under one flag, with New Zealand, one nation – a country of equal citizens, not a collection of competing tribes.
This is what Chris Hipkins needs to recognise if he is to succeed as our country’s leader. He must govern for all New Zealanders, if his party is to regain the confidence of middle New Zealand. Tinkering with policies will not be enough.
And that’s also what Christopher Luxon – and his National Party – needs to realise if he is to have any hope of one day becoming our Prime Minister. Governing for all New Zealanders is the only way to build a successful future. – Dr Muriel Newman
What drives most of us is convenience. It’s why you should never trust polls on matters where the question involves any form of fanciful theory.
What we say and what we do are two different things, not always, but generally.
It’s why the public transport fans have failed so miserably. On a whiteboard it sounds plausible but on any given busy day it’s not real, it never has been real and it never will be. – Mike Hosking
The theory was we would use EV’s and batteries and solar and wind and sunflower seeds. But the reality is none of those things are reliable enough or available enough.
As they currently stand, they aren’t actual answers. They are alternatives of a temporary nature and, given that, there is no point in getting all angsty about profits and wanting to put a windfall tax on them that is talked about.
That gesture is driven by our own anger and frustration at being wrong about the future and wrong about our overall intent.
It’s not BP‘s fault the war started and it’s not BP’s fault we all want to use more and more oil. They are only doing what they have always done, which is supply a demand.
That is why the whole model hasn’t worked – we keep demanding more. – Mike Hosking
The zealots are asking us to do something we won’t do, which is go backwards.
Farmers know this. The way to reduce emissions is reduce cows, make less money, eat less meat and do less farming.
The oil zealots want us to catch buses that don’t go where we want to go, even if they turn up in the first place.
We will not do it and we are not doing it.
Our reality, and its smooth operation, will trump ideology every time. – Mike Hosking
The 2022 New Zealand Honours acknowledged and recognised around 200 citizens who had made meaningful contributions to the well-being of our country.
On reading, I could only identify two or three names who had contributed directly to creating the wealth which fuels our society’s ability to address well-being.
The list lacked diversity.
New Zealand as an entity is no different than the corner dairy. Its survival and growth depend upon customers purchasing products and services that more or less fall within the general categories of Food, Fibre, or Fun (tourism). New Zealand produces these products and services very well and, in many cases, we lead the world in design, quality, sustainability and reliability. – John Wren
So just like the corner dairy, it is only the profit from “New Zealand Inc” that can possibly create the rewards we need to fuel what we refer to as “well-being”. The government and their supporting bureaucrats appear to be blind to how fundamental this is – as we can clearly see in their selection of the heroes who were honoured at the New Year.
The heroes we should recognise are those, who through their commitment, passion and personal risk, have built businesses that contribute to enhancing the well-being of every New Zealander.
Unfortunately, this government and its advisers don’t understand that diversity must be all-encompassing – recognising not only social, ethnic and gender but also productive wealth creation. – John Wren
The government is increasing the minimum wage from $21.20 to $22.70 from 1 April next year. At the headline level this is a 7% increase, which is roughly the CPI increase in the past year. So this is an inflation adjustment, in real terms people on the minimum wage will stay exactly where they were.
But is that true? We know from the EMTR series that the abatement rates are a problem. We also know that the minimum wage is getting awfully close to the 30% tax rate, so bracket creep may mean that we’re not getting full inflation compensation.
Who is really getting the bulk of the minimum wage increase. Spoiler alert – for many of those most in need, the government will be pocketing 80% of the minimum wage increase. They’re asking businesses to pay more, but the lion’s share of that money is going directly into government coffers, not to the people they would profess to be helping.- Paul L.
The bigger problem is when we get into people who are receiving any government support – a partial benefit, accommodation supplement, or working for families tax credits.
Consider someone who is a sole parent with two children, one between 3 and 5 years old, and one over 5 years. Because the youngest child isn’t in school yet they’re working 20 hours a week. Their household income before the minimum wage change was $869.14. After the minimum wage change their income is $874.14, an increase of $5 per week. Their $30 pay rise has mostly been clawed back by the government in abatements. While their pay went up 7% (the inflation rate), their household income has only increased 0.6%. They are 6.4% worse off in real terms, or $55 a week worse off than before the inflation and minimum wage increase. That would be a big impact on a household with two young children. – Paul L.
I’m not suggesting that there shouldn’t be a minimum wage increase. What I’m saying is that when the government claims it’s compensating the lowest paid for inflation, they’re not. Many of these people are worse off, whether because of bracket creep or because of abatements on government programmes. The people who aren’t worse off are the people with no other income, and who are working part time – i.e. students living at home, second income earners in a high income household. The poorest and those most in need are worst off. – Paul L.
- People think that inflation hurts rich people. It doesn’t. Inflation has a major impact on poor people for exactly these reasons. Even with a very significant minimum wage increase many poor people are still much worse off. This is why the right wing, and economists in general, think inflation is bad. Not because they’re evil and hate the poor. Because they know it hurts the poor
- Every generation seems to need to learn again that inflation is bad. It’s been 30 years since we had serious inflation, most people in power have forgotten about it. There’s still plenty around who know – Helen Clark, Don Brash, Richard Prebble, Jenny Shipley would all be able to articulate why we should have been careful about our monetary policy. We weren’t, we have a mess, and now it’s going to hurt a lot of low income people. We can’t change that now, but we can learn.
- Inflation adjusting the minimum wage is better than nothing – I’m in no way arguing we shouldn’t have done it. These people would be worse off without that change.
- Actually compensating these people for the cost of living pressure requires changing more than just the minimum wage – all these abatement rates/thresholds need to be touched, and the benefit rates will need to be changed. When inflation is only 2% you can get by with doing it every couple of years. At 7% it’s too big an impact – it will need to be done soon.
- When the Labour government claims that they’ve inflation adjusted the minimum wage and it’s fine, realise that that’s not true. And when the media or people on twitter claim that these people are now OK for cost of living pressure, that’s also not true. And it’s especially not true for those most in need – sole parents with kids, people living on their own – those people receiving support from other government programmes. – Paul L.
I do not think about or write about aging. I do not think of myself as old – don’t look or act or dress old – and don’t think of myself as a senior citizen. I’m not in denial, I just have more vital things to do and think about and be. I’ve long been at ease with the thought that there was a time when I did not exist, and the time will come when I will not be again. It’s the Way of all Life.
The ticket I got coming in is for a round trip.
OK with me. – Robert Fulghum
If and when the new Prime Minister gets around to his bread and butter reset, the work he has to do on Three Waters is going to be something to behold.
That’s a genuinely complex issue that either most of us don’t get, or don’t want to – or a combination of the two.
And it’s the co-governance aspect of it that kills it.
Co-governance is not the way forward in this country, or indeed any country. The line they are now using is the one where we apparently misunderstand what it is.
So that’s the part I am most looking forward to – what part of us handing over a chunk of the running of our water, or an entity, or the country, don’t we understand? – MIke Hosking
And that’s why, for all the ground we have made, we have still gone backwards.
Because in trying to address past wrongs we have opened ourselves up to the inevitable mission creep.
The tribunal is now so activist it’s absurd. The only upside is we never gave them actual power outside of recommendation.
And the likes of the Human Rights Commissioner have drunk so much Kool Aid they’ve ended up blurting out a volume of extremism we can only laugh or sigh at in dismay.
We either move forward or we don’t and Hipkins now has the task of explaining why this level of extremism is; 1) remotely acceptable and, 2) more importantly for him, electorally viable. – MIke Hosking
We’ve just seen a prime minister cancel a huge amount of projects that have been a stupendous waste of time, energy and money for New Zealand … it’s quite incredible to me.
It’s been ‘let’s do this’, and then ‘let’s not do this’. – Christopher Luxon
We can do well by doing good … I believe that, you know, deeply. – Christopher Luxon
Brad Olsen was on the show late in the Business Hour yesterday arguing the Government had to hike the minimum wage by a full $1.50 yesterday.
Because it had to be in line with the annual inflation rate.
If you look at the minimum wage in the isolation of one year, yes that’s an easy trap to fall into.
But you have to look at the minimum wage over the duration of the last six years of this Government.
It has gone from $15.75 to $22.70.
That’s a $7 increase in six years. That’s 44 percent.
Hands up, who else got a 44 percent pay rise in the last six years? – Heather du Plessis-Allan
So now, what we have is reportedly one of the highest minimum wage rates in the world in an economy that has among the lowest productivity in the developed world.
This doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t make sense to keep bumping up the pay of teenagers so they’ve got heaps to blow on new sneakers.
While making it harder for their employers, who might be parents running a small business, to square the books. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
SUPPOSE THEY MADE A REVOLUTION, and nobody noticed. Suppose the “Cabinet Office” ordered the nation’s public servants to implement an unmandated revolutionary transformation of New Zealand, and they complied. Suppose one of the leading authorities on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Dame Claudia Orange, confirmed that this revolution was, in fact, a done deal. – Chris Trotter
Now, forgive me, but my understanding of revolutionary change is that it does not, and cannot, take place without the “general public” being aware. The active participation of the people in replacing a regime that has, in their eyes, lost all political legitimacy, is pretty much the definition of a revolution. The idea that not only could such a profound upheaval have taken place, but also gone past the point of no return, without the people either noticing it, or sanctioning it, is, quite simply, absurd.
So what should we call a programme initiated by the “Cabinet Office” (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet?) with the ultimate intention of transforming the nation’s constitutional arrangements in such a way that the “consent of the governed” need not be confirmed by democratic means?
Given that New Zealanders have lived through such a transformation before, when the programme of ruthless economic “reforms” known as “Rogernomics” was unleashed upon them without warning, and without an electoral mandate, between 1984 and 1987, then it seems only fitting that this latest attempt to impose transformational change from the top down be described in the same manner. What New Zealanders have been experiencing since 2019 is a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. – Chris Trotter
Were the recommendations of “Matike Mai Aotearoa” and “He Puapua” to be followed, the manner in which New Zealanders are governed, and the rights and privileges they are heir to, would indeed be transformed – out of all recognition.
Race Relations Commissioner, Meng Foon, has responded to the reports by committing himself to the long-term goal of “Eliminat[ing] racism in Aotearoa in all forms, in all organisations whether it’s government, non-government organisations, businesses, amongst our communities.”
New Zealanders anxious to learn how this elimination might be accomplished – especially given the Human Rights Commission’s acceptance that racism and white supremacy are baked-in to New Zealand society – should probably study the “re-education” centres established by the Chinese Government in Xinxiang to eliminate radical Islamist ideology from all mosques, schools, organisations, businesses and communities of the Uighur people.
It is difficult to believe that Labour could be contemplating a bureaucratic coup-d’état even more destructive than Rogernomics. If they are, then – this time – they will provoke a real revolution. – Chris Trotter
If we are going to change our constitutional arrangements in a fundamental way, this needs to be done in a coherent, planned manner, with wide community support, not by Te Puni Kokiri mission creep, or the stumbling we have witnessed so far, where nobody professes to know what’s going on.
We have the longest continuous universally franchised parliament in the world, from 1893 and counting. The Bill of Rights Act reinforces that position, with section 12 stating that elections to the House of Representatives shall be by universal suffrage and by secret ballot. So it should be with all subordinate public decision-making authorities.
Labour’s constitution also states that the natural resources of New Zealand belong to all the people yet, with regard to perhaps our greatest natural resource, the current Three Waters proposal offers equal governance authority to 84% of the population on the one hand and 16% on the other.
There is nothing in the Treaty, our primary source document, that provides for that inequality. It is just plain wrong (and unpopular).
Mana whenua definitely need to be involved in resource management. Co-management under a democratically elected authority is definitely better than co-governance.
Squaring the circle won’t be easy, but a proper, formal process is guaranteed to produce a better result than the slow motion drift to the destruction of democratic accountability. – Sir Kerry Burke
Hipkins is doing a reasonable job of selling the nonsense that burning these bad ideas will help alleviate the cost of living crisis. Of course it won’t. Killing off the merger won’t put food on your table. Saving the $330m it would cost is chump change in the Government’s annual budget.
The truth is, the bonfire just increases Hipkins’ chances at the next election. It means he doesn’t have to waste time and political capital constantly trying to convince voters that these bad ideas are good ideas. Listening to Ardern’s double-speak about all these policies was part of what led to her popularity falling in the end. – Heather du Plessis Allan
Cutting Three Waters will probably be the biggest test of Hipkins’ political management skills. He needs to go far enough to convince voters to accept it, while convincing the Māori caucus to swallow that dead rat. Then he needs to unwind a law already passed.
Time is not on his side. He can’t dawdle so long that he loses the momentum of the current sense of change. Sooner is better so that he can stop looking backwards and start looking forwards. – Heather du Plessis Allan
Once he’s finished telling us what his Labour Government will not do, he’s going to have to start telling us what they will do.
The list of gripes voters have is long. Retail crime. Potholes. Falling house prices. Rising mortgage rates. Grocery bills. Warnings of winter power outages. Truancy in schools. Falling literacy and numeracy rates. Looming winter strain on a badly stretched health system. More kids sitting on the dole. Traffic congestion in major cities.
Somehow he’s going to have to sell his plan for fixing all of that, while convincing voters that this plan will actually fix those things, unlike Ardern’s plan that didn’t fix any of them. – Heather du Plessis Allan
Even going on just the last couple of weeks, New Zealand’s creaking education system seems uniquely unsuited to dealing with these sorts of disruptive challenges. The idea that its hapless top-down, one-size-fits-all culture could respond quickly and effectively to take advantage of new technologies is laughable.
The latest unsettling evidence of the ridiculous rigidity within education was the debacle that was Auckland’s return to school this year. On the back of the freak rainfall event on Anniversary Weekend, the lumbering Wellington-based education ministry decided on Monday it should close every school in Auckland for the first week of the school year. All 600-odd, plus another 1200 or so pre-schools.
There were some that needed to be closed as a result of flooding, or slips in the vicinity. – Steven Joyce
In a sign the bureaucrats are still drunk on the power they took for themselves during the pandemic, they decided individual principals and boards of trustees could not be trusted to make the decision about when it was safe to open their doors. And this despite the fact that these same people are nominally in charge of the education of hundreds of children every day.
The ministry panicked and pulled the pin just as schools were looking forward to their first non-disrupted year since 2019. Once again we demonstrated to a generation of impressionable school-age children that, despite our protestations to the contrary, schooling isn’t really that important. No wonder they can’t be bothered going.
It got worse. About a day later, the officials were apparently having second thoughts. Maybe early childcare centres could open, and then possibly some schools. And then yes, they should open on the Thursday, except for those that couldn’t. It was appalling and cringeworthy. Principals, teachers and parents suffered daily whiplash as bureaucrats and their political masters in Wellington micro-managed Auckland’s schools to within an inch of their lives, trusting no one but themselves despite their all too obvious limitations. –
The public health wallahs we became so heartily sick of during the pandemic were back to tell us that fully half of all schools should be given government-provided school lunches, and eating a government-provided lunch should be compulsory at those schools so as to not offend anyone.
The airwaves immediately filled with stories about unappetising government-supplied lunches, huge wastage, and parents affronted that only officials in Wellington can tell them what is healthy for their kids. Arguments raged over the lack of choice in government-sanctioned menus.
The contrast is apposite. The bureaucratic machine takes more and more power from schools and parents at the same time as a new piece of technology threatens to literally eat their lunch. We have poorer and poorer academic results in our schools, students are staying away in droves and out-of-control officialdom is busy dumbing us down even further, taking responsibility for the food our kids eat and deciding whether it is safe to open the gates. – Steven Joyce
Health officials in Wellington took decisions to leave hospitals empty for long stretches during the pandemic and in doing so created the longest waiting lists of unnecessarily suffering people of all time. They are apparently going to solve this mess by taking even more power for themselves to micro-manage every public hospital in the country.
Our politicians need to lift their sights. Squashing an ill-advised merger of old-media companies is all very well, but they are missing the main game.
Centralised monopolistic public services have surely reached their limits. Its time to de-power the civil service in Wellington and encourage innovation, experimentation and great teaching in our education system. Yes, even pay more for top performance. Where is the fresh thinking from both sides of politics about how we can get away from the bureaucratic dead hand that is stifling us?
Clever new technologies like ChatGPT are more evidence the revolution is coming. The question is whether our kids will be ready to participate in it, or will even more of them be passed by in the interests of an overweening bureaucracy? – Steven Joyce
Amazing what happens when you are staring down the barrel of defeat. All the principles that PM Hipkins had purported to hold over the past five and a half years have just flown out the window. Or have they?- Paula Bennett
To be fair most people weren’t listening too closely to what they wanted to do because they didn’t believe they could actually deliver anything. It was a waste of time listening because the reality of it actually happening was slim to none. Except then the media and opposition started doing their job and asking questions about costs and consultants. The numbers were staggering.
Not many people cared about the RNZ/TVNZ merger until they heard that tens of millions had already been spent and it would then cost another $350 million. The wasted money on investigating the harbour bridge cycleway and light rail was already over $100m. They may not be able to deliver but they sure can spend money on nothing.
Hipkins was one of the three designers of the Government’s policy agenda. He wasn’t a spectator who just did as Jacinda Ardern wanted as he now wants you to believe. He was an integral part of policy development and design. His backtrack this week on a few initiatives is cynical politics at its best.
He helped design bad policies that they failed to sell to the public. They wasted millions of dollars in consultancy fees and public service time. He believes in these policy initiatives that he cancelled this week and has only postponed them because polling told him they are unpopular. He believes in social unemployment insurance and the RNZ/TVNZ merger. As such, you have to believe that these are on hold and not cancelled. You cannot trust that these policies will not be back on the Government’s agenda if they are back in government post-election. – Paula Bennett
As I’ve often written, Labour governments have commendably shaped modern New Zealand for the better, notwithstanding some inevitable blunders and excesses. But I have absolutely no doubt the current one, with the perspective of time, will be recorded as the most incompetent and socially and economically destructive in our history.
They leave a legacy of massive needless debt, a badly damaged economy with thousands of small businesses destroyed, a history of slap-dash financial irresponsibility and ironically, of an unknown but reportedly sizeable number of preventable deaths with the ceasure of life-saving operations following the closure of surgical activity for a lengthy period in 2021. But perhaps their greatest crime is their disgraceful attempt to abolish the most basic underlying principle of democracy, namely one vote per adult and not the 2% of the population who can claim 50% or more of Maori ethnicity receiving half of the management function of public institutions based on ethnicity. This they described as co-government which they endeavoured to justify on a totally bogus interpretation of the Treaty. – Sir Bob Jones
Those seeking to make hate speech illegal are relying, increasingly, on the concept of “stochastic terrorism” to justify their plans for extensive political censorship. Stochastic, in this context, is best explained as the problem of identifying precisely which one of the ten thousand antisemitic readers of an incendiary online posting is going to borrow his brother’s rifle and walk into the nearest synagogue.
The promoters of hate speech laws argue that it is enough to know that those contributing to the creation of a climate of hatred and prejudice will, eventually, succeed in provoking a deadly political reaction. Although it is virtually impossible for the authorities to identify exactly which one of these ten thousand potential terrorists will pick up a gun, the statistical certainly remains that someday, someone will.
Better, therefore, to legally prohibit extremists from building-up the sort of highly-charged political atmosphere that can only be earthed by a bolt of terrorist lightning. No antisemitic literature, no antisemitic movies, no antisemitic blogs and – Hey Presto! – no antisemitism!
Quite apart from the immense cultural wounds such an approach would inflict – no Merchant of Venice – it is far from certain that such extensive censorship would be effective. – Chris Trotter
The hate speech legislation packed off to the Law Commission by Prime Minister Hipkins proposed to limit the extended protection of our human rights legislation to religious communities alone. This offered considerably less protection for “vulnerable groups” than had been promised in earlier recommendations, and yet, even when limited to religious belief, the potential for conflict remains high. The Bible and the Koran both contain passages that are, at least on their face, antisemitic. Should both holy books join Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in the sin-bin? – Chris Trotter
Truth is a hard goddess to like – and even more difficult to serve – but among all the other gods she stands alone for keeping her promise to humanity. “I cannot shield you from the pain that comes with me,” she told us, “but I am your only sure protection against those who would have you believe that happiness is ignorant, and that lies can set you free.” –
So we’ve not learned much from lockdowns have we? We still go crazy, we still panic, and supermarkets still can’t seem to plan ahead for that.- Kate Hawkesby
Any doubts that the cost of living’s worst effects were starting to bite, and bite hard were confirmed this week when a group of health professionals urged the Government to expand its free lunch scheme to more schools.
Health Coalition Aotearoa, a group of more than 55 health academics and 65 medical organisations, said more children than ever needed the scheme, attributing the reason to soaring food prices and the recent Auckland floods. – Janet Wilson
You may well ask how can half the country’s school-aged children need the state to provide them with food?
Implicit in that question is a judgement that researchers say is the problem that renders poverty invisible.
Yet while material hardship rates have decreased since the Global Financial Crisis, poverty for single-parent families remains above comparable countries in Europe and food insecurity is now beginning to become an issue in two-parent working families. – Janet Wilson
With food inflation at 10.1% for the year ended last October, its fastest rate in 14 years, food insecurity is silently rippling into Kiwi homes forcing parents to miss meals, so their children have enough to eat. – Janet Wilson
With Stats NZ revealing that fruit and vegetables had increased by 17%, meat, poultry, and fish by 10% and grocery items by 9.7%, food insecurity is less about poor personal choices and more about the struggle to access nutritious food that’s stratospherically expensive.
So how can New Zealand be a land of plenty that produces enough food to feed 35 million people a year, yet one in five Kiwi kids experience food insecurity and have poor access to good food? –
The researchers contend that rather than attributing hunger to individual decision-making these narratives hide the more pressing realities of inadequate incomes, insecure work, high rents, and lack of access to suitable land for growing food.
As the number of food insecure families grow, simplistic narratives about individual responsibility and poor choices need to be replaced with more equal access to good, nutritional food.
Food in schools programmes, while well-intentioned, in effect masks the wider issue of why the food insecure can’t get access to good food. – Janet Wilson
So was it really a bonfire when incoming Prime Minister Chris Hipkins put a match to several of the Ardern government’s policies?
Certainly his supporters (and some within the media commentariat) hailed the move as being bold, although the ACT party argued that far from setting a bonfire of his own policies, “he has burned a little undergrowth and left a few weeds smouldering for the future”.
Critics were not slow to point out that Hipkins had done nothing to rectify those “achievements” in his own portfolio of falling standards of education and rising truancy in primary schools, not to mention the disaster of the polytechnics merger.
Even now with his avowed focus on “bread-and-butter” issues, the decision to raise the minimum wage rate by the largest aggregate amount since 1997 could push many of its beneficiaries into a higher tax bracket, in effect recycling much of it back to the government’s own coffers. – Point of Order
Who cares if a huge deficit is bequeathed to the next administration? Every previous outgoing Labour government has done so. – Point of Order
The trouble for the Hipkins team is that the Ardern government has wasted so many millions on projects like the proposed merger of TVNZ and Radio NZ, now off the table, that extra funds have to be found to keep those outfits functioning. – Point of Order
With extreme events likely to become more common, we all have to think about the tradeoffs we might have to make to future-proof our homes and our cities and towns.
It’s lucky for us, however, that we have our other superpowers, like knowing when to look out for others, and being a helping hand for anyone who needs it. .
We’ll need to draw on that over the coming days.
Kia Kaha. – Tracy Watkins
We understand that people are doing it really tough but the tough political decisions had to be made.
Here’s the question: What do you do for teachers? What do you do for police? What do you do for defence? Are you going to do it for everyone, Michael?
This… [is] the inflationary price/wage spiral that we’re going to get into that the Federal Reserve in America, that the Reserve Bank here is worried about. This Government isn’t worried about it but everybody knows it’s where we’re going to end up. – Erica Stanford
I’ve been reading about Three Waters over the weekend.
It’s a mess. We knew it was a mess but the headline grabbing aspect of the mess is around co-governance and how unpalatable that is to most of us.
Willie Jackson said as much last week. The argument has been lost, David Seymour and Christopher Luxon have successfully driven the discussion to a point where the Government doesn’t stand a chance. – Mike Hosking
But here’s your next big hurdle, and it’s what I think most of us haven’t understood, who is liable? You know, for the bill.
We haven’t understood because the question hasn’t been answered until now. But also, I suspect even if it had most of us haven’t wandered into the weeds of this thing and got our head around it.
Some of the local bodies have, hence they’ve never liked it. – Mike Hosking
The answer around liability is another crime in a series of crimes.
It’ll cost, by Government estimates, up to $180 billion. To borrow that you need some sort of assurance. And this is the rub – the Government wants to stick it on the ratepayer.
The Government covers none of it. Think about that.
The four water bodies simply tell lenders if it all goes wrong, we will use a property rating mechanism – in other words, you and me.
So the council have had their assets taken off them but the public are on the hook for the debt. And you wonder why councils don’t want a bar of it. – Mike Hosking
What fool unilaterally has their investment and assets removed from them, handed over to a new body, partially or not, we are yet to see, run by Māori and then the debt liability is handed back to you. On top of the fact that the pricing of the project you have no control over.
And then you, as the council, are charged with collecting the money from the punter at a price agreed to with the water authority that may or may not suit you.
Have you ever seen a more bewildering one-sided cock up of an idea?
This alone is every reason you need to get rid of the Government. They’re insane. – Mike Hosking
The fact that the local voice, the knowledge of the local people is being weakened.
My message to Government would be to butt out and let local government work out these things; work with us rather than telling us what to do, – Carmen Houlahan
It really does not seem like a simplification process. To me it sounds like lots of bureaucracy and centralisation of power and control. – Jules Radich
Its quite ironic that in the same breath they are trying to task local government with how to get people more involved on a local level of participation … when in fact their voice is being taken away – Jules Radich
These are important issues but they are deeply, deeply complex issues about who pays for it fairly in terms of insurers, individual property owers, taxpayers, ratepayers, is it this generation, future generation … it will be a multi-decade effort and it’s really important that we can work together in a bipartisan way.
“I think it will be part of a review, a good set of questions to ask why over 50 years there’s been houses built in places that maybe aren’t appropriate now and we should be really clear about that, so making sure councils have authority and power to do that will be important. – Christopher Luxon
The reactions by media chiefs and cultural commissars to accusations that government cash has bought the media’s support or silence — particularly on co-governance — has been marked by bewilderment, defensiveness, exasperation and anger.
Some of that reaction stems from the fact that a very specific criticism of the fund — that it requires the media to endorse a particular view of the Treaty of Waitangi — metastasised quickly into the widespread belief the media had been “bought” generally.
Once that view had taken hold, no matter how loudly editors and journalists insisted they were robust critics of the government, the damage had been done. The widespread disdain for the recipients of the fund’s cash was summed up by the epithet “The team of $55 million” — a play on “The team of five million”, which Jacinda Ardern used to rally the country behind her Covid management strategies. – Graham Adams
The first of the general eligibility criteria requires all applicants to show a “commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to Māori as a Te Tiriti partner” — alongside a commitment to te reo Māori. The section describing the fund’s goals includes “actively promoting the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner“. These criteria may appear uncontroversial to most government bureaucrats and media managers but they are very contentious to the many New Zealanders who don’t accept that the Treaty implies a partnership of any kind — let alone a 50:50 power-sharing agreement between the Crown and iwi, which Three Waters, for instance, incorporates. And it’s not as if rejecting the claim that the Treaty implies a partnership is a fringe opinion.
In his Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture in 2000, former Labour Prime Minister David Lange described that view as absurd: – Graham Adams
The defence of the fund on the grounds that most of the projects approved by NZ on Air are not directly concerned with the Treaty has been dismissed by critics, who say the criteria have an insidious effect by functioning as a “good behaviour” bond for any organisation that wants to access taxpayer cash.
Just how seriously PIJF applicants take the requirement to swear allegiance to the approved view of the Treaty was revealed when details of NZ on Air’s assessment process were released in 2022 under the Official Information Act. – Graham Adams
Perhaps the biggest blow to the fund’s credibility was the publication of a report in March last year that expanded the criteria stated in the funding application documents. Titled the “Te Tiriti Framework for News Media”, it was commissioned by NZ on Air — at a cost of $33,350 (plus GST).
While NZ on Air advised that the “framework” was offered only as “guidance”, any media organisation hoping to tap into the fund’s millions would have been under no illusions about the stance they should take towards the Treaty.
Indeed, the report begins with a firm instruction: “Mass news media organisations need to consider, explore, build on and implement this framework in ways that show commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”
Examples of the “guidance” include:
-
- “Māori have never ceded sovereignty to Britain or any other state.”
- “…our society has a foundation of institutional racism.”
- “For news media, it is not simply a matter of reporting ‘fairly’, but of constructively contributing to Te Tiriti relations and social justice.”
- “Repeated references by the government to the English version [of the Treaty], in which Māori supposedly ceded sovereignty, have created systematic disinformation that protects the government’s assumption of sole parliamentary sovereignty.” – Graham Adams
Despite such firm evidence of what NZ on Air expects from applicants, many senior journalists still seem unable to accept that demanding adherence to a certain editorial position on the Treaty as a requirement for funding is an outrageous abuse of government power and taxpayer money.
Equally, they seem reluctant to accept it was a massive blunder for media organisations to agree to such criteria. Nevertheless, a few media managers have admitted privately the PIJF has been a disaster for them. – Graham Adams
As the concepts of co-governance and partnership increasingly become a flashpoint in this year’s election campaign — at a time when the government has been steadily inserting them into a swathe of legislation and policy ranging from education and health to the RMA and Three Waters — a question remains over just how much the fund’s criteria have crimped that debate.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins insists that many voters are suspicious of co-governance only because politicians haven’t explained the concept clearly — but that failure also falls squarely on the shoulders of journalists. – Graham Adams
In short, for Stuff there is no debate to be had over the question of whether the Treaty implies a partnership — in much the same way it prefers not to publish criticism of anthropogenic climate change or transgender activism. – Graham Adams
There can never be a definitive answer to the question of exactly how much the Public Interest Journalism Fund has helped shut down criticism of the Treaty at a crucial time in our political history. But by accepting its conditions, it is undeniable that the media has inflicted a terrible wound on itself by being seen to have compromised its principal assets — trust, credibility and independence. – Graham Adams
The lesson to media organisations seems clear: if the government ever comes calling with a bag of money that requires editorial prescriptions to be followed, take the advice of the advertising campaign that ran in the early 1990s to discourage children from experimenting with illegal drugs — and just say no. – Graham Adams
That faint squealing noise Australians have been hearing over the past couple of weeks was the sound of New Zealand’s Labour government slamming on the brakes. The distant smell of burning rubber can also be explained. That was the same government executing a handbrake turn.
Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation last month triggered not only a sharp political reset but a pronounced change in the country’s mood. Ardern may have enjoyed worldwide adulation, but in two terms as leader she had become an increasingly polarising figure at home. Her departure resembled nothing so much as the lifting of a spell. – Karl du Fresne
Ardern’s departure – which was spun as a sudden decision, but turned out to have been carefully plotted weeks beforehand – could be interpreted in two ways. One was that she saw defeat looming at next October’s general election and didn’t want to go down in history as a failed prime minister. (That was the rat-and-sinking-ship theory.) The alternative explanation was that she realised she had become a liability to Labour and wanted to give her successor time to regroup before going to the polls. (That was the noble self-sacrifice theory.)
Either way, the portents were clear. Not only did opinion surveys show Labour in steady decline and its National party opposition in the ascendancy, but Ardern’s personal popularity had slumped to the point where she had fallen into the negative approval zone, where voters who liked her were outnumbered by those who didn’t.
It was a dramatic demonstration of what some political scientists call the Obama effect, where a leader is admired abroad but not so much domestically. It also reinforced the fundamental truth that ultimately, the only people in a position to truly judge whether Ardern was doing a good job were those who had to live with the consequences of her government’s policies. When it comes to the crunch, rapturous applause from left-leaning overseas commentators is just so much meaningless noise. – Karl du Fresne
The Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 was a crucial turning point. Ardern’s earnest ‘be kind’ shtick and her patronising entreaties to the ‘team of five million’ soon took on an unmistakeably totalitarian tone. State-imposed mandates that barred unvaccinated people from working were seen as cruel and heartless. The same was true of a chaotic and randomly unfair isolation and quarantine system that prevented New Zealanders overseas from returning home, often in heartbreaking circumstances.
To many people, Ardern became the face of authoritarianism – ironically, the exact reverse of the compassionate image she sought to convey. Her daily televised pep talks from what was derisively labelled the Podium of Truth, so named because of her statement that the government was the sole source of reliable information about the pandemic, aroused as much scepticism as shoulders-to-the-wheel fervour.
None of this was helped by the growing public perception that Ardern was protected by sycophantic journalists. New Zealanders expect the media to subject the government to rigorous critical scrutiny, and they didn’t see that happening. In the end, the media’s fawning over Ardern became a negative. – Karl du Fresne
Covid aside, what most damaged Ardern was the growing public realisation that her government was pursuing a radical agenda for which it had no mandate and which it demonstrably lacked the competence to execute. Even as homelessness, gang crime and child welfare issues escalated, Labour ideologues seemed more concerned with promoting disruptive and destabilising changes in health, education and local government. As with some Labour regimes in the past – and with Australia under Gough Whitlam – there was a striking mismatch between ministerial ambition and ability.
So now Hipkins has embarked on a desperate salvage operation, reshuffling Labour’s cabinet, demoting his most unpopular minister, the divisive Nanaia Mahuta, and pledging to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ such as the cost of living. He has also signalled the likelihood of a rethink on some of Labour’s most ideologically toxic policies – notably, Mahuta’s push for what is euphemistically termed Maori co-governance over the nation’s water resources. – Karl du Fresne
The Bill of Rights Act says that everyone aged 18 and over has the right to vote. The Supreme Court says that setting the voting age at 18 is inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Astute readers may have noticed a contradiction, one that arises out of the Make It 16 decision issued by our highest court late last year. It’s the result of a tangle of legislation and judicial logic which, when unravelled, is a good illustration of why the courts shouldn’t be asked to resolve contentious social and political issues like this. – Alex Penk
The Electoral Act 1993 sets a minimum age of 18 for voting in general elections. Section 12 of the Bill of Rights Act says that qualified voters “of or over the age of 18 years” have the right to vote in Parliamentary elections. However, section 19 of the Bill of Rights Act says that everyone has the right to freedom from discrimination including age-based discrimination, with “age” defined as any age from 16 onwards. The age-based non-discrimination right was actually inserted into the Bill of Rights Act three years after it was first passed, apparently without anyone noticing that this created a contradiction between sections 12 and 19. This contradiction opened up a line of argument for Make It 16, who were seeking a declaration of inconsistency—a formal statement that the voting age of 18 is inconsistent with the fundamental rights and freedoms in the Bill of Rights Act.
A majority of the Supreme Court judges resolved this contradiction with a rather creative interpretation of the Bill of Rights Act. Section 12, they said, only guarantees that the voting age won’t be raised; it doesn’t mean that it can’t be lowered. The majority justified this conclusion by invoking section 6 of the Bill of Rights, which says that wherever possible, “an enactment” should be “given a meaning that is consistent with the rights and freedoms contained in this Bill of Rights”. In other words, section 12’s specification of the voting age should be interpreted in a way that’s consistent with section 19’s prohibition on age discrimination. – Alex Penk
First, it seems frankly implausible that Parliament would have thought it was creating some sort of sliding scale rather than fixing a specific voting age, especially when you look at the actual legislative history.[1] Only Kos J, writing a sole minority opinion, did this in detail. Disagreeing with the majority’s interpretation, he concluded that Parliament meant to prevent the voting age being raised or lowered because a change in either direction, “is not a neutral political action” but one that will inevitably “benefit some parties disproportionately.” He noted too that the voting age is one of those rare entrenched provisions in the Electoral Act—a provision that requires a super-majority vote of 75 percent of MPs or a majority in a referendum to change—meant to settle the position and end a history of “Parliamentary tinkering with electoral law”.
Second, it’s hard to see how the interpretive direction in section 6 can be used to resolve inconsistencies within the Bill of Rights itself. It’s entirely circular to say that the Bill of Rights Act should be “given a meaning that is consistent with the rights and freedoms contained in this Bill of Rights”. This just begs the true question—what do those rights and freedoms actually say?—and the confusion provides cover for judges to resolve conflicts between rights in a way that fits their preferred view, in this case using section 19 to reinterpret section 12. There’s no reason this logic couldn’t be used to justify the exact opposite approach—using section 12 to reinterpret section 19—but in fact the whole issue is a red herring.
As Kos J said, the real issue is how to resolve the conflict between a specific provision, section 12, and a general one, section 19. Like him, I think the best way to do this is to say that, “the explicit right to vote in parliamentary elections at 18 years, grounded in the constitutionally-entrenched provisions of the Electoral Act and affirmed by s 12 of the Bill of Rights, prevails over the generalised right to freedom from discrimination affirmed by s 19.” – Alex Penk
Then the majority got into policy-making territory, though to be fair that’s not entirely the court’s fault. The Bill of Rights Act says that rights are subject to “reasonable limits” that are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” So the courts will only say that a law is inconsistent with the Act if the law creates an unreasonable, unjustified limit on a right. But asking judges to decide what is “reasonable” and “justified” in a “free” and “democratic” society is an intensely value-laden exercise, not a legal one, the kind normally reserved for politics. Judges are clearly sensitive to the perception that they’re straying into politics, and the majority was at pains to stress that it was simply stating what the rights mean. – Alex Penk
These are not legal questions; they are questions of social science and policy, and this is not how policy should be made—on the basis of a solitary and uncontested study containing no New Zealand participants, provided by a Commissioner who has been advocating for a lower voting age since at least 2018, supported by the assertion of a mid-ranked academic at an overseas university. Compare this to the Parliamentary process which, at its best, gathers comprehensive research, puts it through an open and contested process, and offers a measure of transparency via Select Committee deliberations and ultimately accountability to the electorate.
The Attorney-General also played an eyebrow-raising role in all this. First, the Court said he was required to provide positive justification for a voting age of 18—in other words, to offer evidence to support the current position. But the Attorney-General wasn’t able to do this, and so was limited to arguing that 18 is within a range of reasonable possibilities. The Court therefore relied only on the evidence from the Children’s Commissioner, and made the declaration of inconsistency that Make it 16 sought. But the judges said that limiting the voting age to 18 could potentially be justified—it just hadn’t been in this case. Second, and more concerningly, the Attorney-General had also begun his case arguing that section 12 disposed of Make it 16’s case, but abandoned this argument before the case began. Kos J was particularly unimpressed by this, describing it as a “regrettable” choice and noting: “Important questions of public rights before this Court cannot just be resolved by forensic choices made by parties.” It’s difficult to understand why the Attorney-General made this choice—though a cynic might think it had something to do with the fact that the Attorney-General isn’t just a law officer but a member of the Government, the same Government that immediately greeted the Court’s declaration with an announcement that it would introduce legislation to lower the voting age.
For now, opinion seems firmly against changing the voting age but what is changing, in this era of declarations of inconsistency, is the role the courts are playing in political issues. They are ill-suited to this; it’s not ideal that arcane arguments about legal interpretation play such a large role in a case like this. And as this case demonstrates, courts are limited to the issues raised and the evidence supplied by the parties—or not, in the case of the Attorney-General. Whatever his reasons, when a single party’s litigation strategy can have such far-reaching implications it illustrates why issues like this shouldn’t be decided by the courts. – Alex Penk
When our highest court says something is inconsistent with fundamental human rights, that tends to stick in the public consciousness and to motivate political action. Just look at the power to make declarations of inconsistency itself, a power that wasn’t in the Bill of Rights Act and was invented by the courts, to be eventually acknowledged in statute by Parliament. Will the same thing happen with the voting age? Who knows, but with the courts taking this kind of approach, expect to see more cases like this. – Alex Penk
There is responsibility when you take on the role of public service, you have a responsibility to the people that you’re representing”.
It’s important that egos and collaboration and civility, and actually you can disagree strongly without being disagreeable or personal with each other. That behaviour and that character and that leadership really matters. – Christopher Luxon
You don’t just have council because it’s a squabble-fest. You’ve actually got to get things done for people.
As you’ve seen even in the last round of elections across the country, people are frustrated with politicians not getting things done.
That’s my call to all politicians is that we have to model out the standards of leadership that we want to see in our fellow citizens. We’ve got to carry ourselves with civility. – Christopher Luxon
The full economic and financial cost will take some time to realise. We know the biggest economic costs are going to be in the form of lost capital and lost economic opportunity. – Caralee McLiesh
What we are talking about is inflation-adjusting tax thresholds which we think is just entirely fair, done in many countries around the world and is a completely reasonable thing to be able to do to give people more of their own money to navigate a cost of living crisis which is the other big challenge we’ve got.
What we have got to make sure is we do a proper assessment of what the damage actually is and what support is really needed and then we make sure we apply those funds with good economic responsibility and we are prudent economic managers because it is taxpayers dollars and most important is we actually get things done. – Christopher Luxon
As a former CEO, who is used to spending money and making investments, it is about what you do with that money and how you get a return on that and how you get things done that deliver benefits for New Zealanders. –
The focus has to be on making sure Kiwis are safe, making sure we are supporting them, making sure we start the clean-up, and then obviously making the assessment of what is needed. –Christopher Luxon
Politicians want their positions more than anything else. If being pro-trans to this extent loses a significant politician her position then many other politicians will not be, stop being, pro-trans to this extent.
In more detail here there’s a very vocal part of the political class demanding many things for the trans cause. Among the general public not so much. And that’s the thing about this democracy kick – at some point the general public do get asked. – Tim Worstall
The British Government has a new policy around unemployment and it’s the old carrot and stick.
There isn’t anything new around employment thinking. It’s a combination of rules and incentives, the state of the market place in terms of jobs and the mix of attitude of those looking for work and the amount of assistance the state Government is prepared to offer.
In Britain they are cracking down, so you need to meet your welfare officer or get penalised or apply for jobs or get penalised. If you don’t play ball you will lose your benefit.
Here, it’s the opposite – if you don’t want to work no one seems to care. – Mike Hosking
Thousands upon thousands of young people are not only without work, they are not in training, not looking to improve themselves and aren’t in education looking to add to their CV’s.
They are literally doing nothing and for that we support them financially in some cases for years on end.
The great crime in that is, 1) they are young and therefore you are robbing them of a future that could be vastly different, and, 2) it comes at a time of extraordinary amounts of work.
It would be nice to think you could sort yourself out, that you are self-motivated or someone around you is there to help you on your way. But for clearly too many, that simply isn’t their reality. – Mike Hosking
This all resonates with me because the age group we are dealing with are the 15-24-year-olds. That’s the age of all five of our kids.
They are all doing their own thing but what we told them as parents was you could do whatever you want, as long as it wasn’t nothing. – Mike Hosking
Although we vote for polices that affect us our sense of the economy, health waiting lists etc, tell me how you can vote for a Government that for five years has allowed that number to get where it is, at a time when answers have been so plentiful?
If it’s irresponsible as a parent, then surely it’s as bad for a Government.
What Government can justify writing off the next generation by literally doing nothing except handing out money with no expectation of social, moral or economic improvement? – Mike Hosking
British writer Samuel Johnson quipped: “When a man knows he is to be hanged… it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Eighteenth-century gallows humour is obviously just as apt in the twenty-first as we watch Chris Hipkins make a show of jettisoning many of Labour’s policies he apparently backed just a month ago.
The prospect of his party being hanged at October’s election has obviously concentrated our new Prime Minister’s mind to such a marked extent he has lost the sense of embarrassment most political leaders would feel about extravagantly ducking and diving to get away from what have clearly been highly effective Opposition attacks. – Graham Adams
For its election slogan, the Labour Party might consider adapting Groucho Marx’s famous line to read: “If you don’t like our principles, don’t worry, we’ve got others (and any or all of them may be abandoned at short notice!)”
What must really be confounding to the Opposition is that Hipkins is being hailed as stunning and brave on account of his dramatic retreat while questions are being asked about his opponents’ performance — with Luxon in particular under fire.
Some in the media have seized on a handful of polls taken while Hipkins still enjoys the novelty factor of being the nation’s new Prime Minister and have decided that Luxon is a lacklustre leader and that National has lost direction.
This despite the fact Luxon — aided by David Seymour — has just seen off Jacinda Ardern, a celebrity politician who even a year ago was a very popular Prime Minister, and has forced her successor to retreat swiftly on several fronts.
Journalists seem to have fallen for Hipkins’ implausible impersonation of a new broom — which can only be said to be true inasmuch as he has lifted a corner of the Labour government’s tattered carpet and is busily sweeping as much contentious policy under it as possible so it is firmly out of sight before the election. – Graham Adams
As National leader Christopher Luxon put it: “Chris Hipkins has been part of this Labour Government and been part of that engine room with Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson driving all of this agenda.
“It’s rather disingenuous — and some clever Jedi mind trick really — if you say, ‘I have got nothing to do with that and now I believe this… I actually think it could be all about the economy.’
“Well, where have you been for the last 15 months?”
Why would anyone imagine Hipkins is deeply dedicated to reforming Labour policy — especially co-governance — rather than superficially reacting to polls that had been plummeting?
And why would anyone imagine that the very same policies Hipkins is now jettisoning won’t be resuscitated if Labour finds itself in a position to form a government in October? – Graham Adams
The initial signs are not promising. He has — without a trace of embarrassment or awareness of public sentiment — suggested that rebranding co-governance as “mahi tahi” (“work as one”) might be helpful. In fact, he has been reported as saying he “loves the phrase mahi tahi”.
Does Hipkins really have such a low opinion of those opposing co-governance that he thinks that will do the trick? Does he have no idea how much resentment exists already to renaming government departments and government policy with Māori names? – Graham Adams
For a Prime Minister to pass off widespread opposition to a reshaping of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements as fear-mongering should be beneath him.
It appears not to have crossed Hipkins’ mind that many New Zealanders object to co-governance because of fundamental concerns around the erosion of democracy.
Their “fear” is that principles of “one person, one vote, of equal value” — and policy being based on need not race — are being overturned in favour of a society where ancestry can confer rights denied to everyone else. – Graham Adams
Perhaps New Zealanders’ fierce attachment to democratic principles is something that Hipkins — like his immediate predecessor, Jacinda Ardern — simply doesn’t understand.
What is particularly hilarious is that Hipkins is pretending that once the public understand more about co-governance they will fall in love with it.
In fact, the real danger for Hipkins is that the mainstream media will actually do its job and voters will get to see clearly what the government has planned for them via the notion of “partnership” — and its offspring “co-governance” — which under this government has been intricately laced through official policy from health and education to Three Waters and the rejigged RMA legislation. – Graham Adams
Hipkins will be hoping fervently the public doesn’t suddenly grasp the scale of the revolutionary changes that have taken place under the government he has served in for five years — and that have been imposed without any specific public mandate.
If they do, their fury will see Labour crushed in October — no matter how much Hipkins likes to posture as the fresh-faced new boy suddenly dedicated to “bread-and-butter” issues. – Graham Adams
January 2023. It all started so well.
A 5% jump in the polls just for becoming PM – nothing else.
This probably reflected the return of borderline reasonable ex-Labour voters desperately hoping the party would revert to its traditional core policy of just trashing the economy, rather than democracy as a whole. An outpouring of relief that Jacinda’s minority-obsessed, divisive and authoritarian rule was apparently over, rather than faith in Chippy’s abilities to run the country.
Nevertheless, trying to maintain the momentum, he pushed forward. That’s when the cracks began to show. – Derek Mackie
But….. and this is where Chris revealed his true Left-wing, woke credentials. He only postponed the hugely expensive Unemployment Insurance Scheme, a direct tax by any other name, which would see families paying another 3% of their earnings to keep redundant workers on the couch watching Netflix on 80% of their former salaries for up to 7 months.
And, the anti-free speech and divisive Hate Speech legislation was referred to the lefty lawyers at the Law Commission for review. In other words, wait until after the election then magically revive it.
Then he made his really big mistake. He actually promised to fix the economy, crime, health and education….well, eventually! Not that he really thought there was much wrong with the last three, particularly crime and education, which he felt he had presided splendidly over.
And, he pledged to concentrate on the bread-and-butter issues and get rid of all the woke nonsense. Although, any mention of winding back Labour’s separatist co-governance agenda was conspicuous by its absence or hidden in a smokescreen of “mati tahi”, Chippy’s new favourite Maori phrase.
However, he did promise to explain better to the public how he was going to turn NZ into a two-tier, tribal-ruled, apartheid state. Gee, thanks mate for the clarification! – Derek Mackie
I’ve followed Rowling’s saga from the beginning, and have read her supposedly “transphobic” tweets and her account of “reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues.” I’ve also seen the social-media mob go after her to the extent of some of the offended burning Harry Potter books! And it won’t be news to you that in this issue I’m pretty much on Rowling’s side.
I have seen nothing “transphobic” from her: no hatred of trans people at all. What she’s demonized for is insisting that transsexual women, while deserving of the compassion that should accrue to all humans, are not identical in every respect to biological women. She does not agree in the literal sense with the mantra “trans women are women”, and has explained why. She is navigating a tortuous path between the rights of biological women and those of transsexual women, and has been attacked because she sometimes uses sarcasm and humor to make her point.
But one thing I haven’t seen in her is a fear or hatred of transsexual people. What I have seen are bravery, persistence and compassion in the face of “Rowlingphobia” (now she’s being called a “Nazi”), but also her fierce conviction that some trans activists are trying to infringe on the rights of biological women, rights that are not 100% in synch with the rights of transsexual women. – Jerry Coyne
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.
But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist. – Pamela Paul
Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.
Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth. – Pamela Paul
Of course, some children really are trans — and benefit hugely from getting help with transitioning. Ironically, they have now lost a clinic designed to assist them, thanks to the stupidity and short-sightedness of ideologues.
We are now approaching — albeit cautiously — a place where politicians and professionals should at the very least be able to question certain practices without being dismissed as bigots.
That said, as we have seen from the recent debate around Nicola Sturgeon’s ill-thought-out self-identification legislation, a lot of people are still afraid of tackling the gender ideologues. And understandably so: the activists are very powerful and some are very persuasive.
They dominate social media, targeting the young and impressionable, casting themselves as the enemies of old-fashioned and outdated values; pioneers of a newer, more progressive age of self-expression and tolerance.
Some present themselves as harmless entertainers. Others have a more direct agenda, proffering gender reassignment as an easy, fun and, in some cases, lucrative lifestyle choice.
Provided no one challenges them, they are all sweetness and light. Express even a bat-squeak of concern, however, and they can be utterly vicious. Witness the recent ‘decapitate Terfs’ placards at pro-Sturgeon rallies in Scotland. – Sarah Vine
Terf — or trans-exclusionary radical feminist — is the trans fanatic’s (misogynistic) preferred acronym for anyone, be they concerned parent or cautious professional, who dares question the wisdom of not merely allowing but, like the Tavistock, actively assisting young and vulnerable children to start altering their gender.
By demonising all opposition, trans ideologues have, over the years, skilfully and successfully shut down almost any debate on the issue. – Sarah Vine
All this amounts to a scandal on a truly titanic scale, one that affects not just the lives of individuals such as Keira Bell, who will have to suffer for ever from the after-effects of the treatment she underwent, but also for everyone who has ever been made to feel like a bigot in this toxic debate.
Because this is not just a catastrophic betrayal of thousands of vulnerable children and their families by a taxpayer-funded institution that allowed itself to be infiltrated and influenced by a highly politicised ideological agenda.
It’s also an example of what happens when all debate is stifled, and of the harms that occur when free speech is shut down and legitimate questioning of motives and methods is sacrificed on the altar of wokeness. – Sarah Vine
History teaches us that wherever good people are silenced, bad things happen. I have no doubt that in years to come, when we look back on what happened at the Tavistock and at the whole situation surrounding the trans debate in general — such as convicted rapists being allowed to declare themselves female and serve jail time in women’s prisons — people will shake their heads in disbelief that such things were ever allowed to happen.
But happen they did, and not because no one saw what was going on.
They took place because the rest of the world was too busy covering its own sorry backside — too busy being woke, too busy painting pointless rainbows on pedestrian crossings, too busy organising ‘inclusivity seminars’ and paying trans activists to teach primary-school children that biological sex is a ‘construct’ — to see that many vulnerable children were being consigned, like Bell, to a lifetime of ill-health and regret.
In short, too busy paying lip service to a bunch of politically correct bullies, while ignoring those who really need society’s protection. It is, I’m afraid, the story of our times; and, as many of us warned and Hannah Barnes’s book shows, it’s a shameful one. – Sarah Vine
What an extraordinary week.
I’m not just talking about the devastation, the tragedy and the heroism, although all that was remarkable enough.
What was also exceptional was the manner in which the country responded. Cyclone Gabrielle gave us a tantalising glimpse of a New Zealand that most of us grew up in and recognised – a country where people set aside real or imagined differences and pulled together in the face of a common crisis. – Karl du Fresne
We have been through a sustained and bruising period of division and polarisation, the purpose of which seemed to be to pull us in different directions based on race, gender, sexual identity and other markers of “otherness”.
But in recent days we have witnessed the re-emergence of the old New Zealand: a country in which people recognise that all of us – urban and rural, male and female, Maori and Pakeha, young and old, queers and heterosexuals, immigrants and those born here – are bound by common interests, values and aspirations and need to pull together when our national wellbeing is threatened.
We have seen the very best of New Zealand in the way communities rallied and turned to their own resources, and in the way emergency services personnel, many of whom were themselves directly affected by flood damage, selflessly responded to the urgent needs of others, often at great personal risk – and in two cases, with fatal consequences.
We have seen an outpouring of public support for the thousands of people whose properties have been destroyed and who must now set about trying to rebuild their lives. Farmers, horticulturists and orchardists are some of the worst affected and it’s possible the disaster will have a positive outcome in the form of a greater public appreciation of the rural sector and its importance to the rest of us.
We have been reassured and impressed by the performance of community leaders, sector representatives and local politicians who suddenly found themselves thrust into situations for which there was no chance to rehearse. – Karl du Fresne
We have been generally well served by the media, especially the broadcast media, who were tested to the limit. In the first two days the mayhem was so widespread and fast-moving that it was hard for news outlets to keep up. Just as reporters were getting to grips with one major development, another story broke somewhere else. I can’t recall any other crisis when the media focus kept shifting at such a dizzying pace – from Muriwai to Tairawhiti, Northland to Hawke’s Bay. Power failures and communication breakdowns made the job even harder, but reporters rose to the challenge.
Radio in particular came into its own. It’s unique in its ability to keep on top of a fast-moving and fluid (forgive the pun) situation. Radio reporters are highly mobile and can phone in their reports from wherever things are happening. Programme schedules aren’t rigid, unlike TV, and can be interrupted whenever news breaks. Moreover, you can listen to the radio pretty much wherever you go and whatever you’re doing.
The crisis also served as a striking reminder of the limitations of digital technology. When a smart phone is useless because cell phone towers are out or the phone can’t be charged, a battered transistor radio – as one farmer marooned in a remote area of Northland attested this morning on RNZ – can be a lifeline. – Karl du Fresne
To summarise, in the worst of circumstances we have glimpsed the best of New Zealand – a New Zealand many of us feared was changing beyond recognition.
For five days, ideological agendas and their vociferous, mischievous champions have been sidelined. The constant discordant static of division has been silenced. New Zealanders have had far more pressing issues to focus on – practical issues of survival and recovery.
They have been given a vivid reminder of the importance of social solidarity at a time when it was never more desperately needed. The question now is whether this spirit can be sustained once the immediate crisis has passed. – Karl du Fresne
Newly-minted Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has had some sort of road, excuse the pun, to Damascus experience by announcing we need to “get real” about our roading
He says some of them will need to be moved to be more resilient. No kidding Chris, you road-hater from the political party of road-hating.
The political party that killed any number of significant roading projects that would see major state highway improvements. They jettisoned them so we could have bus lanes, cycleways and light rail that is $70 million deep on consultants without a millimetre of track laid two years after it was supposed to finish. – Mike Hosking
I am praying at some point most New Zealanders wake up to this fraud, if you haven’t already.
This from Chris “I-have-a-truancy-announcement-to-make” Hipkins, despite the fact, as Education Minister, he ignored the issue for years. ‘But I can’t make that this week because I have an emergency to deal with as Prime Minister.’
‘And as Prime Minister I have seen roading in a state that it shouldn’t be, despite the fact I sat in cabinet for the past five years promoting e-bikes and buses that don’t turn up, because we have no drivers, because my Minister for Auckland, who is also Minister for Immigration, doesn’t let anyone into the country.
You can’t make this stuff up. This guy is the biggest, bewildered wonk we have seen out of Wellington in many a long year. – Mike Hosking
Chris at least is about the place. But the problem with that is in an emergency you see the real “them” and the frightening part of the real Hipkins is it seems he’s never left Wellington and when he did he couldn’t believe what he saw.
The rest of us have lived it for five years and he didn’t quite get the message.
So, Chris – the roads are an issue are they? Who do you think has overseen that particular disaster? – Mike Hosking
It is a hard time to be a farmer in the North Island, this week especially.
Yes, the cyclone has affected a lot of people, not just farmers, in some cases devastatingly. But the farming community have got to be among the worst affected.
I really don’t mean to minimise this cyclone for anyone else, but farmers are isolated.
They will probably be the last to have their power reconnected, the last to have their bridges fixed to get the milk tankers in; they’ll be the last ones in to the supermarket in town. And they’ll be the last ones to have someone turn up at the door and ask if they’re ok
And when most others affected have replaced the roof and dried the carpet, farmers will still be shifting forestry debris off their land, they will still be counting the loss of dumped milk, spoiled kumara, damaged avos, wiped out maize crops, and lost apples for months, if not years. – Heather du Plessis Allan
In case you’ve forgotten, they had Covid shutting the borders and keeping workers out.
To this day, they’ve watched unharvested veges rotting in the soil, fruit rotting on the trees, the winter grazing regulation dreamed up in Wellington, the ute tax, the climate emissions levy, and now the planned RMA reform coming at them.
The forestry conversions are threatening communities, they’ve had the flooding in Gisborne just over a year ago, the frosts on central North Island farms last winter, and the flooding on Franklin District farms last week.
It has been a lot for farmers. – Heather du Plessis Allan
We rely on these guys.
We don’t think of that a lot, but they bring tens of billions of dollars into this country to help pay for our kids’ education and our parents’ healthcare.
Spare a thought for them, because they’ll be the last ones to make a fuss.
And when this cyclone doesn’t even feature any more in the news cycle, the effects of it will still be weighing on farmers’ minds. – Heather du Plessis Allan
Nah, we’re just three Māori boys – Mikey Kihi, Rikki Kihi and Morehu Maxwell
Economist Herbert Stein once said that ‘if something cannot go on forever, it will stop’. Today, there is growing evidence that ‘Stein’s law’ is coming for the renewables industry, particularly for wind and solar power.
After investing billions of dollars into the green-energy transition, many of the major players in the energy sector are now shifting their priorities. The global energy shortages of 2022 seem to have woken much of the world up to just how impractical renewable energy can be. – Ralph Schoellhammer
The year 2022 marked a decisive shift. Energy security replaced climate change as the world’s top priority. And while politicians’ green rhetoric will carry on as normal, the markets are reflecting this transition. In the US, the market for green bonds has already started to stall as producing clean energy has become less of a priority than producing energy full stop.
This process is not likely to be smooth, however. Politicians and CEOs could still be held accountable for their over-ambitious green promises of recent years. – Ralph Schoellhammer
The energy crisis was a major wake-up call for the world. It was a reminder that our energy supplies are far more fragile than we often realise. And it made it clear that green technology can rarely be relied on. The exception to this rule is nuclear power, which can produce vast quantities of electricity without any carbon emissions. Despite this, during last year’s global energy crunch, working nuclear power plants were shut down across the world, from California to Germany. This will be seen by future generations as a moment of absolute madness. As will attempts to phase out fossil fuels before reliable replacements are available.
To return to Herbert Stein’s quote, there is a positive to stopping something that cannot go on forever. It forces us to face up to the reality of our energy needs and to reject the green delusions that have dominated decades of policymaking. A complete overhaul of Europe’s energy strategy is long overdue. We cannot afford to keep ignoring reality. – Ralph Schoellhammer
Nothing speaks to the madness of the modern elites better than their war on farming. Consider France. One day President Macron is telling the world to get serious about ‘food security’. Post-Covid and with war raging in Ukraine, we must make sure food keeps being made and transported around the world, the French government says. Yet, at the same time, that same government, without missing a beat, is bringing in pesticide bans that could devastate sections of France’s own agriculture industry. Which could even lead to the closure of farms. Behold the schizophrenia of the 21st-century establishment. – Brendan O’Neill
Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about this latest farmers’ revolt on the continent – the tractor uprising against the laptop elites rarely makes the mainstream news these days. The farmers are furious over the government’s ban on neonicotinoids, a chemical that kills insects that eat plants. Such insecticides are potentially harmful to bees, and so farmers will be forbidden from using them. And the fact that the ban will hit sugar-beet farmers particularly hard, potentially leading to the closure of sugar factories? Doesn’t matter. Bees come first.
For sugar-beet farmers, neonicotinoids are essential for staving off yellows virus, a pathogen spread by sap-sucking insects that causes beet leaves to turn yellow and which can reduce crop yields by up to 50 per cent. The farmers who took to the streets of Paris this week are worried about a ‘further decline in beet plantings’ and, consequently, ‘sugar-factory closures’. ‘Macron is liquidating agriculture’, one of their banners said. ‘Save your farmer’, cried another. As Reuters reported, the farmers believe the government’s ‘excessive pesticide curbs’ run counter to its ‘calls to boost food security in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine’. – Brendan O’Neill
The French clampdown on neonicotinoids sums up so much that is wrong with modern politics. The ban is a diktat from an unaccountable technocracy. It was under pressure from the European Union that France overturned its longstanding policy of allowing beet farmers to use neonicotinoids even though their use is forbidden elsewhere in the EU. Last month, the European Court of Justice decreed that France was behaving illegally and should immediately stop using these toxic substances that are bad for bees. So much for French sovereignty. With the stroke of a foreign judge’s pen, beet farmers in France have had their ability to make a living thrown into jeopardy. No wonder so many working people feel they aren’t in control of their own lives anymore.
The EU’s callous issuing of a decree that will hurt hardworking French farmers echoes its antics in other member states. Dutch farmers have been in a state of revolt for almost four years now after the EU put pressure on the Dutch government to cut nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands in half by 2030. Such a mad, drastic policy would be devastating to farmers’ livelihoods, potentially leading to the closure of 3,000 farms. Ireland is also being bullied by the EU to slash emissions by between 22 and 30 per cent, which Irish farmers believe could cost their industry €4 billion and 56,000 jobs. It isn’t only in the unhinged oligarchy of the EU that farmers are being prevented from farming. Justin Trudeau wants Canadian farmers to cut nitrous-oxide emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. – Brendan O’Neill
We need to talk about the irrationalism of the global elites’ hostility to farming. Last year, the UN estimated that 180million people are facing ‘food crisis’ right now, and yet various governments around the world are making it harder for farmers to grow food. What’s more, banning an insecticide like neonicotinoids in yet another Western country – France – does not mean the world will become a ‘cleaner’ place. As this week’s protesting French farmers pointed out, France will just end up importing more sugar beet from ‘countries that allow neonicotinoids’. Slowly destroying farmers’ livelihoods, and for what? Not for a world free of chemicals. That stuff will still be used, somewhere else, to make food French people will end up eating.
This cuts to the rotten heart of the elites’ anti-farming agitation. Self-styled virtuous nations seem content to outsource the ‘dirtier’ aspects of farming to other countries, just as they’re content to get coal from Africa or China. This means our morally pristine countries can wallow in eco-virtue, safe in the knowledge that the hard, filthy work of mining for coal or making sure sugar-beet crops don’t get devoured by diseased insects is being done by other people in other parts of the world. Preserving our virtue takes precedence over preserving our industries and the jobs they create. Being eco-pure is more important to the new elites than the ability of working people, whether coalminers or beet farmers, to earn a living and contribute to society.
This is how estranged from reason and reality the 21st-century elites have become: in the crazy tussle between food and signalled virtue, they choose the latter. It’s what happens when we’re governed by the out-of-touch, by a cushioned pyjama class that rarely ventures out of its metropolitan bubble and whose every whim is met by an ill-paid precariat. We end up with rulers who know little, and care less, about how things are made; about the importance of agriculture to the continued existence of humanity; about the necessity of industry; and, most importantly, about the centrality of work to working people’s sense of meaning and autonomy. Only an establishment that had completely lost connection with the material world of things and production and jobs could so cavalierly say, ‘Let’s close down a few thousand farms to save the bees’.
This is why the farmers’ fightback matters. This is why we should cheer the revolt of the tractor classes against the laptop classes everywhere from Canada to France to the Netherlands. Because these people are fighting for more than their right to work and make food. They’re also fighting to restore reason and sense to the otherworldly realm of technocratic rule. – Brendan O’Neill
According to the clerics of the Green Cult, once we blow up our last coal mine, send all diesel engines to the wreckers, stop using concrete, reinvent sailing clippers, cover the grasslands with solar clutter and the hills with wind machines and then slaughter all of our cattle. . . global climate will become serene – not too warm, not too cold. Wild weather will cease, and there will be no more droughts, floods, cyclones or snow storms and no more plant and animal extinctions.
But the records written in the rocks tell a far different story about climate changes. Even when nature was in full control, it was not a serene place. – Viv Forbes
The international commentariat may be forgiven for believing new PM Chris Hipkins has relaunched the government rather well.
First a clever pivot to the centre and now a compassionate and inclusive focus on disaster recovery.
Giving credence to rumours that the key strategic brains agreed and executed a skilful change of direction rather well. – Point of Order
And yet, there’s something not quite right about this narrative.
It’s hard to explain away the binned policies (or is that postponed?) as ‘too far, too fast’ or an excess of zeal.
To many – both inside and outside New Zealand – they seem nicely representative of the direction in which the government (certainly the Ardern version of it) hoped to travel. They even seemed to be trying to actually implement some of them.
Their termination – so far without replacement – will leave the voting public with a short record of concrete policies to consider. – Point of Order
One of the weaknesses of small country media consensualism is that it obscures the divisive elements of the government’s approach to date. Even – or perhaps particularly – when it has been able to build majority support for that.
The result has been something of a soft ride for the cultural and social intolerance of the government and its supporters in public – and indeed private – institutions; failure to probe the impact of rule by the government’s preferred experts; and celebration of positive discrimination for favoured groups.
Above all of this, not much questioning of the gradual effect of the government’s spending more money on its supporters’ ever-narrower needs – and then limiting the ways the other people can spend what’s left. This gets particularly problematic when the growth machine stops.
You can’t blame any democratic government for making use of slightly-stretched claims of national unity. But it’s unprofessional (for both politicians and journalists) to believe them too much. Good politicians must always be aware of the need to agree to disagree. – Point of Order
The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule. I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language.
I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use. – Richard Dawkins
We exist for a flash of time, a spark of consciousness in an eternity of oblivion. Perhaps the only self-aware sentient living organism anywhere in the cosmos.
So how is it that, amongst all that we can and have achieved, we remain capable of the sort of production-line evil that prompted the good people of Portland to affix a metal teddy bear to a stone walkway as a remarkably simple but brutally effective statement of commemoration?
What madness, what flaw in our individual or collective souls lead a civilised, modern nation to bundling mothers and their children into fake showers and gassing them, knowing that they would die huddled together, naked, terrified and confused in their final moments. – Damien Grant
Eichmann claimed that his only alternative was suicide, but Arendt retorts: “…this was a lie, since we know that it was surprisingly easy even for members of the extermination squads to quit their jobs without serious consequences for themselves.”
It wasn’t just a crime against humanity. It was a crime by humanity.
There is no specific marker for this article, and that is the point. It is good to remind ourselves of what happened, and not assume that this event was an anomaly which we need not trouble ourselves with. – Damien Grant
Both Eichmann and Korczak belong to our shared humanity. We always have choices and taking the time to remember what occurred is one we should make more often. – Damien Grant
Despite decades of warnings about extreme weather events, New Zealand was defenceless and overwhelmed by the brutal storms.
Nearly six years ago, Jacinda Ardern declared called climate change “my generation’s nuclear-free moment”.
But her government became preoccupied with stopping the missiles, but neglected to build the bunkers. – Andrea Vance
All good policy requires a direction of travel. Now we’ve got two… But we’ll have run out of roads before we get there.
The most severe impacts of these more frequent and intense storms are felt on our road network. As part of the mission to reduce emissions, transport agency Waka Kotahi was tasked with reductions of 41% by 2035.
It was to reduce our reliance on private vehicles by improving public transport, walking and cycleways. But the agency’s budget didn’t expand to meet these new demands, and keep pace with the black hole that is maintenance.
This is also a policy direction that favours the urban and wealthy over poorer, rural and remote communities. – Andrea Vance
Councils are meant to pick up half the costs of repairing damage to local roads, which is fine in theory, but they don’t have the money either. Some of the damage was exacerbated by forestry slash – an industry that sends a large chunk of profit overseas – and despite repeated warnings, the Government failed to act. – Andrea Vance
For safe and reliable access to drinking water, we need more storage, better protection from contaminants and more stormwater capacity, as well as protection from salt-water intrusion, reduced flow in drought conditions, and the relocation of low-lying facilities.
None of these is controversial – and yet the Government managed to make it so, as well as an unholy mess of reforms. If a new government is elected, those reforms will be repealed, setting that work back years. – Andrea Vance
That approach is deeply fraught – moving communities with deep ties to a location is complex, sensitive, and likely to take decades. Vulnerable residents don’t have the luxury of time, and necessity may dictate greater protection (which we haven’t planned or budgeted for) rather than relocation. – Andrea Vance
1. Had New Zealand cut emissions like the Green Party/Alliance since 1990, or any other climate change activists wanted, it would have made zero impact on whether or not the cyclone would have happened. – Liberty Scott
2. Had New Zealand cut emissions like activists wanted, along with all of their other policies, New Zealand would have been measurably poorer with less investment, lower GDP, lower population and less tax revenue for government. New Zealand would have had fewer exports, fewer imports and had even less resilient infrastructure, because the hard left would have ensured all infrastructure was underpriced (so having less money for capital) and there would have been no private investment in most infrastructure.
and if New Zealand DOES slash emissions regardless of cost following this, the odds that another cyclone will devastate part of New Zealand do not change one iota. – Liberty Scott
Yet the best way to respond to the threat of climate change and the threat of natural disasters is wealth, economic growth and building infrastructure for resilience.
Whether it be back-up power for cellsites, bridges that can withstand the debris from cut forests, stopbanks or simply re-emphasising what people can do THEMSELVES for civil defence (non-perishable food, water, batteries for transistor radios).
Shutting down industries, denying people mobility they wish to pay for and kneecapping New Zealand exporters that face competition from subsidised and protected rivals in other countries makes people poorer, it makes it more difficult to pay for more resilience in road, water, communications and energy networks, which ultimately users will (and should) pay for.
It’s why Japan survives big earthquakes better than Turkey. – Liberty Scott
This Government is good at emotion. As was pointed out various times last week, it does disaster politics well. The Ardern years have been saturated in it.
What the country needs now though is action. This lot, if the gang looting and the Police Minister’s vigilance on it is an example, will once again talk big, but deliver little, if anything – Mike Hosking
Nicola Sturgeon may be on her way out – but after 16 years of SNP rule, Scottish schools are still places of indoctrination. This may sound like a hyperbolic thing to say, but that’s the only conclusion you can draw when you look at what Scottish educators and the Scottish government are saying themselves. – Dr Stuart Waiton
Take the General Teaching Council for Scotland’s Standard for Headship, which sets out the professional framework for what a headteacher, teachers and schools should be all about.
You would expect such a document to be all about imparting knowledge and aspiring to teach every child as much as possible. Instead, it is a horrifying mix of therapeutic new-speak that stresses the need for teachers and headteachers to focus on the matter of social justice.
In the 16-page Standard for Headship report ‘social justice’ is mentioned seven times. – Dr Stuart Waiton
The terms sustainable or sustainability appear 23 times in the document. This includes what some would see as a Malthusian demand for ‘respect for our natural world and its limited resources’ as well as a call for ‘learning for sustainability’, whatever that means.
This new doctrine is highly therapeutic, with the entire document grounded in a need to ‘promote health and wellbeing’ and ‘emotional intelligence’, which, as part of our culture of social justice, is ‘enabling’ and ‘empowering’ pupils to be ‘safe’ and ‘caring’.
This melding together of social justice moralising and therapeutic language permeates through the entirety of the Scottish education system. Education in Scotland is no longer viewed as a way of passing on vitally important knowledge to children, but rather as a way to ensure that ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are embedded in our children’s minds. – Dr Stuart Waiton
Elsewhere the Scottish government and Education Scotland have worked to ensure that teachers are ‘Embedding race equality in school’. This is not simply about treating people equally, quite the reverse in fact. Rather it is about the promotion of Critical Race Theory and the divisive and self-loathing idea of ‘white privilege’, which is endorsed by Education Scotland. – Dr Stuart Waiton
Perhaps worse of all is the Supporting Transgender Pupils in Schools guidance document, a policy that would fit comfortably on the shelves of the most extreme trans activist.
Schools, for example, have to ensure that children, ‘demonstrate an understanding of diversity in sexuality and gender identity’. From age 12 children can self-identify and receive support and validation from schools. The school will develop a ‘support plan for the transgender young person’, thus creating a ‘safe space for transgender young people to be themselves and have their identities respected’.
If parents don’t support this development it is implied that they are a wellbeing concern. But then, many parents will not even know that this gender fluid ideology is being adopted or that their child is being transitioned with the help of the school as, ‘it is best to not share information with parents or carers without considering and respecting the young person’s views’. – Dr Stuart Waiton
It’s entirely fair for young adults to be able to debate the merits of Marx versus Malthus or the differences between critical race theory and colour-blind anti-racism. And we should be able to discuss transgender policies too – even though many universities appear to be uncomfortable with any debate on this issue.
But this is school education we are talking about. Many of these ideas are not part of a debate, they are a dogma, a form of cultural engineering, where ideas and outlooks that the majority of the Scottish population oppose are forced onto children.
For those who are directing this process there is a clear attempt to ‘change the culture’ of Scottish society through the politicisation of the curriculum. – Dr Stuart Waiton
The Scottish Union for Education will challenge these illiberal (and indeed illiterate) developments and aim to create a framework for ordinary parents, grandparents, teachers and communities to make their voices heard. It may appear to be a tough ask, but I am convinced that the majority are on our side and for the sake of our liberal and democratic society, something must be done. – Dr Stuart Waiton
Quite so, kids love naughty. Part of the whole process of testing boundaries. So, and therefore, kids must not be allowed to test the boundaries of the current orthodoxy for who knows what Emperor’s clothes moments might arise?
That fear in itself showing the weakness of the current orthodoxy, of course. – Tim Worstall
I really do believe [these books are] of their time and they should be left alone. Roald Dahl was a great satirist, apart from anything else. It’s disgraceful.
It’s this kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say,’oh, that didn’t exist’.
Well. it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history. – Brian Cox
If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society. – Suzanne Nossel
The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they’ve carried out on some of the finest children’s literature in Britain.
As for me, I’ll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl’s stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colourful glory. – Laura Hackett
‘This is truly extraordinary. This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilised, liberal, cultured education. It includes some of the greatest works in the Western canon and in some cases – such as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent – powerful critiques of terrorism. Burke, Huxley, Orwell and Tolkien were all anti-totalitarian writers.– Andrew Roberts
A number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation… It seems that RICU is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem. – Douglas Murray
It almost seems like a joke. House Of Cards was actually a satirical view of Right-wing politics. This list includes more or less the entire classical canon of literature and some of the very best British television programmes ever made. – Andrew Davies
No-one was closer to the former PM than Grant Robertson, a career politician despite his protestations, with Prime Ministerial ambitions. Grant is a clever bugger and knows only too well the government will be massacred this October. He also knows, as our post-war history shows, that following a heavy defeat, better to let some-one else be the fall-guy then move on him or her a year before the next election, or in good times (which won’t be the case in the next few years), let two successive election fall-guys cop it, as we saw with Labour following Key’s 2008 succes.
The incoming National government will face a mountain of problems so it’s my pick Grant will make his move in early 2026 when a victory could be feasible. – Sir Bob Jones
You’ve got to look after the people you love and just do whatever you have to do at the time. – Ethan Cross
Labour – under former Minister of Education Hipkins – have driven this off a cliff. – Alwyn Poole
We have 120,000 chronically absent, over 10,000 enrolled nowhere, she says average full attendance up to 46% – but their main policy is 84 more truancy officers. Nothing about improving schools, improving teaching standards.
When high decile State school students (low Equity Index Number in the new parlance) are not seeing the point of going to school as they are finding more efficient ways of learning – the system is shot. – Alwyn Poole
It is widely accepted by those who follow such matters that the Waitangi Tribunal has become wildly activist.
It is now, without question, a brilliant example of a decent idea gone horribly awry. – Mike Hosking
Ironically, history increasingly shows the Government’s that have made the most progress have been National ones.
Chris Finlayson of late and Doug Graham before him made major inroads into settlements, whereas the current Labour Government, like so much of what they do, amounts to little. – Mike Hosking
Anyway, the tribunal in their latest report tells the Crown off for not funding Māori adequately so they can make their claims.
What makes the tribunal so activist is this sort of statement and the thinking behind it is par for the course. What is adequate?
And given the system is invented, you have always needed a quid pro quo approach. What is a just settlement? Is it money, is it an apology, is it land or is it all three?
Every case is individual.
But somewhere along the way it’s spiralled out of control. It’s become an industry as individual lawyers have made millions. The tribunal seems intent on being here forever dealing with historic claims despite, if you remember, under Jim Bolger’s Government there was an attempt to put a timeline on it all. – Mike Hosking
Surely at some point the historic claims should be registered and settled. Just how long do you need to want to rectify something you argue went wrong over 180 years ago?
How many lawyers, how much research, how much funding?
The path to ratification has been open since the mid 70’s and we are still scrapping over funding for claims. Surely boundaries have to be drawn and timelines have to be put in place? – Mike Hosking
Good intention is one thing. A runaway train is another. – Mike Hosking
It’s easy to become inured to the madness of the culture war. Stories of Peter Pan being slapped with trigger warnings or God going gender-neutral are 10 a penny these days. They can sometimes wash over you. Not because they are unimportant – far from it. But because they are so ubiquitous. Every institution from the Wellcome Collection to Splash Mountain has fallen to some flavour of woke regressivism. Language is warped to flatter a few narcissists. Old art works and new are censored at the behest of hysterics. Such cases don’t surprise us anymore, no matter how deranged and illiberal.
But once in a while the authoritarians who make up our cultural elites outdo themselves – and remind us how much is at stake in this thing we call the culture war. The rewriting of the late Roald Dahl’s books is one such story. When the Telegraph revealed yesterday that Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, has made ‘hundreds of changes’ to his beloved children’s books, in line with suggestions from so-called sensitivity readers, the response was one of horror and disbelief. An author beloved by generations of children for his magical, spiky and sometimes sinister work has had his literary edges sanded off. All new copies will feature the newly cleansed text. Dahl’s words and stories will be changed forever, no longer truly his own, all because some weirdo with a red pen thinks they know better. The philistinism, the cultural vandalism, is stunning. – Tom Slater
What is it that made these sensitivity readers conclude that Dahl’s books must be changed, so they ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, in the words of Puffin? The word ‘fat’, for one. That’s gone from every book – sparing the blushes of characters like Augustus Gloop, the fat lad from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Oompa-Loompas are now no longer ‘titchy’ or ‘tiny’. Just ‘small’. They’ve also gone gender-neutral for good measure, with ‘small men’ swapped for ‘small people’. Perhaps most outrageously of all, whole lines have been rewritten and brand new lines added, seemingly to pre-empt any prejudice that might otherwise curdle in the minds of young readers. In The Witches, a line describing a witch posing as a ‘cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman’ now casts her as an aspirational girlboss, ‘working as a top scientist or running a business’.
That last edit sums it all up. It’s the PC takeover of culture in a risible little nutshell. Propaganda has triumphed over creativity. Being on message is now infinitely more important than storytelling and nuance. Even in children’s books. Perhaps especially in children’s books. Indeed, there seems to be a particular interest in giving kids’ lit the identitarian acid wash. – Tom Slater
We live in infantilised times – in which speech, culture and even history is censored and rewritten to avoid rattling our brittle spirits. And while we treat adults as children we seem to treat children as robots – to be programmed with the right views and sensibilities rather than left to explore. This can only impoverish literature and repel young people from it. Part of Dahl’s enduring appeal, in spite of JK Rowling’s hostile takeover of kids’ bookshelves, is precisely his appetite for the dark, violent and grotesque. ‘When writing stories, I cannot seem to rid myself of the unfortunate habit of having one person do nasty things to another person’, he once said. The magic and misanthropy of Dahl’s work, notes his biographer, was informed by the Norwegian fairy tales he was raised on and a personal life full of tragedy. To sanitise his work is to completely, utterly, idiotically misunderstand what marks it out in the first place. – Tom Slater
These are the people who have taken over our cultural industries and institutions – idiots who have no idea what it is they are destroying. This sanitisation of literature isn’t coming from outside pressure. There was no big petition demanding Dahl’s works be given a rewrite. The barbarians are inside the gates. The sensitivity readers – a growing industry within the publishing world for many years now – were hired by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which is now owned by Netflix. The review began when the company was still run by the Dahl family. We desperately need to push back against this new philistinism among our elites; against this vandalism posing as progress. – Tom Slater
My starting point is I want a society where we maximise happiness. If people can live happier lives by living and identifying as a gender different to their biological sex, then we should be fully supportive of that as a society.
I can only imagine how hugely challenging it must be to not identify with your biological sex, and the mental health challenges involved with that. I absolutely support people being able to change their gender to reflect their sense of identity, and we should support and accept that both as a community and as individuals. – David Farrar
But, and of course there is a but, there are some situations where biological sex needs to still be regarded as a factor, not just gender identity. I’m going to outline some of those areas below. Returning to my theme of maximising happiness, we should be fully supportive of allowing people to live and participate in their gender identity, unless doing so might reduce happiness to others. By that I don’t mean reduce happiness in the sense of personal disapproval, but in terms of substantive harm.
This is not an issue such as same sex marriage (which I actively campaigned for) where there was no real balancing of competing interests. Allowing same sex couple to marry doesn’t negatively impact anyone else, but (for example) the issues of trans participation in sports does bring in competing or clashing interests of inclusiveness vs fairness.
Now where things get difficult is that some (not all) trans people feel any discussion of these issues invalidates their identity, and marginalises them further. And I accept this can be the case. But I don’t think the solution is not to ban discussion and label any women who disagrees as a TERF. It is to try and have the discussion in a respectful way.
As a society I believe we need to recognise people have a biological sex and a gender identity. In most cases they are the same, not not all. Generally the gender identity is what should be determinative, but there are a few areas where biological sex is also a factor. – David Farrar
The terms sex and gender should not be used interchangeably. Sex is dichotomous, with sex determination in the fertilized zygote stemming from unequal expression of sex chromosomal genes. By contrast, gender includes perception of the individual as male, female, or other, both by the individual and by society; both humans and animals have sex, but only humans have gender.
Now it is also worth nothing that while biological sex is for most people a binary issue – you are male XY or female XX, there are some who fall outside those two. Sarah Bickerton wrote an excellent article in Stuff on how she is intersex. Also another article on Sarah here.
The fact some people are intersex doesn’t change the fact that there are still biological differences between men and women. Humans are described as a bipedal species, even though some humans are born with a disability where they are not bipedal. – David Farrar
Another language issue is the drive to remove the word women from the language. Instead of pregnant women, we now have pregnant people. This is silly. If you want to be a man, great – go for it and transition. But if you want to be pregnant and have a baby, that is hardly consistent with wanting to be a man. Now on an individual level, you should respect what choices someone has made, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw out the word women from all literature. – David Farrar
Most scientists have concluded that biological males who go through puberty as males have significant advantages in terms of strength and speed that persist, even if testosterone levels are decreased. A review of the latest science found adult male athletes have on average a 10-12% performance advantage over female competitors in swimming and running, 20% advantage in jumping and 35% in strength-based sports.
One should have sympathy for transgender athletes. They work and train hard to get to the top tier, and banning them from competing because they are transgender is harsh on them. And no, I don’t think anyone would go through hormone and/or surgery just so they can better comparative sporting results.
But you also have to have sympathy for the female athletes who are biologically female. They can train just as hard and be the best in the world, but then have someone who is not biologically a female beat them, and feel that nothing they can do will allow them to win.
The trade-off is inclusiveness vs fairness. – David Farrar
This article details how media are routinely referring to some rapists as female. The general rule is refer to someone using their gender identity. But if an offender has a penis and has raped someone, then I think it can revictimise the victim to have their offender described as a woman in court documents and reporting. In this rare case, the rights of the victim should have precedence over the identity of the rapist. – David Farrar
The key point is that one should not start with an assumption that transition is the answer to every child who has gender incongruence. It may be the correct course for the majority, but there is a legitimate concern that in some clinics, you are not allowed to argue against transition. There are concerns that some (not all) of the children wanting to transition may just have same sex attraction.
Just in the US there has been a 300% increase in gender dysphoria diagnosis in five years. It is not anti-trans to want to know what is causing this increase – is it just increased social acceptability and awareness, or is it that it is being diagnosed wrongly for some?
Two long-time feminists raise issues in this op ed about why gender confusion and transgender is not the same thing and caution is needed. – David Farrar
It is worth noting that these are mainly issues around the margin. The vast majority of trans people are not competing in the Olympics, in prison etc. The most important thing, in my view, is to treat people who are trans with kindness and respect for their gender identity. If you are a parent of young children, there is a chance your child may turn out to be trans, and I am sure you would want them to have a great life where they are adored for the unique individual they are. – David Farrar
Someone wrote to me over the weekend and made a really good point after I talked about the resilience of people last Friday.
They said it was true, that often times a disaster can bring out the best in people or —as we’re seeing with the looters— the worst, in some cases. But they made the point that a part of that optimistic and resilient nature also prevents us from complaining because we don’t want to appear as whingers when there’s always someone worse off.
But as a result of that, they pointed out, the focus can shift away from questions that need to be asked. And as a resident of Hawkes Bay, these were his questions: what are the three things you need to be working in a disaster? Communications, power and roads, he said. What failed in Hawkes Bay, and continues to fail in many parts: communications, power and roads. – Kate Hawkesby
His point being, the questions needing to be asked are sometimes obvious ones, but the solutions won’t necessarily be simple.
And we are seeing now, more and more questions coming to the fore, more and more people getting angry about their circumstances. Napier’s deputy mayor over the weekend said she was “going rogue” in pointing out that the Cyclone had ‘laid bare the lack of support and investment the Government’s given the city recently.’ She said ‘the slow erosion of government services in Napier over her lifetime was “embarrassing”, as was the 2 million dollar support package announced by the Government for East Coast communities,’ she said.
She claimed Napier as a community had been abandoned by government from services they should have had. – Kate Hawkesby
Piha residents west of Auckland have said they feel isolated and angry, forgotten about.
Hawkes Bay residents still without power or access are angry, Gisborne residents feel forgotten in many parts.
There are areas where debate’s ensuing over who’s responsible for what – is it a council issue, a central government issue or a transport agency issue? Who will own the issue and who will fix it? How much will be spent and is it enough? Is it as simple as to say oh well this is climate change – or are there infrastructure problems that exacerbated things? And if so, how do we track down all those issues and pin point exactly where they are? How do we plan for fixes and budget for them and execute them before another catastrophic event? How much gets politicized? And so it goes.
So although people are resilient yes, I think they are starting to ask the hard questions and demand answers, and more than that – look for long term real fixes that go beyond short term band aid solutions. – Kate Hawkesby
The government’s most recent failed attempt to enact hate speech laws shows just how difficult it is to strike the right balance between free speech and the protection of religious beliefs.
The tension between free speech and the protection of religious beliefs has long been a subject of debate around the world, and the complexities of hate speech laws have become a challenging issue. In New Zealand, this debate has been especially prominent in recent decades, with several high-profile cases and tragic events bringing the issue to the forefront of public discourse.- Thomas Cranmer
While the intentions behind these laws may be noble, their practical application is often called into question. Critics argue that such laws can be used to silence legitimate criticism, artistic expression and intellectual inquiry, while doing little to prevent violent behaviour. – Thomas Cranmer
These overzealous reactions by the authorities serve to highlight that the unintended consequences of hate speech laws extend far beyond academic discourse, artistic expression, and political speech. They can also have a chilling effect on everyday social interactions and conduct. As George Orwell chillingly warned in his dystopian masterpiece ‘1984’, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”.
This warning is especially pertinent to religious hate speech laws, as their broad and ambiguous definitions can be exploited to stifle free expression and curtail open dialogue, even in settings where diverse viewpoints are crucial. The potential for censorship and self-censorship is a real and constant danger when governments are given the power to regulate speech. Therefore, whether you are a provocative artist, a daring comedian, or a regular member of the public, it is crucial to oppose hate speech laws that threaten our fundamental right to free expression. – Thomas Cranmer
Last year I wrote that the proposed $14 billion Auckland Light Rail project was a Harry Potter fantasy.
Why? Because politicians love the allure of trains. Our new Prime Minister has confirmed it, with the light rail link surviving the Government’s policy cull, at least as it was announced earlier this month.
For voters, trains are an easy sell too. They’re the aspirational form of public transport.
And because new rail projects take so long to build, voters get to pretend that someone else will pay for it.– Sam Stubbs
First let’s look at the train line we’re already building, the Central Rail Link (CRL). It’s 3.5 kilometres long, with a current cost estimate of $4.4 billion. That’s $1.25b per kilometre, making it the second most expensive rail line in the world, ever. Only New York has spent more. It’s not a competition anyone wants to win.
But it gets worse. $4.4b is a 2019 estimate, with a clear warning recently that it will rise.
That could mean a final bill of more than $5b, compared to the original 2010 estimate of $2.3b. – Sam Stubbs
Let this be a lesson for us all. The real bill for a single light rail line is likely to be much higher than the $14b “estimate” the politicians currently use to justify the project.
Why could they get it wrong a second time?
Once again, let’s look at the maths. The line is estimated at 24km, 12 underground and 12 overground.
So assuming the current cost of the central rail link of $1.25b per km, that’s at least $15b spent on the underground section, before we get to the other 12km overground.
If we repeat the Central Rail Link experience, and double the original estimate, the proposed line could cost over $28 billion. – Sam Stubbs
Is there a better way?
Yes, and it’s cheaper, faster, easier, and leaves billions for the new infrastructure we will surely need.
When done well, dedicated busways really work. The key infrastructure required – roads – are usually delivered in New Zealand on time and on budget, because we do them often.
A dedicated bus network could be expanded much further, in a much shorter time, and at a much lower cost, than a train based solution. – Sam Stubbs
So $650m would replace every public bus in Auckland with a new, more pleasant, quieter, electric equivalent.
Auckland Transport trials show that every electric bus saves $10,900 in operational costs and 160 tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year.
An all-electric bus fleet would prevent 128,000 tonnes of carbon from going into the atmosphere, and save $8.7m in operational costs, every year.
Yet under current planning, we will only get to a zero-emission bus fleet in Auckland by 2040, and will still be buying brand new diesel buses for the next three years.
In 2021 the world had 425,000 electric buses operating. New Zealand had 19. Go figure. – Sam Stubbs
We could do all this, and still have plenty of change from $14 billion for more flood protection, or hospitals and schools, across all of New Zealand.
Our politicians do have to choose between trains, drains and automobiles. They can’t fund them all. – Sam Stubbs
THERE IS A LESSON to be learned from Cyclone Gabrielle, but far too many New Zealanders are refusing to learn it. From Climate Change Minister James Shaw’s portentous quoting of Winston Churchill, to Jack Tame’s hectoring of Finance Minister Grant Robertson for supposedly moving away from “mitigation”, Gabrielle is fast becoming one of those crises that political actors deem “too good to waste”.
But, if we are, indeed, entering a Churchillian “time of consequences”, then a moment’s reflection should tell us that the “mitigation” ship has sailed. The best we can hope for is a government committed to doing everything within its power to help us adapt to unstoppable global warming. – Chris Trotter
The central problem confronting the world’s leaders is a brutally simple one: to combat global warming effectively, four-fifths of humankind would have to foreswear the life that the burning of fossil fuels makes possible; and since no leader would dare demand that his people make such a sacrifice, global warming cannot be significantly mitigated.
Which is why, whether they are willing to admit it or not, governments around the world are focusing their efforts increasingly on adapting to the consequences of a warming planet. The primary lesson which Cyclone Gabrielle delivered to New Zealanders last week is that, domestically, these adaptation efforts have been woefully insufficient, and that much, much, more work is needed if New Zealand is to function (and hopefully flourish) in this “time of consequences”. – Chris Trotter
Cyclone Gabrielle, in all her exogenous fury, has left our political parties with scant room for manoeuvre. The damage inflicted by the storm must be fixed, and the funds to do the fixing must be found. Moreover, politicians who insist Gabrielle’s primary lesson is that the personal and societal sacrifices bound up with climate change mitigation cannot now be avoided, are likely to get a very short shrift from those whose houses, farms, orchards and livelihoods have been destroyed.
The political party that promises to make good the damage of Gabrielle, while offering an adaptation strategy for ensuring that such destruction does not become an annual event, is going to be much more warmly received than one which asks every voter to don a hair shirt and do without the wonders of our fossil-fuelled civilisation. When U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said “the American way of life is not negotiable”, he wasn’t kidding. – Chris Trotter
When lives and livelihoods have been lost, it is no time for politics. So National’s Gerry Brownlee agreed to the adjournment of Parliament, saying “I simply say to the minister, thank you for your engagement and thank you for the work that you’re doing.”
In a national emergency, it used to be that Parliament was summoned so MPs could be briefed and consulted. Parliament never adjourned for WWI or WWII.
National declared a political truce but Labour and the Greens have not. Both those parties used the adjournment to create the narrative that they are best to handle the disaster and climate policy. – Richard Prebble
New Zealand should support the global effort to combat climate change, but no reduction of emissions by this country will reduce the frequency and severity of cyclones. In our Parliament there is no bickering over the reality of climate change. There is bipartisan support for getting New Zealand to zero emissions.
The party in denial is the Greens. Their refusal to accept that climate change is here regardless of any reduction of emissions by New Zealand, is the reason why in government, the Greens have not promoted policies to help the country adapt. – Richard Prebble
Economics Professor Robert MacCulloch says in his blog that this Government has done almost nothing to assist the regions to adapt. Instead, Labour proposes white elephant projects for Auckland like a cycleway over the Harbour Bridge and light rail to the airport. – Richard Prebble
Labour can promise to borrow all the gold in Fort Knox but it cannot rehabilitate without a law change. Parliament had to suspend the Resource Management Act (RMA) to enable Christchurch to rebuild. Labour has announced there will legislation for this disaster.
Local bodies told the parliamentary select committee considering Labour’s proposed RMA replacement that it is unworkable. Unless the proposed legislation is a U-turn on Labour’s proposed planning laws, the affected region will never be rehabilitated.
The paperwork for an infrastructure project can take 10 times longer than it takes to build.
Ukraine’s infrastructure is being destroyed by Russian missiles. But the Ukrainians are rebuilding in the middle of winter, in the middle of a war, at an astonishing rate. It can be done. – Richard Prebble
Simon Bridges chaired the select committee into the Covid response. He held a press conference and outlined what the committee had found: tracing was not working, testing was inadequate and the lockdown was longer than necessary. The media crucified him. His caucus rolled him.
Eventually, the Government adopted all of Bridges’ suggestions. If National had held Labour to account, the changes would have come earlier, saving a significant social and economic cost. Being an effective Opposition could not have resulted in a worse election result.
National must hold the Government to account. Christopher Luxon should follow his instincts. He was the first MP to call on the Mayor of Auckland to declare a state of emergency. – Richard Prebble
A fictional parody can hardly be accused of breaching their privacy. All South Park has done is roast Harry and Meghan for their hypocrisy – and deservedly so.
Clearly, the royal couple don’t like it when the lower orders speak back to them. They generally expect to be lauded for their ‘insights’ or to be showered with human-rights awards. In the cosseted world of Harry and Meghan, anything less than effusive praise will not do.
Thankfully, we have come a long way from the days when Trey Parker and Matt Stone might have been sent to the Tower for their satire. But the prospect of lesser legal action should still trouble us deeply. Our right to mock Harry and Meghan must be vigorously defended. – Fraser Myers
Sadly relatively few people seem to grasp that the frequent calls for ‘zero tolerance’ against anti-Semitism actually undermine the struggle against Jew hatred. If anti-Semites are not even allowed to express their opinions, bigoted though they are, it becomes impossible to challenge them.
Indeed the demand for zero tolerance is not a brave stance against anti-Semitism but, on the contrary, an evasion of the need to combat it. Demanding the authorities muffle an argument is not the same as making counter-arguments. Of course hard core bigots are rarely swayed but the battle is for public opinion more generally. – Ted Deutch
Of course it is understandable that Jewish organisations in particular should favour zero tolerance. They often have good reason to feel scared and isolated. The problem is that not only is such an approach wrong it principle but that it makes matters worse in practice.
The principle is easy to state. In a free society people should be able to express any views they like. Those who disagree should be equally free to argue against them. There should be freedom for those who speak and freedom for those who have contrary views. Nor should it be forgotten that the public needs the freedom to work out where it stands on any issue.
But the practical reasons to support free speech are also vital. For a start making the expression of anti-Semitic ideas illegal means they cannot be countered. Banning something is not the same as challenging it. On the contrary, as stated earlier, it is an evasion of the responsibility to counter it – Ted Deutch
A key problem confronting anyone trying to tackle anti-Semitism today is that if often takes a coded form. Most notably much of the vitriol aimed at Israel is an implicit form of anti-Semitism.
That does not mean that any form of criticism of Israel is invalid. However, much of the flack aimed at it relies on standards that are not applied to other countries. Such anti-Semites often use coded language, such as singling Israel out as an ‘apartheid state’, to portray the country as a symbol of Jewish evil.
In this way they can avoid using explicitly anti-Semitic language.
A zero tolerance approach towards anti-Semitism makes it harder to pin down. Anyone who wants to fight anti-Semitism effectively needs to recognise a difficult truth. A pre-condition for a successful battle against this form of hatred is to give anti-Semites the freedom to express their poisonous views. – Ted Deutch
The task is more than “lifting back up”, of course, and for the most part the prime minister’s opening speech reiterated the steps outlined already in the response. There is only so long that he and his newly assigned cyclone response minister and taskforce will be able to avoid talking specifics. – Toby Manhire
Even though the same person who prides himself on our prudent balance sheet is the same person who decides how much we spend on bridges and hospitals and housing, there is somehow an implacable distance between the two.
This is embarrassing, because they could not be more related. To put it as plainly as I can: our debt is low because we have refused to spend money building the things we need. That infrastructure deficit is very real – the combined past and future gap is $210bn, according to the Treasury – but it’s not recognised on those balance sheets we brag about, therefore it magically disappears.
At a personal level it’s like driving around in a car with bald tyres, two indicators out and a boot that doesn’t shut anymore after a prang. Yes, the owner has more cash in the bank – but only at the cost of risking their life and the lives of others as a result. Multiply this by five million and you understand roughly where we are as a country – it still works, but it’s a mess and kinda scary a lot of the time. – Duncan Grieve
It’s the unspoken headlock paradox of New Zealand’s politics, subject to a bipartisan, mutually-assured destruction pact. A typical exchange occurred in 2008, when Labour’s Cullen described National’s plan to borrow to fund infrastructure as “Muldoonist” in 2008.
Basically, if you have to choose between getting a sticker and a biscuit for keeping our debt low and actually spending the necessary money to build and fix our stuff, finance ministers will always, always keep the debt low. This was caused in part by sovereign debt defaults and crises, which rightly chilled governments to the bone – but we are an incredibly long way from such scenarios. The saddest thing is that fear means that we have just, over the past year, seen the abrupt end of a lengthy period in which vast sums of money was available to the government at very low interest rates way out into the future. Now inflation has roared back, and that door is closed. – Duncan Grieve
Events, even the most awful, can provide cover for politicians to do things they really want to do, but could not find the will to. The scale of this disaster, which is actually a mere data point on the way to the bigger cost of addressing the climate crisis, arrives at a curious moment in the history of this country and this government. It has awoken us all to how much we’ll need to spend to get back to where we need to be, let alone to respond to the climate crisis. Perhaps Gabrielle might mean that our finance ministers are finally able to admit it too. – Duncan Grieve
There’s a big disconnect happening at the moment between government and locals in the Hawkes Bay area over what’s really going on.
The Police Commissioner and the PM were both on Mike’s show yesterday saying the reports of looting are just not true, that it’s all the stuff of rumour and gossip, and that it’s unsubstantiated.
But then you have the locals. They’re irate, arguably more irate after hearing the denial of it from government, and saying it is very real, it is definitely happening and they’re traumatized by it. – Kate Hawkesby
I’d argue you have to believe the people at the coal face surely? Those on the ground, living it, feeling it, surely they’re the ones we have to take seriously not government officials who pop on some high vis and do a whistle stop tour through an area flanked by hangers on. Is that really a realistic picture of what’s actually happening?
Hipkins reckons the media rolling into town with all their cameras has hyped things up too. Insinuating that the media are looking for drama, there may be a bit much disaster porn going on yes, that’s probably fair, but, the truth also is that the media are capturing things the government would rather they weren’t. – Kate Hawkesby
And what we do know of this government is that it likes to be the only narrative on any story. It likes to be the pulpit of truth and dish out the messaging, it probably doesn’t appreciate some independent journalism being done around the place. But this denial of any issue smacks of a Jacinda-type approach; rejecting the assertion of everything.
That didn’t go so well for her, it became farcical, and so I wonder why Hipkins would go down the same track. Rejecting people’s truths as fiction is not a good look. If they’re experiencing it how can it not be true?
Just because a bureaucrat in an office somewhere doesn’t have an official report of it on paper, does that mean it’s not real? No. It smacks of the PPE scandal all over again.. and the RAT tests.. and the flu jabs.. remember all that? – Kate Hawkesby
So we have a trust issue here.
Do we believe the Government’s official line – that crime is down, there is no looting, as true? Or do we believe the increasingly frustrated locals?
And don’t forget the mixed messages we’re getting here too from government.
Police Minister Stuart Nash asking gangs to ‘pull their heads in’. Justice Minister Kiri Allan, calling on thieves to ‘get their act together’ all the while the PM and the Commissioner saying ‘nothing to see here, there is no crime.’
So which is it? – Kate Hawkesby
Look, I really want to believe that 82 new truancy officers are going to turn around our falling attendance rates at schools.
But we live in the real world, so here are some real world facts:
We have 2500 schools and 815,000 students in this country.
That means each of those officers is going to have to cover 31 schools each. Each of those officers is responsible for 10,000 students each.
If the figures are to be believed and 54 percent were truant in term three last year, then each of those officers are supposed to chase up 5400 students regularly.
Obviously, there are already some existing truancy officers trying to do the job, but the trouble is; we don’t how many, because the Government doesn’t know how many. And it’s probably not a lot. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
But it’s only popular if it’s believable, if voters actually believe it’s going to make a difference. And on those numbers, it’s hard to believe that this is possible.
It’s also hard to believe that this is anything other than cynical vote winning tactic from this Government, because they’ve left it this late to deal with the truancy. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Chris Hipkins himself, as former Education Minister, would’ve seen the truancy numbers ticking up. And did nothing about it, until today.
Truancy is a massive issue in New Zealand. Our kids’ education should be top priority, not an easy headline bought with 82 truancy officers.
So I’m sorry to say this feels like one straight out of the Jacinda playbook.
Good headline, scratch beneath the surface just one layer- disappointing. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
This Government has wasted a huge amount of money… because inflation’s so high, it’s raising a huge amount of extra tax already.
“You just know [the Government] will raise the tax and it will carry on doing dumb, pet ideological projects. – Christopher Luxon
I think we should borrow for it because we’re actually making an investment in that region and, when you borrow money to upgrade the roof on your house versus borrowing to pay for your groceries, there’s a difference there in terms of making an investment in a region – Christopher Luxon
Put the funding into schools and then the schools can use the funding to create a solution that suits their community – Graeme Norman
This is curious: The effect, anti-racism, grows ever stronger as the cause, real racism, grows ever weaker. But perhaps this should not altogether surprise us, for as Tocqueville noticed, oppressive regimes do not provoke protest or revolt when they are at their worst, but when they are trying to improve themselves. Thus, it is with the diminishment of real racism that anti-racist rage is expressed, becomes general, and reaches its height. Such rage has the additional virtue that it is an easy way to be virtuous, or to believe oneself such, and it makes no demands other than expression of the rage itself. Moreover, the expression of righteous, or self-righteous, rage is always a pleasure in itself. – Theodore Dalrymple
In everyday life, we often ascribe motives to people that they do not ascribe to themselves. We say that the real reasons that they do what they do are very different from the reasons that they themselves give for their conduct, and we do not necessarily assume that the difference between the reasons that we and they ascribe are because they are lying. On the contrary, we think that we know their reasons better than they know them themselves. To that extent, we are all psychoanalysts. – Theodore Dalrymple
However much I try to “understand” the mind of a mass killer such as Huu Canh Tran, by which I mean imagine myself in his place, I find that I cannot—just as well, you might say. When all the data are in, and however minutely examined the antecedents may be, there will remain a gap between the explanation and what is to be explained. It is a commonplace sentiment that there but for the grace of God go I, and in many cases this is no doubt a generous or inspiring thought, a corrective to censorious condemnation, that is to say condemnation that admits of no understanding or extenuation by circumstance. But there are some actions to which this commonplace sentiment cannot apply, and a mass shooting is one of them.
We are condemned by our very human nature perpetually to try to understand such actions, and we are condemned perpetually to failure in the endeavor. And I am glad that we are doomed to failure: Nothing would be more dangerous for mankind than complete self-understanding. – Theodore Dalrymple
We are constantly told that the culture war isn’t real, and that if it is it’s simply a hysterical reaction by the conservative Right to social change and progress: old white men uncomfortable with ethnic minorities, women and LGBT people finally being given a voice, or complaining about being “cancelled” from their huge media platforms.
The truth is that the culture war is more like a culture surrender. It’s the one-way offensive of an increasingly extreme and anti-democratic “progressive” agenda, focused not on conservatives and reactionaries, but waged ruthlessly against the liberals of the previous generation – whether they’re second wave feminists, free speech advocates, gay people who don’t want to be dragooned into trans and “queer” agendas, or libertarians and classical liberals.
The latest episode is the disfigurement of Roald Dahl’s books, once lauded by liberal parents for their anarchic and child-centred approach, and now to be extensively amended by commisarial “sensitivity readers”. – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/20/censoring-roald-dahl-proves-culture-war-total-surrender-right/
These were works that were supposed to belong to children rather than adults; that were intended to teach lessons of honesty, courage and independence. They were some of the most popular and ubiquitous works in our culture, and had nothing whatsoever to do with right wing politics and culture.
And yet these beloved and respected works of children’s literature were coldly and ruthlessly targeted by fanatics not in some obscure sociology faculty or modern art gallery, but at the heart of one the largest publishers in the world. This was no flight of fancy. Going “woke” is not only a matter of faith for many in the world of publishing, it’s also a perfect vehicle for dumbing down and softening Dahl to make him more palatable to American audiences and critics.
Like so many targets of the culture war Dahl’s legacy was not picked on because it was uniquely offensive, or a focus of right-wing affection, but because it has power. The culture war is straightforwardly a grab for influence and profit by a coalition of strident and opportunistic ideologues, who have discovered that if they use the right words (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, offence) they will be met with total capitulation. – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/20/censoring-roald-dahl-proves-culture-war-total-surrender-right/
The culture-war is a counter-insurgency and propaganda operation run by people who are already in the corridors of power, who have captured the flag and claimed the castle. We are increasingly governed by people who believe in (or have been bludgeoned into submission towards) a “woke” ideology whose simple intent is the dismantling of Western culture. They employ the language of fairness, equality and liberty, but mean by them something entirely different than how most of us use them. We have a culture war in which one side isn’t fighting back; a culture surrender. – Sebastian Milbank
Some good news for Islamist hotheads in Iran: The Great Satan might not be as Satanic as you thought. In fact, some of the inhabitants of the licentious hellhole of the United States of America are on your side, at least when it comes to shutting down scurrilous commentary about Islam. Behold the extraordinary explosion of religious censorship at Macalester College in Minnesota this month. Following complaints from students, officials at this prestigious liberal arts college threw a black curtain – literally – over the work of an Iranian-American artist that depicted women in niqabs revealing their knickers and women in burqas with huge breasts. Hiding blasphemous art behind black sheets lest it cause ‘deep pain’ to Muslim students? They did you proud, Iran. – Brendan O’Neill
There’s an irony here that would be funny if it were not so sickening: a female artist who challenges the forced draping of women in black cloth finds herself being likewise veiled, likewise draped in shame, likewise hidden from public view. A censorship veil thrown over an artist who dared to make fun of the modesty veils thrown over women in Iran.
There was pushback against this disgraceful act of misogynistic intolerance. spiked’s friends at FIRE – the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – drew national attention to the ‘sinister’ censorship at Macalester. Eventually, the college administrators backtracked on their ayatollahism and removed the shame curtains from the exhibition. But their paternalistic authoritarianism remained intact. The entrance doors to the exhibition were taped up, so that no poor soul would unwittingly glimpse these painful paintings, and two signs were attached to the doors. One was a content warning, the other a student-made leaflet telling people not to attend the show. So the exhibition was reopened, but students were begged not to enter. What a demeaning way to treat an artist whose only ‘crime’ is to make fun of Islamic extremism. – Brendan O’Neill
On a liberal campus in 21st-century America, at an elite college that has a special ‘focus on internationalism’, the cry for freedom of brave Iranians was hidden behind a black curtain. It was shrouded from view. It remains, alongside Talepasand’s more provocative works, concealed behind a door smothered in construction tape with a plea to students not to enter this sinful sphere. This was more than just another act of petty tyranny carried out by ‘snowflakes’ and the college administrators who kowtow to them – it was a grotesque betrayal by elite students who enjoy every freedom you could imagine of people in Iran who enjoy so few.
Macalester was basically doing the ayatollahs’ dirty work for them. It did to Ms Talepasand what Iran would have done to her, though less violently of course: it censored her, branded her a social menace. It shoved this dangerous, hysterical woman behind a black curtain. Macalester aren’t the only ones doing the censorious bidding of the Iranian theocracy. Across the woke West, criticism of Islam is frequently condemned and in some cases punished. The Anglo-American world’s justification for crushing anti-Islamic ‘blasphemy’ might differ to Iran’s. We talk about protecting individual Muslims from the ‘pain’ of seeing their prophets and customs being questioned, while Iran focuses on the ‘pain’ caused to Islamic society, and to Allah himself, when people diss Islam. But the consequence is the same: punishment of blasphemy, diminution of freedom. – Brendan O’Neill
People have lost their jobs in the West for making fun of Islam. People have been murdered for ‘mocking’ Muhammad. Virtually every institution frowns upon ‘Islamophobia’, which often just means strong criticism of Islam, and even ‘hijabphobia’, which the Huffington Post describes as ‘unfounded hostility towards the hijab’. That is essentially what the Iranian tyranny is waging a vicious war on – the ‘hijabphobia’ of uppity women who are hostile to the idea that they should always be veiled in public.
The commonalities of wokeness and ayatollahism are chilling. Right-on Westerners have become willing, compliant footsoldiers of Iranian-style intolerance. They think they’re doing something nice and socially just: protecting Muslims from offence. But in truth they’re pushing unforgiving religious-style censorship and demeaning our Muslims citizens into the bargain. The idea that Muslims cannot handle difficult discussion and require educated activists to cover their frail eyes and ears is infinitely more racist than a painting of a woman hiking up her burqa. I’m starting to understand why there has been so little sustained solidarity with the revolt in Iran, which continues, by the way. It’s because so many over here have been inculcated with the belief that questioning Islam, mocking Muhammad and criticising the veil are bad things to do. This is the impossibility of solidarity with Iran’s rebels.
For students on a privileged campus in the US to speak of the ‘deep pain’ of being invited to view an Iranian-American’s rebellious art is actually quite repulsive. Pain? More than 300 protesters dead, scores lined up for execution, others severely injured by batons and bullets – that’s pain. And I have no doubt that your shrouding of their slogan and other pro-women artworks behind a black cloak of moral censure will have exacerbated that pain. – Brendan O’Neill
Journalism took a fatal wrong turn when it confused itself with activism and assumed the right to hector the public with ideological lectures, often tinged with an ugly spirit of authoritarianism. Journalists are not our moral guardians, and until they grasp that fact their credibility will continue to decline. – Karl du Fresne
Hipkins should think more about the victims and less about his political opponents in future responses. – Audrey Young
The warning came after an entertaining first Question Time in Parliament for the year, in which Chris Hipkins made a pretty fundamental error which revealed his lack of experience in matters budgetary and economic.
He insisted, in answer to a question by ACT’s David Seymour, that Government spending as a proportion of the economy was lower under Labour today than when they came to office.
It isn’t.
In 2017, it was 27.7% of the economy and in the Budget update figures in December it was 29.9%.
Making mistakes about or not knowing numbers happens – it isn’t a quiz show and politicians’ memories are fallible. But arguing you have shrunk the size of government when you’ve clearly made it bigger is a different and fundamental order of mistake. – Luke Malpass
When you start treating people like that by not processing applications or sitting on them for a while, you get a very bad reputation among migrants – especially those who have choices of places where they want to live,” says Crampton.
There’s a global race for talent. Places like Canada are sharply increasing migration and New Zealand now has a pretty stink reputation. Fixing that would be a good place to start. – Eric Crampton
Whenever you are in a downturn, people start seeing migrants as competitors for our jobs or wages. And if the housing market is broken, voters see migrants as coming in and stealing the house that they might have bought. That builds a toxic environment for the politics around migration so that whenever there’s the slightest pressure, the government is tempted to clamp down. – Eric Crampton
Most of the tax revenue benefits from migration go to central Government, while the costs are being left with local governments. Councils don’t know how to fund and finance the kit that they need to accommodate growth, while central Government will often tell them to please accommodate it. –
We need to start thinking about revenue-sharing mechanisms, so that when a city council or region does very well and contributes a lot more to central Government revenues, that they get a taste of that back. – Eric Crampton
Hold a referendum asking New Zealanders whether they want a name change for the nation. If more than half vote yes, a Commission will be established to receive public submissions on a new name and put the most popular three to a vote at the next election
NOTE: I’m on record over the years pointing out the historic silliness of our country’s name
But if it’s to be changed then it should be SOLEY FOR THE PUBLIC AND NOT ANONYMOUS PUBLIC SERVANTS AND THE MEDIA TO DECIDE. – Sir Bob Jones
In election years, make it compulsory for the public radio and television broadcasters to provide equal time for Oppositions to comment on issues with the same time provided for the government spokespersons. In the interest of sustaining freedom of thought, this would not apply to privately owned media. But neutrality must apply to the publicly owned media. – Sir Bob Jones
At a time when literacy rates across the country are plummeting, and children who read for pleasure are as rare as a conservative in a humanities department, why, oh why, are we messing with the classics?!
While we can debate whether it’s appropriate or not to refer to someone as “fat” (with the holier-than-thou judgment coming down from Dahl’s publishing company noting it most certainly is not appropriate), we have got to the point that, in James and the Giant Peach, Miss Spider’s head is no longer “black” and the Earthworm has given up its “lovely pink” skin for “lovely smooth skin”. Last I checked, spiders are often black, if the ones that make a most unwelcome appearance in my home are anything to go by, and earthworms often appear pink in colour. Are the words “pink” and “black” to be [insert any colour but black or pink]-listed? – Dr Melissa Derby
The word “black” took another hit, having been removed from the description of the terrible tractors in Fantastic Mr. Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”. What if, in Roald Dahl’ imagination, the tractors were black? A rather pertinent question to ask is ‘what was going through the censors’ heads if they felt the word ‘black’ was inappropriate here?’ I’m sure that question would make the so-called anti-racist zealots squirm.
Another change is presumably meant to empower women – in The Witches, the wording has shifted from “even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman” to “even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business”. As a girl who devoured Roald Dahl books over and over, I was never ‘limited’ by the original text. Rather, it was my parents who took responsibility for broadening my horizons, not Roald Dahl. – Dr Melissa Derby
I could list other egregious changes, but why bore us all with the nit-picking of the miserable, vocal few? Instead, I’ll continue to read my original copies of Dahl’s stories with my son so that he can enjoy them in their lively, edgy, wonderfully colourful glory, just as I did. – Dr Melissa Derby
Roald Dahl didn’t have much time for parents, which may go some way to explaining why children have so much time for Roald Dahl. Like all great children’s authors (a reliably odd, frequently unpleasant bunch), Dahl preferred the exciting state of orphanhood to the supposed comforts of the nuclear family. From Oliver Twist and Pip in Great Expectations via Alice in Wonderland and James Henry Trotter to Harry Potter himself, the heroes of juvenile fiction invariably face the trials and tribulations of this world alone. – Allison Pearson
As a mum reading bedtime stories almost 20 years ago now, I confess I wasn’t sure that I much liked the morality of the anarchic, viciously unsentimental Dahl. But my enthralled, pyjamaed pair lapped him up. The more grotesque, the merrier. First, Dahl made my small people afraid, and then his words cast a spell that helped them master their fears.
Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death. – Allison Pearson
And who gets to decide what language can “continue to be enjoyed by all” or, indeed, whether all might not prefer the salty original? Not young readers who, for more than six decades, have positively relished Dahl’s arcane epithets and mad creations (Oops, sorry, “mad” is now banned; on mental health grounds, I think). Certainly not the author himself, who died in 1990 but must be rolling in his grave at one change made by some cloth-eared twit to The Witches. Dahl’s witches all wear wigs (because they’re bald) but, as he wrote, “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet… Just you try it and see what happens.”
Puffin’s new, more “accessible”, less offensive version reads: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
What the Dickens? (They’ll be coming for him next, mark my words.) There’s the problem right there. Sensitivity readers are not sensitivity writers. Wokesters of impeccable social justice credentials but very tiny (oops, sorry, not allowed to use “tiny” any more. Sizeist!) brain, they clearly cannot hear what is wrong with that sentence. Dahl was incapable of writing anything so clunking. Or so dull. Had he lived to see the sanitised, sanctimonious, health and safety caveat they have attached to his mischievous hair-pulling of witches’ wigs, he would have flown his Hawker Hurricane into Puffin HQ, and with every justification. –
It’s not funny. And Dahl is, above all, scabrously, uproariously, rudely funny. That’s why kids love him. But the new unsmiling arbiters of public morality – the leftist Virtue-osi – don’t want children to find politically incorrect, aka downright truthful, things about the human condition entertaining. Instead, they must be force-fed so-called “empathetic” books which “promote health and wellbeing”, “race equality”, “caring” and “emotional intelligence”. Dreary, pious tomes which teach them that their history stinks, white people are awful and biased (especially if that bias is unconscious), everyone has to Be Kind (except white men in history who were AWFUL and beyond the pale) and sticking with the sex you were born with is nether diverse nor inclusive.
We should be very worried. The same smug forces that want to castrate Dahl because he’s supposedly a malign influence on young readers are the ones who are indoctrinating children in our schools with a pernicious, highly political creed that would appal most parents, if they only knew. – Allison Pearson
James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, warns me, “There are primary schools teaching children that it is possible to be born in the wrong body, that the doctor took a guess at who they were when they were born and may have made a mistake. There are materials telling young girls that if they don’t want to play sport against a biological male, that is transphobia. There are resources suggesting to young people that to be ‘straight’ or ‘cis’ is to be stale and boring. This is indoctrination. It makes it increasingly less likely that children will become comfortable with their own bodies and sets them down a slippery slope to potential harm.”
Highly divisive critical race theory and an aggressive trans ideology are being embedded in the school curriculum, even dictating the content of books, yet the censors come for Dahl who, for all his failings, had children’s best interests at heart. He would have been outraged by these contemporary witches who steal the innocence of eight-year-olds and call it kindness. – Allison Pearson
As I was re-reading Matilda, I came upon the list of titles her creator said the little girl devoured within six months. They include: Oliver Twist, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Animal Farm by George Orwell.
‘Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Matilda said, ‘Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same.’
‘A fine writer will always make you feel that, Mrs Phelps said. ‘And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.’
What good advice. Trust a great author. Submit to the spell of their storytelling. Beware giant peaches and charging rhinoceroses. Words matter, so guard them well, especially the ones that have stood the test of time. Sensitivity readers be damned. – Allison Pearson
Despite being a country with one of the diverse Parliaments in the world, we have become a far less tolerant society since the pandemic.
Where previously, different views might have been shrugged off as just ill-informed or eccentric, there is now a growing feeling that such views are simply wrong, and therefore dangerous, and should not be promoted, or even held at all. – Peter Dunne
Public debate, not community censorship, is the best antidote to views that appear quirky or extreme to the majority, and we should never shy away from that. The last thing we need is the mediocrity and uniformity of a “carbon copy” approach to the expression of public opinion. – Peter Dunne
Making judgements about what should be believed and what should not, should never be based on the type of artificial absolute that applied during the extreme circumstances of the pandemic. Doing so poses a more dangerous threat to free speech than the expression of certain views themselves. We do not need to be told what views are acceptable in public discourse and which ones are not – that was exactly the problem the government ran up against in its early efforts to define what constituted hate speech.
Rather, we need to focus afresh on promoting informed debate based on thorough information. – Peter Dunne
The irony is that over the years New Zealand has been more diligent than most in calling out threats to the freedom of expression and the rights of minorities in other countries. We have even gone to wars in the past on that clarion call.
We should uphold the principle once more at home. – Peter Dunne
Rural people feel that their experience at times … doesn’t get understood or acknowledged by regulators and urban people more generally. Then we have these events which equalises us all. There is a hell of a lot more that unites us. – Todd Muller
In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong. – Dominic Sandbrook
How, then, does it end? If you agree with, say, the late Jeremy Corbyn, then the answer is obvious. Peace is better than war, so all that matters is to make it stop. Go cap in hand to Moscow, and keep offering them territory until Vladimir Putin raises a hand and says: “Enough!” If you want to feel good about yourself, you can dress it up as offering the Russian president an “off-ramp”. Or, if you’d prefer to be honest, you can just call it appeasement.
The alternative is at once emotionally unsatisfying and boringly straightforward. And sadly it involves lots of people dying, because that’s the nature of war. It is simply to keep giving the Ukrainians the aid, weapons and emotional and political support they need, until they have driven every last occupier from their land — or until they’ve had enough and are prepared to cut a deal. But that should be their decision, not ours. After 12 months of war and more than 100,000 casualties, they’ve earned the right to make it. After all, we would want the same, if we were in their shoes. And like them, we’d want our friends to do the right thing.
Good versus evil; right versus wrong. In a complicated world, sometimes it really is that simple. – Dominic Sandbrook
There was a time when it was widely accepted that it was a good thing to adapt nature for our own ends. Indeed, that’s the only way we humans can survive. Nature has dragons; left unprotected from them, and they will devour us.
And on our own, compared to nature’s power, we human beings are weak. Left exposed and naked and without the food, shelter and technology produced by our adaptation of nature, if we merely settled for adapting ourselves to nature’s dragons then ever single one of us would struggle for survival. But adapt nature to ourselves — make it more humane and set nature’s processes and nature’s bounty working for us rather than agin us– and then as a species we’re off to the races.
This path — adapting nature to ourselves — was the path of centuries of human civilisation and flourishing, starting all the way back in settlements around the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Nile where floods were tamed and used to produce abundant wealth from the enormously fertile soil.
This is not the view nowadays however. Not so much.
THE PREDOMINANT VIEW NOWADAYS is that protecting ourselves from nature is wrong. That “the environment” trumps human beings. That nature must take its course. That natural processes have rights, but human beings don’t. – Not PC
This is not a climate problem or an engineering problem. It’s an attitude problem. It’s an attitude borne of bad philosophy: of the ethics that says that Gaia comes first, and humans a far distant second.
We didn’t always think this way, or we would never have come so far as a species.
However it’s now a notion that’s philosophically entrenched in present generations, and in most government departments (central and local). It’s also legally entrenched in the RMA (which gives rights to the “intrinsic value of ecosystems,” but not to humans wishing to protect themselves from the often dangerous natural processes inflicted upon us by ecosystems). And don’t think David Parker’s various replacement bills for the RMA will improve things either — to read those legislative tributes to Gaia is to understand they will only make things harder all round.
Just imagine if this attitude was predominant around the Nile in the times of the pharoahs; if instead of taming the Nile and its regular floods to produce abundant crops, invent hydraulic engineering and to build a civilisation the Egyptians ran away instead. As a culture they’d now be deservedly lost to history. As would all the cultures and civilisations (i.e., ours) that built upon those first beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
And that goes for any culture that opts out of the ongoing battle against the dragons of nature — and it goes for us too. – Not PC
The PM’s tenure as Minister of Education has given NZ school students a racialised and unbalanced curriculum
Even if Chris Hipkins is no longer the Prime Minister after October’s election, his legacy will be locked in for some time. – Graham Adams
Hipkins may, in fact, not even have been the principal architect of the stealthy revolution that has occurred on his watch but it will be seen as his legacy nevertheless because formal power over the education portfolio rested with him from 2017 until he became Prime Minister in January.
Over those years, Hipkins and his ministry have given the nation’s schoolchildren a radical (“decolonised”) history curriculum, which teachers throughout the country have begun implementing this term. “Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories” is now compulsory for schools from Years 1-10, with the subject optional in Years 11-13.
It can perhaps be best summed up as a one-eyed ideological exercise in demonising Pakeha as oppressive colonisers and valorising Maori as valiant resisters. – Graham Adams
Hipkins has been responsible for the disastrous centralisation of polytechnics and the first-year, fees-free university programme — which last week Times Higher Education pointed out had disproportionately benefited the wealthy — but the radical reshaping of school curriculums may be more enduring and difficult to unwind than these flawed programmes. – Graham Adams
And the radical policy prescriptions in education don’t stop with the history curriculum. That is just an early part of a “Curriculum Refresh” which will be implemented fully by 2026, with principals encouraged to begin sooner if they can. – Graham Adams
Professor Rata draws particular attention to the concept of “mauri” (life force) being included in the NCEA Chemistry & Biology syllabus. “Vitalism, the idea of an innate ‘life force’ present in all things, has surfaced in many cultural knowledge systems, including European, but has been soundly refuted and is not part of modern science.”
Some of the proposals in the draft are so preposterous that it is shocking they found their way into any official document. What are we meant to make, for instance, of the “Purpose Statement for Mathematics and Statistics in the New Zealand Curriculum”, which states: “Being numerate in Aotearoa New Zealand today relies upon understanding diverse cultural perspectives and privileging te ao Maori and Pacific world-views”? – Graham Adams
Since becoming Prime Minister, Hipkins has told us that the government has failed to explain co-governance adequately to the public, and a principal reason why the policy is so contentious is that it has been “misunderstood”.
Perhaps he could begin the new era of glasnost under his leadership by explaining exactly how partnership and co-governance work in the education portfolio he has just relinquished — and specifically in the makeover of the school curriculum.
The curriculum refresh makes it clear that what is taught will be decided in collaboration with local iwi. It recommends that, “Leading kaiako [teachers]… incorporate te reo Maori and matauranga Maori in the co-design of localised curriculum with whanau, hapu, and iwi.”
Co-designing a curriculum with Maori is, of course, an informal example of co-governance. Perhaps Hipkins could explain why “whanau, hapu, and iwi” should be involved — and especially what educational qualifications and experience they might be required to have to undertake such a prominent and important role. – Graham Adams
Public criticism of partnership and co-governance imposed through legislation and policy has so far mostly focused on Three Waters. But once parents get a better grasp on what their children are being taught at school, Hipkins can expect another ferocious battle on that front too. – Graham Adams
It won’t be long, however, before boys will be discouraged from their dinosaur stage by fears that such a stage is the manifestation of a colonialist mindset. After all, dinosaurs were first recognized and studied in an imperialist country; therefore, the study of dinosaurs must be imperialist. – Theodore Dalrymple
To be surprised that paleontology is a study pursued mainly in rich countries indicates a complete absence of common sense. I mean paleontology no disrespect—I fail to see how anybody with leisure and opportunity could fail to be at least mildly interested in it—but paleontology, fascinating as it is, would hardly be the first priority for poor countries, even among the natural sciences.
Paleontology is an expensive and, in some sense, a luxurious pursuit. It’s natural that it should be pursued predominantly by rich countries. Paleontologists have, I imagine, no particular thirst for martyrdom, and therefore it isn’t surprising that they tend to shun countries difficult and dangerous to access, when there are plenty of other countries to explore. – Theodore Dalrymple
As science develops it grows more expensive to pursue. But the economic order of the world changes, and countries formerly poor can and do become rich. They will then be enabled to pursue paleontology—if they so wish. They will need to develop a tradition, but it can be done quickly with the right frame of mind.
Thus there can be no need to “decolonialize” or “diversify” paleontology, and the easiest, indeed only, way to ensure that its practitioners are representative of the population of the world as a whole is to abandon it altogether.
It seems that some kind of prion, the minute particle that caused the fatal brain disease known as kuru among the Fore people of New Guinea, has entered the minds of the intelligentsia in the West. In the meantime, boys should enjoy their dinosaur stage while they’re still allowed to do so. – Theodore Dalrymple
Collectively, the human species is burning more coal, more oil, and more natural gas than ever before. So, how likely is it that New Zealand pulling on a metaphorical hair-shirt and crying “Follow our mitigation example!” is going to stop them? – Chris Trotter
But, just how receptive are the poorest peoples on Earth likely to be to a message delivered to them by their former colonial masters which boils down to: “Please don’t try to become as rich as we are – the planet can’t take it.” Are they likely to say: “Yes, Master, we are happy to remain poor – for the planet’s sake.” Or, will they not-so-politely suggest that if the peoples of the West really are so determined to save the planet, then how about they agree to spread their extraordinary wealth evenly across it? Will either side agree to mitigate climate change by making such huge sacrifices? Or, will both sides move as swiftly as – Chris Trotter
Inevitably, as the world warms, nation states will become even more selfish. When cyclones as devastating as Gabrielle lay waste to forests, farms and orchards, and make plain the worst errors of urban planners, every available dollar is going to be spent on recovery and adaptation. Pleas for financial assistance from developing nations confronting similar challenges are likely to fall on deaf ears. Charity, the voters will insist, begins at home – and their political representatives will not dare to disagree.
It has not helped the mitigators’ cause that so many of them seem to be located on the left of the political spectrum, or that those not identifying as left are fervent advocates of indigenous rights. These climate activists characterise “Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation” as the three evil giants that must be slain before climate change can be effectively mitigated. They are less forthcoming, however, when asked how this slaughter might be accomplished. This is understandable, given that the chances of destroying Carbon, Capitalism and Colonisation peacefully and democratically are rather slim.
Not that these difficulties are likely to bother the true revolutionaries, since for them global warming has always been the most wonderful excuse for imposing the sort of regime that nobody who believes in individual rights, private property, and the Rule of Law would ever willingly submit to. In the grim summation of George Orwell: “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” For far too many climate activists, mitigation has always been a Trojan Horse. – Chris Trotter
Eric Crampton and I appeared before the Committee last week to speak to the New Zealand Initiative’s submission on the Natural and Build Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill.
The Initiative submitted that the government should withdraw both Bills. While the existing Resource Management Act is demonstrably bad both for the environment and development, in our view the government’s proposals will likely make matters worse. – Bryce Edwards
The first step in assessing the merits of any proposal is to determine whether it identifies the causes of the unsatisfactory effects. The second step is to develop options aimed directly at those causes. The third step is to assess which of those options best enhances the wellbeing of those affected.
The official analysis fails at each step. First it does not consider deep causes. Instead, it simply assumes that the remedy is to double up on prescriptive central government direction. Second, it fails to identify any options other than the government’s proposal. This means it cannot take the third step.
To claim net benefits relative to a failed RMA is not a test of how to best address the situation.
One cannot justify shooting oneself in one foot on a regular basis by asserting that it is better than shooting both feet on a regular basis. The option of not shooting either foot has to be considered.
The Ministry need to show instead that the preferred proposal beats the best alternative option. – Bryce Edwards
The Bills’ ‘solution’ to the above problems is more central government direction, gutting local government autonomy in the process. Conflicts of interest will abound in the decision-making bodies. Delays due to hold-out by partisan interests seem inevitable.
The Bills are basically a list of conflicting aspirations. They propose no methods for assessing how much weight to put on which aspiration. That makes purposeful decision-making impossible. A decision one way today could as easily be reversed by different personnel tomorrow.
People who own land will not be able to make long-term decisions about its use with any confidence. The rule of law is undermined when no property owner really knows what the law means, today or tomorrow.
At the Bills’ heart is the fiction that environmental bottom lines exist that can be achieved regardless of the cost to New Zealanders’ wellbeing. In reality, there are only trade-offs. Resources are scarce. More of one thing means less of something else. – Bryce Edwards
Thirty years later agreed bottom lines have yet to be revealed. They will not be revealed in the next 30 years because they do not exist. There are only contentious trade-offs.
The proposed pursuit of agreed bottom lines independently of costs is a perpetual motion machine for dispute and discontent. A cost is a negative benefit. People care about benefits.
These Bill essentially deny private property rights in land use. Your land use rights are blowing in the political wind. The Minister’s claims of net benefits have no merit. – Bryce Edwards
Dahl grew up in the repressed world of the British upper class in the 20th century, where his mother was happy to pack him off to boarding school and his country was happy to pack him off to war. His own feelings were unimportant. As a writer, he responded by focusing on the horrible and the uncanny, on revenge and revolution. You can see the BFG—bullied by the other, bigger giants in the book of the same name—as an analogue for the young Dahl at Repton School, small and picked on by the older boys. Miss Trunchbull, meanwhile, is a grotesque version of every teacher who gave Dahl the cane. She deserves everything she gets. – Helen Lewis
Many writers I know have reacted strongly to the news of the rewrites, probably because we know how powerful editors can be. Almost everyone who covers difficult, sensitive subjects can tell you about a time they received a “hostile edit” in which the process of publication felt like running uphill through sand. In such cases, the editors introduce so many caveats and concessions to other people’s perspectives that the work ceases to feel like yours. Those kinds of editors—whose highest goal is a piece that won’t cause any trouble—presumably approach a dead author’s work with an appropriately Dahl-esque glee. Finally, a writer who can’t fight back!
Also, let’s not be cute about it: Sensitivity readers, including those at the company that edited the Dahl books, are a newly created class of censors, a priesthood of offense diviners. – Helen Lewis
Given the zeal with which the American right is currently targeting books such as The Handmaid’s Tale, the cultural left should be extremely cautious about championing the censorship of literature, particularly when that censorship is driven by business prerogatives rather than idealism. The Dahl controversy will inevitably be presented as a debate about culture—a principled stand in favor of free speech versus a righteous attempt to combat prejudice and bigotry. But it’s really about money. I’ve written before about how some of the most inflammatory debates, over “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” are best seen as capital defending itself. The Dahl rewrites were surely designed to preserve the value of the “IP” as much as advance the cause of social justice. – Helen Lewis
But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more. – Helen Lewis
Adding in something quite alien when no one was expecting it risks upsetting things, especially those important conventions protecting our electoral infrastructure.
“It also risked transforming and concretising our ecosystem from a flexible and responsive political constitution to a more rigid hierarchical legal constitution and eroding our cherished principle of parliamentary sovereignty. – Dr Dean Knight
I’m open to change and evolution of constitutional arrangements, but if we are going to be taking steps towards the Geoffrey Palmer-Andrew Butler-style of constitution where we lock everything down that will have ramifications for the everyday politics and the constitutional ecosystem. – Dr Dean Knight
If particular political parties or activists want to expand the range of rights that are protected, they can make the case for that, try and find support for that, try and get a majority – have a discussion framing it as a constitutional issue and something that needs broad-spectrum buy-in.
I think generally entrenchment should be used sparingly … but I don’t have a monopoly on what is decided as constitutional and what’s not, with all due respect, members of the committee don’t have a monopoly on that, it’s really for us to discuss and decide as a nation – Nicola Willis
Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr’s boost of the official cash rate on Wednesday was a thudding reminder to the Finance Minister and the rest of us of that other cloud looming over us: the cost of living crisis, which got shunted into the background for a bit as Cyclone Gabrielle entered the scene. – Claire Trevett
The easiest remedy for the cyclone crisis is to throw money at it in vast quantities – for the infrastructure, the clean-up and support for the people and businesses hit by it.
The remedy for the cost of living crisis (or at least one of them) is to try to cut spending to help dampen inflation – but Robertson had hoped to spend some of those savings on helping ease the pain for households struggling with their bills.
Then there are the mortgages. As Orr put it, if the Government cuts its spending and raises taxes, Orr might not have to raise interest rates so much.
So Robertson faces a choice of political poisons: people can either pay more in tax or pay even more in mortgages than they already are. – Claire Trevett
Add in the political palatability test to the various remedies and sub-remedies and things get even more complicated for Robertson.
Does he bring in a flood tax to help cover the cost of cyclone damage – and therefore take money out of people’s pockets during the cost of living crisis? Does he resort to doing it all on tick, making the books look worse? Does he rein back what he had hoped to do on the cost of living front?
All of this has added a pickle into PM Chris Hipkins’ “bread and butter” sandwich.
That bread and butter offering is looking increasingly like the home-brand white bread with a smear of margarine.
And that meagre fare may well prove to be the most politically palatable thing to do. There will be little appetite or expectation of election lollies now. – Claire Trevett
The flooding disasters are vast in area – from urban Auckland to rural East Coast and Hawke’s Bay.
It has had ramifications on people’s way of living and of making a living. It will hurt the economy and impact the export industry. As quick a rebuild as possible is needed.
And a tax targeted at top earners would possibly leave room to do more on the cost of living front for those on lower incomes.
That won’t stop National from pointing to any such levy as a breach of Robertson’s 2020 campaign promise not to introduce any new taxes this term beyond the new top tax rate of 39 per cent. – Claire Trevett
In the end, what matters is not necessarily whether or not you’ve broken a promise, but whether the voters think it was justified. Sometimes a u-turn on a problematic promise is actually rewarded.
In light of the increasing tendency for the unpredictable to happen, perhaps the lesson there is not to make such promises in the first place rather than whether to stick to them.
That, however, is easier said than done in the heat of an election campaign. – Claire Trevett
But what we have observed over the past fortnight simply puts New Zealand in the Third World category. It is questionable whether the damage from Cyclone Gabrielle — which was again exacerbated by the heavy downpours which took place overnight — wipes out any economic utility the industry has to New Zealand in that part of the country. That’s because the multi-billion-dollar damage suffered by the dairy and horticulture sectors due to the “runoff” of slash exacerbated the scale and impact of the flooding. – Fran O’Sullivan
Royal Commissions of Inquiry are reserved for the most serious matters of public importance. They are appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of the Executive Council. The 2011 inquiry looked into building failure caused by the Canterbury quake.
The part the foreign companies, their managers and contractors and the local councils have played in contributing to this disaster are best explored there — along with hearing from those affected. – Fran O’Sullivan
We are still in the response phase, but thoughts must turn quickly to what comes next. While lifelines are being sticky-taped back together for now, they must be made much more robust, and quickly. Whatever else happens in the next fortnight, winter is not far away.
Events like this remind us that, at least outside Auckland, we are a country of geographically isolated towns and villages linked together by ribbons of tarseal that are crucially important but too often taken for granted. – Steven Joyce
This rebuild is another huge job. But it has been done before and it will be done again. We need to lean into our resourcefulness, our practicality and our common sense, to get it happening fast.
That means using structures that harness everyone’s skills. The public sector, the private sector and all our communities. There is no place here for the Covid-era mistake that the Government must run everything. There is precious little chance that bureaucrats in Wellington understand how to rebuild, dare I say it, the Three Waters infrastructure of Napier or Waipawa.
There are five key elements for a successful infrastructure build: the funding envelope; a delivery mechanism for spending it quickly and wisely; the people to do the work; the ability to move quickly without excessive red tape; and a method of paying for it all. – Steven Joyce
The Government should take a flexible approach to dealing with each of the key lifeline utilities, recognising where the expertise lies. There is no time to needlessly set up new entities.
Transpower, the electricity lines companies and the telcos are experts in their fields. Their problem will be doing things that improve resilience but which customers don’t want to pay for. In the case of the electricity companies, they are prevented from doing so because the regulator won’t let them recover the cost.
These are sensible models in normal times but they won’t work here. The Government should borrow a leaf from the ultrafast broadband playbook and part-fund the needed investments to get them over the line.
The Three Waters rollout in Auckland, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay should be immediately halted and those working on it redirected to fixing what’s there.
This reorganisation was a luxury in normal times and is a massive distraction now. We need the shortest path to success. – Steven Joyce
The highways are the job of NZTA, but there is a real question mark over whether it can re-focus quickly to do the work.
Urgent flood protection works must be accelerated. This has been on the government to-do list for years, and is the least developed in terms of thinking and delivery. The logical partners are regional councils, but significant funding will need to come from government.
If it was me, I’d re-purpose the broadband rollout company, Crown Infrastructure Partners, as the primary public funder. They are used to partnering with people, understand contracting, and have a good track record of getting things done. They may need some new personnel to come up to speed quickly, but they are the agency most ready to go.
Just spending the money is not enough. One agency needs to have the power to cut through the regulatory thicket of the RMA and all the other restrictive legislation and get things done. – Steven Joyce
We don’t have time for long regulatory processes to agree on plans to protect the Esk Valley or Wairoa from more flooding, or to replace the slumped parts of copious highways. We need to get started and design as we go, as with the rebuild of State Highway One around Kaikōura. This will be a real test of a Government whose instincts on planning reform are more likely to slow things down.
Finding enough people to do the work will be challenging. Many decamped for Australia as roading work wound down. Contractors must see a clear pipeline of work over several years in front of them, so they have the confidence to scale up. The Government’s visa announcement made sense, but nothing will happen without that confidence.
As for how the recovery is paid for, that is a political choice. – Steven Joyce
Ministers seem to be limbering up to “not waste a good crisis” and use the floods to institute some good old left wing envy taxes, which sock it to the productive sector.
I suspect there will be little public patience for such politicking when the country’s economy will need to be running on all cylinders to pay for this investment.
Borrowing too much would also be inflationary, but it beggars belief that after spending increases in the tens of billions over the past few years, the Government couldn’t cut its cloth better to help pay for what’s needed. They could start by junking the preposterously expensive Auckland light rail.
There is much to do and no time to waste. Regional New Zealand will be watching closely. It hasn’t fared well under the current Government. The speed of the recovery in Northland, Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay will be seen as a measure of how much politicians care. – Steven Joyce
Time and again, in his writing for adults as well as children, Dahl championed the bullied against the bullies.
“Yet here we have a kind of cultural assertiveness that strong-arms readers into accepting without alternative – though, happily, not without demur – a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.
“This particular revisionism sits oddly with Dahl’s irrepressibly anarchic outlook, his distinctive combination of mischief and wonder, and, of course, ignores the fact that words, central to a writer’s armoury, are a matter of choice in order to manipulate meaning and conjure effect. – Matthew Dennison
It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and has made me weary of ebooks. – Clarissa Aykroyd
The problem with politicians is you usually know the answer yourself and you know what they should be saying, but they don’t say anything, and that’s the problem. Politicians I’ve found over the years are verbose to the extent that they talk themselves around a corner, and sometimes a door opens and they go in, and it’s too late to rescue themselves. – Barry Soper
I’ve had to explain to my older kids and apologise to them [as] when you have your first families, you tend to be pursuing your career, trying to make money, buying houses, so you don’t have the same time. Now, I’m an old geezer, far too old to be having kids, and he has been fantastic. He’s the joy of my life. He’s just wonderful. – Barry Soper
I take my hat off even more to what you once were as a solo mum. How on earth you cope as a solo mum, I’ll never know. That it’s so hard, emotionally, work-wise, and lonely. So I take my hat off generally to women that do it, and it’s sort of opened my eyes totally to child rearing. – Barry Soper
Taking the meme ‘Everyone I Don’t Like Is Hitler’ to dizzying new heights, now we’re being told it’s far right to want to drive your car. Motorist and fascist, peas in a pod. Protesters against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and so-called 15-minute cities – policies being adopted in various regions of the UK that will severely limit where and how often a person can drive his car – have been damned as hard-right loons. Who but a modern-day Brownshirt would bristle at eco-measures designed to save Mother Earth from car toxins? One author attended this month’s colourful protest against Oxford City Council’s anti-driving policies and decreed that this motley crew of car-lovers are on ‘the road to fascism’. Only they’ll never get there, presumably, given the elites’ penchant for road restrictions.
The climate fanatics are getting desperate. Of course, they’ve long used the tool of demonisation to try to shame and silence their critics. ‘Denier’ is a favoured insult. Question any aspect of the climate-alarmist agenda, including the harebrained claim that billions will soon die in a fiery apocalypse of man’s making, and you’ll be branded with that D-word. It marks you out as unfit for public life.
Yet the hysterical denunciation of pro-car protesters as maniacs and conspiracy theorists who are one car journey away from becoming open fanboys of the Fourth Reich is a new low. It’s classic gaslighting. The elites are hell-bent on restricting car-use, and this will make life harder for people, especially working-class people. To brand as nuts those who make this correct observation feels like a species of psychological warfare. – Brendan O’Neill
The climate fanatics are coming for your car. It’s not a myth. It’s not a conspiracy theory. They’re open about it. In both the UK and the US, eco-thinkers continually talk about using urban planning to socially re-engineer the throng. Let’s remake American cities so that ‘walking, biking and public-transit use’ are prioritised over car-use, says Vox. Don’t call this anti-car, though. Don’t say the establishment longs to deprive us of the great 20th- and 21st-century freedom of getting in one’s vehicle and going wherever one pleases. You’ll be denounced as a crank.
Yes, some hard right-wingers have attached themselves to the uprising against the motorphobia of the new elites. But you’d think the Guardianista middle classes would understand that this is inevitable in a relatively free society. After all, these are the kind of people who attend anti-Israel demos at which you will frequently see the most vile expressions of anti-Semitic hatred and who went on those bitter anti-Brexit marches at which some banners mocked the intellectual inferiority of working-class Leave voters. If the appearance of a far-right twat at a pro-driving protest means that everyone who’s pro-driving is far right, then by the same token you all must have a very serious problem with Jews and working-class folk. That’s how this works, right? – Brendan O’Neill
It is perfectly legitimate to describe top-down, eco-justified restrictions on people’s freedom to drive as a climate lockdown. No, it isn’t the handiwork of the WEF and it isn’t part of a global plot to imprison us in our homes. But erecting cameras to spy on car-users and fining those who drive to certain parts of their own city, all with the intention of pressuring us to walk instead, is a breed of lockdown. It is illiberal, anti-modern and further proof that our green-leaning elites care little for the freedom or the bank balances of working people. Protesting against this isn’t ‘far right’ – it’s sensible and good. – Brendan O’Neill
If free speech does not include the right to make deeply offensive claims that are perhaps antiquated and even abhorrent to the average Kiwi, but that does not incite violence, then we no longer have free speech. And without free speech, we would never have had the Springbok tour protests, the Maori Land Marches, the Nuclear Free New Zealand movement, or many other examples of speech that stood up to prejudice, bigotry and hatred.
Free speech is not free. It certainly runs the risk of allowing incorrect, stupid, hateful, or wrong views to be expressed. But censorship is not free either and the cost is much higher. – Jonathan Ayling
Labour, meanwhile, may find that its road to October has been closed. Rather than proceed with all speed down the path of repudiation and reprioritisation promised by Chris Hipkins when he became Prime Minister, the exigencies of dealing with the Auckland Anniversary Weekend Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle appear to have provided Hipkins’ caucus opponents with a chance to regroup and push back.
This was especially true of Three Waters. The period within which the unequivocal repudiation of the project remained politically feasible was always dangerously short. Indeed, the slightest delay threatened to make its abandonment impossible. Nor was the threat exclusively internal. The longer Hipkins put off Three Waters’ demise, the greater the risk that National would produce a viable and popular alternative. Which is exactly what it has done. – Chris Trotter
National’s decision to restore of local authorities’ property could hardly have come at a more opportune moment, given the very recent judicial observation that the asset base of the Three Waters’ “entities” had, indeed, been “expropriated”, from their local authority owners without the payment of fair and adequate compensation. It is a measure of the reckless radicalism of the Three Waters project that a New Zealand court could endorse such a claim. In no other context is it possible to imagine a Labour Cabinet signing-off on expropriation without compensation – a policy worthy of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. – Chris Trotter
If this is, indeed, what National is planning – and by what other means could citizens escape crippling rate increases and/or water charges? – then it is reasonable to predict a decisive shift in the relationship between New Zealand’s central and local government institutions. If the drift towards ever larger and more remote central bureaucracies is to be halted, then a radically new way of funding local infrastructure and the provision of local services will have to be devised. It is simply untenable for the present practice of central government offloading more and more responsibilities onto local authorities, while simultaneously withholding the funding needed to pay for them, to continue. There is a limit to how much can be borrowed affordably from private lenders, just as there is a democratic limit to the size and frequency of local government rate-hikes.
If National has, at long last, recognised this, then it can present itself as offering something new and progressive to the electorate. Subsidiarity is, after all, entirely congruent with the conservative (but not the neoliberal) view of politics. Conservatives are deeply suspicious of strong, centralised states which have no need to fear the displeasure of their citizens. Democracy, as a means of ensuring political accountability, similarly decreases in efficacy the further away the decisions affecting citizens’ daily lives are made. When the Americans say, “all politics is local”, they’re speaking the truth. – Chris Trotter
Making everything worse, are the public misgivings about the way Labour is handling the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. Intended or not, accurate or not, Hipkins’ downplaying of claims of lawlessness in the stricken communities of Tairawhiti and Hawkes Bay reminded too many people of the Covid emergency’s infallible “Podium of Truth”. Compounding Labour’s difficulties is Forestry Minister Stuart Nash’s inability to fully articulate the locals’ white-hot rage at the forestry companies. The latter’s failure to do anything about the hugely destructive volumes of “slash” that repeated storms have sent crashing into bridges, fences, orchards and people’s homes, has outraged the whole country. If ever there was a moment for righteous ministerial wrath, then, surely, this is it. Action, not yet another expert inquiry, is what the situation demands. Action, and the colourful condemnatory language of a Bob Semple or a Jack Lee. Labour men who really did “move with speed” in a crisis.
For Chris Hipkins and Labour, the state highway to October has been rendered impassable by inaction and political slash. Christopher Luxon and National, meanwhile, have discovered an unsealed road without slips and fallen trees. It’s not their usual way of reaching the Treasury Benches, but, with a bit of luck, it just might get them where they want to go. – Chris Trotter
The London School of Economics has decided that it will not use dreadful words such as Christmas, Easter, Lent, and Michaelmas to designate its term times and holidays. Presumably, its management now congratulates itself that it has made a step toward true diversity, equity, and inclusion, the modern equivalent—irony of ironies—of faith, hope, and charity.
An article in The Daily Telegraph was headed “The LSE’s decision is not just drearily woke. It’s completely pointless.” Alas, if only this were true, if only the decision were merely pointless; but on the contrary, the decision was extremely pointed. It was part of a tendency—I won’t go so far as to say part of a conspiracy—to destroy all links of the present with tradition, particularly (but not only) with religious tradition.
Tradition and pride in institutions are obstacles to a managerial class who prefer people whom they manage to be birds of passage, or particles in Brownian motion in the ocean of time, who are completely fixated on the present moment. The managerial revolution, when it takes place, is very thorough, and nothing is too small to escape its destructive notice. – Theodore Dalrymple
That is why those who want to manage the whole of society love the kind of history that sees no grandeur, beauty, or achievement in it, but only a record of injustice and misery (which, of course, really existed, and all of which they, and only they, will put right). The real reason for the enthusiasm for pulling down statues is to destroy any idea of the past as having been anything other than a vast chamber of horrors, and since everyone has feet of clay, and the heroes of the past always had skeletons in their cupboard (to change the metaphor), reasons for destroying statues, even of the greatest men, can always be found. – Theodore Dalrymple
The Daily Telegraph said that it was insulting to Christians, but actually it was far more insulting to non-Christians, such as I, for it assumed that they are so sensitive and intolerant that they are offended by the slightest reference to the Christian religion or to any vestiges of the Christian past of the country in which they live, either permanently or temporarily. In other words, non-Christians are made of psychological eggshells and are so delicate constitutionally that they need the protection of the LSE apparatchik and nomenklatura class—which after all has to occupy itself with something (it held meetings to make this decision, no doubt under the mistaken impression that it was working, even working very hard).
No one wants to live under a theocracy, other, that is, than theocrats (and even they only want to live under a theocracy so long as they are the rulers), but the danger of that is vanishingly remote, at least until Islam becomes the majority religion. It is said that only a minority in Britain now claim to be Christian—about 44 percent—but the Christian past of the country can hardly be denied. – Theodore Dalrymple
Perhaps one day, when decolonization is complete and Newton discovered to have been originally from Burkina Faso, attention will be turned to the triggering effects of so many Christian churches in countries such as Britain, edifices that so powerfully remind descendants of victims of Christian persecution of their ancestors’ traumatic experiences, which they are thereby forced to relive.
To this, of course, there is only one solution: pull them down, raze them to the ground. Likewise, cemeteries should be cleansed, crosses removed, religious inscriptions expunged.
Language, mon dieu, how it needs reforming! The place to start, of course, is schools, where the future of the nation is being developed. Any child who is heard exclaiming “God!” or anything like it should be told that he must in future use the good, solidly secular expletive “Fuck!” (this, of course, is happening spontaneously as well), under pain of punishment. The Bible should be made as illegal to bring into school as it is to bring it into Saudi Arabia, and expressions derived from that triggering work should be removed from common usage. Sufficient unto the day are the unjust social circumstances thereof. –
I am hesitant to write in a satirical vein because, as I and others have remarked, satire is prophecy. A number of current policies would have been regarded as satirical exaggeration only a few years ago. Who would have thought, say a decade ago, that a serious, or at any rate a prominent and powerful female politician (I refer here to the First Minister of Scotland), would argue that a man convicted of rape was actually, that is to say in reality, in fact, in every sense, a woman? Such propositions now elicit only irritation, not laughter; and irritation declines before long to resignation. Absurdity is first discussed, then adopted by a vanguard of intellectuals in search of a cause, and finally becomes an orthodoxy that it is socially unacceptable to question. Intelligent people give up opposition because it is boring to argue against what is not worth entertaining in the first place. – Theodore Dalrymple
Hipkins has tried to rebrand Three Waters by calling it an ‘investment in pipes and infrastructure’ and many other descriptions that are far better than the weird bureaucratic branding it received.
For most voters, it isn’t a vote-changing issue. But “Three Waters” as it has evolved over the past few years, does have a potent mix in it that’s potentially negative for Labour: Wellington-knows-best centralisation, thieving assets off councils and a bit of general secret Government agenda about it. – Luke Malpass
Earlier this month, the White House announced a five-year plan for redressing racial inequality. It is essentially the Biden administration’s version of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plan, like those issued by nearly every major university, only at a vastly larger scale. The policy aims to “advance an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities” by embedding equity goals in every aspect of the government.
From the highest offices of the state down to the smallest local bureaucracies, DEI now pervades almost all levels of American society. And while it was once thought that the fringe racial theories that animate the DEI agenda could be confined to small liberal arts campuses, it is clear that is no longer the case. – John Sailer
To many in the universities and perhaps in the country at large, these values sound benign—merely an invitation to treat everyone fairly. In practice, however, DEI policies often promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.
That ideology is exemplified by a research methodology called “public health critical race praxis” (PHCRP)—designed, as the name suggests, to apply critical race theory to the field of public health—which asserts that “the ubiquity of racism, not its absence, characterizes society’s normal state.” In practice, PHCRP involves embracing sweeping claims about the primacy of racialization, guided by statements like “socially constructed racial categories are the bases for ordering society.” – John Sailer
Shorn of any context, the principles of diversity and inclusion strike many people as unobjectionable, and even laudable. But in practice they are used as a shorthand for a set of divisive ideological dogmas and bureaucratic power grabs. Under the banner of DEI, medical institutions that are supposed to focus on protecting human life are being sacrificed on the altar of the racialist ideology.
Because of the ideological project associated with DEI initiatives, critics often highlight their effect on curriculum and teaching. But the more potent effect, in the long run, could end up being on scientific research and scholarship. – John Sailer
In other words, under the new ideological regime that has taken power both inside the federal bureaucracy and in institutions like UCSF, even medical research has become yet another front in a larger ideological battle. Tomorrow’s doctors and medical experts are being selected and trained on the basis of their willingness to “disrupt power imbalances between racialized and non-racialized people.” – John Sailer
Choose your Zelensky. He can be either saint or sinner. Either valiant repairer of the liberal international order or compliant puppet of the WEF. Either a one-man defender of liberal democracy or a stooge of nefarious globalists. These are the only two Zelenskys. There’s no in-between. He’s either a Guardian editorial made dashing flesh or the willing jester of Davos Man. Take your pick. – Brendan O’Neill
There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-lounge Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelensky is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with. – Brendan O’Neill
My mum and dad have always taught us to have goals, and I realised quite early on that it didn’t matter what car you drive or what material things you have if you don’t have a safe, warm house to put them. – Steph George
Democratic accountability is why we now have elected Government, not Kings. – David Farrar
I pray that somewhere in the departments that waste so much of our money, someone, somewhere, has the spine to stand up and tell the rest of the plonkers that what they are doing doesn’t work. – Mike Hosking
Reminding people about speed and seatbelts and driving drunk is only applicable to the sort of idiot who isn’t susceptible to being told what to do.
Those who are, are already doing it. I am sure deep within the ad agencies they genuinely believe their latest piece of creative genius is the one to crack the code.
And to be honest, if the Government were writing the sort of cheques they are, what fool turns that down?
Which is why we need leadership. Someone at the highest level needs to break the ideology that spending other people’s money for the sake of it makes some sort of difference, when it can be shown it doesn’t. – Mike Hosking
If you rounded up the hundreds of millions, if not billions, that has been spent these past five years on nonsense, we wouldn’t be talking about a tax for the clean-up.
We are only short of money because we wasted it. – Mike Hosking
The puzzle of how we become what we are is insoluble. When I was young and callow and a hard-line determinist, I would simply say that we become what we are by the influence of heredity and environment, for what else could there be? Heredity and environment, and that was that. – Theodore Dalrymple
Is it true that we act as we do because of how we are? This seems to me either false, or unfalsifiable. To take the latter possibility first, we estimate the rather loose idea of ‘who we are’ by the way we behave, the preferences we have, the habits we develop, and so forth. But then we go on to say that what is to be explained is the explanation of itself. We behave as we do because of how we are, and we know how we are because of how we behave. I have seen this argued in court by psychiatrists trying to exculpate a murderer and once (but only once) saw it work. Poor lambs, the murderers could not help what they did because they had the type of character that inclined them to go round murdering people. – Theodore Dalrymple
In short, saying that we do what we do because of how we are is either true by definition or it is false. If the former, it is unilluminating, and if the latter—well, it is just false.
Then we come to the question of whether we cannot help how we are which, roughly speaking, is our character. Can one decide to have a character other than the one that one has?
It is a matter of common agreement that habit becomes character. For example, I used to have a very bad temper, but realising that it was a bad thing to have, I made a conscious effort to control it, and before long there was nothing, or at least much less, to control. – Theodore Dalrymple
I do not believe that anyone could live as if this were true, at least with regard to himself. Amongst other things, it would make consciousness redundant. Why have we developed powers of thought, which include those of considering alternatives and choosing between them, if those powers serve no purpose, by which I mean did not cause us to behave differently from how we would have done without it? We would all be what Descartes thought the lesser animals were, namely automata. We would have to believe that our own conscious thoughts were but epiphenomena and made no difference to anything, and I do not believe that anyone is capable of sincerely believing this. Not, of course, that by itself this would necessarily make it false: it is perfectly possible that, because of our very biological nature, we are incapable of believing something that is true. – Theodore Dalrymple
I do not have a full understanding of how people become themselves, or of how I became what I am myself. It is a mystery that passes my understanding, and I suspect (and hope) that it is a mystery that will always escape human beings: for if it ceased to be a mystery, it would cease only for some and not for others, and those for whom it ceased to be a mystery would almost certainly abuse their superior understanding to harm, exploit, or abuse the rest. Those who understood would be in the position of extra-terrestrials who landed on earth and, observing humans as entomologists observe ants, would be able to regard them as mere animated objects (not, as it happens, that we are very good at controlling ants, and if ever there is a final struggle between man and insect, it will be the insect that wins). But however much the extra-terrestrials thought they understood us, I do not think they would be able to understand themselves. They in turn would need beings who were alien to them to understand them fully; and those aliens in turn would not understand themselves. – Theodore Dalrymple
But if we abandon the idea that crazy and ignorant people also need to be represented in Parliament and start setting entry tests on this stuff, well, I have a few proposals.
First up, any MP that can’t pass intermediate micro isn’t qualified. Give a basic tax incidence question, see if they follow the consensus of economists. If they don’t, kick them out. Same if they think rent control is a good idea – there’s a very clear expert consensus on this one.
Next, rules on genetic modification. Clear scientific consensus that GM crops are safe. The rules against them do a lot of harm. We’d kick out most of the Green Party on this one, if any were left after the rent control question. And that could be fine. They’d be replaced by pro-science greens. Don’t you like science? It would be better, right?
How about any MP who thinks that stadium and film subsidies provide net benefits? Both are in clear violation of the scientific consensus. We can retrospectively kick John Key out of Parliament. He loved stadium subsidies.
Kick out of Parliament, and out of the bureaus, anyone who demonstrates through their policy advocacy that they really really do not understand how an ETS with a binding cap works. – Eric Crampton,
There’s a strange, Year Zero quality to pronouncements like these. They are so freighted with ideological jargon that it can be almost impossible to work out what they actually mean in practical terms. But what they do reveal, vividly, is that council bureaucracies have become highly politicised and detached from the pressing everyday concerns of ratepayers. – Karl du Fresne
https://twitter.com/NasimiShabnam/status/1630899966766903298
One of the justifications of great wealth and the inequality necessary for it to be possessed is that it can be used to adorn the world, to the benefit of everyone including future generations. This is something to which people at a more basic economic level cannot easily aspire.
The question, then, is: Why is it that in our age, everywhere in the world, the very rich are incapable of adorning the world, unless it be by preservation of the monuments of the past? The artists and architects who serve them cannot do it either. If beauty is one of the proper goals of life (the others being truth and goodness), humanity has lost its way—at least in this respect. – Theodore Dalrymple
So they promised 15% and delivered 1.5%.
If there was a gold medal for under-achievement, this Govt would win it. They don’t miss their targets by 2% or 5% oe even 10% but by 90%. They’re currently sitting at 1.6% of their Kiwibuild target! – David Farrar
New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.
The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethnonationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt. – Chris Trotter
Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being “the social laboratory of the world” has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.
Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.
Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.
The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun. – Chris Trotter
Surely the large swathes of the media in these past five years are living proof that you can pretend to be neutral until the excitement over a late arrival from Mt Albert sees you swooning just a little bit embarrassingly.
So, instead of a job for life, what about the best person for the job for a public service appointment?
And as the job changes, as it always does with Governments, the same way it does as one chief executive leaves and a new one arrives, you appoint the people most aligned with the thinking, and therefore the greater desire to get it done.
‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes Prime Minister’ had the reality of the public service worked out – and that was 40 years ago. – Mike Hosking
When Kelvin Davis addressed a conference of indigenous Australians yesterday it is doubtful whether the Minister for Maori Crown Relations intended to damage the credibility of his government’s Maori policies, but that’s what he did. If the New Zealand Herald is to be believed, first, he used an incorrect translation of the Treaty of Waitangi instead of the Sir Hugh Kawharu translation that the previous Labour government celebrated at the 150th anniversary of its signing in 1990. Davis claimed that Article Three of the Treaty guaranteed Maori “the same rights and privileges of British subjects”. In fact, Article Three guarantees Maori “the same rights and duties of citizenship”. Small difference in wording, I agree, but the mention of “duties” is significant when it comes to Maori rights. These days all too many Maori spokespeople prefer to interpret the Treaty as promising Maori an armchair ride to prosperity rather than something they have to work for, like other New Zealanders. – Michael Bassett
Davis is telling Maori that they can continue to produce babies outside stable family environments; have disproportionally high numbers of fetal-alcohol syndrome babies; fail to vaccinate them; make less use of free medical services for children; smoke more than Pakeha; have high “Did Not Show” statistics for specialist appointments at public hospitals; continue to tolerate a world where more than 50% of Maori children truant from school each day; and be over-represented amongst the ram-raiders and the Hawke’s Bay burglars; and still get ahead. Despite evidence of manifold failures to avail themselves of the opportunities available to them, Davis’ government will “focus on equity of outcomes, not just equality”. I suspect that Ngata, Buck and Pomare would swiftly tell him he was on a hiding to nowhere, and that Maori leaders like him who fail to stress the need for effort and hard work are guilty of gross dereliction of duty. And they’d be right. Kelvin Davis is deliberately misleading his people. In fact, life wasn’t meant to be easy; everyone needs to put in effort.
Where has Davis got the notion from that it is possible to guarantee any people “equity of outcomes” no matter what choices they personally make in life? No other country has such a policy for the very basic reason that it just can’t work. – Michael Bassett
Sadly, Davis is one of the blunter knives in this government’s drawer. By continuing to recite that unattainable mantra he also calls into question his ministry’s preoccupation with promoting co-governance. How can our country recover the ground lost in the pandemic and in the storms if significant numbers of the decision-makers’ only qualification to be in charge is their ethnic make-up? We know of course that many Maori have made an effort and have succeeded in life. Good. That means they can qualify for roles in governance on the grounds of their ability, not their ethnicity. Then in governing roles they are just as accountable to the wider public as non-Maori. Just what Article Three of the Treaty envisaged. – Michael Bassett
A stronger relationship between local and central government, as well as officials more willing to listen to outsiders, is needed if New Zealand is to live up to its claims of a “world-class” public sector, former public servants and politicians say. – Sam Sachdeva
The public sector has … a huge focus on planning, which is appropriate – it’s something we do need to do – but it all seems to fall to pieces when it comes to the delivery. – Anne Tolley
Those two are not even aligned so that when local government comes to do its 10-year plan, it knows what the three-year funding commitment from Waka Kotahi is – how on earth can you plan infrastructure? – Anne Tolley
There seems to be a lack of creative tension: people are so busy being polite to each other, they don’t argue much anymore, it seems, whereas the public service I remember was actually a pretty hard school. – Graham Scott
The conclusion we can draw from this is don’t look to the Courts to redress unfair laws – it’s just false hope and a waste of money.
This highlights a gaping problem with our democracy. The public has no legal protections against a Parliamentary majority that abuses the rights of others.
Thank you, Justice Mellon, for reminding us of that alarming reality and exposing the need for laws to protect the sovereignty of the individual against 61 members of Parliament. – Frank Newman
What Christopher Luxon got right in his state of the nation speech was severalfold.
You have to accept that Governments lose elections and the current Government will lose this election in October because of some of the stuff Luxon outlined yesterday.
It is hopeless at delivering stuff and the stuff it did deliver very few wanted, or even asked for.
It’s easy pickings for an opposition to outline a litany of failure and it will serve them well if they keep reminding voters just how bad it has gotten —from the MIQ debacle to the vaccine roll out, to the Kiwibuild shambles, to the light rail waste to the cycle bridge— and Luxon spent a decent amount of time on wastage, of which there is mountains. – Mike Hosking
But the bits that will really resonate is the message of hope and aspiration.
This country, not so long ago, was winning. It had a rock star economy and a spring in its step and was a can-do country.
In five and a half years it’s been trashed. Those who want better have been side-lined for those who don’t care or can’t be bothered.
It’s a very good example of how hard it is to do well but how easy it is to give up and let it all slip.
This is a country riddled with malaise, there has been an avalanche of working groups and committees that have twiddled and tinkered and thought-bubbled – and come up with next to nothing. –
In some respects the pressure is on National. Not only is the victory there for the taking, it’s just how large the thrashing is going to be.
But the trick is to keep reminding us what a mess it is and keep telling us how much better it used to be – and will be again. – Mike Hosking
The economic stimulus during Covid from extra government spending and monetary policy was even greater as a proportion of the economy than elsewhere. The restrictions on the border were more disruptive to the labour market than in other countries, and the desire to crank nominal wages for political reasons more intense.
Since this Government came into office, the minimum wage has risen by a vast 44 per cent.
Ministers also hiked the effective minimum wage for migrants much higher, and both flowed through to increased labour costs. We were in a pro-inflationary environment long before the rest of the world.- Steven Joyce
Government spending these days is more than 40per cent of economic activity. Restraining it would help reduce inflationary pressure on the economy. Restrain it enough and it would be possible to provide some tax relief to struggling families as well.
But restraint is the key. If the Government just borrows more to increase public spending or to give handouts to families, that will push inflation up further.
The good new is that there is huge capacity to cut public spending. Government expenditure has increased by an unbelievable 65 per cent since 2017. Some of it was for the pandemic, but that should be winding out by now. Blind Freddie can see we have a bloated public sector which has gorged itself on free money.
People have made much this week of consultancy spending, but however big that is, it’s small beer. The real problem is a general looseness with the public purse, and the hare-brained schemes ministers have been spending all the money on. There has been virtually no fiscal discipline for five years. Every brain fart of an idea has been funded. – Steven Joyce
You can be sure what we see is the tip of the iceberg. As one who’s been there, I can confidently predict billions and billions will be able to be wrung out of the current Government’s spending and nobody outside the Wellington vortex would notice.
There could easily be enough money to both restrain government spending overall to help control inflation, and give the long-suffering taxpayer a much-needed downpayment on tax reduction. As a result of tax increases and bracket creep, New Zealanders are collectively paying more than $40b more tax this year than they did six years ago. No wonder they are feeling the pain.
The Government’s problem is that their mismanagement of core public services like health and education means that, if anything, the public and people working in those sectors will be wanting to spend even more money there. – Steven Joyce
To meet the reasonable aspirations of New Zealanders, this year’s Budget will need to be crafted with the sort of surgical discipline that we haven’t yet seen from this Finance Minister. He will need to spend money in the right places, slaughter great herds of sacred cows, and provide something to alleviate cost-of-living pressures, all without increasing borrowing. He will also need to demand accountability from the public sector for performance.
If he took a zero-based look at the gargantuan increases in spending on his watch, then with a lot of hard work all that should mostly be possible. If he doesn’t, then I think we are in for a bumpy ride.
High inflation, high tax, squeezed family budgets, teacher strikes, people turned away from emergency departments and highly visible wasteful spending, could all add up to a looming winter of discontent. – Steven Joyce
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
The culture wars are often viewed as an exclusively American phenomenon, but the reality is that they are becoming increasingly prominent in countries around the world, including New Zealand. Some may believe that they are immune to their influence, but the truth is that these battles have already entered New Zealand politics and are being enthusiastically fought by the Labour government and the political left. Instinctively, right-leaning parties in New Zealand have shied away from culture war issues, preferring instead to focus on their traditional core policies. But whether we like it or not, the game is afoot, and we are all players.
So, what exactly are the culture wars? In essence, they are political conflicts that revolve around social and cultural issues, such as gender, race, sexuality, religion, and identity. – Thomas Cranmer
In recent years, the country has seen heated debates over topics such as transgender rights, hate speech laws, and the role of colonialism in shaping New Zealand’s history. These debates have been driven largely by the Labour government and the political left, who have taken a strong stance on issues of social justice and equity. While some may view these positions as admirable, many see them as a threat to traditional values and free speech. – Thomas Cranmer
These debates have, however, left those on the political right feeling excluded and marginalised. The National Party and the Act Party have been vocal in their opposition to the government’s policies, but they have struggled to gain traction in the face of a media and political establishment that is largely aligned with the left. This has led to accusations that the government and its supporters are trying to silence dissent and impose a narrow set of values on the country.
However, it is important to note that culture wars are not inherently bad. They can provide an opportunity for different groups to engage in meaningful dialogue and debate over important issues. They can also bring attention to marginalised communities and push for greater social justice and equity.
The problem arises when culture wars become polarised and divisive, with each side demonising the other and refusing to engage in productive dialogue. This is where New Zealand currently finds itself. The government and the political left have taken a strong stance on issues of social justice, but they have also been accused of being intolerant of dissent and imposing their views on the rest of the country. Meanwhile, those on the political right have been left feeling excluded and silenced, unable to engage in meaningful dialogue or shape the direction of the country. – Thomas Cranmer
While they may dominate the headlines and social media feeds, there are many other important issues facing our country, from health, education and economic matters to criminal justice. We need to ensure that we are not so consumed by culture wars that we lose sight of these other important issues.
In conclusion, the culture wars have already entered New Zealand politics, and if international experience is anything to go by, they will only broaden and intensify. New Zealand has a proud history of progressive reforms going back to the suffragette movement but this shouldn’t be a reason not to engage in good faith debate about the concerns surrounding the current culture wars. Indeed these issues are so pervasive – going to family, religion and identity – that it will not be possible to avoid their reach forever. For conservatives, that means taking a first principles approach to the debate and objectively challenging progressive alternatives to the status quo. To paraphrase Trotsky, “you may not be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are interested in you”. – Thomas Cranmer
I’m reluctant to condemn people too harshly for doing whatever they have to do to save their jobs. They may have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay. I’m always conscious that as an independent blogger with a guaranteed income from national super, I’m in the very privileged position of not having to answer to a cowardly employer.
Nonetheless, it has to be said that if everyone cravenly backed down as Panapa and Davis did, freedom of speech would be even more imperilled than it is already. If you say something, you should be prepared to stand up for it.
As it is, the enemies of free speech have triumphed once again – game, set and match. The message is clear to anyone brave or reckless enough to speak their mind. – Karl du Fresne
No, public wrath should be directed squarely at MediaWorks and the totalitarian zealots who have succeeded, despite representing only a tiny, demented fragment of the population, in so intimidating the corporate world that broadcasters are punished not even for expressing controversial opinions (although that should be their right), but for affirming incontrovertible biological facts, such as that only women can get pregnant.
As recently as a few years ago, this entire scenario would have read like something from a futuristic, dystopian satire. Now it’s happening. The irony is that 99-point-something percent of TodayFM’s dwindling audience would have regarded the statements by Panapa and Davis as not only harmless but unremarkable.
MediaWorks doesn’t deserve the privilege of operating in a free and open society. It enjoys the rights and benefits of freedom while at the same time insidiously subverting them. – Karl du Fresne
Perhaps the best possible outcome is that MediaWorks will continue on its present course and in the process, commit slow-motion hara-kiri. No one will miss it. – Karl du Fresne
Remarkably, having considered the breaking of protocol alongside the rebuke from the Attorney-General and the breach of the Cabinet manual in calling up the Police Commissioner, Hipkins had decided Nash deserved no further punishment at all.
While Hipkins might think being dropped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings is an embarrassment and stain on Nash’s reputation, it means absolutely nothing to the public.
If, after two more serious errors of judgment are revealed, you still have a seat at the Cabinet table, then whether you’re ranked 11th or 20th doesn’t matter. – Jo Moir
It was already questionable judgment from Hipkins when Nash held onto his forestry, economic development and oceans and fisheries portfolios after the first strike on Wednesday given how much he’d doubled down on having not done anything wrong when first approached about his chat with the commissioner.
Some gave the Prime Minister credit for dealing with it in just a couple of hours and making it clear to Nash there were no more ‘get-out-of-jail-free-cards’.
Forty-eight hours later and Nash looks to have a whole deck of them. – Jo Moir
To see how destructive identity politics can be, how toxic and divisive, look no further than San Francisco’s crazy reparations idea. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to the city’s black residents for the historic crimes of slavery and racism. The panel decreed that, yes, they should be. Every eligible black citizen of San Francisco should get $5million each, it said. They should also get $97,000 a year for the rest of their lives and be able to buy homes in the city for $1. Incredibly, the Board of Supervisors is seriously considering the recommendations rather than hurling them into the trashcan of crackpot ideas that deserve not a split second’s contemplation, which is where they should be. – Brendan O’Neill
The racial divisiveness of what San Francisco is seriously considering cannot be overstated. Splitting the city into victim races who deserve millions of dollars in love and care and culpable races who will have to stump up the cash for this mad plan is one of the most poisonous proposals I’ve heard in a long time. The far right can only dream of so expertly fracturing a city along racial lines. San Francisco’s reparations idea exposes the rotten hyper-racialist heart of woke politics. This fatalist ideology condemns whites to permanent culpability and blacks to permanent pain. It impresses the sins of the father on white folk and the agony of the ancestor on black people, condemning all to live in a forever purgatory of historically determined angst. What a dispiriting and anti-democratic way of life they aspire to impose on us.
That is the worst part of the slavery-reparations idea – its historical determinism. The idea that modern-day blacks are shaped and haunted by the crimes of yesteryear is deeply demeaning. – Brendan O’Neill
Such thinking presents black people as marionettes pulled this way and that by dead events over which they have no control. Their self-esteem, their opportunities (or lack thereof) – all are apparently moulded by the terrifying force of history. This is ahistorical, apolitical and patronising. It disavows the agency of living black communities. In the words of columnist Gregory Kane, the ‘Victimhood Sweepstakes’ of the reparations ideology actually ‘reinforces’ despondency in African-American circles, rather than challenging it.
Reparations are a con. Paying them might provide a moral thrill to wealthy whites, for whom they will become a kind of modern-day Indulgence, a payment of cash to absolve oneself of the moral stain of whiteness. But such narcissistic privilege-checking would come at the cost of social harmony. And claiming reparations might seem like a good idea to some African Americans, who would get to live more comfortably as a result of modern America’s depressing obsession with historic wrongs. But the financial perk of reparations would be completely outweighed by their sinister compromising of individual agency, of autonomy, of the idea that all of us, whatever our background, are responsible for our lives and our destinies. – Brendan O’Neill
No matter how good an idea, it takes time for the entire country to hear about it.
But that time has now come for localism. – Oliver Hartwich
New Zealanders do not want Wellington to run their lives, and they do not want to be governed by distant bureaucrats.
Instead, New Zealanders have expressed overwhelming support for localism. They want their communities to have a greater say in local development and reward them for their hard work in making their communities grow.
Localism has become a mainstream idea. That is encouraging, and we may expect political parties to incorporate localist policies into their election manifestos for this year’s election.
After a decade of promoting the idea, we at The New Zealand Initiative are proud to have moved the debate on localism forward.
It is a great idea whose time has come. – Oliver Hartwich
The Disinformation Project’s director, Kate Hannah, of Victoria University of Wellington, identifies “Māori, Pasifika diaspora communities, the Muslim community, Chinese diaspora communities, refugee and migrant communities, LGBTQIA+ communities — in particular, trans communities — and peoples living with the experience of disabilities” as victims.
This is important work, which could be expanded to consider disinformation targeted at the community as a whole, including press statements like Wood and Shaw’s and relentless scaremongering from environmental organisations including Greenpeace.
Two issues stand out over recent decades: the relentlessly false political narratives from the far-left about nuclear power and gene science. This disinformation has had monumental implications for New Zealand — far beyond the disruption, violence and idiocy of the Wellington occupiers — and has adversely affected New Zealand’s climate-change mitigation efforts, defence arrangements, productivity and natural environment, including polluted rivers and lakes.
Decades of scaremongering by the political left led to New Zealanders’ inaccurate attitude to nuclear power, which caused us to betray our allies on the cusp of the Cold War being won, and which has compromised our ability to defend New Zealand’s territorial integrity and offshore interests ever since.- Matthew Hootton
Disinformation on both nuclear power and biotechnology was not motivated by science, but by far-left activists’ opposition to the western defence network, capitalism and farming.
For decades, their nonsense was reported, usually unchallenged, even by the state broadcasters, RNZ and TVNZ. – Matthew Hootton
At the same time, New Zealand needs a serious discussion this election year about how to use gene science to reduce agricultural emissions and how to defend our territorial land and sea, and our wider interests, from totalitarian and belligerent states who are averse to our values.
To prevent that, extreme-left activists will seek to subvert any serious discussion with disinformation and false narratives, just as they did in previous decades. We would also be well served if the likes of Wood and Shaw were challenged for making implausible claims about the environmental impacts of their policies, which even their own Prime Minister has now called out.
In recent weeks, the Government has also released health statistics and crime briefings that have turned out to be misinformation, yet DPMC and the Disinformation Project have been curiously silent.
If they are genuinely committed to fighting disinformation that harms New Zealand’s interests, they may need to widen their scope. – Matthew Hootton
Controversy over many subjects remains vigorous among doctors, and in my own career, going back several decades, I have seen medical consensus on many things change. Differences of opinion are always possible, and while they may sometimes be attributable to personal antagonisms, vanity, pride, financial interest, and so forth, often they aren’t. People can disagree without any of them being ill-intentioned. – Theodore Dalrymple
What most alarmed me about the paper in AMA Ethics was that there was expressed in it no attachment to freedom of opinion as a good or desirable thing in itself, independent of its effects: in other words, that freedom is an end in itself, an extremely important value. Even if the CDC, the WHO, or the majority of expert medical opinion were invariably right, it would not be a reason for suppressing dissent by resort “to robust use of [licensing authorities’] powers to take appropriate disciplinary action” by, for example, depriving dissidents of their livelihood. The Soviet Union, it sometimes seems, won the Cold War. – Theodore Dalrymple
Tackling inflation requires a central bank to deliberately cause economic harm and this is not something that any central bank in a democratic state has the appetite to do.
The war with inflation is over. Inflation has won. – Damien Grant
One Minister proved himself to be a rooster this week and the Prime Minister turned out to be a chicken.
Stuart Nash may not be the rooster crowing quite so loudly, but he should be a feather duster. His continuous breaching of the Cabinet manual shows a lack of respect for the office he holds and he should have been sacked from Cabinet and stripped of all portfolios. – Paula Bennett
It is very clear what is acceptable and not when you become a Minister. This is not. If, like Nash, a Minister doesn’t read the Cabinet Manual, he still would know as you get a visit when you first become a Minister by very serious officials, most with a legal background, who talk you through it all.
We are now up to breach number four, that we know of. At this point the rooster should be plucked. No good for eating, he becomes a feather duster. But the Prime Minister has proved himself to be a chicken. By not removing him immediately from Cabinet he is sending a message that this behaviour is acceptable. In a position as privileged and powerful as a Cabinet Minister, it is not. Perhaps the Prime Minister needs to be the top rooster and crow from the rooftops about acceptable standards, but instead he just keeps his head down and pecks away. – Paula Bennett
As an antidote to the morning news. I wanted to be in the company of those who care enough about the common welfare to make a difference.
I wanted to be with those who don’t get mired in the hopelessness of “Ain’t it awful!” but get up and do something about the welfare of their corner of the world.
That’s as much a reality as the news of the disasters of the day.
They represent the truth that there is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t mind who gets the credit.
They know that if all you think of is what you want and need, there is never enough.
They know that if you also think of what other people need, there is always enough.
There are more things to admire in people than there are to despise.
I’m not an optimist – not a pessimist – I’m a realist.
There is more good going on in the world than bad – or else we could not have survived and prevailed this long.
Altruism is alive and well and at work.
That’s also the news of the day.
Don’t miss it. – Robert Fulghum
A particularly significant problem is that the concept of mauri, meaning life force, was inserted directly into the basic chemistry curriculum. Please google the phrase “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri” — this is the language that NCEA used in their pilot Chemistry standards in 2022.
Unfortunately, the concept of ‘life force’ is a well-known pseudoscience, known as vitalism. Vitalism was experimentally debunked by chemists in the 1800s. Having a government agency force it back into the chemistry curriculum by political fiat — while steamrolling the vehement and informed objections of science teachers — is a huge problem. Vitalism is a pseudoscientific error on the same level as asserting that the Earth is flat, or that the world is only 6,000 years old. If vitalism is right, then all of chemistry and biochemistry is wrong. – Nick Matzke
Clearly, all is not well at the Ministry of Education, if such radical shifts in claims about basic chemistry (which has been established for 100+ years, and is the same in all countries) are occurring.
And, despite the change, the “mauri is present in all matter” pseudoscience is still on the NCEA Chemistry/Biology website in numerous places, right now! – Nick Matzke
So, once again, in a Matt Hancock-type revelation we learn that during the Covid years the Government considered handing us all $5,000.
$5,000 for everyone. It’s like Oprah: “you get a car, you get a car, you get $5000”. – Mike Hosking
They thought the way to stave off a recession was to close the borders, and in doing so, strangle the economy but flood it with cash. Cash they never had anyway.
Another part of the plan was to do it Prezzy card style. The only thing that stopped them was they couldn’t get the plastic in from China quick enough. Think about that.
New Zealand, the eco-warriors in the middle of our nuclear moment, changing the world for the better through well thought-out climate policy, wanted to import tonnes of good old Chinese plastic to toss money we didn’t have at a country closed down. – Mike Hosking
All this came about because despite what the Reserve Bank was doing, printing money to the tune of $100 billion and handing it to banks to throw at us anyway they wanted, the fear was that wouldn’t be enough.
Once again, given the state of the economy we sit in this morning, can you imagine how much worse it would be today if these idiots had actually gone ahead with it?
What was needed, and this is perhaps the most important lesson out of Covid and general crisis management, was experience and expertise and, above all, great leadership. And they didn’t have it.
We have amateurs from unions and university and people who had barely any experience of Government. – Mike Hosking
The danger of buffoons running the place cannot be overstated.
We were a bad idea away from catastrophe – and the other bad ideas landed us in the current mess.
I suppose the ironic good news is it could have been worse.
But what a gobsmackingly horrifying thought that is. – Mike Hosking
Here’s a radical suggestion. Anti-Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s used the slogan “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came”. The same idea could be applied to speaking tours by people the woke Left dislike. They could just ignore them. But of course that would deny the woke Left a chance to parade their outrage in the front of the TV cameras. Publicity opportunities like that are just too good to pass up, especially when sympathetic media are always keen to frame the confrontations as a fight against the dark forces of the far Right.
From a broader perspective, the denial of a visa or speaking venues to Keen-Minshull would again signal to the enemies of free speech, as with Southern and Molyneux, that they can shut down people they don’t like simply by threatening disruption. What could be simpler than to orchestrate a confrontation with the other side and then blame them for any unpleasantness that eventuates? In the meantime, freedom of speech has taken another hit – which of course is the objective. – Karl du Fresne
Now, one more radical idea. LGBTQIA+ activists bombard us constantly via the media with their breast-beating laments about how oppressed they are. They are endlessly inventive in creating new definitions of sexuality or minority status – QTBIPOC, MVPFAFF, BBIPOC – that no one previously knew existed. I have even read one activist complain – seriously – that there are not enough terms to capture all the variants of sexuality that queer people might identify with.
A tiny but very vocal minority have succeeded in capturing the institutions of power with their bullying diversity agenda. They have done this so effectively that they have co-opted mainstream society whether we want it or not.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think most New Zealanders give a toss about how their fellow citizens identify sexually. They rightly regard it as none of their business. – Karl du Fresne
This, apparently, is not good enough for the activists. It’s not sufficient that the rest of us consider it their right to adopt whatever identity and lifestyle they choose and just get on with it – preferably quietly, as sexual minorities did in the past. They insist on being noticed.
Call it exhibitionism, attention-seeking, whatever. “Look at me – I’m different.” Ultimately, that’s what a lot of the activism over sexual identity seems to be about. – Karl du Fresne
Culture is important; we would all agree I’m sure. I’m sure we’re all very proud of our own culture, whatever it is.
But surely a child’s safety and wellbeing is more important. I think we’re doing things wrong.
I’m very sad about this news. If this is what Section 7AA does to little kids, then putting it in there was a mistake and it needs to be removed from the law. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Too much of today’s debate is about worthy and, ultimately, pointless exercises – far reaching never-never sort of discussions that, in theory, are interesting or important or transformational but will, in reality, go nowhere.
The current Government bailing on the clunker car scheme is your classic example. When it was launched it was saving the planet and the importance could not be more profound.
By the time it was dumped last week it was too complicated to put in place and really wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway.
Political discourse, locally and nationally, is filled with this sort of time-wasting nonsense. – Mike Hosking
This once-proud country seems to be at a crossroads of sorts.
With a Government majoring in minor things, we are starting to notice that the major things aren’t working anymore.
Just like the repair jobs on the roads, at the centre of our problems is a failure to maintain proper standards. When standards slip, expectations gradually diminish in parallel. We expect less of our schools, our health services and our public officials than we did previously. As expectations fall, so does service delivery. As a result, the services delivered by those organisations enter a period of continuous decline. It’s called a downward spiral. – Bruce Cotterill
These failures will see more people than ever relying on government to support their existence. Increased reliance on government services and government funds is a logical outcome of poor education, declining health services and increasing crime. And of course, as standards slip, so too does the performance of those government services that more and more people end up relying on. It’s downward spiral to nowhere.
Those of us who care to observe what is going on can foresee a collapse of monumental proportions. A decline in standards across basic functions that can, if not arrested, result in the failure of the State.
Meanwhile, the cost of running this little country has ballooned by one billion dollars a week. To make matters worse, we’re borrowing every cent. But what are we getting for it?
You can tell a lot about a country from the state of its roads. – Bruce Cotterill
Going by what little I know about him, Invercargill mayor Nobby Clark doesn’t strike me as a man likely to back down in a fight.
And neither should he. Meng Foon’s call on him to apologise for using the n-word should be brushed aside as the grandstanding it is. The Race Relations Commissioner should pull his head in.
It would be different if Clark had casually used the word in circumstances indicating he approved of it, but the reverse is true. He says he finds it abhorrent, would never use to refer to anyone and is offended when he hears it used in rap music.
His purpose in using it was to ask how far artistic licence should be allowed to go in tolerating words that cause offence. He cited other examples including the phrase “f*** you, Bitch”, which the poet Tusiata Avia uses in a poem that appears to relish the idea of exacting revenge on the descendants of white colonisers such as James Cook. – Karl du Fresne
The striking thing here is that it’s not Avia’s provocative and mostly incomprehensible poem that attracted the mainstream media’s attention, despite its references to shoving a knife between Captain Cook’s white ribs (aren’t everyone’s ribs white?) and a car full of brown girls driving around looking for his descendants, with the suggestion that a pig-hunting knife might be used. On the contrary, Stuff’s Sunday magazine carried a long article by Michelle Duff purring with approval. – Karl du Fresne
Fortunately, it’s true as a general rule that the further you get from the epicentre of the culture wars in Wellington, the more impervious people become to the posturing of people like Meng Foon. – Karl du Fresne
In any case, Clark is not answerable to Meng Foon; he’s answerable to the laws of New Zealand (none of which he has broken) and to the people of Invercargill. If they don’t like the things he says, they can vote him out at the next election.
Sadly the same can’t be said of Meng Foon, safe in his highly paid (and unelected) sinecure. – Karl du Fresne
In its increasingly frenetic rush to distance itself from the least popular aspects of the Ardern government, the Hipkins administration is becoming more and more erratic and inconsistent.
The initial policy reset was reasonable, but the government’s actions subsequently have become abrupt and unpredictable. It is increasingly difficult to discern a clear sense of direction, and hard to escape the conclusion that electoral panic has become the government’s main driver. – Peter Dunne
The greater risk emerging from the government’s quixotic approach is that good people will become less inclined to accept appointments to government boards, because of the uncertainties created by its handling of these recent events. The talent pool of people competent and experienced enough to fill these roles is already a limited one, with the same names cropping up time and time again, mainly because of the small size of our country.
In the overall interests of sound governance, we cannot afford to lose the services of good people because of this uncertainty. Nor can we tolerate a government that treats previously accepted rules and standards of behaviour as its personal plaything, to be acknowledged, applied, or abandoned, only as and when it sees fit, but always to its political advantage. – Peter Dunne
What is characterised as hate speech is more often simply speech that upsets or offends someone. But there’s no human right not to be upset, or to be protected from having your values and beliefs questioned and criticised. So I think it would be helpful to get rid of that loaded term “hate speech” because it’s a misnomer. – Karl du Fresne
Free speech is important to the traditional Left because they know better than anyone what it means to suffer under authoritarian regimes that put you in jail for saying what you think.
You’ll note that I refer to the “traditional” Left. That’s because the opposition to free speech mainly comes from what you might call the new woke Left. I know a lot of people hate that term “woke”, but until someone comes up with a better word, it will have to do.
As a general rule the woke Left are younger and have come through the university system. They have a very limited understanding of history and apparently think they have a human right not to be exposed to opinions they dislike or which challenge their world view. Unfortunately they seem to be encouraged in this belief by their university lecturers. – Karl du Fresne
Universities used to be regarded as bulwarks of free thought and freedom of expression. That’s no longer the case. Universities throughout the western world – even august institutions such as Oxford and Harvard – frequently bring down the shutters on speakers who are deemed provocative or even merely controversial. – Karl du Fresne
There is no DNA evidence for discrete human races among our species, Homo sapiens, even when one compares isolated populations. Variations in genetic expressions across the globe do not reflect race. For example, populations differentiated by selection for lactose tolerance track the spread of cattle domestication from Southwest Asia into North Africa and Europe. This co-evolution enabled high levels of milk consumption across multiple “white” and “non-white” groups.
So, where did a popular essentialised race idea come from? Many of my students are surprised to learn that this notion is of relatively recent origin. Essentialist race was forged by early modern Europeans to justify the colonisation of Indigenous populations and the enslavement of African peoples. – Professor Ian Barber
Official race definitions today, when used, generally disavow assumptions of inferiority and channel a fluid ethnic group identity where ancestry is optional among shared attributes.
But the legacy of problematic and ambiguous race continues. – Professor Ian Barber
Stats NZ uses ethnicity for group identification and “a measure of cultural affiliation”, distinguished from “race, ancestry, nationality, or citizenship”. Ethnicity as defined covers people with “one or more elements of common culture that need not be specified, but may include religion, customs, or language”. Religious communities with strong group identification from unifying origin myths in Judaism, Islam and even Catholicism and the Latter-day Saints conceivably might become ethnic. But ethnicity has been criticised for its vagueness and potential misuse.
It has become a popular synonym for “other” minority groups and their traditions globally. The majority observer gaze may be silently normalised behind the designation multi-ethnic, and in the casual racism of a concomitant question to people of colour especially, “but where are you really from?”. – Professor Ian Barber
Ditching ethnicity in the census to ask “who are your people?” might pick up immigrant and other sub-national affiliations more equally in this world of change and fluidity. It would also acknowledge those who wish to affiliate as a national people only: “New Zealanders”.
A whakapapa of self-identified peoples at multiple scales and from different world views would be created back to the introduction of British-settler Pākehā in Te Tiriti, alongside tangata/takata whenua and tchakat henu as original peoples of the land. That strikes me as a more authentic New Zealand census approach as it references the nation’s founding document to respect and encourage diversity in unity. – Professor Ian Barber
Our goal is to show our son that reputation, hard work and determination can create a life that he deserves or any child deserves. – Toria Cummings
The most depressing aspect is that the whole wretched affair appears to be rooted in a particularly cruel and destructive form of racism – only not the type of racism we normally hear about, because that’s supposed to flow the other way.
And we, the taxpayers, are involuntarily complicit in this process, because the government department pulling the strings in the case is acting on our behalf. It’s not a day to feel a proud New Zealander. – Karl du Fresne
How is it that such a minuscule part of our biology that shapes the variation of our physical selves has been used to organise such huge social, political and cultural realities? Realities that, while at times enriching our cultural lives, have caused so much suffering and pain in the world?
There is nothing wrong with the social and cultural constructs of race. The rot begins when you believe and tout your race as being superior to others and use it to justify the exploitation of others. – K (Guru) Gurunathan
I have no objection to the co-governance or joint management of environmental features, whether it be a lake, a mountain or a national park – as we have seen through many Treaty settlements. But applying co-governance to core public services is a bridge too far, in my view.
Labour has disingenuously tried to deny the precedent at play here, but their Three Waters co-governance arrangements takes the application of Treaty principles into a whole new orbit, undermining democracy’s one person, one vote principle. With a 50-50 split in the regional representative groups, the model accords Māori considerably greater representation than non-Māori as a percentage of the population. – Mike Yardley
You may recall New Zealand’s sixteen former Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs) being merged to form the mega-Polytech, Te Pūkenga.
But if you do, it is a false memory.
Repeat the following until you believe it:
Te Pūkenga has always been the only Polytech in Aotearoa.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, events inconvenient to the totalitarian government are thrown down a ‘memory hole’ in the Ministry of Truth. Once committed to the memory hole, it is if the offending event had never occurred.
Te Pūkenga Chief Executive Peter Winder has built a memory hole of his own. In a new ‘style guide’, his staff are told that they should not refer to the merger. “We always refer to ourselves as Te Pūkenga”, they are admonished. – Dr Michael Johnston
It is very important to use the right words. And the right words at Te Pūkenga, are those dictated by the style guide.
The importance of using the right words actually has little to do with what those words mean. In fact, the right words and the wrong ones often mean exactly the same thing.
Orwell understood that controlling what people say is the best way to control what they think. In part that is because human thought is largely expressed in words. It is also because compelling people to use particular words establishes an attitude of supine obedience.
Winder assures us that there have been no complaints about the style guide. Citizens of Soviet Russia didn’t complain to Stalin about queuing to buy bread, either.
The recent spate of linguistic cleansing at Te Pūkenga follows another incident of censorship at the institution. Last week, Te Pūkenga staff – sorry, work friends – were told not to publicly express political views, because they are public servants.
Some wrong-thinking academics from other institutions have claimed that this pronouncement violates academic freedom. Clearly, these troublemakers are not keeping up with the programme.
At Te Pūkenga, academic freedom is just another old-fashioned idea that’s been thrown down the memory hole. – Dr Michael Johnston
The landscape of lobbying and political donations in New Zealand is the wild west, with politicians unwilling to clean it up. Surely the problem is now so extreme that politicians need to be forced to set up a Royal Commission into Vested Interests in Politics. – Bryce Edwards
Metaphorically, “whakaihu” refers to the university’s place as the country’s oldest university, as well as its Māori students often being the first to graduate from their whānau and communities. And it symbolically includes everyone on the “waka”. –Dominic O’Sullivan
Universities are owned and principally funded by the Crown. But their obligation to independent scholarship means they can’t be part of the Crown in the same way as a government department. Universities don’t take direction from ministers in the same way, and their staff are not public servants. They are not part of the executive branch of government.
Together with their students and graduates, academics are the university – a community of scholars obliged to contribute to the discovery and sharing of knowledge, but not obliged to serve the government of the day. – Dominic O’Sullivan
Parliament and the executive (government ministers) together decide what te Tiriti means to the Crown side of the relationship. Public servants offer advice, but ultimately take ministers’ instructions on giving effect to whatever is the Crown’s Tiriti policy.
Academics, however, can take a different view. They’re not bound by what the Crown side of the agreement thinks. And, as developments in te Tiriti policy show, academic independence makes a difference. – Dominic O’Sullivan
If an institution represents one side of a partnership, that institution cannot be a “place for everyone”. A Māori student or staff member should be able to say, “I belong here as much as anybody else, with the same rights, opportunities and obligations to contribute to the institution’s culture, values and purpose.”
That includes the right to study and teach te Tiriti with an independence that is not available to public servants. – Dominic O’Sullivan
Thoroughness and objectivity – but not political caution – guide academic contributions to policy debate. Such contributions are different in style and purpose from the kind of policy-making that it is the duty of the public service to undertake.
Universities are not the Crown in the same sense, and this is why they are not Tiriti partners. – Dominic O’Sullivan
So I wonder, what genius decided that I and my fellow drivers needed to be escorted by a ute with flashing lights through routine (i.e. non-hazardous) road works that we were perfectly capable of navigating without assistance?
Incidentally, there was a man in a hi-vis vest sitting in the ute’s passenger seat. For what purpose, exactly? Perhaps he was there to ensure the driver didn’t take a wrong turn himself, or – far more likely, given the tedium of their duties – fall asleep.
In other words, two men doing two non-jobs – guiding other vehicles through road works that generations of New Zealand drivers have miraculously coped with in the past without risk to life and limb.
Here was one of the great cons of the 21st century, the cult of traffic management, carried to new levels of absurdity. Some inventive pooh-bah in Worksafe (sorry, Mahi Haumaru Aotearoa) had found yet another way to waste public money, needlessly inflate the cost of highway maintenance and pad out an already bloated and largely superfluous industry. – Karl du Fresne
Brown has shrewdly zeroed in on a 21st century phenomenon that causes millions of New Zealanders to burn with frustration and resentment. No one can drive anywhere and not be aware of the scale of the traffic management fetish.
It’s attested to by vast forests of road cones – frequently arranged in complex configurations that seem more likely to cause accidents than prevent them – and by patently absurd speed restrictions, often where no road works are in progress or have long since ceased. – Karl du Fresne
It’s astonishing to think that New Zealand’s highway network was built without any of this palaver. What changed to suddenly make it necessary? Did I miss a swathe of news stories about road workers being killed and maimed by careless motorists?
The emphasis on safety would be more tolerable if visible progress was being made on the projects that these elaborate precautions are supposed to facilitate, but the NZ Transport Agency has a woeful record for getting jobs done on time and within budget. – Karl du Fresne
The traffic management cult is itself an outgrowth of a longer-established cult, the cult of health and safety. Both proceed from the assumption that most New Zealanders are imbeciles who can’t be trusted to make sensible decisions for themselves and must therefore be protected by ever-proliferating rules and regulations, the economic costs of which are incalculable.
Both also reflect a mindset that has become embedded in the bureaucracy and largely goes unchallenged by the politicians who are nominally in charge. I’m referring to something called the precautionary principle, which holds that every theoretical risk – and I stress theoretical –must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards, often without regard for sensible cost vs. benefit assessments. – Karl du Fresne
The precautionary principle appeals to the bureaucratic psyche because it provides an excuse for every control freak’s dream: the perpetual expansion of an oppressive and intrusive state apparatus that’s constantly looking for new ways to exercise power over people’s daily lives. And for the most part we obligingly comply because we are essentially passive people, programmed to submit to authority. We may mutter with resentment and metaphorically shake our fists, but ultimately we fall into line. The bureaucrats know this, so are free to proceed with impunity. – Karl du Fresne
If we don’t watch out, we are going to end up in a situation, if we haven’t already, where we make the gap between getting the dole and getting paid for work become so small, that it again ends up being a smart move to just stay at home and collect free money rather than work for a living.
Right now, the Government is considering a change to Working for Families that will only exacerbate this problem. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
So it’ll be completely pointless if this Government now decides to give it to just anyone with kids. We’ll be right back at 2004 with people on the dole not wanting to work because they wouldn’t get that much more anyway.
This is already a significant and growing problem. Chris Hipkins already made this worse just over a week ago when he indexed benefits to inflation.
Which means as long as inflation stays at 7 percent, the dole will keep going up by 7 percent every year. Hands up, who else gets a 7 percent pay rise every single year? Nope. Just them.
We already have more than 300,000 people on a benefit. That’s 1 in 10 of every one of us working age Kiwis, that’s too many people.
And anything that makes that number grow should not even be considered, extending Working for Families to beneficiaries included. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Here is the simple truth. You cannot silence people because you disagree with them.
Yes, there will be protests. Yes, there will be rage and Lord knows who will turn up at these protests and attempt to platform off a high-profile situation. That is for the police to oversee. However, the right to protest is an act of a well-functioning democracy in the same way free speech is too. – Rachel Smalley
There are some contentious issues at stake here – transgender rights and women’s rights. In particular, there is a need for meaningful debate on the protection and safety of women in many areas of society. It will likely require regulation. It is inappropriate for members of the Government to be standing among protestors, opposing the Let Women Speak events. That is a clear and political statement from MPs that they don’t believe women should have a voice in this conversation. – Rachel Smalley
Let Women Speak want to discuss the implications of gender self-ID on women’s spaces. It is an entirely valid and necessary conversation. If you identify as a transgender woman, should you automatically be given access to all women’s spaces – prisons, women’s refugees, women’s sports, gyms, and aged-care facilities?
The Greens say yes. I say no – not until we have considered how to ensure all members of society feel safe. The Greens, incredulously, are insisting the needs of transgender women should be prioritised ahead of biological women. And somehow, in all of this, we have found ourselves in the extraordinary situation where men like Green MP Ricardo Menendez-March are telling women they cannot speak about concerns for their personal safety, or have a voice at this table. – Rachel Smalley
New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote. And today there are men trying to shut down the democratic right of women to speak.
The Greens are 100 percent right to stand in their truth and oppose the views of Posie Parker. But they are 100 percent wrong to try and block her travelling here because they disagree with her. They cannot control social discourse. They cannot deny women a voice. – Rachel Smalley
Let’s speak. Let’s talk. Let’s korero. Let’s find a way to support women and girls who say they feel concerned for their safety in some environments, and to enable transgender women to co-exist in a space where they also feel safe and validated too. There absolutely IS a conversation to be had.
You cannot silence people on the basis that you don’t agree with them. This is New Zealand – not Russia or Saudi Arabia. – Rachel Smalley
I have watched as brave women have raised their hand and questioned their safety, but what follows is awful – the abuse, the verbal violence, and the impact on their lives and careers has been severe. It is a viciousness that I have never seen before. It is wrong. It is entirely acceptable to raise these issues without fearing for your life, your career, your sanity and your livelihood.
I never thought, in my time, having spent years trying to elevate the voice of women, that we would see Labour and Green MPs advocating and politicking to silence the voices of women. Shame on you all.
I am not anti-trans and I am not pro-Posie Parker. But I will absolutely die in a ditch to protect Parker’s right to speak. I don’t ever want to see a time when the voice of women is silenced. Nor do I want to live in a New Zealand that bans people from these shores because their commentary is disagreeable or disruptive. That is not a democracy. It is a dictatorship. – Rachel Smalley
Once again, we are hearing the argument, most recently from the Rainbow Greens, that a speaker with controversial views should be blocked from visiting and speaking in public places in New Zealand.
The objection commonly invokes a heckler’s (or thug’s) veto, arguing that other people’s reactions to whatever the speaker may say pose a risk or threat to public order or health and safety, so allowing the person to speak is not in the public interest.
As in debates about hate speech and censorship generally, the argument blurs and confuses important distinctions between words and weapons, disagreement and hate, and offence and harm. – Dr David Bromell
In a free and open society, and in accordance with international human rights law, we have a right to protection from violence and from speech that intends or is imminently likely to incite violence and acts of hostility or discrimination.
But we do not have a right to protection from disagreement, criticism, satire, offence or hurtful comments. – Dr David Bromell
Words are not weapons. Words are what we use instead of weapons, to express disagreement and assert our claims as we negotiate how to live together despite our differences, under the rule of law and without recourse to violence.
If we equate words with weapons, we risk weapons being seen as no worse than words. – Dr David Bromell
In a diverse society where people want and value different things, I cannot reasonably expect other people to like, agree with, approve of, or affirm my ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values or way of life.
And just because someone criticises or disagrees with me does not necessarily mean they hate me. They just don’t agree with me.
I have lived long enough to change my mind about a great number of things. Criticism and disagreement have played an important role in the evolution of what I think, feel and value. – Dr David Bromell
None of us can learn and grow unless we entertain the possibility that we might after all be wrong. It is self-limiting and socially impoverishing to lead our lives only in an echo chamber of like minds.
Besides, even if people who disagree with me do happen to dislike me, I do not have a right to be liked. As Mahatma Gandhi once explained, the state cannot legislate affection. – Dr David Bromell
Sometimes the best we can hope for is mutual toleration of what we disagree with and dislike (or even hate) in one another. Toleration does not sound like much, but in the history of human conflict, toleration is a significant achievement and certainly preferable to violence.
We may not achieve the best of all possible worlds, but we can avoid the worst. – Dr David Bromell
But states cannot justifiably prohibit communication that is insulting or causes offence or hurt feelings if it does not intend and is not imminently likely to incite violence or acts of hostility or discrimination.
The distinction to maintain here is between objective aspects of a person’s human dignity and their decent treatment in society, and subjective feelings of hurt, shock, offence and anger.
Government intervention to restrict the right to freedom of opinion and expression can justifiably protect the former but not the latter. – Dr David Bromell
Attempts to silence speech to prevent offence are more likely to provoke and amplify offensiveness than eliminate it.
The cure for social divisions and polarisation is not shutting out or shouting down disagreement and debate, with a too-ready labelling of opponents (racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, fascist, Nazi, and so on).
Cancelling, censorship and name-calling do not build social inclusion and social cohesion. That requires something much harder–curiosity, the contestation of ideas in reasoned argument, respect for difference, humility, good humour and letting one another be. – Dr David Bromell
Because it’s one thing to roll out another new face to lead the police portfolio, it’s quite another to have police actually able to get tough and make some headway, other than just pulling offenders aside for a quiet chat, and then letting them go. – Kate Hawkesby
There has been a coup. If you did not realise that the Government that we now have is not the one anybody voted for it is understandable. We switch off politics during national disasters.
The new Prime Minister has received wall-to-wall coverage of him in gumboots reassuring flood victims. The TV pictures distracted us from understanding that we don’t just have a new Prime Minister; we have a new government.
The policy re-set has become a total U-turn. Policies that we were assured last year were “critical” are now not needed.
Chris Hipkins’ Government has a completely different mission. – Richard Prebble
Jacinda Ardern’s resignation – which seemed inexplicable – is now understandable. Her transformational government has changed into Hipkins’ transactional government. It is almost as if the last five years never happened.
We do not have a presidential system. We have government by Cabinet answerable to caucus.
The decision to stage this legal coup must be the result of months of secret debate within the Labour Party. No wonder Ardern did not want to lead the dismantling of her policies. – Richard Prebble
The Government has not just U-turned, it has repudiated the policies it claimed were essential. We were told policies were “critical” less than 12 months ago. Now we are told, “there are actually better ways of achieving emissions reductions”. – Richard Prebble
While Hipkins has no mandate for any of his changes, the government he has replaced never had a mandate for its policies. The country elected Jacinda Ardern, not Labour. The country voted for Ardern hoping she would keep New Zealand free of Covid. Few voters had any idea what was in the Labour Party’s manifesto. – Richard Prebble
What has not changed is Labour’s economic policy – borrow and spend. The savings Hipkins announced are not real. The PM has cancelled projects that have not yet started.
A focus on the cost of living is doomed to fail. The announced benefit increases will disappear into supermarket checkouts.
The cost of living is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is inflation. – Richard Prebble
Inflation is not coming down before the election. The teachers would not be striking if they thought inflation was under control.
The likelihood is by election day the country will have both a recession and inflation, stagflation. – Richard Prebble
The latest polls show that the electorate is very volatile.
Inflation is a government killer. From 1972 to 1984 we had governments that tried to address the cost of living not the cause. Nothing worked. If we had had MMP, then every three years there would have been a change in government.
Borrowing to compensate us for the cost of bread and butter is a policy bound to fail. – Richard Prebble
National knew – or should have, since its own research said so – that Christopher Luxon would beat Jacinda Ardern in a policy-free popularity contest.
By the time she quit, enough voters had worked out that, when it came to running a government rather than emoting, she was a complete flake. – Matthew Hooton
The good news is National has finally worked out that it can’t win a beauty contest between the two. Perhaps by necessity, it delivered yesterday what pundits and voters say we want, which is meaningful policy.
If a government ditching its prime minister and main policies is unorthodox, an opposition releasing serious policy is more so, especially so early in an election year. It hasn’t happened this century.
Luxon may be irritated with speculation that his education spokesperson Erica Stanford is a leadership contender, along with his deputy and finance spokesperson Nicola Willis. But New Zealand’s last two important prime ministers, Jim Bolger and Helen Clark, endured speculation throughout their times as opposition leader about Winston Peters, Ruth Richardson, Doug Graham, Michael Cullen and Phil Goff.
Luxon can take comfort that such talk at least suggests a deep bench. That’s not something National has been accused of since John Key, Bill English and Steven Joyce left. – Matthew Hooton
Education doesn’t make the top issues concerning voters, according to National’s pollsters, Curia. It’s a lowly 11th in Ipsos’ New Zealand Issues Monitor.
Moreover, the policy itself is genuinely statesmanlike, being concerned with outcomes that will fully bear fruit only once Luxon, Willis and Stanford are retired. It doesn’t read as if it was bashed out on Wednesday night after some focus groups. It may even be, as claimed, the outcome of Luxon and Stanford’s personal research over the last year, including in Asia and Europe.
There are no handouts cynically targeted at the median voter, although taxpayers will bear the $10 million annual cost of teacher registration fees rather than teachers themselves. – Matthew Hooton
In a world where we hope each generation will be better than the one before, the data National has obtained reveals that the average 13-year-old in 2019 was actually worse at both maths and science than in 1995. Performance will continue deteriorating as Ardern’s and Hipkins’ Covid kids reach intermediate and secondary school.
But the policy doesn’t brainlessly promise vast billions to fix this. It recognises that far-left education theory, not money, is the problem. As Luxon points out, Grant Robertson has increased education spending by 46 per cent since 2017, from $11.1 billion to $16.2b. The extra $5.1b has had similar results to Robertson’s $1.9b more for mental health.
Nor is head office restructuring and rebranding promised, as Labour focuses on, or changes to school management or teacher payment methods, as right-wing economists might prefer. Instead, the policy is about the nuts and bolts of curriculum reform, initial and ongoing teacher training, new classroom materials and resources, and assessment. – Matthew Hooton
The policy can’t help but be popular with parents and ordinary teachers.
It is also detailed and substantial enough to deserve a serious response from Labour and the Greens, plus Te Pāti Māori, which polls currently identify as king-maker.
But, politically, Labour dare not steal National’s policy because its focus on measurability is anathema to the teacher union bosses and ultra-left education theorists who control the bureaucracy and university education departments, and who easily trump students, parents and regular teachers as the education stakeholders Labour most cares about. – Matthew Hooton
Just as National strategists initially had no idea how to respond to Labour’s unorthodox leadership change and policy bonfires, it can be assured no one in the Beehive has any idea what to do if an opposition suddenly starts taking policy seriously. At the very least, National’s bold strike yesterday promises to mix things up a bit – and hopefully avoid Te Pāti Māori deciding whether or not any of it will happen. – Matthew Hooton
The “culture wars” are set to be a defining issue in the 2023 election.
Just take a look at what has dominated headlines this week. It’s not been the cost of living, the Federal Reserve’s decision to hike interest rates amid banking turmoil, nor the confirmation by the Treasury and our Reserve Bank that New Zealand will tip into a technical recession this year (it will hurt nevertheless).
Incongruously, while scientists were delivering their final warning on the climate crisis, debate in New Zealand was instead focused on the danger presented by a pint-sized female Brit coming here on her “Let Women Speak” tour. – Fran O’Sullivan
There is an argument that things have moved too far.
This was underlined by the decision by World Athletics that it will exclude from female competition male-to-female transgender athletes who have gone through male puberty.
World Athletics president Lord Coe said: “We have also taken decisive action to protect the female category in our sport, and to do so by restricting the participation of transgender and DSD [differences of sexual development] athletes.”
So we are entering a vexed time. – Fran O’Sullivan
Just one piece of news in the last week was enough to give the impression that the Government’s great policy bonfire is really smoke and mirrors.
The gobsmacking announcement that the already gold-plated Lake Onslow electricity project has nearly quadrupled in cost yet the Government will forge ahead anyway, confirmed two things. This is the most economically reckless Government since Rob Muldoon, and it has no plans to rein in its own budget to something more appropriate for a country of our size and stage. – Steven Joyce
Burning coal for electricity is an embarrassing feature of this Government’s current energy policy. The decision to ban gas exploration back when climate change was this generation’s nuclear-free moment has made us more dependent on coal-fired electricity generation than we otherwise would be. Gas creates about half the emissions of burning coal, but no matter.
There are plenty of lower-cost, low-emissions solutions to the country’s electricity problems that energy companies would supply if the Government got out of the way and let them get on with it. There are proposed new geothermal schemes, new technologies providing sophisticated demand management tools for industrial users, smaller and cheaper run-of-river hydro schemes, the option of greater storage in existing hydro lakes, and carbon capture and storage technologies which would allow us to keep using natural gas while providing near-zero emissions.
Many of these options would be willingly funded by banks and investors if the Government wasn’t standing over them with a huge taxpayer chequebook threatening to spend $16b and more, and making their investments redundant. For full disclosure, I work with two companies which have technology options which could help bridge a shortfall in hydroelectricity, but there are dozens. In a genuine market of ideas, the best options would get funded but this is not a market of ideas, it’s all about the minister’s preference. – Steven Joyce
Even the proposer of the project, the well-meaning Earl Bardsley from the University of Waikato, admits the business case for it won’t stack up unless a “very wide view” is taken of the economic benefits of the scheme. That’s code for including lots of things that aren’t attributable directly to the scheme to make it look better.
Minister Woods is infamous in Wellington circles for her Muldoonist tendencies. Lake Onslow is her version of Muldoon’s “Think Big” energy schemes which almost sent the country broke in the early eighties. The minister likes to decide a preference very early and then defend it to the death despite any evidence to the contrary. Critics are all dismissed as “vested interests” and cost is no barrier to her preferred policy solution. – Steven Joyce
Those supporting Lake Onslow have no money at stake in their advocacy, while those against are clearly prepared to invest and put their money where their mouths are. We used to have a saying in Cabinet that if the only investor in a “commercial” project is the government, it isn’t a viable project.
It is also ironic that the environmentalists and Greenpeace supporting it are the same people who would have laid in front of the bulldozers protesting the scheme in times past.
Lake Onslow is just another of those white elephant ideas that have been kicking around Wellington for 20 years in search of a sponsor gullible enough to take it forward. Light rail is another, and a bike bridge across the Waitematā was yet another. This Government has probably been the most taken with unworkable populist ideas that we’ve seen for decades, which would be amusing except that we churn through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars proving what was already obvious at a cursory glance. – Steven Joyce
And as for the PM, he missed a trick. A revelation that Minister Woods’ pet project had blown out in cost from $4b to $16b was an ideal time to add it to the “policy bonfire”. It would have shown the Government was perhaps serious about fiscal restraint and tackling the cost of living crisis. That he didn’t gives the impression the great policy re-set is a charade, and that some ministers are not for turning, by anybody. – Steven Joyce
What is “woke”? With origins in cultural Marxism, the general view is that it’s a movement that seeks social and political redress for wrongs derived from social injustice and discrimination.
Like the Black Lives Matter crusade in the United States, which attributed police violence to systemic racism, the woke movement embraces ‘Identity Politics’ with its focus on the so-called ‘oppressed’ groups in society including those centred on gender, race, and sexuality.
In their struggle for social justice these groups claim they have been the victims of systemic oppression, and they demand preferential treatment to address the wrongs.
What is particularly sinister is their propensity to attack and ‘cancel’ anyone with a dissenting voice. – Muriel Newman
The words of novelist JK Rowling, who opposes all forms of woke repression are particularly appropriate: “If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications.”
While a desire to address social injustice and discrimination is admirable, and something few would argue against, the problem arises when the cause of the “wrongs” is fabricated to suit the political interests of those driving the agenda.
And unfortunately, our politicians seem all too willing to promote such false narratives in order to ingratiate themselves with those activist groups. – Muriel Newman
In really simple terms this country and our education system is shocking. And we know it’s shocking because it didn’t used to be that way.
We have, and continue to, go backwards. Now, that shouldn’t be news to anyone, but when you book mark it the way he did it’s an eye opener
The teachers, largely, are not to blame. It is the way we teach, the work load they are expected to undertake, the lack of confidence they have in the first place and the expectation of a Government or ministry that has completely skewed what is important.
Essentially what National are advocating in their policy is nothing exceptional. It’s simply going back to what we once did, which is basic competency in basic subjects. – Mike Hosking
There is no magic. Just, sadly, an appalling hijacking of a system by wonks in Wellington that for some reason have been allowed to run rampant.
What we have by way of an education outcome for so many kids is inexcusable and indefensible.
If you watched Luxon prosecute that yesterday you’d see a bloke who gets it and, more importantly, wants to do something about it.
As more New Zealanders see more of that they will see why the election is nowhere near as close as the polls might suggest. – Mike Hosking
A final thought. Critics of trans peoples’ fantasies are labelled trans-phobic, typical of their ignorance re language. Phobic means fear. The critics are not fearful in the least of these sexually confused folk, rather, specially in the case of male trans for example, women don’t want them in their toilets or with their physical advantages, competing with them in sport. Otherwise it’s entirely their business if they believe they’re born in the wrong body and are really a zebra, Napoleon or the opposite sex – Sir Bob Jones
Ours is not an age of acute aesthetic judgment, except in the culinary field. Here there is no question that food (especially for the middle classes in the Anglo-Saxon world) has improved out of all recognition in the last decades. When I look back on my childhood, I recall food that was almost comically bad: it took skill and determination of a kind to render food so unappetising, at least from our current perspective, though we ate it because there was nothing else and perhaps because we knew no better. There was an almost puritanical vendetta by cooks (or rather, those who cooked) against flavour, one which was for the most part successful. I remember dry grey roast meat with vegetables reduced to a mush by overcooking, served carelessly with some of the water in which they had been cooked seemingly for hours, if not for days, as a kind of punishment for those who displayed the human weakness known as hunger. No doubt such crimes against the culinary art are still committed in places, but something better is now to be found even in the smallest towns.
On the other hand (there is always another hand), the fashion in restaurants in which the much better food than formerly is served also tells us something disquieting about modern forms of sociability. In many of the best places—best from the culinary point of view—it is not possible to have a quiet conversation. All sound-absorbing materials have been removed from the décor, and frequently one has to raise one’s voice, even shout, to make oneself heard to the person across the table. Talking thus becomes a physical effort, where it is not an actual impossibility, and is certainly not a pleasure; one leaves the restaurant both exhausted and exasperated. – Theodore Dalrymple
This is in accordance with a world of psychobabble, in which people talk endlessly about themselves while revealing nothing. In such a world, conversation becomes ersatz, at best a series of monologues whose end everyone awaits in order to proceed with his own, only tangentially related to what has gone before. Speech is audible tattooing. – Theodore Dalrymple
Human beings are both social creatures and blessed (or cursed) with individuality. They feel the need both to fit in and stand out. Advertisers, who are sincere in their cynicism, are fully aware of this seeming contradiction. They constantly suggest that people should stand out by buying exactly what they hope to sell to as large a number of people as possible. And what, after all, are graffiti of the kind that deface whole areas of cities nowadays but an attempt by young people both to conform and stand out, by imposing themselves on a townscape by doing precisely what so many others do?
Hideous though their efforts are, yet the perpetrators retain some aesthetic sense, if only unconsciously or subliminally. – Theodore Dalrymple
Few things reveal a man more than his aesthetic judgments, which is why so much art and architectural criticism, at least of contemporary art and architecture, fails to make any. A whole vocabulary is employed to avoid them: they are as much to be avoided as rude remarks at a garden party. Which of the desiderata of truth, beauty and goodness remains standing after the postmodernist assault? – Theodore Dalrymple
Indeed, transgender rights has become a totemic issue for the left – an unassailable article of faith. This explains why some of the highest profile victims of the debate have been feminists themselves, the most notable being the writer J.K. Rowling who enraged the transgender community with her tweet in 2020, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Despite facing savage attacks, Rowling has remained steadfast and continues to be a prominent advocate for women. – Thomas Cranmer
Having the ability to present my maiden speech. Because what that did is give some insight into the drivers or the values, the tikanga in my life. It’s not that I got here because I did something. I got here with the support of hundreds of people and the values and protocols and principles they instilled in me are now brought to bear in the house… What a marvellous job! – Tama Potaka
Think back to this time last week. Had you ever heard of Posie Parker before?
No, me neither.
Yet here we are, a week later, and many of us now know too much about her.
Too much, because many of us don’t care about what she’s talking about. Not because we’re callous towards trans people or towards women wishing to defend their spaces, but because this isn’t much of a tension in New Zealand. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
So, this time last week, there was a very good chance Posie Parker would’ve come to the country, spoken to a small group of upset women and left. Most of us would’ve been none-the-wiser.
But then the critics piped up. The Green Party called for her ban.
They must’ve known the chances of a ban were incredibly slim. She is a British citizen. She doesn’t need permission to come here. Her travel is visa-free.
The Greens were surely performing for a crowd rather than expecting an actual ban. But they called for it anyway. And the media covered it. And the media amplified her message. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
And the media amplified her message.
And then other critics piled in. They publicly despaired Immigration NZ’s entirely expected decision not to ban Parker. And they accused her of pulling a Nazi OK symbol in her video challenging our PM. And the media covered it.
And then they promised to protest and launched a judicial review in court and attacked the Immigration Minister for not intervening when he could and – as expected – the media covered it. And in the end, all of Parker’s opponents made sure that she was in the news most of the week and that many of us knew exactly what she was saying about women’s rights and trans rights.
For a moment some of them stopped. They talked about whether they were making things worse. But they did it anyway.
They did more harm than good. They helped her spread her message. They played right into her hands. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The Green Party, Auckland Pride, and RainbowYOUTH will probably tell themselves they’ve done the right thing by lending their solidarity to the trans community.
But there are other ways to express solidarity. A considered statement on a Facebook page. A tweet. An Instagram post. There are ways to say what needs to be said to the people who need to hear it without creating the exact kind of drama the media will rush to cover. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Again, these people are not stupid. They must know they just helped some Kiwis, who will like what they see, discover Posie Parker.
What an own goal. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
This weekend saw a showdown between two tribes of contemporary gender politics: those in favour of progressing transgender rights versus women wishing to defend their spaces. It’s a debate with huge passion, outrage and consequences. – Bryce Edwards
There was an element of pantomime on both sides over the last week. Posie Parker thrives on controversy. She might be complaining now about her treatment in New Zealand, but by holding her rally in a public place like Albert Park she was provoking opposition and stoking tensions, hoping to become something of a martyr.
She won. She made global news, fuelling publicity in the UK and US markets where she carries out her main fundraising. She will now be even better equipped to push her particularly toxic form of gender politics.
Likewise, those opposing Parker were rather opportunistic in arguing that she is a fascist and that her beliefs were such a danger to the public that she had to be banned from the country.
They must have known they were giving the previously-unknown visitor huge amounts of free publicity and therefore helping get her views out to a wider audience. – Bryce Edwards
The two parliamentary parties stoking the culture wars are Act and the Greens. Those parties will gain a much higher profile if cultural issues keep rising to the fore. The Greens will pick up middle class supporters whose main focus is on social justice issues, while Act might be able to pick up more anti-woke working class supporters in provincial New Zealand.
Squeezed in the middle are the major parties of Labour and National, who are desperate to stay out of it all, aware that middle New Zealand is less enamoured by such debates and concerns. – Bryce Edwards
There’s a whole new terminology that needs unpacking and defining in the new landscape of culture wars. We have been through versions associated with the “progressive” side of this debate such as political correctness, cancel culture, identity politics, and now “woke” politics. To what extent these terms are useful continues to be debated. Perhaps the better term for the milieu of more middle class progressive demands is “social justice politics”.
Much of it is associated with leftwing politics but, in reality, the left is divided over culture wars. The “cultural left” side tends to be connected with more elite, educated, and middle class activists. The more traditional, or working class orientated “old left”, is still focused on economic inequality and improving the lot of those economically disadvantaged as a whole, with a focus on universalism and civil rights. –
Saturday’s clash of cultures is a sign of where politics is heading in New Zealand – towards a fully-fledged culture war. – Bryce Edwards
Democracy might also be harmed if the culture wars dominate this year’s election. An ugly fight over transgender politics, co-governance, or race relations would be one that alienates many voters, and reduces participation in politics. Some of the public will turn away in disgust, confusion, or fear about culture wars. The intolerance and outrage that often occurs in these debates can make ordinary voters feel unwelcome taking part in discussion and debate, or even in voting. – Bryce Edwards
The main problem in culture wars arise when there is no room for nuanced discussion, openness or a willingness to learn from others and opponents. Overall, there is a need for healthier debate and engagement in New Zealand politics. – Bryce Edwards
New Zealand is facing huge problems which require critical thinking and debate. We won’t be well served if such political debate and the upcoming election are highjacked by the hate and tribal opportunism we saw over the weekend. – Bryce Edwards
I believe in the freedom of speech and the need to have an open debate and consider everybody’s rights, and encourage good, strong, discourse.
I have also spent the best part of my life working in communication. Long enough to recognise that the route of all evil is when people feel they are not heard, or they are denied a voice.
If no one will listen to you, it fuels frustration and fear. If you’re talked at or drowned out, the effect is much the same. You become disenfranchised and disengaged.
I am pro-trans rights but I am also pro-women’s rights. I believe one shouldn’t come at the expense of the other, but I can’t say that easily. If I do, the abuse rolls in and I’m called a bigot and a transphobic and a Nazi. – Rachel Smalley
Last week, we saw some remarkable bias in mainstream media reporting. And when people like Kim Hill – the doyen of interviewing – spoke robustly to both sides of the debate, pro-Trans supporters immediately reported her to the Broadcasting Standards Authority for giving a voice to Posie Parker.
I don’t think we will see balanced reporting again this week. The mainstream media is, by default, quite young – too young to really understand how hard-fought women’s rights have been. They have been born and raised in a world that many of us fought hard to change in the years that have gone by. They’ve benefited from those changes, but they haven’t understood the struggle. – Rachel Smalley
No female sports journalists will endure that today. Women have a voice. And unlike me, back in the 1990s, they know how to use it. It’s a different world. Thankfully.
But that’s also why events like what unfolded at the weekend really upset me. I feel like society is going backwards. Men yelling at women. Men intimidating women. But worst of all, women yelling abuse at other women – or sanctioning intimidating behaviour against them. It is my hope that across the mainstream media, you will find some very strong and brave analyses today that position this story right down the middle.
It is my hope that you get journalists calling this intimidating behaviour out, and reiterating that to enable the rights of the trans community, you also need to enable the voices of women because we are all different and we all have stories, and backstories, and some of us will be impacted by the elevation of the trans community, and we have a right to speak up about our concerns if women are losing our rights to feel safe and occupy women-only spaces.
I don’t know whether you will read, see and hear that today but in a well-functioning democracy, it’s what you should see from our media.
I feel a very lonely voice at the moment in the mainstream media.
New Zealand feels like it’s digressed decades in enabling women, and after what I witnessed at the weekend, and the crushing of women, I feel like I’m back in a sports newsroom in the 1990s. – Rachel Smalley
As a libertarian I believe people should do as they wish but never at the expense of others. – Sir Bob Jones
The folks over at Science-Based Medicine (SBM) have decided that the hill they’ll defend (if not die on) is that sex in humans is a continuous trait, though there might be modes at “male” and “female”. This of course flies in the face of biology, which argues that there are only two sexes in vertebrates: i.e., sex is binary). While there is a low percentage of people (and presumably animals) having “disorders of sex development”, these individuals are not “third sexes” or “new sexes”, but simply those in which the developmental system has gone awry, and they are either sterile or produce sperm or eggs (but not both in a functional way).
I believe the denial of the sex binary is motivated by ideology—to show people who don’t adhere to a “male” or “female” identity that that’s is okay because there are different sexes in nature, too. If you think about that argument, though, you’ll find that it’s not only fallacious but also pretty irrational. – Jerry Coyne
Once again in NZ we’re seeing our public discourse being taken over by the fringes, and no room left for anything in the middle. You’re with us or you’re against us.
I see both sides feeling threatened, but not a lot of empathy for each other. I see both sides talking past each other, and attributing sinister motives to the other side.
I also see a lot of common ground, common ground that isn’t being identified and agreed upon, and that isn’t being talked about in the media. Without common ground there really cannot be discussion – Paul L
A resolution cannot be reached on this without discussion and debate. Simply codifying a right to self id, and therefore a right to access those spaces, without consulting those who feel unsafe is a problem. Simply classifying all trans women as men, and requiring them to use male bathrooms is also a problem. – Paul L
What we saw over the last few days was a media and a public space that had no nuance, no discussion of the fact that there was a conflict of rights. We had (some) women’s rights campaigners focusing on the rights that women have to their own spaces without recognising that trans women also have a right to safety. We had (some) trans rights campaigners focusing on the rights that trans women have to safety without recognising that (some) women are very uncomfortable with people with penises in their spaces.
Unfortunately this is an area that it is hard to discuss without being labelled and without being abused. The extremists are shouting down the moderates, and there are extremists on both sides. – Paul L
Our politicians similarly should have an obligation to articulate a position that illuminates rather than obscures. Even acknowledging that there is an underlying conflict of rights, and that the disagreement isn’t caused by one side or the other being unreasonable, would be a useful start. Better still would be finding the middle ground and advocating for it. However, politically speaking, it is much more beneficial to be unclear. Making a clear statement is unlikely to win you votes, but is quite likely to lead to one side or the other whipping up dissension and losing you votes. Only the Greens and Act can really afford to be clear – because they’re unlikely to drive any of their voters away.
If this is the way we’ll have debates in the future, then I fear we’ll become an increasingly divided society. I don’t understand what will bring us back together, what will help us to find common ground and common cause.
I fear that we’re further driving people away from traditional media, and they will in future get their information from non-traditional sources. Those sources can also be full of disinformation, and some people appear to have difficulty in telling the difference. – Paul L
For a brief moment last year, it looked as if the Ministry of Education was finally going to embrace methods of teaching literacy and numeracy supported by scientific evidence. They published a new literacy and numeracy strategy that made reference to structured teaching methods.
Structured literacy works because it takes account of the nature of human memory and attention, and its limitations. The Ministry has spent more than two decades ignoring mounting evidence in its favour.
To be sure, the new strategy was hardly a full-throated endorsement of structured teaching, nor an especially well-articulated one. Still, I was heartened by their stated intention to develop a Common Practice Model (CPM) incorporating a structured approach to teaching these key skills. As its name implies, a CPM is a guide to teaching methods to be followed by every teacher in the country. – Michael Johnston :
The trouble is, the rest of the document constitutes a doubling down on the same failed, and sometimes ludicrous, methods the Ministry has championed for years. Under those methods, a generation of young New Zealanders has been badly let down. A third of our fifteen-year-olds cannot read at a basic adult standard. Two thirds cannot write at a similar standard and nearly half lack basic numeracy skills. – Michael Johnston :
There isn’t the space here to describe all the ways in which these ‘pedagogies’ will harm, rather than foster, sound learning. I will confine myself to one highlight – that of ‘critical maths’.
The CPM asserts that “Ākonga [students] are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free”.
All this before they even know what mathematics is.
There is little enough time as it is during the school years for young people to develop basic mathematical proficiency. I would like to suggest to the Ministry that loading this kind of nonsense on top of that task guarantees further educational failure.
But, once again, the Ministry has shown that it simply isn’t listening. – Michael Johnston
This is what it must have been like when women were marched to the stake. Yesterday in Auckland the British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker found herself surrounded by a deranged, heaving mob. She had tomato soup and placards thrown in her face. She was doused with water. Huge men screamed insults and expletives in her face. The shoving of the crowd became so intense that Parker feared for her life. ‘I genuinely thought that if I fell to the floor I would never get up again’, she said. ‘My children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.’
It was a truly chilling spectacle. The mobs’ faces were twisted into masks of feral hatred. They ranted in frenzy as the diminutive Parker, her bottle-blonde hair stained orange from the soup that had been dumped on her, desperately tried to make her way to the safety of a police car. It was a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic.
Next time you’re reading a history book and find yourself wondering how Salem came to be consumed by such swirling hysteria, watch the clips of Posie’s persecution in New Zealand. This is how it happens. This is how the fear of witches can overrule reason and unleash the darkest, most punitive passions of the mob.
And what is Parker’s crime? What did this witch do? She said, ‘A woman is an adult human female’. That’s it. – Brendan O’Neill
She thinks a man never becomes a woman, no matter how many hormones he takes or surgeries he undergoes. She thinks if you were born male, you will die male, and in the time in between you have no right whatsoever to enter any women-only space.
This is heresy. Dissenting from the gospel of gender ideology is to the 21st century what dissenting from the actual gospels was to the 15th. And so Parker must be punished. It was a modern-day stoning, so mercifully they only threw soup and water and planks of cardboard at the blasphemer. – Brendan O’Neill
She knows these gatherings of women who merely want to give voice to their profane belief that sex can never be changed will draw out crowds of intolerant trans activists and their allies. She knows the ‘Be Kind’ mob will do everything in its power to stop women from speaking. And she knows it will all brilliantly illustrate her core belief: that trans activism is misogyny in disguise, misogyny in drag, if you like, and that it has devoted itself to silencing women who believe in biology.
Australia and New Zealand played their parts brilliantly in Parker’s clever scheme. From Melbourne to Canberra, Hobart to Auckland, huge crowds of the right-on turned up to drown out the voices of the pesky women who dare to call men ‘men’. ‘Let women speak’, Parker says. ‘No’, says the mob. She incites them to confess their misogyny and intolerance in full public view. And they do.
Auckland was the worst. At Albert park in the centre of the city yesterday, the mob could not hide its vengeful loathing of the uppity women who disagree with its ideologies. Parker is a new kind of witch, one who willingly submits herself to a witch-trial, so that the rest of us might see just how dogmatic and unforgiving the new witch-hunters are. – Brendan O’Neill
The events in Auckland should be a wake-up call for liberals everywhere. We glimpsed the iron fist of authoritarianism that lurks in the velvet glove of ‘Be Kind’. The misogynistic streak in trans extremism is undeniable now. Watch enraged men kicking down metal barriers so that they might get closer to the witch Posie and tell me this isn’t sexism masquerading as radicalism. Witness the crowing of men who are delighted that the mob made the ‘coward TERF’ run away and tell me this isn’t chauvinism on steroids. Behold the use of megaphones and expletive-laden chants and physical menace to silence a woman and tell me this isn’t a sexist, censorious crusade against women’s freedom of speech.
That mob in Auckland did not emerge out of thin air. No, it was a brutish manifestation of a regressive idea that has been taking hold for some years. Namely, that it should be forbidden to dissent from gender ideology. That it is bigotry to state biological facts. That it ought to be a punishable offence – whether that punishment is being No Platformed or sacked or having objects thrown in your face – to say men are men and women are women.
To see where censorship ends up, just look at those grimacing agitators in Auckland, hatred spreading like a current through their number, as they fight with every fibre of their being to prevent the expression of a critical idea. Censorship begets bigotry. It begets violence itself. For the more we tell people that certain words will hurt them, the more we witlessly incite people to hurt those who dare to utter certain words.
That mob was drunk on sanctimony. This is what happens when we tell people their identity is the most important thing in the world and that anything that so much as grazes their self-esteem is an outrage that must be crushed. We nurture a generation of navel-gazing Torquemadas. Posie has exposed them, yet again, and for that she deserves our thanks. This time round, the witches might just win. – Brendan O’Neill
Sport, so focused on winning and losing, on rules and competition, can bring a reductive clarity to the complexities of life. Perhaps that is why the judgement this week of the World Athletics Council was so momentous. Put simply, council president Sebastian Coe had to choose between conflicting “rights” and he decided that the right of those born women to compete fairly trumps the desire to be included in elite sport of those who have gone through male puberty but run or jump as women. “We felt,” he said, “that having transgender athletes competing at elite level would actually compromise the integrity of female competition.”
It can seem that there is no more sensitive an issue than trans rights. But sport, with that same reductive clarity, is not so concerned with sensitivities. It is concerned with the irrefutable reality of the stopwatch and winner’s podium. And they starkly reveal the distortions that testosterone and its consequences for muscle, stature, strength and speed wreak on the track and field. Indeed, so stark and inescapable is the judgement of Lord Coe and his organisation that it de-barbs what elsewhere remains one of society’s thorniest issues. All it took was leadership to act. – Harry de Quetteville
For the transgender rights fissure that opened up in sport echoes that in politics and society more widely. There, faced with increasing public concern, other leaders are increasingly being forced to choose as well. Equivocation is no longer enough. It was oddly fitting, for example, that Lord Coe’s decision in athletics came on the very same day that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon left office – a titanic, once unassailable figure finally, if not exclusively, propelled into the political void by her support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. A leader of long standing who had always seemed so in touch with public sentiment found herself jettisoned, more tone-deaf than deft. – Harry de Quetteville
That decision did not come in isolation. In fact, it came hard on the heels of the devastating Cass Review which led to the closure of the controversial Tavistock clinic, where children found themselves referred for assessment for puberty-blocking drugs and life-changing surgery without adequate safeguards. And the decision at the end of last year by the charities regulator to launch a statutory inquiry into Mermaids, the transgender campaign group found to be offering harmful breast-binders to girls as young as 13 without their parents’ knowledge. And the announcement a month ago, in the same week that Sturgeon revealed she was stepping down, that the Sandyford clinic – known as “Scotland’s Tavistock” – would be closing its doors to new patients.
For activists on either side of the debate, each of these has represented an ideological battle. Together, however, their outcomes point in one direction. That’s why, in years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn. – Harry de Quetteville
Just 19 per cent of those polled, for example, disagree with Lord Coe and think that transgender women should be allowed to compete in women-only sporting events. Fewer than half agree that “a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman”. On high streets, retailers are being forced to react too. Primark, for example, has had to repeal “gender-neutral” changing areas after female customers said they felt unsafe sharing changing areas with men. The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith this week found its “all-gender” loos – in which a woman heading to a cubicle would need to walk past five urinals – lambasted for making women feel “incredibly uncomfortable”.
Meanwhile, a school on the Isle of Man was forced to suspend sex education lessons for 11-year-olds after it turned out they were being conducted by a drag queen who allegedly told pupils that there are 73 genders, and excluded one “upset” child who responded that “there are only two”. Children of the same age were also taught about sex-change operations and oral and anal sex. – Harry de Quetteville
Today, then, it seems that public opinion, the law, and politics are beginning to coalesce coherently around this issue; that viewpoints for so long kept soft by uncertainty and a desire for tolerance are beginning to firm. Minds are being made up. It was only a matter of time. For there was always going to come a moment when, from the safety of posterity, we would look back on the transgender rights activism of the past few years either as a righteous movement which opened society’s eyes to obvious injustice – or an astonishing aberration when, gripped by some delusion, we came en masse to view gender not as objective reality but as a subjective spectrum.
One day, we would have – like Lord Coe – to choose. Or more likely, through a series of decisions, legal, political and incremental, a path would emerge and society would proceed along it, leaving the other path untravelled. This week, it seems we are taking our first steps down one path and not the other.
If so, it signals a momentous potential juncture in a culture war that became a political war. Not an end to that conflict, as Britain’s wartime leader might have said, or even the beginning of the end, but an end of the beginning.
Such marshal language may seem inappropriate, but anyone following the transgender fight online can testify to how bitterly and viciously contested it has been. – Harry de Quetteville
In the face of such an onslaught, it can seem that the events of the past months are not so much a victory as a course correction, after a period in which fear of being labelled discriminatory silenced many in positions of power and beyond. Now, though, it apparently turns out that the view that society cannot be ruled by social media’s cancel culture mob is widely held.
Certainly, those who have dared speak up now feel that momentum is on their side – “common sense at last” in the words of former runner Liz McColgan. The consequences of this week’s turn then, may be far-reaching. Logically, it means that never again are we likely to dish out puberty blockers to confused children, or carry out irreversible surgery to remove the breasts of young women in an environment that – as the Cass Review into the Tavistock Centre discovered – merely confirmed rather than challenged their desire to proceed with such life-altering measures. –
Perhaps even more importantly, this may be a turning point that will cause us to consider the very nature of democracy, where defence and support of the minority by the majority is absolutely central. How far does society bend to accommodate the needs of the few? How extreme does that accommodation have to be, and how tiny the numbers of the minority, before society can rightly refuse to bend, or yield only a little?
It turns out that such questions have been plaguing us since the dawn of political philosophy. – Harry de Quetteville
The 20th century’s appalling toll of racism, sectarianism, misogyny and homophobia have all accustomed us to the idea that moral justice is wedded to the defence of those fighting for improved rights. Now, uncomfortably, we may have to get used to the idea that in some cases, the majority can sometimes be right, with understanding and tolerance, to push back. – Harry de Quetteville
I wanted to interview one of the Green Party leaders this morning.
Both declined. James Shaw and Marama Davidson said no. They’ve been vocal for days on their own social channels, but they won’t be challenged or face questions from media who don’t agree with them. – Rachel Smalley
Remember this date – Saturday, 25th of March. It’s the day the Greens stepped up and publicly applauded the intimidation and silencing of women. –
50 percent of our population is women. 50 percent of the voter base is women. And the Greens say our voice doesn’t matter. Worse, they applauded the men who raised fists, called women c-words, and backed the men who pushed through security fences to intimidate and mob Posie Parker.
Hate has no place in society, they say. Hate against who?
The Greens are the party that Chris Hipkins has no option but to go into coalition with. And if this is the devastation the Greens can inflict on our freedom of speech and on social cohesion when they are in essence outside of Government, imagine what they can do from within it? Labour’s tripping over itself at the moment trying to find its official position on what’s just happened to our society this weekend… but they are largely mumbling something about supporting trans rights and opposing hate.
And don’t we all? Don’t we all support trans and oppose hate? But how can politicians justify the hate that has been unleashed on women? I feel like I am living in some sort of parallel universe. How can it be that it’s okay to silence women about issues that affect them, and physically intimidate them into silence? – Rachel Smalley
Women, if they raise their hands to speak, they are silenced and abused. Since I wrote my editorial on Thursday, I have been called many things. A Nazi. A Terf. A supporter of hate. Anti-trans. A bigot. A bitch. And far worse.
I am none of those things. But I am a woman and I’ve been around these traps for a while. And I do believe that we should all be afforded a voice and an opportunity to speak to issues that impact the world that we live in. That impact our world. – Rachel Smalley
Four of the Greens’ senior women were utterly fervent in their opposition to women at the weekend, calling on the public to rise up against the Let Women Speak group, and then applauding the abuse and intimidation that rained down on them.
How on earth did the Greens become so anti-women? – Rachel Smalley
The Greens won’t accept that you can be pro-trans rights AND pro-women rights. You don’t have to pick a side, but the Greens did. And they opposed women’s rights. In 2023, they opposed women’s rights.
And for me… well, the hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Earlier this year, I interviewed Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman on the issue unfolding in Iran. She said New Zealand must stand up, and stop the misogyny and the hate and the violence that was raining down on the women of Iran. And then on Saturday, I watched her dog-whistle misogyny and violent behaviour against the women of New Zealand. In the moments before the protest, she posted a picture of herself smiling on Twitter holding a sign where she labelled women’s rights campaigners as Terfs and she wrote “Ready to the fight the Nazis!”
That’s me, Golriz. The same woman who stood with you and called for Iran’s women to be given a voice… that same woman is me. And now when I ask for women to be given a voice in a situation that significantly impacts women’s rights, you call me a Nazi and a Terf. – Rachel Smalley
Marama reminded us that she is the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Minister. She reminded us of that as she walked away from a protest that used fear and intimidation to silence women. And she said it’s straight white men who are responsible for violence. White men inflict violence on the world.
How does that sit with the Prime Minister? How does Chris Hipkins view that statement from a Minister in his Government? That’s a big question for him today. – Rachel Smalley
Four Green Party women. Four women at the coalface of silencing women. Four women who believe women cannot have a say in decisions that will impact their lives and their rights.
These are the same women who are behind the forced change in the way the Government now speaks about women in documentation. No woman has been consulted on this.
But I am no longer called a woman by the Government. Girls are called menstruator. Or a person who bleeds. Or a person with a womb. I’m called a chest-feeder or a baby carrier. I, like every New Zealand woman, have been told that I have to accept how this Government is choosing to refer to me in its correspondence. And if I don’t accept it, I am a bigot or transphobic.
What a mess.
Why should Labour and Chris Hipkins be worried about what played out at the weekend? Because the only way Labour can form a Government in October is with the support of the Greens. If Labour gets into power, they will bring the Greens with them. They will have to, to get the numbers. And they’ll have to work with Marama Davidson who shut down the voice of women, and said white men are behind all of the violence in the world. – Rachel Smalley
If this is the level of damage the Greens can inflict on society and on women’s rights when they’re officially in Government, imagine how much destruction they can do if they are entrenched fully within a Labour government?
For the first time in my life, I am fearful of a political party. I really am. I am fearful of how the Greens mobilised their MPs and their followers to shut down women. Marama Davidson is something of a lost cause now. How do we believe or trust in her as a politician? And James Shaw? As co-leader, you’ve lost control of your party. And your political credibility has taken a major hit.
I’ll say this one last time for all of the haters out there, and there are many.
Trans rights are human rights. I 100 percent agree. But I also believe women’s rights are human rights. And one should not come at the expense of another. – Rachel Smalley
I wasn’t surprised by the turnout. And I wasn’t surprised by the noise. I wasn’t even surprised that neither Kellie Jay Keen-Minshull nor any other woman was able to speak at an event billed as Let Women Speak (ironic much).
An unrelenting vomit of media misinformation aided by politician’s slurs the previous week had pretty much ensured that there would be a huge turnout of rainbow youth, Green’s supporters, empathetic women (their niceness weaponised against natal women in favour of men), woman-face drag queens and – Gotverdomme – even a cluster of Dutch dykes on bikes at Albert Park to greet the British women’s rights advocate.
So no, no surprises there. – Yvonne Van Dongen
But what did surprise me was the complete lack of police presence. Call me naive but I thought one of the roles of the police was to enforce order and ensure people could exercise their right to freedom of speech. As the four of us walked up to Albert Park surrounded by young people and placards, we foolishly comforted ourselves with the knowledge that no matter what happened, we would be protected by those men and women in blue.
Instead – nothing. I didn’t see a single officer the whole time I was there although a friend swears she saw two cops standing in the background, looking bemused. Sorry Julie but I don’t believe you. I suspect they were just two people wearing hi-vis vests and caps and you just want to make me feel better. But thanks anyway. – Yvonne Van Dongen
Science says there are only two sexes, woman is adult human female, people can’t change sex and it is impossible to be born in the wrong body. Show me the third gamete. You can call her a woman’s right’s campaigner which is true but at its most fundamental she is staking a claim for sanity.
But sanity was a bit like the police. Missing in action. A call to 111 assured me they were there. Honestly sometimes I feel like I’m being forced to live in the world of alternative facts. Where the fook are they I shouted into the phone. – Yvonne Van Dongen
My photos show placards bearing such inspiring messages as “Suck My Dick” and “Get Off Our Land Cunt.” This, despite KJK being co-hosted by Mana Wāhine Kōrero, a group of Māori women who describe transactivism as the second colonization. By which they mean the way women’s language and spaces are being colonized by men who say they are women.
In what now seems an ironic directive an Auckland council spokesperson was quoted as saying the organisers of the event had the responsibility to not incite violence.
Frankly that goes for the media and politicians. By linking her inaccurately to neo-Nazis (neither the Australian nor the Australian Jewish Association believes that is true) and white supremacists, they fanned the flames of this intimidation and silencing. Guilt by inaccurate association is hardly an argument. Silencing free speech is a victory only for bullies and ultimately a blow for democracy. – Yvonne Van Dongen
There are grifters everywhere, on every loud and voluble side. Making a living by making themselves live clickbait.
This is all very exciting to the protagonists, I’m sure and to the newscasters who need them, because it fills up their news broadcasts and column inches with colourful but undemanding fare. Because it’s issues played out simply for live clickbait. Activism theatre. “Activists” observing an issue out there, and discovering how to make clickbait out of it.
There’s a certain genius to this kind of activism. To make an important stand and to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them? No, not at all: in order to attract more followers. And more clicks.
So instead of discussing the issues, on Saturday we saw lots of people shouting and throwing fists, but nobody listening. Lots of heat, but no light. ‘Cos mostly what they were all shouting anyway, effectively, was not much more than just: “Click on Me!”
Cancel Culture meets Clickbait Culture. Everyone’s a Winner!
These people all need each other. They are part of a mutually reliant ecosystem. Without each of them shouting out their bumpersticker slogans, none of them would be making any kind of living at all. But without any of them, we might be able to have a decent chat about the issues they all say they stand for (or against). – Not PC
Men forcibly stopping women from speaking in public. Men chanting that women who dare disagree with them should shut up and kill themselves. Men punching women in the face. There’s a word for all this: misogyny. Unbridled, violent misogyny, at that. And yet this vile behaviour has been indulged in once again in recent days by those who think they are the foot soldiers in a new civil-rights movement, by those who besmirch the mantle of anti-fascism by claiming it for themselves, by those who somehow still manage to call themselves ‘progressives’.– Tom Slater
These women were demanding only the right to speak in public, about the erosion of their freedom of speech and sex-based rights at the behest of extreme gender ideology. And even that was not afforded to them. The protesters drowned them out. This wasn’t counter-speech – it was the heckler’s veto in action. Even that feels like a bit of a tame way to describe the tactics of this mob. Heckles are often funny. There’s nothing funny about calling women old enough to be your mother fascists and telling them to top themselves.- Tom Slater
Enough. We need to call this behaviour out for the violent misogyny that it is. We also need to call out the various cretins who have put a target on these women’s backs, from New Zealand TV station Newshub, which deployed absurd tactics to smear Keen as ‘far right’ ahead of the Auckland rally, to Australian senator Nick McKim, who called Keen and her supporters ‘cunts’ in Aussie rhyming slang, to our own woke bros like Owen Jones and Billy Bragg, who continue to say that gender-critical women, rather than the black-clad men threatening to beat them up, are the fascist-aligned side in this battle. Finally, not least given the fact that police are refusing to do their job, anyone who believes in freedom of speech and women’s rights really needs to stand in solidarity with these courageous women – physically, in public, at a gender-critical event near you.
They must be supported – and the reactionaries posing as progressives must be opposed. See you at Speakers’ Corner. – Tom Slater
The sub-set of Woke-Fascism that is Transgender-Fascism may have overplayed its iron fist.
Woke-Fascists, including terrorist groups Only Black Lives Matter and PROFA, are the modern-day version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mao’s Red Guards.
In New Zealand they have mostly managed to camouflage their putrid pedigree under the Orwellian guise of Jackboot Jacinda’s “kindness.”
Now, the whole world has seen through the facade … and the whole world is talking about it. – Lindsay Perigo
The country that has been able proudly to boast that it was the first to give women the vote is now known to be the first country outside of Islam in which women are shut down just for being women.
A Woke-Fascist cabinet minister underscored this cosmic atrocity by proclaiming that violence is committed only by “cis white men.”– Lindsay Perigo
New Zealand’s Woke-Fascists are as murderously evil as Woke-Fascists elsewhere.
Now, all the world knows it: – Lindsay Perigo
Marama is the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence and says she wants us to have these “hard and uncomfortable conversations” (which is reminiscent of what Metiria Turei fatefully wanted when she publicly confessed to ripping off the benefit system.)
But back to Marama. Forget for a moment the offence intended and taken, is her revised statement true?
If Police, Corrections or Oranga Tamariki stats are put up as evidence, the court would find in her favour. More men are in prison for family violence convictions than women; police arrest more men than women for family violence and more men commit physical abuse against children than women (though not “overwhelmingly”. If other forms of abuse are considered women outdo men. Take for instance a quote from MSD gang research which revealed, “The alleged perpetrator of abuse or neglect of gang member’s children was more often recorded as the child’s mother than the gang member father.”) – Lindsay Mitchell
Women were the greater perpetrators of physical partner violence which included choking, hitting, shoving, throwing objects, threatening with a knife, kicking, biting, shaking, etc. – Lindsay Mitchell
Then again, with ministers like Marama Davidson it’s unlikely to be used to further our understanding of the real world. The last four days have shown that her negative view of men is fixed and she won’t be searching for any evidence to the contrary.
Excitable dogma may be an asset in an activist but not in a minister. She should go. – Lindsay Mitchell
As crime looks to be a hot election issue this year I worry about two things, well more than two things, but let’s start with these two.
One – the lack of arrests being made and two – the top-down obsession from the police hierarchy with supporting offenders, not victims. – Kate Hawkesby
The other thing I worry about is the obsession with the offenders, their backgrounds, and their families.
The new Police Minister said at the weekend that she promises ‘wrap-around support for families of youth offenders’. And as lovely as that sounds, it’s not really the first priority the community is looking at for a new Police minister. Certainly not during a time of the increased crime. – Kate Hawkesby
The balance has tilted so wildly in favour of those creating the havoc and doing the crimes, that if you’re the victim of it, as these people were the other night in Auckland’s CBD, they rightly say, why even bother reporting it? – Kate Hawkesby
But what’s increasingly common from politicians these days, as the bar has gotten lower and lower, is they say ‘it’s complex’ or they don’t have the stats right in front of them right now, or they need to look into that, or they’ll have to come back to you.
Fewer and fewer of them have any answers or information at their fingertips, fewer and fewer of them know anything about their portfolios, fewer and fewer of them have watched the news, read the paper, gotten across news stories at all.
And if you get to the very bottom of that lowered bar you get Marama Davidson, who just makes it up on the hoof and says what she likes, bugger the facts or the accuracy. – Kate Hawkesby
Maybe I’m old school in expecting politicians to be interested and informed, maybe the reason the polls are so wacky at the moment reflects the mood and malaise of not just the politicians but the public too. Maybe none of us care anymore? Maybe we’re all just sleepwalking around the place oblivious and unbothered?
I don’t know what it is, but it feels like we’re sinking into an abyss of low bars, and low expectations, and I just hope for the sake of this country, that we all snap out of it, at least by October. – Kate Hawkesby
Chris Hipkins, who must be by now regretting ever agreeing to step into the job in place of the hapless Jacinda Ardern in that gerrymandered deal late last year, claims that although the information on Nash was known by the Prime Minister’s office, because of an official information process, somehow the Prime Minister or those close to her were never told.
Really?
A cabinet minister breaking rules, rules that Chris Hipkins very clearly stated was a reason and a reason all on its own for a sacking, was known by the office of Jacinda Ardern and no one who knew thought that telling someone else in that office was a good idea?
Why would they not do that? Are they thick?
Are they thick beyond words?
Or are they so Machiavellian that they owned it all by themselves and thought if they said nothing and the Prime Minister remained untouched and unscathed, they could save her? – Mike Hosking
What we know for a fact is that Nash’s activities with donors via email;
1) Breached cabinet rules,
2) Was known by the office of the Prime Minister and,
3) Cost him his job, because the breach all by itself is a sackable offence.
If it was sackable this week, why wasn’t it sackable then?
You’ll note the theme of this. There seem many questions but very few answers.
Dare I raise the issue of the most honest, open and transparent Government at this stage?
Or is the hole so deep they’ve dug for themselves that it’s become such a farce that it’s not even worth the reminder? – Mike Hosking
There is not a dairy on that road that hasn’t been at the barrel of a gun or the tipping point of a knife in the last three months. There will only be one dairy left on that road very shortly … they’ve all shut down.
Aggravated crime is up in our location despite what people say, and it’s quite in your face. – Tama Potaka
Look at the median Māori income, it’s significantly lower than the average general income. The cost of living is really jamming the lives of Māori, iwi, whānau, and it’s really hurting and making life difficult.
Maybe 25 percent of Māori own their own homes, that’s a shocking statistic, plus you’ve got rental challenges and people in social housing – it’s really tough out there. – Tama Potaka
We’ve been very firm and clear about what we believe in, but you’ll find if you listen to debates in the House, there’s an absolute fever within the Labour Government to drive co-governance arrangements through lots of different things, and we’ve had to respond to that. – Tama Potaka
A question — if the only people allowed to play trans characters are trans folk, then are we also suggesting the only people trans folk can play are trans characters? Surely that will limit your career as an actor? Isn’t the point of an actor to be able play anyone outside your own world? – Guy Pearce *
* This was a tweet which has now been deleted with the following explanation:
The Stuart Nash scandal took a disturbing turn on Thursday when further revelations about the email that got Nash sacked were published by the Prime Minister’s Office.
Now reduced to its atomic level, the scandal can be distilled to that most fundamental of political questions: Cock up or, as the National Party alleges, “conspiracy”?
Labour argues for the former, National the latter – using the cloak of parliamentary privilege to allege “conspiracy” in Question Time (to the umbrage of Labour).
Unless further evidence emerges – and that isn’t likely – it will be difficult to prove one way or the other. But at first blush it’s very hard to believe that not one of the multiple staff who saw and handled the damning email on multiple occasions ever once understood that it needed to be released, and that it contained a breach of the Cabinet Manual so flagrant it would get Nash sacked. – Thomas Coughlan
The National version of events alleges the email was picked up, its contents understood, and a decision made not to release it, or even to speak of it, to ensure plausible deniability if anyone ever came asking.
That’s a staggering allegation, but the only other explanation is an equally staggering chain of incompetence from Nash’s office to Ardern’s (a side note to that is that this scandal has now tarred the reputation of Ardern’s office just days out from what is meant to be a triumphal valedictory speech to Parliament).
Either explanation leaves the Government facing unsettling questions about probity: How many information requests have seen information withheld that should have been released? And worse still: Whether this was by accident or whether the Government has a broader culture problem around the release of official information. – Thomas Coughlan
The perpetually offended have endowed words with quasi-magical properties.
Today, many people suffer from the delusion that language creates reality and that, consequently, you can change reality by changing the language we use.
This has been most obvious recently when it comes to transgender politics. At its most extreme, trans ideology holds that you can change your gender, and even your actual sex, by mere say-so. Seemingly, you can ‘self-identify’ differently, simply by decreeing it. No surgical intervention is necessarily required. A performative utterance will now suffice. – Patrick West
The guidelines describe women as ‘breastfeeding people’ and ‘people who menstruate’, and refer to ‘sex assigned at birth’ instead of ‘sex’. The phrase ‘sex assigned at birth’ is revealing. It is indicative of a philosophy that believes it is words and utterances, not biology, that create our sexed reality. The current belief in the magical power of words also explains why some people get so angry and upset at being ‘misgendered’. – Patrick West
We are inescapably determined by language – that is the essence of today’s thinking. – Patrick West
This belief in the magical power of words has been with us for decades. It’s behind ideas like ‘trigger warnings’, ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’. Indeed, it is a key driver behind our entire culture of offence-taking. We saw this development in gestation in the 1990s, when political correctness made certain words profoundly taboo. Which words are considered polite euphemisms, and which are deemed beyond the pale, is evolving all of the time. Witness how older white people who use the word ‘coloured’, believing it to be a more courteous word for ‘black’, are now upbraided for such a transgression.
If wokery has its origins in critical theory, and before it postmodernism, this belief in the magical power of words also has its origins in 20th-century academia and philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, academics became obsessed with language and the role it supposedly plays in creating knowledge and thought. – Patrick West
As well as focussing on language, 20th-century academics also started to view culture as key to understanding the human condition. Today, it is culture and language, not reason, that are still regarded as crucial to determining our perception of reality. This has been the consensus for decades.
Today, we ascribe words with supernatural, awesome powers. It’s no wonder the woke are so determined to have our ‘problematic’ speech silenced. In doing so, they are seeking to alter reality itself. – Patrick West
For years now, boys have been warned about the dangers of ‘toxic masculinity’. In general, toxic masculinity is presented less as an aberration than as the norm for men and boys. Masculinity and male behaviour are treated as problems in and of themselves – as if they are intrinsically pathological. No wonder boys resort to dysfunctional and disruptive behaviour, and are attracted to such vile types as Tate – those are the only types who sound like they are listening to them. Our fear of ‘toxic masculinity’ has become self-perpetuating. – Patrick West
Chris Hipkins’ initial success as Labour’s fresh Messiah after Jacinda Ardern’s resignation in January has largely rested on the promise that his party’s focus henceforth would be on “bread-and-butter” issues such as the cost of living. – Graham Adams
This recasting of a prominent member of Ardern’s close-knit kitchen Cabinet as a working-class hero (“I’m just Chippy from the Hutt”) was snappily summarised by the mainstream media as a shift from “woke” to “bloke”. But why journalists would promote that view is hard to understand given that even a cursory review of Hipkins’ role as Education minister makes it clear that Hipkins is an ideologue, of the intensely woke variety. – Graham Adams
Of course, Hipkins’ attempt to rebrand himself as anti-woke could never have lasted very long. He has always been a progressive ideologue and his reflexes are woke. It was only ever going to be a question of time before his attempt to restyle the incompetent Ardern government as a fresh, down-to-earth, pragmatic administration fell apart. And it has.
His nemesis has been the British female-rights activist Posie Parker (real name: Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull), who campaigns for sex-based rights that she believes are being erased by transgender activists. She is firm in her view that it is impossible to change sex. – Graham Adams
If Hipkins’ instincts had really been those of the working-class “boy from the Hutt” as he likes to portray himself, he might have been more aware that the vast majority of New Zealanders outside the civil service, universities and the media would find the proposition that a biologically intact male is actually a woman completely preposterous. They would be surprised that anyone asked them to take the notion seriously. – Graham Adams
Identity politics is at the core of what is popularly (and pejoratively) known as wokeness. The state of being woke can be usefully — if roughly — defined as anyone who subscribes to the view that society is enmeshed in a hierarchy of oppression based on identity. This mostly centres on racial, religious, gender and sexual identity with the priests of woke using a mysterious calculation to assess where any group lies on the list. Generally, being brown and transgender will elevate someone above most others on the ladder of oppression. Hence the many media interviews giving trans activist Shaneel Lal the opportunity to condemn Parker’s visit. – Graham Adams
The government seems to have not yet entirely realised how badly they have played this issue — or its likely electoral ramifications. It’s not a case so much of Hipkins and his ministers having blotted their copybook but, rather, of disastrously revealing the progressive hand they were trying to hide. – Graham Adams
Just as he likes to pretend he wasn’t part of Ardern’s government, he is now pretending that his own statements before Parker’s visit and those by his ministers didn’t set the tone for the media pile-on that followed and the subsequent polarisation. – Graham Adams
The run-up to the violence in Albert Park and its fall-out have laid bare just how shockingly detached from reality Labour’s allies in the Green Party are — not to mention unforgivably careless of the truth, offensively racist, and hostile to the rights of women (that is, those “old-fashioned ones” who have wombs and not penises, as Ricky Gervais put it). – Graham Adams
In short, Hipkins will be a hostage to the Greens. Voters can see clearly that Hipkins will have to indulge them, simply because he will need them. And what will be just as damaging will be the public’s growing awareness that many of his political instincts and policy positions are close to theirs. That includes such contentious topics as hate-speech laws and Māori nationalism, including continuing to insert Treaty obligations into all legislation and policy.
Despite Hipkins’ fervent wish that October’s election will be fought on the cost of living, Posie Parker’s brief visit has ensured it will also be fought on cultural ideology. And with Hipkins’ own record in education sitting there to be used against him — and with the Greens as his political allies — he’s highly vulnerable to Opposition attacks.
And they know it. – Graham Adams
However, it all changed this week, through the way Hipkins dealt with crises surrounding two of his Ministers, Stuart Nash and Marama Davidson. In both instances, he looked panicked, hesitant, and uncertain, and no longer in control of events. – Peter Dunne
But, in reality, Hipkins’ decision looked far less that of a Prime Minister in control, and much more a “mea culpa” for not having dismissed Nash when allegations first arose against him a couple of weeks ago. – Peter Dunne
While Hipkins’ decision this week may have got rid of Nash, it has not got rid of the problem. Investigations are already underway into what other inappropriate actions Nash may have taken as a Minister over the last five years. At the same time, and more worryingly for the Prime Minister, investigations have also begun into the role of the Prime Minister’s Office and what officials there knew about what Nash was up to, and why they chose not to inform both the Prime Minister and his predecessor about what they knew.
The net effect is that the Prime Minister has lost control of the Nash issue. Hipkins does not know what other inappropriate actions by Nash the current investigations may find, or how damaging they may be. And because of the involvement of the Prime Minister’s Office during his predecessor’s time, he now faces accusations of a cover-up by his officials over the matter. In the meantime, the Nash issue looks likely to rumble on for some time to come, disrupting Hipkins’ momentum as it does so. Had Hipkins acted more decisively earlier, and dismissed Nash then, instead of just issuing a series of final warnings, it is likely the matter would have blown over by now. However, now, his initial indecision could up by derailing his government altogether. – Peter Dunne
As with Nash, Davidson’s responses this week suggest it is very likely she has not learned from the incident, and there is no consequent guarantee she will not make similar outbursts in the future, to the frustration of the Prime Minister. At the very least, Hipkins should have stood Davidson down from her role as Minister for Family Violence Prevention, and he should have had an urgent discussion with her co-leader about whether she should be replaced as a Minister altogether. By not acting decisively, Hipkins looks as though he is hoping the Nash affair will let Davidson’s transgressions slide by almost unnoticed.
What is surprising is that Hipkins has not learned from the early stages of the Nash affair and seems set to repeat the same mistakes all over again. As he did with Nash, the Prime Minister is just keeping his fingers crossed Davidson will not transgress again. All of which leaves him looking weak and no longer in control of the government’s narrative.
In just a week, Hipkins’ positive, cheery approach and the confidence it was inspiring, has taken a mighty hit. He no longer looks like a Prime Minister in firm and decisive control of his government and its agenda. His indecision and timidity have left him looking distracted, to the detriment of the government’s agenda. – Peter Dunne
The last thing the Prime Minister needs is to be distracted from the big tasks requiring his attention in that time, by having to put out persistent fires in his own ranks. Yet his initial failures to act decisively in the Nash case, and now potentially the Davidson situation as well, have left him exactly in that situation. Against the backdrop of likely more embarrassing revelations about Nash, and more divisive and explosive comments from Davidson (not to mention any other Ministers yet to go rogue!) the Prime Minister now faces an almighty challenge in trying to recapture the control of the political agenda he and his government were enjoying barely a week ago. – Peter Dunne
Ever feel ignored? Just one of the crowd, crammed in at the back, stuck in the rain with a single row of portaloos and a hotdog van. Cordoned off from the standard covered seating area and the eclectic food stalls. That’s what being part of the vast majority is like these days.
It used to mean getting most of what you wanted and having governments that concentrated on meeting your needs. Not anymore. You pay your taxes, which are just as high, but your rights are diminished and you get less and less back in public services, but are thankful as long as you don’t get abused in the process.
In our modern, woke progressive era minorities have become the new majority. They’re loud and very demanding, and even when you agree with them they still bad-mouth you. The media, our academics and politicians adore them and can’t do enough for them. This encourages even more outlandish claims, some bordering on the ridiculous. – Derek Mackie
Traditional men have been out of fashion for decades but it seems even women are becoming yesterday’s news. The fairer sex is now being targeted for expecting some privacy in public toilets and changing rooms from men who “identify” as women but still have all their boy bits under the dress.
Desperate to be considered female in all respects, they also want to be swaddled in a blanket of inclusivity when it comes to having kids. And not as Dad, who likes bottle-feeding Baby dressed up as Mum, but the full “Call the Midwife” experience.
To the extent that breast-feeding has been declared an elitist activity and renamed “chest-feeding”. Oh yeah, and women no longer become pregnant – “people” do.
This is the woke brigade’s latest charm-less offensive (in both senses of the word) to allow anyone delusional enough, to pretend they can give birth, regardless whether the baby has a way out or not.
Some of the most vociferous supporters of this anti-women campaign and biological balls-up are women, usually in positions of power, who previously made a name for themselves standing up for their own sex. The Green Party and Labour Party are littered with them.
Many have kids so should know exactly how things work down there but that hasn’t stopped them from denying the obvious. – Derek Mackie
Who are the greatest victims of climate change? People flooded out of their homes? Subsistence farmers affected by drought? I would suggest an alternative group: the 56 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds who, according to a 2021 poll, think humanity is doomed by a changing climate. You can see it in tearful schoolchildren boycotting lessons, in Just Stop Oil activists earnestly telling us that billions of people are going to starve, in those who say they will never have children because, in the words of one 27-year-old woman quoted in The Guardian, “I feel I can’t in all conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions”.
Having been a child for the second half of the Cold War I know all about growing up with the threat of doom hanging over us. But I don’t recall my contemporaries traumatised by the prospect of nuclear war. We indulged in black humour, and some went on CND marches and shouted things, but I never saw anyone reduced to a gibbering wreck, as some seem to be over climate change.
The young who feel doomed are not direct victims of climate change, of course, but the hysteria surrounding it. They have been fed daily predictions of doom by people they feel they can trust. – Ross Clark
The reality, though, is that we are not doomed. We should reduce, and as much as technology allows us, try to eliminate carbon emissions. But we are not going to drown, starve or die of thirst because of climate change. Rather, the most immediate danger lies in exaggerating the threats and rendering an entire generation incapacitated by fear. –Ross Clark
The All Blacks and farming define New Zealand. The All Blacks unite and inspire. Farmers provide food and the export economy
They also do their best to improve the environment where research shows that actions will make a difference – whether or not people are watching. – Jacqueline Rowarth
If the children had randomly guessed, their success rate should have been around 25 per cent.
That means we’ve introduced something into the NZ education system that is so bad, our Kiwi kids would have been better off guessing – Dr Audrey Tan
The collectivist Net Zero political project is starting to come apart before our very eyes. Making everyone poor, cold, hungry and confined to small living territories was always a tall political ask, but decades of green virtue-signalling, backed by a ‘settled’ version of science that cannot be debated in polite society, has kept the show on the road. – Chris Morrison
Elections are always tricky when attempting mass collectivisation projects like Net Zero. The science can be settled and admirable ecological objectives can be hijacked, but when the electorate twigs that it is their holiday, their car and their beef steak that is under threat, they can cut up rough. – Chris Morrison
The German online publication Pleiteticker noted that members of the upper middle classes had declared war on the lower middle classes with their destructive climate measures. For years, these groups have been spreading their ideas “in a self-righteous, arrogant and sometimes aggressive manner”. It suggested that outside the Berlin political bubble and other urban feel-good oases, there is not much support for these causes.
Certainly there doesn’t seem to be much support for giving up food. – Chris Morrison
Guardian activist George Monbiot recently called for an end to animal farming. It is difficult to know when this madness will end. The academic economist Ralph Schoellhammer recently noted in an article in Newsweek that climate activism isn’t about the planet – it’s about the boredom of the bourgeoisie. It might be argued that pampered and indulged elites have had it easy for so long that they have lost all track of understanding how food, warmth, shelter and security from the ravages of nature are both produced and secured. – Chris Morrison
It is the perfect farm animal. A pig, covered in fur, that lays eggs and can be milked. The Germans call it the ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’, or an ‘egg-laying wool-milk-sow’. It provides everything you want and tastes great.
It doesn’t exist.
According to its cheerleaders, the Lake Onslow pumped hydro-electricity project will mean we don’t run out of electricity in winter, bring down power prices, and make our electricity system 100% renewable. An ‘Eierlegende Wollmilchsau’. – Josie Pagani
The titanic IOU makes this the most important decision the country will make in this year’s election. We should ask if there is a cheaper way. – Josie Pagani
Energy shortages have consequences. The thinking behind Onslow goes, we need a way to store energy – a battery. When we have excess wind or so much rain that the hydro lakes are spilling water, we would use the energy to push water uphill to fill Lake Onslow. Then, when we are short, we would generate from the stored water.
But if Onslow provides back-up energy when the wind doesn’t blow, which is every couple of days, then it is not going to be full when we have a dry winter. Or, if the water is held back for dry winters, every five years or so, then we can’t also use the same energy to generate on calm evenings. – Josie Pagani
Advocates say Onslow will buy energy when it is cheap, and sell it when it is expensive. Genius. But if the lake must be full and on stand-by, then you have to buy energy when you need to fill it, then sell when the country needs the energy. If prices rise when energy is short, then the market is already pricing shortages. So why isn’t a hydro lake already being kept back for dry years?
The answer is that it costs money to hold fuel for tomorrow that you could use today. Imagine if you bought all the petrol your car needs for the next five years and stored it in a tank, using it over the next five years. You have to pay for the tank. The money to buy that petrol could be used to pay down your mortgage or invest. Forgoing those gains is the cost of storage. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to hold energy in storage.
It is not believable to add so many costs and expect consumer prices to fall. – Josie Pagani
There are better, lower-cost alternatives to get the same outcome – and sooner. New Zealand has wind, geothermal, solar and potentially biomass and carbon capture use and storage (CCUS) options that can produce electricity at competitive prices today and in the future.
If we choose lower cost options, instead of building Onslow, the government would then have another $15.7 billion-plus, to build much more environmentally valuable projects like passenger trains or insulating homes.
Christopher Luxon should not answer a single question about ‘’where the money is coming from’’ until the Government has an answer for where the money is coming from for Lake Onslow. – Josie Pagani
I wholly support immigration from religiously and ethnically diverse countries, with the one proviso that it needs to be carefully managed so as to avoid destabilising the host society. Europe has shown us what can happen when large groups of disaffected migrants congregate in ghettoes.
This doesn’t mean we should want immigrants to assimilate to the point where they become submerged, as was expected of non-British migrants (including my own forebears) until well into the 20th century. Most New Zealanders welcome and applaud the cultural diversity introduced by the liberal immigration policies of the past few decades.
But it’s not too much to expect that immigrants respect the values and institutions of the country that has adopted them, as most do. Those values include, but are not restricted to, freedom of speech and the rule of law (we’re looking at you, Eliana Rubashkyn), equal rights for all and no special treatment on the basis of race, religion or sexual identity (which is what Shaneel Lal and his/her fellow cultists seem to be agitating for, as far as one can tell).
That’s the way we do things here. It’s why this country is seen as a sanctuary by people fleeing despotic regimes. To paraphrase the headline on my 2021 blog post, why move to a new and infinitely better country if your first instinct is to change it? – Karl du Fresne
Free speech guarantees the right to both express perspectives and views, and also to hear others’ perspectives and views. The Police have failed in their duty to protect these foundational rights.
Kiwis expect the police to ensure that they can exercise their rights without being intimidated or attacked. If you allow the Thug’s Veto to take free speech off the table, contested opinions and beliefs don’t simply go away. However, the ability to express them peacefully is undone.
This leaves only far more extreme forms of expression on the table. We are concerned for the tenor of public debate, and the potential for this to produce violence. Free speech is an antidote for this, but it must be protected by the police. – Jonathan Ayling
Christopher Luxon’s suggestion of a “cover-up” on the ninth floor of the Beehive suddenly seem more than quotidian politicking. At minimum, the saga leaves us asking: just how often are OIA requests unscrupulously denied, stonewalled, ruled out of scope, for sheer, naked, political expediency? How often is official information withheld in defiance of the law, in affront to public scrutiny? – Toby Manhire
Hipkins has been focused in his first months as prime minister on pruning the work programme, but this is something that surely needs to be added to the in-tray. What often looks like an esoteric subject of interest to few has suddenly emerged as emblematic of something much bigger, going to the heart of the probity, integrity and basic honesty of government. – Toby Manhire
The rise of cancel culture, which involves public shaming and boycotting individuals or organizations for perceived harmful or offensive behaviour, is a threat to free speech, tolerance and civility. – Bryce Wilkinson
The current, and I fear increasing, polarisation of New Zealanders over the politics of gender and race is not a domestic phenomenon. Its origins are international.
British author and political commentator Douglas Murray’s 2019 book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, examines the ideological origins of this polarisation.
Murray’s key insight is simple. Instead of respecting individuals, the proponents of cancel culture judge them through the lens of an assigned group identity. What counts is not your individual character or what you have to say, but the group others put you in. This is group tribalism.
The next step is to declare one group ‘victims’, and others ‘oppressors’. Religion, skin colour, gender, politics, place of birth, and much else can be used to classify and demean individuals and, thereby, divide society. – Bryce Wilkinson
The point of telling individuals that they are victims because of their group membership is to make them feel resentful. Resent breeds a desire for vengeance. Those emotions foster hostility and intolerance. Marx was fostering revolution.
The ‘virtuous’ term for vengeance is ‘social justice’. Social justice is necessarily different from ‘blind’ justice where all individuals have equal standing. Group justice risks mob “justice”. – Bryce Wilkinson
Neo-Marxists may see individuals with white skin as oppressors, and claim that men oppress women. Similarly, heterosexual individuals are perceived as oppressing non-heterosexual groups, such as gay, lesbian and transgender individuals. These perspectives frame each ‘victim’ group as being oppressed by at least one other demographic group.
Individuality is thereby diminished. Those who opposed Posie Parker but valued free speech likely feel affronted by the intolerant members of ‘their’ supposed tribe. – Bryce Wilkinson
The debate over gender classification has been ongoing for centuries, with men and women traditionally differentiated based on biological factors. However, more recently, the argument has shifted towards self-identification as a determining factor.
There is room for civil discussion on these topics, but that was not what we saw last Saturday.
The events in the Auckland Domain show that the norms of civil society, such as tolerance of different viewpoints and respect for the dignity of the individual, are at risk. The risk was heightened by a member of parliament using the occasion to denigrate all white men as the main progenitors of violence. – Bryce Wilkinson
Scruton bleakly concluded that some simply wished to dismantle capitalism, without offering any viable alternative. Revolution without responsibility seemed to be the goal.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining. The events of last Saturday have induced people who value tolerance and mutual respect to speak up. Those values are worth fighting for.
Hopefully, one day universities in the West will, once again, lead the way in defending those values, rather than leading the charge against them. – Bryce Wilkinson
The Nash scandal is now far wider than the ex-minister, and there are fundamental questions about the role of the Government in allegedly covering up the misuse of public office for vested interests. Labour politicians are calling the suppression of official information a “stuff up” due to “human error” in the PM’s Office, while the National Opposition is calling it a “conspiracy”, and demanding an inquiry into what looks like “corruption”. – Bryce Edwards
In order to believe that Ardern’s Deputy Chief of Staff didn’t understand the problematic nature of the Nash email and the ramifications of releasing it to a journalist investigating political donations, you would have to believe that she was incompetent. If she decided not to elevate the email to her boss, then she would have been in clear dereliction of her duty.
Of course, it is possible that Donald did in fact elevate the issue to either Ardern or the Chief of Staff, and the public isn’t being told of this. Alternatively, Donald was fully aware of the need to keep the Nash email from her superiors, so that there was plausible deniability for the Government. – Bryce Edwards
In dealing with the burgeoning scandal, the Labour Government’s new strategy is to blame everything on Stuart Nash. He certainly deserves blame for his involvement in it all. But he’s also now being used as a convenient fall guy for what seems like unethical behaviour in other parts of the Beehive. – Bryce Edwards
Increasingly political commentators and journalists are using words like “stench” and “rottenness” in regard to the Government’s Nash email scandal. Hipkins will be forced to take the issue much more seriously than he has been if he’s to avoid his reputation being tarnished and his government associated with the smell of corruption. – Bryce Edwards
New Zealand is very proud of our reputation as a country that is consistently ranked as one of the least corrupt in the world. The international transparency index puts us at number two because of our perceived levels of lack of public sector corruption, and we must guard that very carefully. What we have experienced in recent days with a series of revelations reminds us that there is a grey area that Governments can stray into too easily that could put that reputation at risk. The grey bits matter.
I want to step through for the House what has actually gone on here, because this is not a matter about one man, Stuart Nash. This is not a matter about one decision. This is about Ministers in a Government being part of a culture that thinks that if you don’t want the public to know, you work out how to cover it up.
We have witnessed an egregious breach of Cabinet confidentiality in which a Minister shared information with his personal donors for reasons that have not been explained, but reasons that leave us all wondering. We have one group of privileged New Zealanders accessing information that is never available to everyday people. We now know for sure that it wasn’t just Minister Nash and his staff who knew about this; the Prime Minister’s office knew all about it too. They knew about it last year. They were actively consulted about how it should be managed, and they were complicit in the decision to cover it up. – Nicola Willis
The Nash email omission really serves to highlight the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in managing difficult and sensitive OIA requests and Written Parliamentary Questions across ministries. Whilst it is being portrayed as a one-off innocent mistake by two hardworking and trustworthy civil servants, in truth it reveals a small glimpse of the Machiavellian machinations of government. – Thomas Cranmer
“Why me?” is a question that people who have been careful of their health, in particular those who have followed the latest dietary advice (and moreover imbibed often heroic quantities of turmeric, blueberries, fish oil, nuts, broccoli, vitamin C, etc.), ask when struck down, seemingly at random, by some fatal disease. They have always lived healthily and yet are unjustly attacked by fatal disease! The only answer that can truly be given in the present state of knowledge to the question of “Why me?” is “Why not?” – Theodore Dalrymple
Acceptance of what must be borne is as important as not to accept as mere fate an avoidable evil. The difficulty is in distinguishing the avoidable from the unavoidable, to do which requires both knowledge and wisdom, which are not always found together. – Theodore Dalrymple
It is difficult—impossible would probably be a more accurate way of putting it—to be always counting one’s blessings, however great they might be. Nevertheless, it is important to try to do so at least intermittently, or else one would lose sight of them altogether and give in to self-pity, one of the few emotions that can, and often does, last a lifetime. – Theodore Dalrymple
Conspiracy theories are, in every sense, for losers. When your side is losing in ways that you find inexplicable, extraordinary explanations become appealing. The centrists and the sensibles who hold high-status opinions went a long time without losing, but in the past decade have suffered several major defeats. At the same time, conspiratorial thinking has entered the mainstream like never before. Is this a coincidence? A conspiracy theorist would say that there is no such thing as a coincidence and, in this instance, they would be right. – Christopher J. Snowdon
There is no logic to a $100 million dollar hospital build budget cut when the same Government is proposing tens of billions of dollars of spending on light rail and Harbour Bridges.
There is no logic when the same agency is spending $600 million finding efficiencies that may result in 1600 redundancies. There is no doubt in my mind that the money spent now will be recouped many fold in the future.
If this is a government that is getting back to basics, there is nothing more basic than building legacy hospitals. It’s doesn’t happen nearly often enough so heed the people of Dunedin and their mayor.
Do it once and do it right. – Andrew Dickens
just think she was extraordinarily uncomfortable with the media. Even though she appeared to be relaxed she was very uncomfortable with the media. And the more time we had, the less she trusted the media and the media became more sceptical of her and what she had to say. And from her part, it came across as condescending and patronising.
Initially, we had a good relationship. I liked the idea of a young, 37-year-old liberal democrat in the Prime Minister’s chair. I thought this is great for a young country like New Zealand, but it didn’t take long, for me anyway, to realise that it wasn’t quite what it seemed. And she was just ill-equipped to be the prime minister. And, in fact, she had said herself she never wanted to be the prime minister. – Barry Soper
The media didn’t understand Ardern. And she didn’t try to understand the media. – Barry Soper
Those disruptive Posie Parker protesters who opposed her presence in Aotearoa, and who have been congratulating themselves over their raucous, aggressive, bullying behaviour, ought to navel gaze a little and look up the definition of hypocrisy.
Don’t preach love, tolerance and respect, then brazenly do the opposite. It’s not a one-way street. Dignity and self-control, whatever the circumstances, matters.
Issues such as gender identification, queer expression, restroom access, puberty blockers and the like are not simple ones. Pretending they are ignores the complex interplay and influence of cultural perspective, philosophy, theology, gender identification and human biology and physiology.
They’re issues with a wide range of views and opinions across the spectrum. They’ve ignited debates of all sorts of hues across cultures, countries, communities, and social strata. – Sam Clements
Too readily those opposed to, or who question, trans demands, are accused of “hate speech”. The term is grossly overused, often misused and loaded. It’s often employed by individuals or groups who appear blissfully ignorant of the concepts of irony, paradox, cliché, and hypocrisy. – Sam Clements
Listening, learning, exploring, debating, and ultimately respecting difference of opinion, is important, even if we passionately and angrily disagree.
If opinion advocates violence clearly, unambiguously, and implicitly, we have laws that will result in prosecution of those individuals. Attempting to shut down strong opinions, however unpalatable we might find them, including through attempting to enact repressive laws, is not in the interests of a healthy democracy.
People may never reach consensus, but at least they’ll never be accused of lacking decency. And maintaining decency, particularly in the face of indecency, matters. – Sam Clements
We’re all human. But it matters that we never tire in our endeavours to find common ground, however tenuous and fragile that ground may be, or to forget the human.
Such endeavours can produce great long-term good. That is something all passionate believers in liberty should surely agree upon. – Sam Clements
I have loved being part of the mainstream because I love being part of the conversation on issues that concern the bulk of New Zealanders. I know that I am not apart from the great unwashed. I am as ordinary, unremarkable, and mainstream as anyone in the country. If I have any skill as a journalist, it is knowing what concerns the average Jo/Joe.
And yet for the past three years, I have struggled to get stories published – not polemic, but evidence-based stories – on an issue I know concerns many of these people and that is the impact of gender ideology on women and young people.
After the visit of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull this weekend and the debacle that ensued, I realise that the New Zealand mainstream media no longer exists. – Yvonne Van Dongen
Apart from one writer who wrote in favour of free speech, the media here universally panned Keen, repeating the slurs of her critics and the contents of a rubbish Wiki entry, which call her a an anti-trans, white supremacist, Nazi simply because of the presence of some LARPing louts doing a Sieg Heil salute at an Australian gathering of women. Their gatecrashing action was dismissed by both the Australian Jewish Association and New Zealand Jewish Council as nothing to do with Keen and publicly denounced by Keen herself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the writers and commentators in the media were male.
So RIP New Zealand mainstream media. They have joined the ranks of the political and public service urban elite pushing a state-sponsored religion – gender ideology. Gender ideology is an unverifiable belief system. There is no such thing as gender. In my view it is a construct and has no business being taken seriously, least of all by the media, politicians, academia, and the public service (as is currently the case). Not to mention with the groups who should be protecting women, such as the National Council of Women, the Midwives Council, and Girl Guides. I know from speaking to friends in many of these groups, certainly those in the public service, that they are too scared to speak out against this ideology, fearing for their jobs. – Yvonne Van Dongen
New Zealand police, presumably desperate to keep their reputation as diverse and inclusive, adopted a hands-off approach while a small group of women were mobbed by a much larger angry crowd. It pains me to say it but the police have clearly been politicised by this government. – Yvonne Van Dongen
Reporting on this debacle, one in the media had the gall to report the event as a ‘soundscape of resistance thick with joy’ while Green MP Chloe Swarbrick said on Twitter that thousands of New Zealanders knew what they experienced yesterday and ‘overwhelmingly that was love and affirmation’.
Women at the event were scared. An older woman was punched in the face by an activist while a pregnant marshal feared for her safety and unborn child as the protesters surrounded the rotunda where she was stationed. She had to be helped out of the melee by a male photographer. – Yvonne Van Dongen
It’s not just gender ideology that is not examined fairly in the media, there are other issues New Zealanders know are being suppressed, such as differing viewpoints and information on the curriculum refresh, the teaching of science in schools and universities, co-governance, Three Waters and anything to do with Māori politics. The fear is that such stories will fuel racism just as an examination of gender ideology and trans activism is believed to fuel transphobia. Perversely, the suppression of debate on issues like this is dividing the nation like never before. – Yvonne Van Dongen
What happened on Saturday was avoidable. It was fomented by politicians and mainstream media. They could not have done more to fan the flames of opposition and fear of a small British woman wanting to provide a space where she and other women could talk about what is happening to women and girls. Then the inevitable was allowed to unfold by hands-off police.
Before she arrived here, Keen said New Zealand was ‘insane’. Sadly, this proved to be prophetic. – Yvonne Van Dongen
We have indeed contributed to the global debate about transgender rights – but only by showcasing how intolerant this group is, and how violently they react to ideas that challenge the perceived orthodoxy in our South Pacific hermit kingdom. It has cast a spotlight not only on the violent undertones that exist within parts of the transgender movement; but also on New Zealand’s own appalling record of violence, particularly with regard to domestic violence.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Yes, there is free speech in New Zealand, but there is very little robust debate about difficult or controversial topics. Discussion is routinely closed down by slurs, stigmatizing language and official complaints. Local media often avoids politically or socially sensitive topics. – Thomas Cranmer
Ask Dawkins or Keen about free speech in New Zealand. Ask them how intellectually curious we are. Now, thanks to an unruly mob in Albert Park, many millions of people around the globe have seen how tolerant New Zealand is when it comes to engaging in public discussion.
At the very least, if politicians and leaders of institutions don’t want to pick sides in social issues, they should provide the space in which proper debate can be had by those willing to discuss these issues – whether in a lecture theater or a park. – Thomas Cranmer
The reason we’re getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out.
There’s a whole set of debates where ordinary New Zealanders are simply not seeing their views represented in politics. – Stephen Franks
Unless someone’s inciting violence, I’m all for free speech it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. I want to hear from people I detest. – Stephen Franks
I think it left us better informed that this is an extremely divisive issue.
Will they be better acquainted with the arguments on either side? No, probably not – Juliet Moses
There are people who come here and speak…who I profoundly disagree with, people who indulge in antisemitism…. but my view is that it is generally better to let people have their say, as uncomfortable as that might be, than not let them in.
My concern is that if we can’t have these discussions, civil or even uncivil dialogue, it plays into the hands of extremists on both sides and I really don’t think that is a healthy place for us to be as a society. – Juliet Moses
New Zealand is a lost cause insofar as science education is concerned, for the government and educational establishment is doing all it can to make local indigenous “ways of knowing” (mātauranga Māori, or MM) coequal with modern science, and taught as coequal. This will, in the end, severely damage science education in New Zealand, and drive local science teachers (and graduate students) to other countries. It won’t help the indigenous Māori people, either, as it will not only give them misconceptions about what is empirically “true” versus what is fable, legend, or religion, but also make them less competitive in world science—both in jobs and publishing.
Now, I would be the first to admit that indigenous knowledge is not completely devoid of empirical knowledge. Indigenous people have a stock of knowledge acquired by observation as well as trial and error. This includes, of course, a knowledge of the indigenous plants and their medical and nutritional uses, when the best time is to catch fish or pick berries, and, in perhaps its most sophisticated version, the ability the Polynesians to navigate huge expanses of water. (That, of course, was also done by trial and error, and must have involved the demise of those who didn’t do it right—something that’s never mentioned.)
Is observational knowledge like this “science”? In one sense, yes, for you can construe “science” as simply “verified empirical knowledge”. But modern science is more than that: it’s also its own “way of knowing”—a toolkit of methods, itself assembled by trial and error, for obtaining provisional truth. – Jerry Coyne
Because modern science comprises not just facts but a method codified via experience, indigenous knowledge generally fails the second part, for it lacks a method for advancing knowledge beyond experience and verification. Indeed, I know of no indigenous science that has a standard methodology for ascertaining truth. Yes, various plants can be tested for their efficacy in relieving ailments, but this is done by trial and error—in contrast to the double-blind tests used to assess the effects of new drugs and medicines.
Still, indigenous knowledge can contribute to modern science. This can involve bringing attention to phenomena that, when tested scientifically, can be folded into the domain of empirical fact. Quinine and aspirin were developed in this way. And, of course, local ecological knowledge of indigenous people can be valuable in helping guide modern science and calling attention to phenomena that might have otherwise been overlooked. Nevertheless, what we have is experiential knowledge on one hand—a species of knowledge that rarely leads to testable hypotheses—and modern science on the other, which is designed to lead to progress by raising new testable hypotheses.
The concept of “indigenous science”, then, baffles me, especially if, as in New Zealand, it’s seen as coequal to science. It’s not, though, for it lacks a methodology beyond trial and error for determining what’s true. But because of what philosopher Molly McGrath called “the authority of the sacred victim.”, indigenous “ways of knowing” are given special authority because they’re held by people regarded as oppressed. This leads their “ways of knowing” to be overrated as competitors to modern science. Indeed, MM is a pastiche of real empirical knowledge, but also of religion, theology, ideology, morality, rules for living, authority, and tradition. This kind of mixture characterizes many indigenous “ways of knowing”, making it necessary, when teaching them as science, to not only distinguish “fact” from “method,” but to winnow the empirical wheat from the ideological and spiritual chaff. – Jerry Coyne
Now I’m not sure what’s included in “ethnomathematics”. If it’s just approaching teaching math but using examples familiar to indigenous folk, then it’s not an alternative form of mathematics but a method of teaching. If it really adds stuff to the knowledge of mathematics, I’d like to know what. (Be always wary when you see the term “holistic approach” applied to education. And the notion that ethnomathematics has something to do with “social justice” scares the bejeezus out of me.) Perhaps ethnomathematics is mathematics + ideology, in which case it’s not an eye that sees, but a hand that propagandizes. – Jerry Coyne
Stuart Nash getting in trouble – again – has reminded the public that changing the General doesn’t change the troops. And if you didn’t like them before, you probably won’t like them now.
Hipkins must take some responsibility for the Nash saga getting to this stage. He should’ve sacked Nash two weeks ago. Nash was always going to cause more trouble. It was so predictable that this column actually predicted it a fortnight ago. The only surprising element was how quickly it proved true.
Hipkins is trying desperately to paint this latest indiscretion – the email to donors – as Nash’s most egregious yet. He’s hoping to make it sound completely different to the other indiscretions, to excuse his previous lack of discipline.
But in truth, it wasn’t Nash’s biggest mistake. Yes, an email full of secrets sent to men who donate money is a massive error of judgment. But line that up next to the fact that Crown Law considered prosecuting him for contempt of court and it’s not close. And yet Nash survived.– Heather du Plessis-Allan
But the Marama Davidson drama is probably more damaging to Labour, even though she isn’t a Labour MP.
Her “white cis men” comments created huge amounts of anger. Far more anger than the Nash affair.
There were calls for an apology. Hipkins could’ve demanded one. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Hipkins could’ve – if he wanted to – forced an apology out of her. He is the PM. She is one of his ministers.
But he didn’t. He said those were words he wouldn’t have used. Bringing race into it was “not particularly helpful”. Early on, that was enough. But when Davidson started doubling down and refusing to apologise, Hipkins’ action was not enough anymore. Because she was so publicly defiant and because she is a minister, his inaction looked at the very least like a lack of concern, at worst like private agreement.
There are a fair few white men and their wives pretty upset at those comments. Hipkins will need white men and their wives to win the election. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Again, that was probably not the smartest distraction. Not this week anyway. It was just another reminder that Hipkins is dealing with the same old crew, with the same old tired tricks that Jacinda Ardern had to deal with. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The reality is that most of the high-profile initiatives she had either went backwards or Chris Hipkins has essentially ripped them up. – Sir John Key
It is not the Opposition that has absolutely taken the knife to her policies, it’s her successor. – Jim Bolger
All disasters. It has just been a shambles. It’s sad but true.
“I lifted the pension from 60 to 65 and it certainly wasn’t welcome but you can manage these things – I was re-elected the next time as well. – Jim Bolger
If you look at the broader issue of race relations, and primarily because of how she mishandled the introduction of co-governance, she has left New Zealand’s race relations in a much worse position.
Her policy failure, her inability to explain what she meant with co-governance, has meant we are going to be more divided on race than we have been for years and years and years.
That is evident everywhere now. People are anxious, concerned, worried, uncertain …and that’s frankly just a failure of leadership in a vital area of society. And Jacinda didn’t provide it. – Jim Bolger
We are now quite divided on racial issues and that is tragic. And it is going to take quite a while to build back. – Jim Bolger
One of the peculiarities of our age is the ferocity with which intellectuals and politicians defend propositions that they do not—because they cannot—believe to be true, so outrageous are they, such violence do they do to the most obvious and evident truth. – Theodore Dalrymple
Among the propositions defended with such suspect ferocity is that men can change straightforwardly and unambiguously into women, and vice versa. Now everyone accepts that they can change into something different from ordinary men and women, and can live as if they were of the opposite of their birth sex; moreover, there is no reason to abuse or otherwise maltreat them if they do, and kindness and human decency require that we do not humiliate them or make their lives more difficult than they are. But this is not at all the same as claiming that those who take hormones and have operations actually are the sex that they choose, or that it is right to enshrine untruth in law and thereby force people to assent to what they know to be false. That way totalitarianism lies.
To propound and defend ideas that you know are false is intellectually and morally frivolous, but it lacks the usual enjoyment that frivolity is supposed to supply. It is combined with earnestness but not with seriousness: one thinks of the Austrian saying under the Habsburgs, “the situation is catastrophic but not serious.” – Theodore Dalrymple
If we try to look on this episode with the eye of a future social historian, on the assumption (by no means certain) that western societies will someday come to their senses and that their social historians will be at least moderately sensible, what will we hypothesise? How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves to an unprecedented extent upon scientific enquiry, and that had a higher percentage of educated people than ever before in human history, nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities? What could have possessed them? – Theodore Dalrymple
Pity and compassion, formerly Christian virtues, are the virtues that run wild in the modern social liberal’s mind. Indeed, one might almost say that he has become addicted to them, for they are what give meaning and purpose to his life. He is ever on the lookout for new worlds not to conquer, but to pity. In his mind, pity and compassion require that he adopts without demur the point of view of the person he pities, for otherwise, he might upset him; he must not criticise, therefore. In short, if need be, he must lie, and he frequently ends up deceiving himself as well as others. And if he has power, he will turn lies into policy. – Theodore Dalrymple
From our cities to our remote rural areas, cones have become a fixture of the New Zealand landscape, clogging up footpaths, roads and even beaches.
The cone-quest of our islands has become a national phenomenon. It would not be an exaggeration to say that New Zealand is starting to look like a giant VLC media player.
Effectively, road cones are New Zealand’s new national flower. Sadly, they have also begun competing with native kiwi birds and other local fauna. – Dr Oliver Hartwich
Where we previously advertised our country to the world as “100% pure”, we should adopt a new marketing slogan: “New Zealand: Come for the scenery, stay for the cone-versations!” – Oliver Hartwich
As they say on Karangahape Road: “Why did the orange cone cross the road? To annoy the other side!”
The invasion of road cones calls for urgent action. It will take imagination and courage to drive them back, and we are glad to see Mayor Brown on the case. Politicians like him really think outside the cone. – Oliver Hartwich
To address the cone-undrum, the government should recruit an elite army of Cone Collectors. Dressed in bright orange uniforms, they will blend right in as they do their dangerous work of removing cones from our roads.
The cone harvest can be used to build new tourist attractions. Conehenge anyone? Or a Cone of Liberty? Maybe even a Millennium Cone? And Cone-tiki tours between them?
As New Zealanders take back cone-trol of their cities from their orange overlords, they will know who to thank.
His name is not orange but Brown. Wayne Brown. – Oliver Hartwich
We need a real conversation. One informed by reliable research. One in which people with strongly differing viewpoints listen to one another with respect. One in which no one has decided the outcome from the very start.
That is how we do things in a democracy – even if some of our public servants seem to have forgotten it. And there’s nothing more important to democracy than a sound education system. – Michael Johnston
Recent trials of new standards for NCEA show that two thirds of our 15- and 16-year-olds cannot write at a basic adult standard. One third cannot read at such a standard, and nearly half lack basic numeracy skills.
In large part, the reason for these shocking results is that we have been using teaching methods skills that fly in the face of scientific evidence on how people learn. In recent decades the Ministry has dictated an approach based on ideology rather than evidence.
The solution is clear. We must urgently start following the best evidence on teaching literacy and numeracy. These skills need to be taught in a structured way, taking careful account of the limitations of human memory and attention. – Michael Johnston
We need a new curriculum that specifies, in some detail, the knowledge that children need, in order to learn to think independently and develop their ideas in a sound way. A high-quality curriculum would also structure the order in which knowledge is taught and learned much more effectively than our current one. – Michael Johnston
We might expect that teachers-in-training would acquire an understanding of the scientific evidence on how children learn. Unfortunately, most training providers do not equip them with this knowledge.
The criteria for teachers to register with the Teaching Council are the right pressure point to change this. To be granted a teaching certificate, new teachers should have to demonstrate such knowledge, as well as their ability to apply it in the classroom. Teacher training institutions would have to ensure that their graduates hold, and can apply, this knowledge. – Michael Johnston
We’re having a free-speech moment. It isn’t going well. – Damien Grant
We no longer engage in debate but in a tit-for-tat escalation of tactical moves to deny those we disagree with the opportunity to be heard or to punish them if they speak out of turn. – Damien Grant
We have graduated to a cultural landscape where commercial intimidation and even physical violence is permissible against people if their views are deemed unacceptable by the cultural, political and media leadership.
Those in positions of responsibility may wish to reflect on this, rather than stoking further escalation. – Damien Grant
It may have looked ok on a whiteboard but in practice it looked like the half-baked cake it was.
If there was any kind of consumer guarantee in the contracts for advice from the consultants involved, you would be calling on it. – Rob Campbell
The same people in the same or essentially similar roles leading change showed an inadequate appreciation of the scale and depth of change required,. – Rob Campbell
The last thing we need is another winter of discontent, but that is exactly what’s coming. A complete change of focus is required and Te Whatu Ora needs to make keeping the nurses it has as its first priority – and that means showing them respect and paying them adequately.
Next we have got to put massive resources into recruiting more nursing staff into training now, and removing the financial and logistical barriers that stop many nursing students graduating.
Then we’ve got to sort out long-standing pay problems like Pay Equity for Te Whatu Ora nurses, and Pay Parity right across the health sector. We cannot afford not to do this or there won’t be any nurses left, and we’ll have no one ready to replace those who have already moved on. – Paul Goulter
New Zealand has “Zombie Educationalists” who deserve nothing like the same level of respect. As soon as someone – other than Labour – releases an education policy they stir into action thrust limbs upwards through the dank earth to make proclamations that make me feel as despondent for them, and the people they may influence, as Solomon was in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.
“All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
The background to the reanimation of two such EdZombies was National having the temerity to acknowledge that our education system (i.e. bureaucracy, schools, teachers) are currently failing to lift ability and outcomes for students – with huge personal and societal consequences. – Alwyn Poole
What he fails to see is that he is outright bagging the quality and competence of every primary school teacher in NZ. He is telling us that they cannot make teaching the basics and then, thoroughly, expanding upwards, exciting and worthwhile. Frankly – he is calling the primary teacher work-force a bunch of unimaginative dullards. He claims the position of Professor of some form of the Arts but cannot see the excitement of reading and writing.
What he also fails to see is that in many areas of learning – music, tennis and all sports, Maths, driving, … the list is endless – that a huge amount of significant, purposeful, practice is required. – Alwyn Poole
Why was our education system comparatively strong in the 1970s – 80s? Largely because our family and social institutions were strong, and our schooling system (with some notable exceptions) has not pivoted to the societal changes/decline. Both parenting and education can, and must, become world class in NZ. – Alwyn Poole
The curriculum is a blueprint for what we teach in our schools. It should provide a framework for teachers to guide young people through the school system.
It should provide detailed indicators, so teachers can clearly identify who is on track, and who needs additional assistance.
It should also ensure the domain of knowledge that we expect all of our schools to teach is adequately covered.
New Zealand’s curriculum hardly qualifies as such a framework. It’s threadbare. There is very little detail to help teachers guide students. – Michael Johnston
The lack of specificity in the curriculum means that teachers must spend more time developing content than they should have to.
Even more seriously, the actual content taught varies widely across schools. Regrettably, there is nothing national about the New Zealand Curriculum. – Michael Johnston
Instead of clear guidance for each school year, the curriculum is divided into three-year bands. That makes it difficult for teachers, let alone parents, to tell whether or not a student is on track.
Another problem is that the curriculum includes a distraction, called the “key competencies”. These are things like “managing self” and “relating to others”. They don’t need to be in the curriculum because they don’t need to be taught directly.
Personal responsibility and social skills are acquired through interacting with others in a community. Schools should be set up to foster this kind of knowledge. An orderly and respectful school environment fosters interpersonal skills.
But trying to teach this kind of knowledge directly isn’t effective. – Michael Johnston
Our curriculum over-emphasises knowledge that doesn’t need to be taught and underspecifies knowledge that does.
It’s hopelessly vague when it comes to signposts for students’ progress. Not all professors of education agree that the curriculum needs reform, though. – Michael Johnston
In response to O’Connor, I say that there’s nothing duller and more narrowing for a child than being at school and not learning. He seems to have overlooked that far too many of our young people, especially those from poorer communities, are leaving school without basic adult levels of literacy and numeracy.
If children don’t learn sufficient numeracy at primary level, the path to success in mathematics and science at secondary school is closed off. Not learning to read and write closes off the path to almost everything.
Far from “narrowing” the curriculum, a focus on “the basics” at primary school, is what opens the curriculum up later on. Besides, National’s policy for two hours per day to be spent teaching literacy and numeracy still leaves about three hours for art, music, P.E., science and more.
As for Cooke’s argument that yearly progress markers assume all children will learn at the same rate, yearly curriculum expectations provide a mechanism to identify students who are falling behind, so that they can receive the additional teaching and support they need. – Michael Johnston
What schools need is a curriculum that focuses on the core knowledge that is every New Zealander’s birthright.
It must be specified in enough detail for teachers to be able to take a reasonably consistent approach across the country.
It must include enough information about what is expected every year for schools to be able to identify students who are falling behind and help them to catch up. – Michael Johnston
This approach has been called “tired”, “cliched”, “right-wing” and ‘ideological’. But it’s hard to see why wanting every child in New Zealand to have an equal chance to succeed at school is any of these things.
Any assertion that such a curriculum would be dull and narrow confuses curriculum with teaching.
The curriculum simply specifies the knowledge that is to be learned. It’s our teachers who bring it to life.
A high-quality curriculum would be an enormous support to teachers, especially those early in their careers. It would free their time to explore ways to teach engagingly and effectively, and provide clear indications of which students need more help. – Michael Johnston
More than two-thirds of New Zealanders actively avoid news coverage and more than one in ten do so regularly. – Gavin Ellis
Biased and unbalanced reporting is cited as the strongest reason by those who express distrust in the news (82 per cent), followed by the political leaning of the newsroom (80 per cent). However, both these results must be treated with caution as they may reflect the respondents’ own biases and political leanings: If the media do not reflect my world view, there must be something wrong with them.
Less subjective, however, is the belief that the news is too opinionated and lacks factual information, a view held by almost three-quarters of those who do not have a lot of trust in news. Almost half believed the range of voices in the news was too narrow and represented society’s elites.
There is widespread – and growing – concern over standards of journalism. “Poor journalism” was defined as making factual mistakes; dumbed-down stories and misleading headlines/clickbait. More than 90 per cent of those surveyed were concerned about “stories where facts are spun or twisted to push a particular agenda”, and almost that number were concerned about “stories that are completely made up for political or commercial reasons that look like news stories but turn out to be advertisements”.
Add in lack of transparency and the perception that government funding subverts journalists (views held by more than 60 per cent of the ‘untrusting’) and it is easy to see why only 41 per cent of people believe the media hold the Government to account. And a slightly larger proportion disagreed that the media are free from undue political or government influence. A mere six per cent strongly agreed with the proposition that we have independent media. – Gavin Ellis
Oases of good journalism undoubtedly remain but it is high time news organisations came together to reclaim the desert. The JM&D report sends clear signals to them that they need to return to the tenets of good journalism if they are to restore public trust. That means putting public interest news values ahead of analytics, clearly separating fact from opinion, taking the initiative over disinformation, and provide fair forums for legitimate debate.
Above all, it means reflecting a more balanced view of the world in which we live. Too often the selection and treatment of news leaves the impression of a world filled with nothing but crime, conflict, calamity, and a contest of wills. All of that exists, but not to the exclusion of the other things that sit on the spectrum of life. – Gavin Ellis
The aim of adding criminal offences to the OIA is not really to prosecute those involved in improperly withholding information or improperly pressuring others to withhold information (although if they do, we should), but adding criminal penalties gives public servants involved in these decisions something stronger than the public sector code of conduct to point to when pushing back against pressure to withhold.
Any criminal offence would not cover simple errors, or even incompetence. That can continue to be dealt with through ombudsman criticism. Only those who deliberately and knowingly breach their OIA should face the risk of prosecution and conviction. But those who do should fear more than being mildly criticised by the ombudsman. – Graeme Edgeler
The idea that Stuart Nash’s emails to donors in his electorate is something he was sending as an MP isn’t laughable. Ministers don’t run for election, candidates do, and they’re running to become MPs. Constituent work and contact with donors is something people don’t do as ministers. When political parties auction off things like morning tea with the prime minister, they tend to auction off morning tea with Chris Hipkins, leader of the Labour Party. The ombudsman may still find the decision was correct, but there are at least strong indications the information related to Nash’s emails that he is aware of as a minister – the information he released about confidential cabinet discussions is something he is only aware of because he attended cabinet. This was not information that the prime minister then announced at a media conference after the decision was made.
I suspect what happened here would not qualify (though that may depend on what the ombudsman uncovers), but the existence of repeated questions in this area suggests more teeth are needed when dealing with deliberately recalcitrant ministers. – Graeme Edgeler
Shaneel is dividing the community and is an opportunistic narcissist, – Jacquie Grant
. . .meaningful dialogue has always seemed to be the right way to go. But for Shaneel to make statements like white trans have downtrodden people of colour trans is downright offensive and just so wrong.
We all mixed and work together. We just never saw any difference in the colour of our skin. – Jacquie Grant
Back in those days we didn’t see the colour of anyone’s skin being any sort of barrier and to state as Shaneel has that white queens stood over people of colour is a figment of a very vivid imagination. – Jacquie Grant
Keir Starmer is taking women for fools. He imagines he’s solved the contentious question of how to protect women’s rights while meeting the demands of gender dysphoric men and trans rights activists with his ingenious formulation: 99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis. That, he thinks, will reassure anxious floating voters and get his new target, Stevenage Woman, on side. Of course, he tells us, incredulous that anyone should suppose a sensible person like him would believe anything else, being a woman is biological. Well, mostly. Until it isn’t. There is the little matter of that 0.1 per cent.
And with that declaration Sir Keir abandons all safeguarding and flings the door of women’s spaces, sports, showers, jails, awards and intimate care needs wide open to every male who fancies walking through it. If some women have a penis, and any man can self-identify as a woman, which is Labour’s policy, then women lose all privacy, rights and protections. Some 48,000 men identify as trans women. It is impossible for women to distinguish between the genuinely dysphoric men who just wish to live peacefully as women, and men with bad intent. There is no marker. Voyeurs, exhibitionists, sexual fetishists, predators and men who enjoy making women uneasy and humiliated have the right to enter any female space once sex segregation has been abandoned. –
There’s no “somehow” or “could” about the rolling back of women’s rights. It’s already a reality, one that huge numbers of women are frightened and furious about. – Jenni Russell
Schools are forcing girls to use unisex loos where boys photograph them under the partitions, break open the doors or harass them by listening for the crackle of sanitary products, leaving girls too scared to use lavatories during the day. Women are being described by the NHS as “menstruators” and “uterus-havers”. A handful of rapists and male murderers have been placed in women’s jails. So many male sex offenders are claiming to be female that ministry of justice figures show trans women appear five times as likely to commit these crimes as men.
Mediocre male sportsmen are identifying as women and seizing women’s top titles as swimmers, weightlifters, cyclists and runners. Trans women, even those who identify as women on some days of the week such as Credit Suisse’s Pips Bunce, are being listed among Women of the Year and given women’s prizes. Women who protest are mercilessly abused online, forced to move home after threats, driven out of jobs, dropped by publishers and producers, reported to the police for tweets saying biology exists. Women’s groups who meet to discuss women’s needs are targeted, assaulted and shut down by masked trans rights activists howling “punch a terf, kill a Nazi” or “suck my lady dick”. Venues that take them get their windows smashed and reviews trashed.
This is not what most MPs envisaged when the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004. It was conceived of as a polite legal fiction that would only ever apply to a very small group, fewer than 6,000 people, who were genuinely troubled by the mismatch between their bodies and their identities. Instead its abandonment of biological sex divisions has become a Trojan horse, attacking women’s achievements and protections by confusing the reality of sex with the social roles associated with it — gender. – Jenni Russell
Many women are astounded by men’s insouciance about the removal of women’s single-sex spaces. I’ve realised why. Good men don’t know why they matter, and predatory men are eager to erode them. Decent men don’t realise how constantly wary women have to be of the small percentage of men who would assault them if they could. They have no idea how vigiliantly women have to move through the world, alert to flashers, stalkers, gropers, men who track behind them as they run, block their path on winter evenings, drug their drinks, stick hands up their skirts in crowded concerts. It is only in single-sex spaces that women are free from the exhausting necessity of being on guard.
This is why sex cannot be fudged as Starmer imagines. Legal fictions have been a disaster for women. Trans women should be accepted as trans women, with their own spaces and awards. – Jenni Russell
Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom.
Under the proposal, professors would have been required to warn students in advance about “traumatic” content that touched on topics like self-harm, domestic, racial or transphobic violence and homophobic harassment. – Wall Street Journal
The entire idea of a trigger warning for speech is antithetical to the idea of a university, and in a previous age no one would have taken it seriously. But this is era of woke censorship, so it’s news when campus leaders push back, as they have at Cornell. – Wall Street Journal
Research has shown that trigger warnings aren’t effective at helping people manage their anxiety, and including such warnings in an academic environment encourages emotional fragility and intellectual cowardice. It also teaches students and faculty to self-censor.
Cornell’s position is good news, but these bad ideas will recur as long as the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy governs academia, pushing the notion that honest speech and debate are traumatic. If universities want to reclaim real intellectual openness on campus, they have to help students get comfortable with being uncomfortable. – Wall Street Journal
The lobbying business is often described as the wild west because we don’t have the specific regulation that Washington and Australia have. So what. Where is the specific Government regulation of print journalists, the clergy, academics and farmers? We have occupational regulation of say carpenters for good reasons, but I wonder how you regulate good behaviour for lobbyists. What I do know is shonky operators will be found out quickly and will not be successful. Like every Kiwi, lobbyists have to comply with the laws of the land and the Speakers rules for Parliament.
The problem with any new law is the risk of perverse consequences and unnecessary costs. For instance a register of official lobbyists might end up creating barriers to entry for say a PR firm that might wish to lobby only once every five years. – Barrie Saunders
The Parliamentary press gallery has a remarkably modest understanding of lobbying. They don’t seem to appreciate that much lobbying takes place outside Parliament. It’s often more cost effective to influence the government official who drafts the first discussion document that ultimately leads to a Bill, than make a learned submission on the Bill itself. Much Government policy is not found in legislation but in regulations, standards and decisions made by Government officials. Helping shape these is the work of skilled lobbyists who have the trust and confidence of Government officials, whose only motivation is to produce good policy that works.
I was quite frankly astonished when PM Jacinda Ardern got consultant lobbyist GJ Thompson to set up her office after the 2017 election and was Chief of Staff for a while before returning to his firm. Even more astonishing was the media’s relatively passive acceptance of this amazing decision. Only Victoria University’s Dr Bryce Edwards, complained loudly about it.
I am equally astonished by the way the media uses consultant lobbyists as political commentators. With the exception of Matthew Hooton, most of these lobbyist commentators run fairly predictable party lines, with the left of centre being very consistent. I do not believe lobbyists should be used in this way because they will have many agendas which go beyond the narrow interests of specific clients.
RNZ likes to think it operates on a higher moral plane because its advertising free and its statutory requirements. To me its use of lobbyists as political commentators is a disgrace. There are plenty of journalists and others who could be used to comment on politics and it’s much better the pool is widened so we don’t get the same old running the same old lines.
Will Government act? The decision to ask the Speaker to end issuing swipe cards for consultants etc is almost meaningless. – Barrie Saunders
What’s not discussed by commentators is the positive role lobbyists play whether industry based or consultants. They can iron out dopey ideas clients often have. They also aggregate views of their members or clients and ensure decision makers are presented with coherent policy packages. These lower transaction costs for the Government and help improve the policy making process. It’s part of the consultation process and great for democracy. – Barrie Saunders
The Government’s plan to impose a UK-wide ban on the sale of new, pure petrol cars in just six years and nine months’ time is insanely detached from reality. The country and the technology are nowhere near ready for a full roll-out. Sticking with this preposterous timetable will impoverish and inconvenience millions and trigger a seismic, anti-green popular revolt. – Alister Heath
Until now, the costs of decarbonising society have been disparate or borne by industry – one reason why voters remain supportive. Fuel duty has been frozen. Home energy bills have gone up, but other factors have had a far greater impact on the cost of living. Taxes on long-haul flights have been hiked, hurting British-Asian and African communities, but the general public hasn’t really noticed. Voters have accepted the shift to reusable bags and paper straws and are happy to recycle. But those were easy – in some cases, costless – tweaks that haven’t required massive behavioural change and they fooled our elites into believing that voters will put up with endless misery to go green. They won’t.
Given enough time, a seamless transition to zero-emissions cars that don’t impact a person’s quality of life or their pocket is eminently possible. The same cannot be said of the proposed shift to heat pumps, or decarbonised air travel, or low-carbon construction, or reduced meat diets. These are likely to end up being explosively expensive and unpopular. We will eventually crack a new way of powering planes, but not a commercially viable one by 2050. The public will go wild if every home is forced to stump up a five-figure sum to retrofit a heating system that doesn’t even work properly when it gets really cold, or if foreign holidays are effectively banned.
The growing civil disobedience and furious rejection of low-traffic neighbourhoods and other anti-car diktats is a harbinger of things to come, as is the anti-Ulez movement which is galvanising many outer London and Home Counties demographics. – Alister Heath
There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.
The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause. They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.
Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. – Alister Heath
The public backs the first approach, not the latter. The net zero fanatics have already overreached. Our politicians must break with these extremists, or they will unleash a popular revolt that will make Brexit look like a gathering of Davos technocrats. – Alister Heath
You should be marrying your best friend. – Donald Carter
You stay home, you have the orchard, the vege garden, the chooks and you eat what you grow and you survive, – Joy Carter
If you’ve got someone to confide in it makes the journey a lot lighter. . . Through it all the man upstairs never lets you down. – Donald Carter
So far in 2023, National has been releasing a new policy every couple of weeks and Labour has been having a Cabinet Minister break the rules every couple of days. – David Farrar
The Reserve Bank’s surprise – probably erroneous – decision to throw a 50 basis point official cash rate increase on to the cost-of-living fire has made the job of the finance minister that much harder, as he tucks his next Budget into bed.
The decision will make jobs more precarious, depress house prices even more and potentially create a higher summit for mortgage rates … just as the peak appeared to be in view. – Vernon Small
Alongside the recovery from the recent floods and cyclones, the cost of living crisis is the hungriest beast in the Cabinet room and Adrian Orr and his team have made it harder to feed.
There is only so much that half-priced public transport fares and petrol excise cuts can do. – Vernon Small
Someone must be very proud of the slogan “See it, say it, sorted”, for it is relayed countless times — ad nauseam, in fact — over public address systems in British trains and stations.
The slogan has the effect that a squeaky piece of chalk had on me as a child — it sent shivers down my spine and made me clench my jaw and grind my teeth. It is preceded by “If you see anything that doesn’t look right, call the British Transport Police …” Recently, however, it was changed on at least one train to “If you see anything unusual, call the British Transport Police …”
Something unusual — like a well-dressed person, for example? You can go a long way on British trains before you see a well-dressed person, probably longer than you can see someone being aggressive. – Theodore Dalrymple
See it, say it, sorted: what does “sorted” mean in the context of the British police? If the experience of countless millions is anything to go by, it means “sorted” as far as the police are concerned, that is to say an incident is given, often somewhat reluctantly, a crime number.
I say reluctantly because a crime number for a crime that the police have no intention of investigating, let alone solving, messes up the statistics with which to deceive the public.
Sorted, indeed! One would have thought that the police were as efficient as a modern diesel car. The slogan is not only vulgar, but an implicit lie. – Theodore Dalrymple
National’s policy to strengthen the curriculum would bring much greater consistency. It would provide a common framework for education, to be followed by all schools. – Michael Johnston
National’s testing policy is explicitly designed to identify children struggling with literacy learning as early as possible. Children making insufficient progress can be given further diagnostic tests to see whether they have dyslexia. – Michael Johnston
A preponderance of research evidence shows that structured teaching of literacy provides the best assistance to dyslexic students.
Pope-Mayall recognised that. He called structured literacy “a dyslexia friendly approach”. In fact, structured literacy is not only dyslexia-friendly, but also the most effective way to teach literacy to all children. And structured literacy is just what National wants to introduce. – Michael Johnston
And again, National’s policy platform would help, by emphasising structured learning in teacher training and professional development. This, in my view, is the most important of National’s policy announcements.
A strong curriculum and plenty of data would provide important support for teachers. But training teachers in structured literacy is the best way to ensure that children, especially those with dyslexia, learn to read and write. – Michael Johnston
Politics in the age of social media is often an ugly beast. Just look around over the last fortnight. The Posie Parker visit, the martyrdom or otherwise of Donald Trump, the opposing views on the legacy of Jacinda Ardern, the hardening of attitudes against China. We can be a virulent lot — at least those who choose to express themselves online.
And every now and then the hate and vitriol spills into real life. The scenes at the planned speaking event at Auckland’s Albert Park didn’t reflect well on anyone, and especially on those who stoked the anger. – Steven Joyce
If the pre-internet days were suffocating and stifling of new ideas, and they often were, then today is the exact opposite. Social media gives a megaphone and a platform to everyone who wants one, and the resulting cacophony can be deafening. The end game is wild polarisation of public opinion. – Steven Joyce
Social media thrives on strong views and stronger emotions. Platform owners learnt quickly that indignation and anger drives online activity much better than happiness and agreeability. You only have to observe the difference between the Twitter feed you built for yourself versus the one generated by the algorithm, to know the algorithm writers are trying to find content that literally pushes your buttons.
And nobody attracts many likes or shares by being reasonable. You attract retweets and shares by being quirky and outrageous and standing out from the crowd. The more extreme and polarising your view, the better. – Steven Joyce
It always has been an option for an unscrupulous politician to whip up the mob. You don’t even have to be experienced. It’s a base skill of populists to divide the world into us and them, and ruthlessly attack them. Social media just makes it easier. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that we have entered into what appears to be a political age of mindless populism at the same time social media companies have become dominant in the competition for our attention. – Steven Joyce
Politicians don’t have to lean into social media, of course. It is still possible for them to transcend the mob mentality and appeal to our better natures. To seek to unite us, rather than divide us. It’s just more difficult in the age of online mobs with megaphones and pile-ons.
Ardern managed it in response to the Christchurch terror attack. She united us all, of every ethnicity, origin and creed in the face of unspeakable and divisive evil. She rose to the occasion and the country benefited. As has been said elsewhere, it was her finest hour and became one of ours.
She was less successful in the response to Covid. She started out okay, but then let the mob off the leash to criticise the vaccine-hesitant, those who sought to cross the border, those who didn’t follow the mob’s rules. People who argued were vilified, and some were made scapegoats by her or her ministers.
We have seen the same divisiveness in the trans debate. Lesser politicians than the Ardern of 2019 aggressively attacked people whose world view they disagreed with, and intentionally or inadvertently licensed the mob to do the same. How much better would the outcome have been if a leader had risen above the partisanship of this culture war and encouraged civility and the ability to tolerate opposing views? It is not too hard to imagine a different, more unifying outcome if that had happened. – Steven Joyce
If only we’d accepted the vaccine-hesitant rather than firing them from their jobs, or found a more compassionate way to look after those found on the wrong side of the border. Or managed not to call those protesting the strictures a river of filth.
That is surely the political challenge of our internet age. To overcome the hyper-partisanship of the public square by demonstrating civility and generosity.
Showing the ability to swim against the tide of aggressiveness and populism and provide truly inclusive leadership which encourages thoughtfulness and tolerance of different views.
It’s not an easy task. Our current leadership seems to find it easier to just agree with the currently ascendant mob rather than lead for everyone. But surely that makes it more important than ever. – Steven Joyce
It would be simply frustrating if, when trying to ask the question about renewable energy – “ why are we not using a natural resource which is shamefully underused when we face an energy crisis that doesn’t need to happen?”, the ideologically driven zealots were forced to justify their repeated rejection of the idea.
The facts are that we could be 100% renewable so easily in a cost efficient way that would make most countries so envious.
Yet every time someone who appears to know what they are talking about suggests we build dams in areas where the energy can be used at source, they are told to f… off and leave it to the experts who are environmentally literate. We are told that anyone with an ounce of nous would understand that dams are a relic of a bygone era and as such, are being replaced by less efficient monstrosities that look like the alien towers coming over the hill in the “War of the Worlds”.
When pushed to explain further this outrageous con the engineers, who have the ear of the ministers who matter, limply say that we are doing this In order to prevent the destruction to the environment that would occur if common sense had its way. – Clive Bibby
How come, when the most valuable by product of building dams is the fresh water that has multi uses and has relatively little negative impact on the place where they are built. Or what about building a much larger dam at Waikaremoana out flow to replace the relatively tiny Tuai where the water, after power generation is lost to the sea. The cost of piping the water from that new facility to either HB or Poverty Bay would no doubt be much more acceptable than leaving it untapped.
And of course, when you add the recreational facilities, the benefits far out-way any environmental damage. – Clive Bibby
Most people, even those who are wind power junkies, admit that these wind towers are in direct conflict with the local bi-laws that control skyline construction.
How is it allowed ? I can’t think of a more damaging effect to to our natural environment.
It is also hard to understand why dams that have the capacity to do all three things mentioned above are not coming off the drawing boards like there is no tomorrow.
Why are we even contemplating spending $15.7 billion on the Onslow pump hydro power scheme that may as well be on another planet because of its distance from the end users, when we could build another series of reservoirs in the Hunua ranges that would provide the same amount of multi use water and power at a fraction of the cost. – Clive Bibby
Body odour could soon be making a comeback. Why? Because the UK government is looking to impose stringent reductions on home water usage. The media have suggested that this might mean the end of power showers, but the limits being mooted in Whitehall will bear down on water use as a whole. This will affect showering, taking baths, hand washing, cleaning clothes, and more.
The plan is spelled out in a new 81-page report put out this week by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Titled Our Integrated Plan for Delivering Clean and Plentiful Water (or Our Plan for Water, for short), the document details how the government intends to plug what it believes will be a shortage of four billion litres per day in the public water supply by 2050. In part, this will be done, under the Environment Act 2021, by cutting household water use from an average of 144 litres per person per day to 122 per person per day in 2038, and then to just 110 litres per person per day by 2050.
Make no mistake, this is a positively draconian policy. Worst of all, it places most of the blame and responsibility for water management on to the consumer – letting the water companies, regulators and the government itself off the hook. – James Woudhuysen
The problem with the government’s plan is that it is far keener on social engineering – in creating parsimonious, ecologically conscious citizens – than it is on the actual engineering of leak detection, leak repair, pipe replacement and all the rest. – James Woudhuysen
As far as eco-evangelists are concerned, what matters most is reducing ‘demand’ – whether that be for water, energy or travel. Building the infrastructure we need to meet demand always seems to be off the table.
It is worth reminding ourselves that there is no reason whatsoever for a developed, rainy country such as Britain ever to run out of water. No water is leaving the planet (even the very modest escape from the Earth of water’s constituent, hydrogen, is limited by a number of physical phenomena). Water scarcity is entirely a problem of mismanagement and bad government.
Calls for demand management and behaviour change are simply codewords for austerity and rationing. The government wants us to accept the blame for the shocking state of our water infrastructure ourselves, and to endure poor personal and home hygiene as a consequence.
Rest assured, the rich will not be giving up water sprinklers on their estates, nor spas in their basements. These water cutbacks will only be demanded of us commoners. It’s time we caused a stink about it. – James Woudhuysen
What is sad about this is that the question of how transgender people can participate in sport is going to become an increasingly important question over time given the huge rise in transitioning, so we need to have a discussion about it NOW, before these problems become quite frequent. The discussion needs to involve science (what criteria do we use to determine eligibility?), philosophy, and ethics (how do you balance fairness towards transgender athletes with fairness towards women?) Cisgender men are involved as well, but to a lesser extent.
It’s a shame that nobody can discuss this civilly—at least nobody calling for bans or caution—without being slurred as a “transphobe” or even without being physically attacked.
Women like Gaines who have to swim against biological men who identify as women have a special right to express their views and to be heard, as they are the ones who feel the unfairness on the “cis” side. But no, that’s not in the card: people like Gaines, Martina Navratilova, and J. K. Rowling are the ones deemed most reprehensible. – Jerry Coyne
The Minister of Transport, rather like a desperate gambler having a bad night at the casino, is reportedly ‘doubling down’ on the Government’s ill-starred light rail project. He now wants to extend light rail to the North Shore. The problem is five years on, the Government has yet to build anything to extend it from, not a millimetre of track. And embarrassingly, has been unable to produce a business case. Nevertheless, Treasury last year costed the present scheme (city to airport) at $14.6 billion up to $29.2 billion. Fortunately for the minister (but unfortunately for the New Zealand taxpayer) it’s not his money at stake here. And if one thing is certain about this project, it’s that we, the taxpayers, are most likely to lose our shirts. – Mike Lee
Despite five years of head-scratching by bureaucrats and consultants (the latter costing $60m at last count with a lot more to come), there is a fundamental contradiction lying at the heart of this plan. The light rail scheme is trying to deal with two separate public transport problems at the same time, serving Auckland Airport, whose passenger throughput is predicted to grow in the post-pandemic world to reach estimates of 40 million in 10 years, and reducing congestion by providing better public transport (in one corridor) on an intensified isthmus.
Attempts to achieve these two objectives with a single solution are suboptimal for both. They are, in effect, contradictory. The faster and more convenient the airport service (the fewer stops, currently 18, the better), the more inferior the public transport service along the corridor – and vice versa. It is this strategic confusion that no amount of determined attempts to hammer a square peg into a round hole can solve. This stubborn contradiction will be a key part of the explanation for the failure to produce a business case, especially the benefit/cost analysis usually mandatory for taxpayer-funded transport projects. – Mike Lee
The over-reliance on consultants, the hallmark of the Auckland light rail project, is undoubtedly due to a deficit of technical knowledge. This has always struck me as peculiar given that ample know-how and experience exist only three hours’ flight away in Australia. A key indicator of this knowledge deficit is the constant, vacuous assertions of officialdom that light rail is ‘rapid transit’. However, as the builder and manager of the successful, 20km with 19 stations, G-Link light rail on Australia’s Gold Coast, Phil Mumford told an Auckland Transport delegation I was a part of in 2015 – “Important thing to remember guys light rail is NOT rapid transit – it’s mass transit”.
Unlike our bureaucrats and consultants, Mumford knew what he was talking about. The popular G-Link, competently built and operated since 2014, moves thousands of people per day (‘mass transit’) in comfort and with zero emissions, but its average speed (30km per hour) is still slower over comparable distances than buses and trains. That said, it is considerably faster than Sydney’s newest light rail service. While light rail has many city-building benefits, ‘rapid transit’ is not one of them. To proceed on the basis of this misunderstanding is a fundamental error. – Mike Lee
History will record Jacinda Ardern as one of the country’s greatest prime ministers.
It doesn’t mean she actually was one of the greatest. In fact, I could mount a strong argument for why she was one of the worst.
But history doesn’t record the truth. History records a version of it. And that version, in all likelihood, will wax lyrical about her greatness.
Mostly, it will record her as Jacinda the Great, because she was Jacinda the Global Superstar. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Some of Jacinda’s global stardom was earned. Having a baby in office was a special and unusual thing, evidenced by the fact she is only the second female PM in the world to have done that. Embracing the Muslim community after the mosque shootings deserved praise too. Any other Kiwi leader might have also done it had they been in office, but she did it well. It played to her empathetic strength. –
Some of her stardom, though, was just the coincidence of timing. She just happened to be the PM at the very moment something happened that hadn’t happened for more than 100 years. A new virus swept the planet. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Of course, right now that’s hard for some to see. Some still carry a lot of anger towards Jacinda whether for vaccine mandates or Auckland’s too-long lockdowns or a litany of other stupid ideas she needs to own. The ill-timed immigration clampdown that’s strangling businesses. The wild spending that helped drive up inflation. The lending rules that drove down house prices. The economy’s in a parlous state because of decisions her government took.
Cunningly, Jacinda left the job before she could be punished at the ballot booth for what she did. She left even before the recession her government helped cause was confirmed. She’s left behind no achievements worth mentioning.
But time will move on. We will slowly pick up the pieces. And we will forget this anger.
And future generations who fete her will not understand why their parents and grandparents might scoff at her name. Because the left writes history and history will be kind to her, and their parents will just be old-fashioned grouches.
The list of the greats is littered with Labour leaders you could argue don’t deserve the spot.
David Lange, fondly remembered as a great, but for what? For a good debate, a jolly nature and a clever turn of phrase. But his government wasn’t a good one. To some, his government went too far with the pain it inflicted. To others, it lost its nerve at the last minute and didn’t finish the job.
Norm Kirk. Most famous for dying in office.
Mickey Savage. The man who started the welfare system, which is a helpful net to some but to others has become the biggest failure in New Zealand: an intergenerational trap of misery.
Prime Ministers don’t have to be great to be remeembered as one of the Greats. They just have to be remembered. Jacinda will be. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The party that Key did a deal with back in 2008 was a party that believed in what we called localism and devolution… This is a party that now believes in two separate systems and that is something we cannot support. – National Party
This party, the Green Party in New Zealand, has changed as well. It is a more socialist party now rather than an environmental party, if we’re honest about it.
James Shaw and Eugenie Sage, they genuinely care about the environment – but the other eight MPs actually are all interested in a whole bunch of other random stuff. That makes it really difficult. – Christopher Luxon
One of the last things Jacinda asked of us in her valedictory speech yesterday was that we “take the politics out of climate change”
I hope the MPs in that debating chamber completely ignore that.
Because think about what that means.
What Jacinda asked our MPs to do was to ignore what we the voters want, and just ram through whatever they consider necessary for climate change.
Because that’s what politics is, the contest of the different things that different voters want. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The Government would start charging farmers for their emissions from tomorrow. That would mean up to a quarter of sheep and beef farms could shut down.
It would put the fuel tax back on petrol, so you would pay another 25c per litre effective tomorrow.
It would drive the price of carbon up to $120 per unit as recommended, pushing your electricity bills up 5 percent, your gas bills up 7 percent, your diesel cost up 8 percent and your petrol up another 5 percent.
There is a good reason none of that’s happening, because it would hurt us, it would make you and I poorer than we already are.
You can’t take the politics out of something like that, because voters should have a say on whether they want their lives that deeply affected. A governing party can’t just do that to people without their consent.
It’s remarkably hypocritical that she says that on her last day in Parliament, when she didn’t take the politics out of climate change herself.
She could’ve forced the climate levy on farmers when she first announced it, using a hay bale as a podium six months ago- she didn’t. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
It’s a bit rich to not do something and then try to shame the people you leave behind into doing it.
Jacinda’s not naïve, she would’ve known no one’s going to heed that call. But it looks good in the media, doesn’t it?
Especially for someone off to a position on the board of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.
So no, let’s not take the politics out of climate change, and let’s see this request for what it is.
It’s a play to get good international headlines, and a bad idea that we should all ignore. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
In fact, she could be described as an ‘accidental’ PM – thanks to the ‘kingmaker’ Winston Peters in 2017 choosing not to form a government with National – the party that won the most votes – but with Labour instead.
And just as Labour was not ready to be in government back then, nor was Jacinda Ardern ready to be PM – her inexperience and arrogance clearly on display through her “Captain’s Calls”, which were made without public consultation, official advice, or sometimes even Cabinet approval.
That was certainly the case when, just a few months into her administration, she banned new offshore oil and gas exploration on the eve of an overseas meeting of world leaders. And while the decision gave her bragging rights on the world stage and helped her build her international profile, at home it was described as “economic vandalism” and a “kick in the guts” for the region, that not only put at risk 11,000 jobs and a $2.5 billion industry, but led to the tripling of imports of ‘dirty’ Indonesian coal, as New Zealand’s reserves of clean burning natural gas continue to decline. – Muriel Newman
Conflating weather events with climate change and dramatising the effects enabled Jacinda Ardern to not only introduce the most stringent carbon restrictions of any country on earth, but to boast about it on the world stage.
It didn’t seem to matter to her that the policies she was introducing would destroy the backbone of our economy – the farming sector – nor that New Zealand’s enormous sacrifice would make absolutely no discernible difference to global emissions. – Muriel Newman
Unsurprisingly, Jacinda Ardern did not mention Labour’s toxic He Puapua blueprint to replace democracy with tribal rule, that underpinned so much of their Maori agenda. She didn’t explain that she had deliberately kept it hidden from her Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and from voters during the 2020 election campaign – presumably to avoid “the hilly bits”, like public opinion.
Nor did Jacinda mention that ‘co-governance’, which has become code for ‘Maori control’, was a central component of the failing reforms she introduced for the polytechs, the health system, and Three Waters.
The polytech centralisation has turned into a disaster with cost blowouts, declining enrolments, and falling standards.
The health system centralisation is now in danger of catastrophic failure through a chronic shortage of thousands of nurses, doctors, and medical specialists. Furthermore, health care has now been transformed into an apartheid system based on race instead of clinical need, with Maori prioritised over everyone else.
Three Waters, remains a disaster-in-waiting – a system designed to give control of water to Maori. With the architect of the reforms Nanaia Mahuta no longer in the picture, Prime Minister Hipkins is hoping some window-dressing will enable him to rush the remaining law changes through before the election – and before the majority of voters wake up to the dangerous implications of tribal control of freshwater. – Muriel Newman
In the end it was Jacinda Ardern with her absurd claim that her Government was the ‘single source of truth’, that became a major source of misinformation. Ignoring Ministry of Health advice, she imposed one of the world’s harshest lockdowns onto the country – her Orwellian call for ‘kindness’ disguising the cruelty and heartbreak caused when basic human rights were denied and businesses destroyed. – Muriel Newman
But her most glaring disaster will be the way she has left the country so deeply divided and far less cohesive than it was when she first became Prime Minister.
In this regard alone, her legacy is one of immense damage and shame.
Having embraced identity politics throughout her administration, New Zealand is now a country divided by race, by gender, by sexuality, as well as by vaccination status. And anyone who disagrees with Jacinda Ardern’s view of the world is accused of living in a ‘rabbit hole’ of disinformation.
The situation has been exacerbated by a media that sold its integrity to become an echo chamber for her administration – instead of acting as a public watchdog and holding the government to account. – Muriel Newman
Hearing the words “Free speech is a right this House is united in defending” from a leader who attempted to introduce the most draconian new hate speech regulations in our history – that would have outlawed criticism of groups defined by gender, sexual orientation, race, age, disability, employment status, family status, religion, or political opinion – was simply bizarre.
While a fierce public backlash forced her to back down from her planned crackdown on New Zealanders’ right to free speech, she continues to claim her critics are conspiracy theorists. – Muriel Newman
The problem is that her call for censorship of the internet has gone too far. Try posting up articles on Facebook criticising the Armageddon claims of climate fanatics, and not only is your post likely to be taken down, but your site threatened with closure.
Try sharing the latest research questioning the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines from the most reputable sources, and you risk being blacklisted.
Thanks to our Prime Minister, the internet is no longer the free frontier it once was for those who oppose the woke conspiracy. One can only hope that the big internet operators see the danger and follow the lead of Twitter’s Elon Musk to greater freedom not less.
Jacinda Ardern has left our Parliament but still wonders why she is no longer universally loved in her home country. The fact that she has not figured this out for herself is in itself enlightening, and it is that lack of realistic self-reflection that was her undoing.
A kind interpretation of Jacinda Ardern’s tenure is that she was naive and impressionable, and those weaknesses were manipulated, especially by the Maori caucus to advance their agenda for Maori rule. Other interpretations are much less kind. – Muriel Newman
To paraphrase the late, great Billy T James: “Hey Billy, someone is stealing your gate bro! Aren’t you going to stop him?” “Nah. He might take a fence!”
These days the “takers of a fence” are crawling out of the woodwork, primed and cocked, ready to “take a fence” at any and every utterance made in their direction. Every minority group, every pressure group perceive themselves to be belittled, bullied, subjugated and repressed by one faction or another of the majority. – John Porter
The ever-growing numbers of “takers of a fence” are able to be described most appropriately as “thin-skinned”. If you’re thin-skinned, you take criticism, rejection, disappointment, and failure very hard. Being left out of anything could be perceived as a major insult.
But in truth things do not give offence; people do, by their words or actions. While it is quite common to recognise pictures, cartoons, and language as offensive, what is really offensive is that someone has represented them in such a way as to give offence. – John Porter
Contemporary issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, multiculturalism and racism have become the battle grounds for cultural conflicts. The cultural warriors of these minorities, often ultra-minority groups, brook no criticism or denigration nor allow any exploration or investigation of their views from the outside.
Expressions and outbursts of entitlement and privilege have become an identifying feature of current times. Almost every leader in every sector is now dealing with angry stakeholders and minority groups. – John Porter
Many people feel pessimistic about their future, that there is a systemic bias in the opportunities available to their particular minority. Many are being drawn toward ideologies that legitimise themselves and create an us-versus-the-majority outlook. Many, also, feel, rightly or wrongly, that the game has been rigged against them, that they are disadvantaged in life and society is marshalled against them.
None are more so “takers of a fence” than the extremely visible and vocal transgender minority. Any attempt to debate this issue quickly becomes toxic and anyone asking any question gets immediately denounced as transphobic.
The transgender lobby and their LGB, intersex and asexual supporters are actually attacking the foundations of a democratic society by suppressing free speech, with bizarre concepts such as “trans women are women,” “gender-neutral pronouns,” or “there are more than two genders”.
There is a certain irony in that these “protectors of public enlightenment” are guilty of the very behaviour that phrase derides. We may dismiss the transgender lobby as just an extremist fringe movement, but the views, claims, rights and recognition they demand and we accept are actually infecting and affecting our politics and our culture. – John Porter
Surely the most effective way to deal with these most virulent “takers of a fence” is to ignore them. How they choose to live their lives is up to them.
More often these days, we see the trans community saying they, as a people, are disadvantaged, at risk and have fewer opportunities in life.
Seemingly, when marginalised groups such as the transgender lobby, ask for (or is it demand) recognition or understanding, it’s an attempt to make their own lives safer and more fulfilled.
Alas, they seem to have a strong desire not to allow us to ignore them. They toil diligently to keep the fires of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse aflame.
And who provides oxygen for those fires? The Main Stream Media! The MSM have a vested interest in promoting the dissent and argument as it is a creator of great headlines. – John Porter
The indisputable fact is that warfare is mankind’s greatest failure, invariably caused by dictatorial leaders with expansion ambitions. The passion to lead people is a continuing puzzle to me, I shall write about soon. – Sir Bob Jones
Still, there is a limit to the usefulness of branding within the public sector, which Three Waters and KiwiBuild chillingly illustrate. Three Waters came from from a universally acknowledged issue, in that our drinking water is literally killing people, and our sewage is flowing in the streets. Likewise, KiwiBuild arose out of rampant house price inflation which left working people unable to afford to buy or rent an adequate home, and our most vulnerable living in cars.
There is no political constituency attempting to defend the status quo here. Where Labour has got itself into trouble is in wrapping a brand around its intention to fix something, as opposed to the finished product. The problems exist because they are very hard to fix, thus it was near-inevitable that the fix would not go smoothly. Opponents would say that they compounded this by over-promising to a near fantastical degree in KiwiBuild’s case, or over-complicating in Three Waters’. But regardless, the work was made far harder precisely because there was the convenient hook of a brand around which to hold the conversation. – Duncan Grieve
Much of this only happened because the political decision was made to brand the reforms, rather than allow them to plod through as a meat-and-two-veg policy programme. Were that to have happened, they might still have got into trouble, but it would be that routine background noise typified by the RMA reforms, rather than the hurricane strength conspiracy-creating vortex that has enveloped Three Waters. – Duncan Grieve
It tends to suggest that this government’s reliance on highly engineered communications as needing to be baked into all facets of its work has run too far, and should be deployed much more judiciously in future. Hipkins’ rebranding of Three Waters as a yawn-inducing infrastructure reform programme could be seen as the start of a new campaign to make the public service boring again. Counterintuitively, becoming more invisible might be one thing which actually restores faith in the whole institution. – Duncan Grieve
I have seen too many people’s careers and their mental health ruined by spurious allegations of transphobia… there is real fear in the arts. – Denise Fahmy
The tragedy is transgender rights, celebration of transgender humanity and its mainstream acceptance may always be tainted by the violent, self-congratulatory extremism on display in Auckland’s Albert Park.
The very intolerance that protest movements object to can be mirrored in their own protest if it becomes extremist or violent. It is implausible to play the victim and then be the bully, trampling on the civil rights of others. Free speech can die if it is not even allowed to turn into hate speech, let alone corrective debate. The bullied become the bully. Any righteous claim of vulnerability gets destroyed in the venal power of mob rule. – Alistair Boyce
The NZ public has no appetite for violent and disruptive protest following the occupation protest which effectively shut down the Wellington city CBD. There will now be a probable hardening wedge between mainstream society and the reactionary protest movement. Parents are simply not going to want their children exposed to the violent, paranoid, self-righteous victim culture that was on active and prominent display. The movement’s public manifestation is now one of violent intolerance and it seems to be spreading with supportive rallies in Christchurch and Wellington. In fact families could now prefer protection from, rather than exposure to, any contact in civil society with protest participants and their wider community. This was the manifestation during and after the parliamentary occupation protest. A protest can produce more societal division than the words that were never spoken, the lies that were never told.
The counter protest can enable the opposite agenda oxygen and a moral high ground. Intolerant bigotry may never be exposed. The vast majority of New Zealanders want a peaceful existence where they can enjoy the fruits of their labour through participation in a tolerant liberal democracy. Posie Parker never mattered to most of us but her forced exit does. The images of violence will be etched into public memory just like the final day of the parliamentary protest. Actions speak louder than words, especially when graphically displayed in mainstream media and to the world.
The Ghandi version of peaceful protest carries sincere weight and longevity of re-inclusive peace. The power to educate and forgive. This would be a far more powerful and effective form of protest than the violence and hateful rhetoric New Zealanders have been witness to. – Alistair Boyce
Elected senior Labour and Greens politicians need to look in the mirror. Hipkins, Wood, Davidson, Whanau et al, all either tacitly approved of the counter protest or were participating and even driving it. Division and differences on the back of identity politics, picking socio-economic winners and promoting ideological agendas are driving a restless sea of division in this country.
The legacy of the 6th Labour government is fast including one of ongoing civil unrest and societal disaffection and division.
I believe the violent furore and controversy of the last few days surrounding the Posie Parker speaking tour will harden latent bigotry bringing only a ‘pot of tears’ to the transgender rainbow and the wider politics of equity, inclusion, minority rights and diversity. – Alistair Boyce
In one respect, French law is greatly superior to British or American: It doesn’t allow publishers to alter a text once its author has died. For good or evil, a written work remains the author’s unchanging legacy forever, and if a publisher doesn’t like or is offended by it, that’s tough. The publisher either prints what the writer wrote or refrains from publishing it at all.
This precludes the absurd, but also sinister, retrospective editing of books such as those that Roald Dahl wrote for children, and now Agatha Christie’s detective stories—all in the name of sensitivity to people’s feelings, but in reality to exercise power and control over the population’s thoughts in the best Stalinist manner. – Theodore Dalrymple
Now Agatha Christie is to be “corrected” by such readers. That she’s the author whose books have sold more than any other in history, in almost every written language, doesn’t suggest to them that perhaps she doesn’t stand in need of correction, or that readers have been able to take any supposedly “offensive” language in their stride. Even where her characters utter sentiments not completely in accord with current sensibilities, no one could mistake her books for “Mein Kampf.” – Theodore Dalrymple
In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them – ‘The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate’, in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.
The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of attacks on the meritocracy, starting with criticisms of the workings of the 11-plus exam and then broadening into denunciations of social hierarchy and social mobility. Egalitarians argued that meritocracy replaced a proper socialist idea – equality of results – with equality of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on of opportunity. Radical activists argued in favour of collective rights (based on gender or skin colour) rather than equal opportunity for all based on ability. – Adrian Wooldridge
The radical left is now presenting a critique of meritocracy that is far more extreme than anything that has gone before it, but which also wields far more cultural heft: a woke assault on meritocracy. It starts by repeating standard leftish complaints about meritocracy: that it protects social inequality by dressing it up as cognitive inequality, thereby adding to the already intolerable pressure of modern life. Then it throws the explosive question of race into the heart of the debate. This rests on the demeaning claim that the best way to promote members of ethnic minorities is through ‘equity’ rather than ‘excellence’. It also makes it far more difficult for ordinary people to discuss the subject dispassionately and far easier for radicals to engage in demagoguery and polarisation. Even more importantly, it creates a new hierarchy of virtue at the heart of society. We are thus moving to a more ambitious stage in the left’s long social revolution: from simply dismantling meritocracy to creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability. – Adrian Wooldridge
The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi, ‘is antiracist discrimination.’ The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. ‘Abolish whiteness!’ says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives.’
These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.
Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.
Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged. – Adrian Wooldridge
This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.
The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. – Adrian Wooldridge
The global business elite is also screening people for their WQ not just by using ‘diversity’ as a criterion for selection but by soaking everything it does in woke ideology. Business schools devote far more effort to teaching about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) than about maximising shareholder value. – Adrian Wooldridge
Human resources departments are expanding their role in corporations from old-fashioned bread-and-butter questions – making sure that everyone is on PAYE, for example – to shaping the workforce. These diversity champions find it just as natural to employ a woke framework in making appointments as the old gatekeepers found it natural to employ an academic or professional framework. ‘Do our latest hires help us to hit our diversity targets? What can we do to eliminate the ever-present danger of discrimination? Are we being inclusive enough? What if our older employees harbour all sorts of unconscious biases?’ The assumption is always the same: that members of ethnic minorities will not be able to make it on the basis of their own merits, but need a helping hand from a virtuous bureaucracy.
The public and charitable sectors are even more prone to such thinking. The NHS employs ‘lived experience’ tsars on £115,000 a year despite the health service’s dire financial state. Oxfam recently found the resources to publish an inclusive language guide that included convoluted arguments about when you can use the term ‘womxn’ and when you can’t. (‘Some trans people object to the phrase on the basis that trans women are women and the use of “womxn” might suggest otherwise.’)
All this is not only changing the criteria whereby people are selected for elite positions; it is changing the people who are doing the selecting. This is not merely a struggle between the educated elite and regular people for control of the culture. It is a struggle within the educated class, with a new class of woke bureaucrats seizing power from the traditional gatekeepers of professional society, taking advantage of a combination of moral power (nobody wants to be accused of being a racist) and the growing self-absorption of professionals (many academics are more interested in publishing research than taking part in time-consuming admissions processes).
The return of inverted-pyramid thinking is replacing the concept of ‘inclusion’ with something more sinister.–
The morality of all this is up for debate. (Though I personally find the return of race-based rights deeply worrying, I realise that many profoundly moral young people disagree with me equally strongly.) But the morality of replacing the old aristocracy of talent with an aristocracy of woke also needs to be weighed against two practical consequences. The first is that it will reduce economic efficiency, as we stuff more square pegs in round holes. Meritocratic societies and institutions are much more productive than non-meritocratic ones. Singapore is a more productive society than Sri Lanka (the two had roughly the same GDPs in 1960 before Lee Kuan Yew pioneered Singapore’s meritocratic revolution). The Nordic countries are more productive than Greece and Portugal. Public companies are more productive than family companies (unless family companies bring in professional managers or subject the younger generation to a vigorous weeding-out process).
The brain drain only flows in one direction: from the non-meritocratic to the meritocratic world. This process will be self-reinforcing. One of the most reliable laws of social affairs is Rowse’s law (named after the great historian A.L. Rowse), that without first-rate people to pull in the right direction, second-raters will always appoint third-raters and fourth-raters and so on in an accelerating avalanche of mediocrity.
Reducing your economic efficiency is a foolish thing to do at the best of times, because it condemns our children to a lower standard of living than we have enjoyed. It is suicidal at a time when an increasingly belligerent China is rediscovering the virtues of meritocracy, but this time by producing scientists and technologists, not Confucian scholars.
The second is that it politicises the distribution of opportunities and jobs. One of the virtues of meritocracy is that it takes some of the heat out of job allocation: people with power try their hardest to give jobs to those who deserve them and people who are disappointed can take comfort from the fact that the system tried to be objective. But once you say there is nothing to the distribution of jobs and opportunities but the raw exercise of power, you encourage a free-for-all. And once you start deliberately privileging some groups over others on the basis of race, you reinforce ethnic enmity and reward ethnic power politics.
The new woke elite, if it continues to gain strength, is destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society as people advance their interests through collective agitation rather than individual effort, and as economic growth becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps we should think a little harder about replacing the aristocracy of talent with the aristocracy of woke. – Adrian Wooldridge
Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.”
After all the promises of a refocus on Three Waters, a rebrand and more entities fail to hide the fact that the Government’s water reforms remain an asset and power grab.
Increasing the number of entities quite simply misses the point. Forcibly removing assets from councils undermines the property rights of the ratepayers who have funded them over many decades. There is nothing wrong with sharing water services to drive efficiencies and reduce costs, but shotgun marriages of councils and creating additional tiers of management and bureaucracy simply won’t deliver any savings.
Three Waters 2.0 is still undemocratic, still unaccountable and still expensive. These changes simply pay lip service to the concerns raised by ratepayers and councils across the country while continuing to push ahead with these ideological reforms using their parliamentary majority. – Callum Purves
Labour’s desperate attempt to rebrand their toxic Three Waters reforms won’t fool Kiwis and won’t fix New Zealand’s water infrastructure.
The message from Kiwis is very clear – they want local water assets in local hands, and with no divisive co-governance structures imposed on them.
Today’s rebrand from the tired and incompetent Labour Government shows they just don’t get it. These are the same broken reforms, just with a new coat of paint. – Simon Watts
Yet the wheels of the Hipkins’ government are steadily loosening. Voters are already ranking it behind National on all the key issues. Moreover, the shoddy performance of some ministers in recent weeks and the tardy and inconsistent way in which the Prime Minister has dealt them, has reminded voters once more that this is one of the least talented Cabinets in a long time.
The same troubles that bedevilled Ardern and her attempts to achieve a transformational agenda are now striking at Hipkins’ attempts to restore “bread and butter” politics: ministers who simply are not up to the job.
Nor do the recent shenanigans within the Green Party over list rankings and family violence inspire any confidence that the election of more Green MPs would improve Labour’s performance in government.- Peter Dunne
Good water services are the lifeblood of our economy and this reform still strips it out of the hands of the communities that had built it.
While we may be guaranteed a seat on the regional representation group, it will be one of nearly thirty others two steps separated from any real influence.
We had hoped the reset was the opportunity for community led water reform, but one again it’s just a case of Wellington thinking it knows what’s best for South Canterbury. – Nigel Bowen
The number of entities have increased and the Better Off Funding for communities – a total of $1.5 billion – has been taken off the table.
The changes do not address the way in which the reform agenda has been driven from Wellington, placing Council teams under pressure with no clear certainty for water staff about their future.
It does not address the excessive amount of resources expended in driving this agenda at pace.
The real issues remain – ongoing improvement in infrastructure stymied due to funding constraints, assets being expropriated without compensation and no real property rights over these assets.
The real solution should be locally led and locally informed. – Anne Munro
Inexplicably, throughout the pandemic response the government consistently ignored or overlooked overseas advice or experience in reaching decisions, preferring instead to re-invent the wheel for itself.– Peter Dunne
New Zealand retained lockdowns long after most other countries abandoned them as too socially disruptive and ineffective against new variants like Delta and Omicron. We clung to the notion that somehow we could do what no other country had done and beat the virus, without any negative social costs.
This week’s decision smacks of the same arrogant “New Zealand is different, and we know best” approach of earlier times. According to Health Minister Verrall, more work needs to be done on whether testing to return to work earlier than the seven days for people who are not symptomatic or are mild cases, could be a safe and effective approach.
Yet, Te Punaha Matatini principal investigator, and disease modelling expert, Professor Michael Plank says the “direction of travel” internationally has been to drop isolation requirements and treat Covid19 “alongside all the other important public health issues that we have to deal with.” Britain abandoned mandatory isolation a year ago, and Australia did so late last year. – Peter Dunne
Plank’s modelling and what is happening internationally shows there is no compelling evidence for keeping isolation requirements in place in New Zealand insofar as Covid19 is concerned. Nor is doing so likely to be a popular move politically, with most sectors of the community keen to move on from the Covid19 era. Verrall’s excuse for not doing so now looks very weak, unless, of course, the government has another agenda in mind that it does not yet want to acknowledge, but for which continuing Covid19 restrictions is a convenient cover.
With the public perception of a public health service in crisis, and a reform programme that looks incoherent and disorganised, the last thing the government would want in the lead-up to the election, is the health service overrun by, and unable to cope with all the usual winter ailments. Far better, therefore, and certainly more cynical politics, to follow Baker’s suggestion and keep the Covid19 restrictions on for a little longer in the hope of keeping a lid on the spread of this year’s annual winter bugs.
Three years on, the government still seems determined to milk every political advantage it can from Covid19. – Peter Dunne
The things that make you feel good in politics don’t necessary do good. But boy, are they morally satisfying.
Legislating to stop hate speech. Using a “hecklers’ veto” to run Posie Parker out of town. Victories against hate. Job done. – Josie Pagani
Shutting down people who are hateful feels right. But counter-intuitively, banning hateful words is not the best way to stop the hate.
Nadine Strossen is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She hates Nazis.
She hates them more than she loves free speech. Over coffee, she told me her mission is to get rid of the hate, not the speech.
She has spent decades looking at hate speech through history, and found no evidence that banning it reduces hate. – Josie Pagani
New Zealand’s draft hate speech legislation has been put in the freezer, for now. Extending the Human Rights Act to cover hate speech against religion and politics was a well-intentioned response to the Christchurch shooting. But it is bad law.
The first red flag was the Government’s inability to define hate speech. ”You know it when you see it,” the former prime minister said.
You don’t know it when you see it. One person’s hate speech is another’s just cause. Words cannot define precisely enough what is a subjective concept. “Hate is an emotion after all,” says Strossen. “No two thinking people can possibly agree on what is hateful and what is not.”
Every argument today to justify censoring white supremacist speech was made by defenders of slavery to ban abolitionist speakers. – Josie Pagani
It is impossible to write anti-speech codes that cannot be twisted.
Worse still, hate speech legislation distracts from more effective ways of countering hate. A swastika sprayed on a Jewish school is vandalism. Burning a cross on someone’s front lawn is an illegal threat. Planning mass murder in Christchurch was already illegal in 2019, if only our secret services had been paying attention. – Josie Pagani
There are better ways to counter offensive speech than running the likes of Posie Parker out of the country. – Josie Pagani
Posie Parker is not a Nazi. She has a right to speak. The trans community also have a right to protest. It is hard to describe the line between where protest ends and the “hecklers’ veto” begins.
This matters. Because we need to keep talking.
If she had turned up to speak against same-sex marriage, she would have been ignored. Gay marriage has mainstream support. The issue is settled. The talking done. But when people are unresolved, for example, about how to love trans people without erasing the definition of a woman, the talk must continue until it is settled. – Josie Pagani
Feeling good and doing good do not have to be exclusive, as long as you know your history.
Look beyond the things you want to ban and imagine where the same legal principles could be turned against speech that should not be banned. – Josie Pagani
So the question today is “are we being ripped-off big time by the Government’s latest version of its water reforms?”
That’s the question. And my answer is a resounding “yes”. – John MacDonald
If Chris Hipkins thinks rebranding Three Waters by calling it “Affordable Water Reforms” is going to win us all over, then he obviously thinks we’re stupid.
At the end of the day, the only serious change I can see here is switching from four monstrous and unwieldy administrations to 10 monstrous and unwieldy administrations.
We’re told this means every council gets a seat at the table. But despite the Prime Minister’s insistence co-governance is long gone from Three Waters, it’s not.
Māori will still have unelected representation on these ‘regional representative groups’, with their job being to exercise and offer “strategic oversight and direction”.
However, they try to spin it, these changes are still a theft of ratepayer assets. – Tim Dower
No one’s arguing with the basic facts that drinking water isn’t up to scratch in some communities.
Wastewater and stormwater are probably much bigger problems, especially given that they’re getting mixed together all too often.
We’re told we need to spend $180 billion to bring things into the 21st century. That’s around $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Does the Government really think New Zealanders can’t work out that if this money isn’t coming from their rates, it’s coming from somewhere else?
That somewhere else is taxes. There is no magic money tap. If it’s being funded by central Government, it’s being funded by debt. Debt you and I will have to pay back. – Tim Dower
To be fair to Hipkins, he inherited a sow’s ear in Three Waters. Fat chance of making a silk purse from that. – Tim Dower
Labour is being disingenuous with New Zealanders claiming their Three Waters 2.0 policy doesn’t include co-governance, will save households thousands of dollars and will keep assets in local control and ownership.
Nothing has changed. This is the same broken Three Waters policy which forces councils into co-governed entities. – Simon Watts
In terms of savings, Labour’s own modelling showed eight entities would mean New Zealanders would pay more for water – now Labour is creating ten entities so how will Kiwis now be paying less? – Simon Watts
It is also disingenuous to state that councils will maintain control and ownership over their assets when the governance structure of the entities hasn’t changed.
The reality is you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – Three Waters 2.0 shows Labour hasn’t listened to the concerns of New Zealanders up and down the country who have made it clear they want local control of assets and don’t want the divisive co-governance structure imposed on them.
Kiwis face a clear choice this election, Labour’s broken Three Waters, or National’s Local Water Done Well. – Simon Watts
In 2006 Sea World executives, fearful of a backlash from the gay community, decided to change the name of the Phillip Island fairy penguin to little penguin, an act which the community itself described as ridiculous and unnecessary.
That same characterisation could be applied to the lamentably renamed Affordable Water Reforms, aka Three Waters, whose very name has become a controversially partisan clarion call. Lamentable, laughable even, because the water reforms are now less affordable in their new 10-entity formation, a victim of decreased economies of scale.
If Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ policy bonfire two months ago was telling the electorate that he had his eye on the economic ball, then this week’s tweaks, and that’s all they are, shows that Three Waters is clearly the policy hill they’re prepared to die on.
In simply changing the water entities from four to 10, but still denying local government full ownership of their assets, while retaining the 50-50 co-governance of representative groups, and denying councils a promised $1.5 billion, Labour has defined Three Waters as an election issue with a bullseye on its back.
In another word salad this week, Hipkins denied that the 50-50 model is co-governance “as it’s traditionally understood”, a statement which denies the facts and history. – Janet Wilson
But semantics aside, if Three Waters reforms come to pass on July 1, 2026 – and the odds right now are even stevens if you consider the polls – then increased water bills are a certainty. Because no matter who carves the numbers up – and many have – the costs are astronomical. – Janet Wilson
But whatever Three Waters – sorry, Affordable Water Reform – achieves in terms of providing clean drinking water for larger councils, for smaller ones losing one of their most valuable assets has the potential to be life-threatening.
Water assets represent a council’s biggest expenditure, making up 40% of an average council’s capex between 2025 and 2029, with that extending to more than 50% for some councils. That’s according to the draft report of the Review into the Future for Local Government. – Janet Wilson
Yes, councils around the country have brought this calamity on themselves by kicking the infrastructure can down the road, using the three-year electoral cycle as to why they hide from their responsibilities. But that doesn’t justify less democracy for local government, it simply creates the necessity for a more rigorous framework to ensure it’s achieved.
The need for change is indisputable; this week’s Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ report, Our Freshwater 2023, which tracks Aotearoa’s freshwater every three years, proved that when it revealed monitored lakes had worsened by 45% between 2011 and 2020.
Now voters have clearly differentiated choices on who to vote for in seeking that change. You can either choose a locally-owned model with no co-management provisions, or a centrally-based model with co-management.
But one thing is incontrovertible; however the water is managed, whoever owns it, it will be you and me paying for it in some form, either as a taxpayer, a ratepayer or as a consumer.
It’s how those costs will be distributed that’s the devil in that detail. – Janet Wilson
It sounds lovely to say ‘listen to kids’. And no one wants to say that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. (Of course not – it’s gender-critical women, the people who want single-sex spaces and single-sex sports, who should be seen and not heard, silly!) But there’s a reason that children don’t have the same rights as adults – why they can’t get a tattoo, have sex, get married, buy alcohol, fight / die for their country or drive a car. It’s because they don’t know who they are or what they’re doing yet. – Julie Burchill
There’s a reason that we writers are more likely to be witch-hunted than other professions. We love words. We know that being forced to repeat lies is how every evil regime in the world flexes its power. There’s a reason the torture of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is followed quickly by O’Brien finally forcing him to lie about how many fingers the torturer holds up. Today, the lie about four fingers being five has been replaced by those who hold up a penis and force onlookers to say that it’s female. – Julie Burchill
Trans-rights activists hate our side because they’ve failed to force us to lie. The words they expect us to use are designed to spread untruths. ‘Genderfluid’ sounds lovely, for instance. It’s what my teenage idol David Bowie was being when he shagged around like a sailor on shore leave one day, and wore a dress the next. When I used to dance to my favourite song of his – ‘Rebel Rebel’ – I was always full of glee at the line that never got old: ‘Got your mother in a whirl / She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ We old people don’t look down on today’s trans antics because we’re uptight fuddy-duddies – we do so because we’re still reprobates. We find the idea of needing external validation for one’s identity pathetic. We didn’t need it from our parents; we certainly wouldn’t have wanted it from building societies to beer brands, as the softies do today. And as for the poor old whirling mum (trying her best!), today she’d be marched off to the Pronoun Police for not immediately identifying which one of the 72 BBC-approved genders her indecisive offspring was on that particular day. Boy or girl? How dare you limit my potential – today I’m otherkin!
If you go and get sterilised before you can vote, you’re not going to be genderfluid, which sounds like being a mermaid cavorting atop a unicorn. If you’re a young woman having your primary- and secondary-sex characteristics eviscerated, you’re not going to have much in the way of fluids at all – you will be scarred and desiccated instead. If you’re going the other way, you will most likely keep hold of your precious male genitalia (less than five per cent of transwomen actually have the chop). Perhaps you’ll become a big bully in too much blusher yelling at lesbians to suck your lady-dick. The first option is sad and the second is bad, but they both often have roots in mental ill-health. – Julie Burchill
One of the handy effects of wokeism is that it conveniently ignores class as a form of privilege. So if you went to a fee-paying school, but then identify as ‘queer’ or an ‘ally’, you can then behave as if you had a tougher start than, say, JK Rowling. As a child, Rowling was told that, due to her social class, the nearest she could ever get to her dream of being a writer was being a teacher. During the years she spent struggling to become a writer, she was a single parent, on benefits, escaping a violent husband. She has gone from being a billionaire to a multimillionaire through the sheer amount of money she has given away. So she doesn’t need to ponce about #BeingKind to prove she’s one of the good guys.
Meritocracy itself is now ‘racist’ and ‘the antithesis of fair’, according to one Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And in the acting racket, it certainly seems almost impossible for bright working-class kids to take work away from the privately educated pricks and princesses currently ruling the roost. Still, I do feel hopeful on reading that a new Harry Potter television series has been commissioned by streaming service Max. Let’s hope that the next lot of kids JK Rowling makes stars of aren’t such a bunch of prissy, privileged little tossers as the last lot. – Julie Burchill
Societies across the world have long recognised that we all belong to one human race, that we can best live together in harmony when there is a general belief in equality, all belonging in a united county, as one people, equals. That principle has been steadily undermined in New Zealand since 1975, and is now gone: this is a divided nation moving from separation and partnership to co-governance, and towards two unequal race-based parliaments.
There is a choice to be made between tribal rule and equality. We must face the issue, make a decision for ourselves, of what sort of society we want for ourselves now and for the future. It cannot be dodged; to continue as we are is to accept racial separation. – John Robinson
This is the stark choice facing New Zealand in 2023 – to continue down the path of racial separation and division to tribal rule, or to turn back to equality so we can all proudly say ‘we are one people’, that this is our land, a proud sovereign nation where we all belong. – John Robinson
“Rishi Sunak says no women have penises…” Even a few years ago that would have been a baffling headline to read. Just as baffling as if the Tory prime minister had declared that 2 + 2 does indeed equal 4. But given the Orwellian mess we’re in on gender ideology, the prime minister’s gentle statement of biological fact – uttered in an interview with the Conservative Home website – qualifies as a bold and welcome intervention.
Indeed, whether or not sex is real has become a key dividing line in British political life. Labour leader Keir Starmer still doesn’t have a good answer to this question. A few weeks back, he said that 99.9 per cent of women do not have a penis. For him, this represented a daring shift in position, given that as recently as 2021 he was suggesting men could have a cervix. But even now, Starmer prefers to utter absurdities than risk upsetting the trans lobby: as various wags have pointed out, his 99.9 per cent claim, if true, would mean that as many as one in a thousand women have a penis. Which is still an awful lot of penises.
Starmer is going to need a better answer. Voters are sick of politicians putting gender ideology above truth and women’s rights. – Tom Slater
All around us, the gender cult is colliding with common sense. A Scottish GP has just made headlines after being turned away from a blood-donation centre, all because he refused to answer whether or not he was pregnant. World Athletics and other sporting bodies are finally having to admit that allowing biological males to compete against biological females is as good as junking women’s sports altogether. The British people are deeply tolerant. Trans people deserve all the rights and dignity afforded any other citizen. But there is nothing “inclusive” about warping language and dispensing with women’s rights, and many members of the public are unwilling to go along with this nonsense any longer.
There’s a tendency on the left to dismiss the gender issue as a “culture war”, confected by bored right-wing commentators and Tory leaders keen to distract from their myriad failures. But this stuff really matters. Biological sex is real. And without accepting this simple, observable fact, there can be no sex-based rights – crucial protections fought for by generations of courageous women to secure their place as free and equal citizens. The grotesque spectacle of male rapists being put in women’s prisons is the logical end point of giving in to the notion that “trans women are women”, the deranged mantra of our age.
Extreme gender ideology even makes meeting the needs of trans people all but impossible. Take the the 2021 Census. At the behest of LGBT lobby groups, the Office for National Statistics introduced a puzzling question on gender identity: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?” This esoteric activist language flew right over the heads of many Brits, particularly those for whom English is not their first language, rendering the results meaningless. Going by responses to the census question, as academic Michael Biggs has revealed, trans people are apparently wildly overrepresented in areas with fewer native English speakers. Worse still, this question has now “become the default for taxpayer-funded surveys in England and Wales”. How can we allocate resources and assistance to those struggling with gender dysphoria if we have no idea where they tend to live?
Is the tide finally turning on the gender extremists? There are certainly some encouraging signs. The government is mulling over changes to the Equality Act, to clearly define sex as biological sex and so bolster sex-based rights. – Tom Slater
Gender-critical feminists and gay-rights campaigners have successfully fought for their voice to be heard, setting up organisations, refusing to be cowed, and making clear that concern about trans ideology is not confined to the Tory right. Politicians are slowly realising this stuff is electoral cyanide.
But the fight is far over. So many of our institutions remain captured by gender ideology. The Tory Party isn’t even particularly united, clear-eyed or ballsy on these issues. (Rishi Sunak was still dodging “the woman question” as of a year ago.) Now is no time to be complacent. We need to push back this deeply regressive movement once and for all. Saying women don’t have penises is – or rather should be – the easy bit. – Tom Slater
Quite why this Government is so keen on a slow mode of mass transport eludes most people. Since it loves railways, callers asked, why doesn’t it concentrate on the one we have? Mayor Wayne Brown is saying the same. – John Roughan
The trouble with politicians who offer what they call “vision” is that their visions don’t last very long. No sooner was central Auckland being dug up for the CRL than Phil Twyford, then Transport Minister, wanted light rail to the northwest because the CRL would not make the existing western line much quicker.
Now Twyford’s replacement, Michael Wood, is proposing another tunnel out of the city centre for light rail to Māngere, tunnelling near the western line as far as Morningside. Even light rail enthusiasts think this is nuts. Cyclists said the same about his bike bridge.
Every time I see this young minister in the news I wonder how his career has survived the bike bridge. In 60 years of following New Zealand politics, I can’t remember a decision as silly. Yet here he still is, his credibility in the Labour Party and even within the Press Gallery apparently undiminished. He was touted as a leadership contender when Jacinda Ardern resigned.
He is very left wing and he holds three important economic portfolios, transport, immigration and employment. He has given trade unions power to dictate industry pay minimums, retains close control of work visas in the face of labour shortages and, on the evidence of the bike bridge, has no sense of the value of public money.
That project was to be financed with unspent money in the Covid Relief Fund, which didn’t really exist. It was just a name given to a Budget estimate for getting through the pandemic. But as the economy recovered from lockdowns quicker than expected, the money left in the “fund” caused the Government to lose its fiscal head. – John Roughan
When the decision was met with general scorn, the Government said it would instead build another vehicular crossing a decade earlier than scheduled. It was a face-saver.
Big investment decisions such as this are best left to the NZ Transport Agency, which schedules them objectively against other calls on petrol tax revenue. In the meantime, we can probably ignore visions a previous Herald editor with fine instinct called “things we’ll never see”.
But it is no joke that a minister who has shown abysmal investment judgment is now wasting our money to plan and design another mirage. – John Roughan
When Putin started his illegitimate war in Ukraine nearly 14 months ago, he claimed it was for its “demilitarisation and denazification”. Almost all security analysts, however, rejected this ridiculous suggestion. One of the real motivating factors, along with reclaiming territory Russia once controlled, was to reduce NATO influence in the region.
On Tuesday, he got the exact opposite.
Finland’s decision to join NATO reverses decades of military non-alignment. Since the end of the Second World War, Finland has sought to align itself with the West in trade and political terms – it has been a member of the EU since 1995. On security matters, though, it has maintained a neutral stance.
By invading Ukraine, Putin has pushed Finland to abandon this policy and run into NATO’s embrace. – Benjamin Macintyre
NATO does not force anyone to join. Prospective members must be democracies (although Turkey is a stretch in that regard). Whilst, in theory, NATO invites potential members, in practice, they ask to be invited first.
All this is to say that countries do not join NATO for no reason at all. It is almost always a reaction to increased insecurity. And which state has been the most destabilising on the periphery of Europe? No prizes for guessing.
Russia wanted less NATO influence. It got more. Hopefully, this will show Putin that he cannot bully his way to a compliant Eastern Bloc – though this lesson will likely go unheeded. – Benjamin Macintyre
I remember Primary School maths as being about learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Once we had learned those things, we took on fractions and decimals.
There was geometry too, of course. By the Intermediate years we were tackling algebra and trigonometry.
But a brave new era is dawning in mathematics education. We no longer need all that so-called ‘objective’ arithmetic. And who says a triangle must have three sides?
The way ahead, according to the Ministry of Education, is to “use maths to develop critical awareness about wider social, environmental, political, ideological, and economic issues.”
According to the Ministry’s new Common Practice Model (CPM), what will help children learn this new kind of mathematical thinking, is something called ‘critical maths pedagogy’. The CPM tells us that children should be “encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses, including that maths is benign, neutral and culture-free”.
Teachers must no longer take for granted that arithmetic works the same for everyone. For example, whether two plus two equals four depends on a student’s cultural background. According to Jason To, President of the Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association, if you insist that the statement, ‘two plus two equals four’ is an objective fact, you are guilty of “covert white supremacy.”
Mr To is right to call out mathematics for its racism. The Arab mathematicians who gave us the concept of algorithms were heinous white supremacists. And the Indian mathematician Aryabhatta, who came up with the number zero, is known to have had a penchant for white hoods and burning crosses.
As always, the Ministry is right too. Critical pedagogy will make mathematics much easier for children to learn. If there are no ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ solutions to mathematical problems, it follows that any solution is as good as any other.
Even better, when young people leave school, getting into careers that require mathematical skills will be straightforward. Gone will be all the heavy mathematical lifting currently required to become an economist or engineer.
Having dispensed with the, frankly racist, idea that mathematical problems have ‘correct’ answers, designing a bridge will be a doddle. If mathematics is subjective, then so, by extension, are the so-called ‘laws’ of physics. And critical maths will come as a huge relief to those struggling to pay their mortgages in these days of rising interest rates.
All we need now is for reality to get with the new ‘critical maths’ programme. – Michael Johnston
How can any New Zealand prison be near capacity when the prison population has been actively reduced by well over twenty percent since Labour became government?
The possibility arises that one singular prison might still be “nearing capacity” but on reading that the prison in question is Rimutaka, that is also suspect. – Lindsay Mitchell
There are some fundamental questions that arise out of a directive to police to make other provision for detainees because Rimutaka is “nearing capacity” that haven’t been asked.
Or if they were, they haven’t been answered.
Despite Correction’s high-profile recruitment campaign, I suspect the directive is based on the safety of corrections officers if staff/prisoner ratios get too high. And that is a valid concern.
But to have come to this dangerous impasse is more evidence of a government failing and flailing with its lack of consistent, coherent policy and planning.- Lindsay Mitchell
After the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, markets became concerned about Greece’s ability to repay its debts.
Until the crisis hit, rating agencies were relaxed about Greece’s solvency. Fitch rated the country as ‘A’ in October 2008, Standard & Poor’s gave it an ‘A-’ in January 2009, and Moody’s gave it an ‘A1’ in February 2009.
But by 2011, all three agencies had downgraded Greek debt to junk status.
Ratings may seem fine and markets relaxed, but sentiment can change quickly.
The three agencies currently rate New Zealand as AA+, Aaa and A+, respectively. But these high-grade ratings should not give us a false sense of security. There are reasons to be concerned about New Zealand’s economic prospects.
Our current account deficit last month was the largest in over three decades. Given rising price levels, that is not surprising, but the deficit was also the highest relative to GDP, at 8.9 percent.
The result is that every 11th dollar New Zealand spends is a dollar it must borrow abroad. – Oliver Hartwich
New Zealand’s price inflation remains uncomfortably high. The Reserve Bank expressed concern about the economy showing signs of overheating and the labour market being too tight. Both are results of the enormous amount of money created during Covid.
Because of our own policy choices, New Zealand has become a less attractive destination for migration and investment.
A decade ago, New Zealand’s government was much smaller than it is today. Erratic policy making has also created a perception of greater political risk.
Once international markets become alarmed, their worries can become self-fulfilling, as we have seen internationally.
In the event of a credit downgrade, interest rates would likely rise. The impact on household consumption and investment would be significant.- Oliver Hartwich
New Zealand’s economic circumstances have deteriorated so much over the past few years that a credit rating downgrade would be a lagging indicator of our economic troubles.
This scenario may noy be imminent. But it is something to watch out for. – Oliver Hartwich
Half of it [inflation] can be explained through oil prices, the Ukraine war, Covid supply chain shortages that will go up and down, [and] will sort itself out over time. But half of it is purely domestic, purely domestic, because we’ve had a government spending a billion dollars extra … each and every week. – Christopher Luxon
We’re six months to the day from October’s election and the latest economic forecast from Infometrics paints a bleak picture for Labour’s strategists.
Infometrics is forecasting high inflation will persist, stuck at 6.6% at the end of this year with a return to a one-to-three percent target not forecast until mid-2025. – Jack Tame
The curious thing about the Infometrics forecast is that it underscores a growing sense that New Zealand’s inflation battle is diverging from comparable countries.
CPI data in the U.S this week has a year-on-year rate of 5%, way down from the post-Covid high of 9.1%. The Eurozone went from 8.5% in February to 6.9% in March. And the head economist of Australia’s biggest bank is flirting with the possibility of mortgage rate cuts later this year.
Meanwhile, Infometrics is forecasting New Zealand’s inflation will remain stubbornly high, and the cash rate could be raised another 50 basis points in the next few months. What’s more, the speed with which mortgage rates have risen will not be matched by the speed of cuts when we do reach the other side. – Jack Tame
We’re hardly the only developed democracy with a cost-of-living crisis. But if New Zealand lags behind comparable countries in bringing inflation down, voters’ patience with that argument will deteriorate quickly.
The government knows this. There is a reason Three Waters is now called the Affordable Water Reforms, even though it delivers fewer savings and is less affordable from a ratepayer perspective than the previous model. There’s a reason we’ll hear “bread-and-butter” over and over again. But slogans and branding will only help so much, and for now Grant Robertson is still planning a significant operating allowance in the budget next month.
The Infometrics forecast make it crystal clear. Forget co-governance or education, climate change, mental health, or the All Blacks prospects at the World Cup, six months today the 2023 general election will be decided by voters with an intense focus on their back pockets. And if New Zealand isn’t making meaningful progress on taming inflation and other countries are, it’ll be that much tougher for Labour to win a third term. – Jack Tame
The question for our esteemed Finance Minister Grant Robertson is, how long can he keep saying with a straight face that “we are well placed” to deal with what is an increasingly obvious economic calamity.
The 50 basis point official case rate increase from Adrian Orr last week pretty much blew whatever credibility was left out of the water. New Zealand is now into outlier territory.- Mike Hosking
It also seems pretty much certain we are in a recession or, if per chance we aren’t, we are about to be. There is too much economic evidence piling up for us to avoid the so-called “hard landing”. The Government’s tax take is coming in now under budget. The cost of the government’s debt is rising. The size of that debt as a percentage of GDP is going up. The ratings agencies are now publicly commenting on it and talking of possible downgrades.
The trade deficit is at record levels, we are not selling enough to the world to offset what we are bringing in. The main foreign exchange earners of tourism and dairy are now problems for the economy. Tourism is back at 50 per cent of what it was, and the speed of the resurgence post the borders opening is now slowing. When it’s slowing and you are still only at 50 per cent you have issues.
Dairy has demand issues, and the auction numbers of late look increasingly worrying.
While all that is going on, the Government continues to spend beyond its means. The previous Saturday 1.4 million of us got more money, not because we did anything to earn it, but simply because the cost of everything was rising.
Think about that, the Government borrowed yet more money to hand out to people who need yet more money to pay for things, because the cost of everything is going up. That is called a wage/price spiral: one feeds the other.
The fact no one made anything to earn that money is the red flag; the Government didn’t have the money either, it borrowed it. – Mike Hosking
That is the one bright part of the economy. Everyone has work.
But they have work because we haven’t let enough people into the country to avoid the wage-price spiral that’s been engineered.
I say engineered because there can be no other reason for keeping the immigration settings the way they have been, other than to drive prices and wages up in an artificial fashion. – Mike Hosking
So along with Australia, we can now almost certainly add Britain, most of Europe and indeed the US, to the list of countries that appear to be avoiding recession. They appear to be managing a soft landing to their economic circumstances.
And while we know why we aren’t able to achieve the same feat, the real question is how come? How is it we have got this so spectacularly wrong? Benefit of hindsight is always useful but the mistakes seem increasingly obvious.
Too much printed money. Too much of that money spent on things that had nothing to do with Covid. Not enough questions and rigour around where the money was spent and what value, if any, it was adding. A funding for lending programme for banks that had no rules around it. An immigration setting that fuelled wage spikes. An immigration setting that because of delays, led people to choose other countries. And an increasingly frustrated Reserve Bank governor who asked the government to rein it in, as well as telling the public to cool their jets. Both parties ignored him, because the Government loves debt, and we all had pay rises.
Like a slow-moving train wreck, this is all coming back to haunt us. The tragedy of it all is we are increasingly seeing places where it isn’t as bad.
Grant Robertson likes to say it’s not a game of comparisons: actually, it is. And we lose. – Mike Hosking
A big education announcement from the Government- they’re reducing class sizes for primary and intermediate schools.
Classes will drop from 29 to 28. You cannot make this stuff up. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Let’s be realistic about what that’s going to do, it’s going to give the 28 remaining kids in the class an extra 6 seconds an hour with the teacher.
No parent believes that’s enough to, as the Education Minister reckons, turn around our decline in reading writing and maths.
Really the saddest thing about today’s announcement, apart from the lack of ambition is that this is a recycled promise from Labour. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
This is not even an announcement worth making. You have to question the political wisdom of hauling the PM out to announce this.
This just opens Labour up to ridicule for thinking it’s worth announcing class size reduction of one student, and it reminds voters that previous promises were more ambitious- and never delivered on.
Few should be impressed by this and few should expect it to happen. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The problems don’t end in the households in the cities. Farmers on whom the country depends for most of the countries’ export income have been hard hit by inflation, as well as by the climate warriors who are calling on the government to cut herd numbers (and methane emissions) just when the nation needs every cent it can earn from export receipts.
So the issues are piling up on the government. And even if Hipkins can solve them all, will the average punter think he deserves another term, as government debts pile up to be paid at a later date? – Point of Order
Well, I’ve got some good news for those at the upper end of income earning who may have been wondering when the tax axe was about to fall, forcing them to haemorrhage more.
It turns out, our tax system is pretty fair and equitable after all.
A new study completed for tax consultancy firm OliverShaw concludes that the wealthy in New Zealand pay most of the tax collected. OliverShaw is headed by the former deputy commissioner at IRD, Robin Oliver.
Oliver says that the higher their income, the more they pay. Those earning lower incomes end up paying less tax because of the various tax credits, and other payments they’re eligible to receive. – Roman Travers
By the way, there are no plans for tax reform before the election.
The big concern I have is that this government is spending money as if it grows on trees, but their expenditure is now too high compared to the taxation system we currently use.
The outcome of the study, maybe reassuring for those with salubrious incomes, but it still leaves one big question unanswered: where do we go to get the money required to lift New Zealand out of the quagmire?
Even though the outcome of the study is quite clear, do you really trust any government not to tinker with the taxation dials once the election is won? – Roman Travers
Labour’s water reform process has become such a confused and garbled mess it may turn voters away from even trying to understand what’s going on.
Certainly, Labour hopes that’s what happens. Razzle dazzle the country with alarming facts on water and supply and quality issues, then confuse everyone by harping on about a term some consultant handpicked – called ‘spreadsheet’ balance – then announce more entities, saying this will fix it then back it up with some nonsense forecast that claims future savings are massive if we go this way.
Great stuff – a perfect smoke screen in which to hide the real reason and the remaining reason why people are still outraged over this trainwreck change.
Co-governance. More on that soon. But, in the meantime, more cheap talk.
Cheap talk can work to defuse and delay and confuse in the meantime, especially when your own Māori caucus has boxed you in, got you by the gonads, and won’t budge on this thing called co-governance. – Duncan Garner
In politics, talk is cheap but mostly that’s what politicians do. They relaunch, reheat, they fill gaps; their brains aren’t always attached to their mouths and they say things they think people want to hear.
Like, for instance, much bigger savings in the years ahead – but only if we keep this current Government in power and let them push through their new Affordable Water Reforms.
How on earth do you save money on future costs that are yet be finalised when you haven’t spent the money yet?
And, anyway, when did a recent New Zealand infrastructure project of this magnitude come out cheaper? Who trusts this public service and this Government to announce they’ve come in under budget on anything? – Duncan Garner
Labour’s Māori caucus has insisted Māori have influence on the boards governing water in New Zealand. (While each entity will be run by a professional board, strategic oversight and direction would be provided by local representative groups with every local council in the country, as well as mana whenua, getting a seat at the table.)
Ardern barely addressed the issue while she was in power and, on the way out, couldn’t explain why it was necessary.
Now, equally, PM Hipkins looks like he’s been in three rounds of boxing tag with various Māori MPs from within the Labour Party.
Every time someone gets tired, a new Māori MP joins the fray; problem is, Hipkins is the punching bag every time and he’s failed to rein in or convince his Māori MPs how unpopular the concept is. – Duncan Garner
This is all not much more than lipsticking the pig, really.
The savings being talked about are pie in the sky and quite irrelevant to the issue.
First, do we need to secure our water systems and make them better and healthier and more sustainable?
Yes we do, because people have died and continue to die because our water systems are old, unreliable, and can’t be trusted.
But, in the process of cleaning up our water supplies, Labour allowed Māori to fundamentally rewrite our approach to co-governance and how we view the Treaty of Waitangi itself.
And that just got left untouched by Hipkins who didn’t want an election-year fight with his own MPs. Last time this happened, the Māori Party was formed by outgoing Labour MP Tariana Turia.
Hipkins just got rolled. Make no mistake.
So, who is running the country? Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta?
Surely not… – Duncan Garner
For many, youth and old age are mere facts of life that one must confront. But at the University of Exeter, they merit a trigger warning. –
Youth and old age are as unproblematic as the moon and the sun, or trees and grass, so where do you stop?
“What we have now are trigger warning obsessives in search of a never-ending mission. – Professor Frank Furedi
What does politics produce when mixed with violence and intimidation?
Sadly nothing constructive, plus a humungous helping of anger, division, recrimination, spleen and confusion. Oh, and headlines. Lots of headlines. – Tim Wilson
First, we must acknowledge the genuine human anguish in these exchanges. Some charge that Posie Parker deliberately created the melee by holding an outdoor meeting. However, it’s difficult to feel genuine joy at the sight of a diminutive woman being escorted by security through a baying mob. Moreover, the activist who threw the tomato juice has a tortured history of being shamed and disparaged for their gender journey. Wounded people wound.
Next, beware the ideology cartoon. Jargon like “anti-women” and “TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist)” hinders rather than helps. Such vocabulary exacerbates division. Political movements throughout history have used words to drain the humanity from their opponents. Let’s syphon the cortisol from the lingo.
(It is not to the media’s credit that it accepts and repeats these crude summaries in the service of an equally dangerous idol: The Clickbait-Inducing Headline.)
Free speech expert Jacob Mchangama contends that free speech has historically assisted the vulnerable, for example during the American Civil Rights battle.
Another reflection: Majorities aren’t always right and don’t always support free speech. More than 2000 protestors were against Posie Parker, wanting to stop her from speaking; her own group was significantly smaller. Yet free speech expert Jacob Mchangama contends that free speech has historically assisted the vulnerable, for example during the American Civil Rights battle.
Moreover, context is essential. Given the vehemence in and around the issue of trans rights and how they may impinge on the rights of others, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we have a problem with trans people here. Not so; apparently, we’re world leaders in respecting transgender rights.
Lastly, hate (no matter how self-righteously obtained) cannot extinguish injustice. – Tim Wilson
These days, everybody—by which I mean every person who considers himself intelligent and educated—must have an opinion about everything. It would be socially irresponsible, even antisocial, not to be able to opine on each of the thousand burning questions of the day. The natural result is that opinion comes before its own justification, and most intellectual activity consists of finding reasons for what one already thinks. Perhaps it was ever thus. – Theodore Dalrymple
But self-interest is not always on the side of the devil, and though I have not studied the question deeply—nor even shallowly—I suspect that the move to electric cars is based upon a giant confidence trick, foisted on corrupt governments all too willing to be duped by smiling entrepreneurs. (One may smile, and smile, and be a villain, as Hamlet said.)
The questions about the electrification of vehicles are many and obvious. How is the electricity necessary for the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of such vehicles to be generated and distributed? How are enough minerals for the batteries to be mined? How are the extinct batteries to be disposed of? Is not pollution merely being transferred from one area of the globe to another in what one might call blatant imperialist fashion?
The answers to these questions are technical and are no doubt additionally complicated by the prospect of technological advance—which, however, cannot be predicted with certainty. Curiously enough, however, the questions do not seem to be discussed very often, or even raised. – Theodore Dalrymple
I have not the time, nor the patience, nor the technical engineering capacity, to answer the questions properly, and so I stick firmly to my belief, which I am prepared to argue for in any bar or over any dinner table, that electric cars are a giant fraud perpetrated on the public by the corporatist state, in the process punishing the poor who will have to pay dearly if they want to go anywhere—which, of course, the Duke of Wellington, reacting to trains as a cheap means of transport for the multitudes back in the early part of the 19th century, thought they shouldn’t anyway. – Theodore Dalrymple
We live in a world where a man who masquerades as a sportswoman is showered with praise and money while an actual sportswoman is branded a ‘stupid fucking bitch’ and punched in the face. A world where a bloke can be paid thousands of dollars to prance around in a sports bra in a grotesque parody of a female athlete while a real female athlete is set upon by a seething mob and told to ‘go the fuck home’. A world where a man in leggings doing a sub-Dick Emery satire on womanhood is held up as a role model while a young woman who trained her whole life to be an elite athlete is damned as a bigot and – direct quote – a ‘transphobic bitch’. – Brendan O’Neill
A man in women’s sportsgear is fawned over by the right-on while a woman who wants to protect women’s sports is monstered by them. A man does a sardonic take on women’s ‘girly’ workouts and progressives cry, ‘Go, girl’. A woman stands up for the right of women to have their own sports and progressives shout, ‘Shut up, bitch’. The confluence of these two stories is perfect. It captures what a devastating impact the trans ideology has had not only on women’s rights, but also on the entire category of womanhood. That the elites feel more comfortable with a man’s frivolous performance of womanhood than they do with a woman’s passionate, reasoned defence of womanhood confirms that the trans ideology has laid waste to truth, science and sexual equality. All that is left in the wake of this deeply misogynistic ideology is the skin of womanhood, the accoutrements of it, the mask and the drag and the lippy. That’s why, in certain circles, Dylan Mulvaney is a more respected ‘woman’ than Riley Gaines – because he performs the caricature so much better than she does. – Brendan O’Neill
Gross parody of my sex’ – those words ring in my ears whenever I see Dylan Mulvaney. And many of the other ‘transwomen’ we’re meant to treat as actual women. ‘Trans women are women’, as the mantra goes, a mantra that was bellowed with medieval ferocity in the face of the witch, Riley Gaines. Today, though, there’s more than ‘kneejerk etiquette’ demanding that we recognise these fellas with stubble and hirsute fingers as women. An entire new machinery of authoritarianism has been fashioned to pressure us to believe that transwomen are women and to punish those, like Gaines, who dare to demur. Public shaming, blacklisting and even violence are now used to force all to acquiesce to the idea that someone like Dylan Mulvaney is a girl.
Mulvaney’s schtick is incredibly sexist. His diary of ‘girlhood’ gives the impression that femaleness is an act. You thought womanhood was biological, cultural, historical and relational, a thing of real substance and meaning? Think again. It’s drag, basically. It’s eyeshadow and hair extensions. – Brendan O’Neill
Let’s be clear about this: the idea that a man becomes a woman simply by having a facelift and popping a few pills and maybe having his knob removed is profoundly misogynistic. In Greer’s words from 1989, it promotes the idea ‘that the female is no more than a castrated male’. These days a bloke doesn’t even have to be castrated to become a woman. The demeaning of women as castrated males has been replaced by the even more repugnant demeaning of them as dolled-up males. Fellas, if you have access to mascara, wigs and tucking tape to hide your cock, you too can become a woman. Put on your leggings, do a couple of high kicks, open your mouths to make yourselves look dim and vacuous, and hey presto, you’re a lady. Anyone can do it.
The trans ideology has rendered womanhood meaningless. It has emptied it of its truths and reduced it to mere costume, one that anyone can don. As Greer has argued, the trans ideology is entirely counter-feminist, in that it treats ‘femininity’ as the core truth of womanhood. Femininity is a ‘role you play’, says Greer, ‘and for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion’. It really has become the given identity of women. Mulvaney is a celebrated ‘woman’ precisely because he performs femininity so enthusiastically, while Gaines is a demonised woman because she has the audacity to push back against the idea that womanhood is a performance and argues that, actually, it’s real. Biologically, culturally real. That Mulvaney’s gross parody of womanhood enjoys greater validation than Gaines’ sincere defence of women’s rights speaks to the misogyny that has been unleashed by the trans cult.
The problem isn’t Dylan Mulvaney himself. It’s the fact that the chattering classes, the White House and big businesses like Nike Women and Bud Light are all falling at his feet and saying: ‘Yes, Dylan, you are a girl.’ In doing so, they don’t only flatter one bloke’s delusions – they also give official sanction to the sexist idea that womanhood is nothing more than cosplay. And if women aren’t real, what’s the need for women’s rights? It’s a short step from treating womanhood as a joke to treating women as jokes. – Brendan O’Neill
Of all the open invitations to fraud ever issued, the concept of mental health must have been among the most successful. In the past, there was the idea of mental hygiene, which conjured up images of experts pouring disinfectant into people’s minds and giving them a good clear-out, but it was never as popular an idea as that of mental health, which allows people such as Prince Harry to present themselves as unwell and therefore worthy of pity, especially of self-pity.
No doubt the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is produced more or less on the same principles as those of a carpet salesman haggling over the price of a carpet in a Moroccan souk, will one day turn self-pity into an illness, after which the self-pitying will be able to pity themselves for being so self-pitying, meta-self-pity as it were. Indeed, they will be able to take time off work to struggle with, as the phrase goes, their self-pity: a struggle that is doomed to failure, as was the attempt to kill the hydra by decapitating it. – Theodore Dalrymple
Where mental health is the cynosure of every person seeking time off work or early retirement on medical grounds at the expense of others, it is not surprising that supposed fragility should be deemed both desired and desirable. Self-sufficiency in such circumstances seems almost callous and unfeeling. Mental fragility, besides, is a source of employment for all those who want to turn their compassion into cash—who are not a few, and growing more numerous by the year, if not by even shorter intervals.
A population trained up to fragility is therefore highly desirable from a certain point of view. Such a population will be the helping professions’ milch cow, the goose that lays its golden egg. If I believed in conspiracies, I would say that those who indoctrinate children about the imminent end of the world because of climate change are in the pay of the monstrous regiment of mental health workers, who require a timid, shallow, anxiety-ridden population in order to guarantee their future income by promising to restore it to that mirage-like entity, mental health. – Theodore Dalrymple
If Mrs. Goodenough’s child, who probably started worrying about these matters from the age of 10 or 11 at the latest, is a typical child, as the newspaper implies, it is perfectly obvious that those who teach children about climate change at such an age are, in effect, child abusers. They have no idea of childhood as an age of innocence or carefreeness. In their view, children ought to be inducted into the most pressing of abstract concerns almost as soon as they are able to speak. (I do not enter into the question of how far these concerns are actually realistic or justified.)
A psychologist to whom the newspaper spoke suggested that there was only one real solution for the children’s anxiety, and this was for them to become activists—millions of Greta Thunbergs, I suppose. The climate should be to children what Hitler was to the Hitler Youth or communism to the Young Pioneers. That it was possible that children were not in a position, and did not know enough, to pronounce on how the world should be organized, did not cross the mind of the authors of the article. For them, childhood was not an age of innocence but of knowledge and wisdom.
Concern for the environment is not the same as dragooning children into fascistic regiments of humorless automata. The problems are undoubtedly huge, but they are also complex. Moreover, no age has been without its threats and dangers, and in many respects young people today are immensely privileged by comparison with their forebears, though they are too ignorant to know it and their teachers are too ignorant to teach it. – Theodore Dalrymple
“No one died from a lack of empathy,” was how Brown responded to Jack Tame’s persistent baiting on another of Bush’s findings, that the residents of the Super City were ill-served by the mayor’s less than emotive response to the rapidly deteriorating weather that overwhelmed the city. And Brown is right.
I appreciate we live in a post-modern world where intentions matter more than outcomes, but really, just fix the culverts so I don’t have to judge if the depth of the water covering the road is higher than the air intake of my engine.
I don’t want empathy. I want drains that work and reliable weather forecasts. – Damien Grant
Brown is confronted with a $295 million gap between revenue and spending, and is proposing to do something no other political leader in the last 40 years has seriously attempted: a reduction in spending.
Even more remarkably, he is outlining in advance the services he wishes to cut and asking those who live within his jurisdiction to comment on the proposals. – Damien Grant
The point is that Auckland has a mayor who is doing what he said he would do, or at least he is attempting to do so. His authority is restricted by the cumbersome structures he must work within.
You may not agree with his proposals or style, but he is being honest about the problems and canvassing the hard decisions a responsible political leader should be discussing with their electors.
If you look beyond his undiplomatic demeanour and contempt for those he feels are contemptible, we see a political leader more interested in outcomes than optics; and given his sartorial selections, he clearly isn’t worried about optics.
Meanwhile, the extent of the economic and institutional malaise in the capital is an order of magnitude larger than that facing the Super City. Regardless of your political perspective, Brown is providing a model for how democratic leaders can confront the serious challenges that lie before us.
Perhaps our national politicians should trust the electorate and the electorate may surprise them with a willingness to accept that hard decisions need to be made. – Damien Grant
The political hyenas that reside in The Beehive are rounding on the Greens. There’s a whiff of fresh blood in the air. This week, the party has been in self-sabotage mode, feeding information to the media about Tai Rāwhiti-based Green MP, Dr Elizabeth Kerekere.
The writing is on the wall. It’s tickets for Dr Kerekere. Her political career is all but over.
Her crime was to call the party darling, Chlöe Swarbrick, a “crybaby” in a misfired WhatsApp message to the wrong group of Green MPs and staff. The media didn’t need to know about it. In terms of political errors, it was hardly the worst crime in the world. So why did the Greens leak this information to journalists?
It’s simple. The Greens need a reset. Some Green MPs have been running riot in our democracy over the past few weeks, using reckless language, fuelling polarisation in our communities, and acting like hapless student protestors. Dr Kerekere has, quite by accident, put her name forward to be the sacrificial lamb, and has given the Greens the perfect opportunity to look principled and rein in some of their rogue MPs who shoot first, and think later. – Rachel Smalley
You could be forgiven for assuming ‘labelling’ is a Green Party policy – if you have criticised a Green policy and you weren’t labelled a Boomer, a Terf, privileged, a climate change-denier, a Nazi, a transphobe, or a pale, stale, male, can you truly claim to have even lived?
Marama Davidson leads from the front on this issue. The Greens co-leader is proof the fish always rots from the head, most recently labelling “white cis men” the cause of all the violence in the world. And Davidson robustly refuses to apologise. – Rachel Smalley
There were shades of David Cunliffe in Shaw’s reply. Who could forget the former Labour Party leader apologising for being a man in 2014? Shaw’s retort suggests one of two things: that Davidson is actually in full control of the party, or Shaw concurs with Davidson’s “white cis men” assertion. Either way, Shaw has lost credibility among all but the party’s staunch base.
The most concerned by all of this will be the Prime Minister. If he’s to form a government in October, Chris Hipkins will need the Greens and he finds himself in an interesting conundrum. Hipkins has moved his party so far to the right that he could probably find more common ground with National. He’ll be feeling vulnerable right now. The Greens are unpredictable and increasingly fanatical; and, given the proximity of the election, they pose the biggest risk to Labour’s hopes of re-election – and it’s a risk Labour will struggle to mitigate. – Rachel Smalley
If the Greens are capable of true self-analysis, they should recognise the need to reset the party’s communication strategy. And if they’re smart, they’ll use the opportunity to reposition themselves as authoritative, disciplined, and virtuous – three key attributes the Greens do not possess, and they’ve proven as much in the past month. Their reckless use of language and their bullying behaviour was on display throughout the tortuous Posie Parker affair.
The Greens’ inflammatory, and at times frenzied, commentary on social media most certainly played a key role in fuelling the rage, unrest, and entitlement on both sides of the argument at last month’s Albert Park anti-trans rights protest. And it should not be lost on Davidson that it was two cis-gendered white men that stepped in to add some nuance to the situation.
Former chief science adviser to the Prime Minister, Sir Peter Gluckman, was the first to speak up on an issue that is important to trans and cis-gendered women. And he was followed by chief human rights commissioner Paul Hunt. Both men were concerned for the social cohesion of our country – and our national unity.
Sir Peter said: “We’ve seen the weaponisation of narrative, particularly through social media, and these things polarise people, make people scared, which in turn reinforced the ability for people to be more polarised.” – Rachel Smalley
Commissioner Hunt said as much too. He said if women are concerned about an erosion of their rights, particularly in women-only spaces, they should be able to speak to those concerns. The message was clear: it’s okay to talk. Constructive conversation in a calm and reasoned space is 100% the right way forward.
But that’s not how the Greens see it.
In our rapidly changing society, the Greens resort to what they know best – student activism. They become emboldened and battle-ready. Forget Posie Parker. She was the canary in the coal mine. It’s clear the Greens will continue on their mission to silence fair-minded New Zealand women who want a seat at the table, and to contribute to the Government’s changing political language around women, and access to women-only spaces.
The Greens won’t move on this issue. Women will be described as people who bleed, chest-feeders, and parenting people. If you suggest there might be a better way, you’re called a transphobe and you’re cancelled. It’s the Greens way, or the cycle way.
There is no way to sweeten this message. Given the Greens’ recent behaviour, the prospect of a Labour-Greens coalition in October is troubling. Diplomacy will take a backseat to activism, and when you consider the Green’s sizeable digital audience and a willing and waiting media that feeds on outrage, the Greens present a very real risk to social cohesion and the stability of our democracy. – Rachel Smalley
It’s only a matter of time before the election mantras start circulating. I’d wager a bet that, before too long, National, Act, and New Zealand First will roll out something along the lines of: “Vote Labour, and we’ll throw in the Greens too.”
And, if the Greens continue their reckless rhetoric, it might be the only line the Right needs. – Rachel Smalley
Stop and Go signs are now emerging in Maori – has New Zealand reached peak stupid?
Labour would be better off improving child vaccination rates to keep our babies safe. – Wendy Geus
All decision-making by the NZ Transport Agency should be based on safety first, not ideology. Motorists need to be able to react quickly and confidently. How can they do that when the language is different and a moment’s pause or panic reaction to the change might result in an accident?
We need a government that can use common sense, logic and reason when making decisions: not dogma or pure bloody-mindedness even when it’s clear they are wrong. – Wendy Geus
Pragmatic and practical decision-making with the public’s best interest and safety in mind should be the mantra for government public servants who are paid by the public they serve.
However, I have full confidence that we are not fully ‘there yet’ and more examples of this Labour Government’s ideological lunacy will arise.
This is at a time when Maori babies have the lowest vaccination rates in six years, dropping to 67% (from 90% in 2017), and risk catching measles, whooping cough, and meningococcal disease. Three babies have died already this year from whooping cough.
Retaining public service targets that National adopted would have done more for Māori health and well-being than wasted millions spent on plastering Māori words over every spare surface, sign, and public document and ramming the language down our throats through the media (tokenism, according to Kiri Allen). – Wendy Geus
Accountability is scary and requires hard work rather than just announcements and haemorrhaging of money never to be accounted for. Where were the journalists questioning this dangerous move? It is only now I see articles decrying this treacherous Government’s removal of accountability. – Wendy Geus
Six years ago Maori childhood vaccination rates were not much lower than other ethnic groups, hovering around 90%; so our current Labour government cannot put their gross failures down to poor housing and poverty or their favourite: they are a ‘vulnerable’ group of people.
National, having inherited much lower rates from the Clark government, achieved much better results over nine years with sheer hard slog by the health workers and government ministers actually doing their job on the ground and not directing things from their offices while hoping for the best. – Wendy Geus
Regarding the ‘vulnerable’ label, it is part of the ‘culture of excuses’ to which Chris Luxon referred. It is a gross insult to label these groups, ‘vulnerable’ as with the right help from a government prepared to roll their sleeves up and put in the work, these people could be in a much better position today. – Wendy Geus
It is a toss-up between Jan Tinetti or our former education minister, our current PM, as to who has been the most useless.
Chris Hipkins, who presided over the introduction of the contentious cancel culture (history) curriculum and had Shaneen Lal (the individual who helped incite the Albert Park riot and then miraculously was named Young New Zealander of the Year) as an advisor on Gender Studies, probably tops the bill.
Concentrating on promoting their radical agenda, using our children as guinea pigs could be one reason why the reading and maths results are so atrocious.
As a former teacher, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would come to this. And, thanks to our media’s blind devotion to our corrupt Labour Government, many New Zealanders are still completely oblivious as to what is going on, as the media endorse it. – Wendy Geus
How have we got to the point where our lowest-waged workers are now paying tax rates that were set up to sock it to those on higher incomes?
If you’re a minimum wage earner who works more than 40 hours a week, you’re now in the middle $48,000 tax bracket, paying 30% on any additional earnings.
Inflation has dragged you into a higher tax bracket.
To make things worse, the higher bracket at such a modest income level is a tax on ambition that risks killing the incentive to upskill, gun for promotion or take on a side gig.
The idea that drives progressive taxation is that as people become better off, they should pay higher taxes. We need to rethink this logic. The trouble is that our so-called progressive rates have become regressive, hitting minimum-wage workers.
Far from abiding by the old adage that there should be no taxation without representation, meaning only Parliament should set the tax brackets and rates, inflation moves earners into higher brackets by stealth. – Ruth Richardson
The place to start is not with tax levels, but with spending demands. Tax and borrowing levels are designed to cover spending demands and as we have now (re)discovered to our cost, undisciplined spending drives unsustainable inflation. – Ruth Richardson
My 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act set out five principles of responsible fiscal management: reducing public debt to prudent levels, requiring an operating balance to be maintained on average over a reasonable time, maintaining a buffer level of public net worth, managing fiscal risks, and maintaining predictable and stable rates of taxation.
The breach of these principles on the spending side has imperilled not just the quest for stable rates of tax but price stability itself, a monetary policy imperative. –
Any government is free to hike taxes if they dare, but this should be done transparently and with scrutiny. That means collecting advice from the Treasury on how the tax hike will affect New Zealanders and overall productivity.
It means presenting any proposal to Parliament and fielding questions from MPs. It means setting out a clear rationale for your tax hike and the cost/benefit analysis so voters can cast judgement come election day.
Without this due process, Jane Average’s extra $2000 tax bill is a dishonest, undemocratic money grab. Taxpayers could be justified in invoicing Grant Robertson for their money back.
Any promise of tax relief that does not involve ongoing indexation should be protested as a sleight-of-hand: A partial refund of stolen wages attached to a promise to keep on stealing. – Ruth Richardson
These obvious tax injustices demand remedies.
The first port of call is to tackle tax rates. A government could decide to adopt a flat tax, which would avoid both the disincentive to progress and the scourge of fiscal drag. Or the steep five-step bracket regime could be collapsed into two, with the top bracket kicking in at, say, twice the minimum wage.
Second, the stealth tax needs to be slayed forever by legislating for an automatic annual inflation adjustment to the chosen tax brackets. After all, that has become standard practice on the other side of the ledger as benefits and minimum wages are now inflation adjusted.
We expect our finance ministers to rein in inflation by limiting the splurge of taxed and borrowed money into an overheated economy. But here’s where perverse incentives kick in: How can finance ministers be trusted to fight inflation when, thanks to bracket creep, they profit from it? – Ruth Richardson
The belief that distant descent confers psychological characteristics and moral qualities is one with a rather unfortunate history—besides being merely false, of course. But it’s a tool in the hands of politicians for whom all is good that conduces to power. –
All four of my grandparents were refugees, my mother was a refugee, and her sister was a refugee twice by the age of 42. I, however, have never been victimized or persecuted, except by my own foolishness, and therefore I have no special moral standing, nor do I deserve consideration from others because of my descent. – Theodore Dalrymple
We are still far from judging people by the content of their character rather than their membership of this or that demographic group.
While this is so, it will always be tempting for politicians in an electoral system to appeal to groups by means of their own descent, and it’s easier to make such an appeal if you believe yourself to be a member of such a group, and furthermore that such membership is morally, psychologically, and politically important or relevant. And it’s only natural for politicians to claim the descent that they think will give them the most votes. – Theodore Dalrymple
It’s usually the third term before the rot sets in.
Labour is displaying early symptoms of third term-itis, a kind of arrogance and complacency that can be fatal to future electoral success.
The longer they spend in office, the more a government start to look a little grubby. And there is nothing dirtier than money in politics. – Andrea Vance
To draw heat out of the scandal, PM Chris Hipkins changed the narrative by pretending to fix a problem that was never really there.
With Trumpian-level gaslighting, he promised “transparency and vigilance” around lobbyists and their relationships with politicians. – Andrea Vance
I can promise you – ministers are much more likely to pick up the phone to a donor, than scratch the back of a colleague-turned-shill begging a favour.
But sure. Take away the swipe cards that allow a handful of professional schmoozers to sip burnt coffee in Parliament’s cafe. That’ll fix it.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know “a review” is code for “make it go away until the public forget about it.”
Still, once government starts to go off, the smell lingers in the nostrils. – Andrea Vance
Foon’s position is now probably untenable. As a former politician he should have identified that his donations were inappropriate while he held a supposedly apolitical role, charged with holding the Government to account.
MPs should not be taking money from state servants, and Allan should never have accepted the donation. It must immediately be repaid.
It compromises the neutrality of the public service in the eyes of the public. But that will worry Labour less than the damage it does to its own image.
This drip feed of mini-scandals have common threads. They paint a picture of a cosy elite bound by mutual back-scratching, most of which happens within the limits of the law, but that don’t quite pass the voters’ sniff test.
Power eventually corrupts. And once that happens, it’s really hard to get the stink out. – Andrea Vance
To this government, and to those who pull its strings, co-governance means control, if not outright, then by veto. Control of water would be the first skittle to fall. Once precedent has been established, beaches will follow, air waves will be next, conservation land soon-after, and so on … with the ticket being clipped at every point along the way, and in perpetuity.
And all this based on distorted interpretations of the treaty, lies about the past, manipulation of dubious legal rulings, and simple self-interest.
It would be difficult to think of more far-reaching constitutional changes than some of the co-governance scenarios being promoted by the Greens, the Maori Party and Labour’s left. The implications of these changes would be far-reaching, and while some outcomes would be predictable, because we can see examples now, others would be unanticipated. Sometimes you don’t get a true picture of whether change was worth it until you are picking up the pieces, it cannot easily be wound back, and once the damage has been done … it has been done. – Caleb Anderson
The reason we should look more closely at where co-governance is not going well, is that the downsides, and not the upsides of change, are always the things that impact most. At the end of the day, no-one will care if co-governance is working well in 70% of cases (which is unlikely), if it is a disaster in 30% of cases. The downsides will quickly negate any upsides in the mind of the public.
When we are assessing how reforms have worked, on balance, costs always trump benefits in the public mind, because these are the bits that bite.
So what do existing efforts at co-governance tell us more broadly? How are they unfolding at the local level, and at the level where most people transact life? – Caleb Anderson
Some parks returned to Maori are now derelict, the public has been banned from beaches in some areas of New Zealand, some mountain walks, enjoyed by generations of New Zealanders, are now off-limits, and gates have been erected on public roads, moved only when council paid to have these re-opened. Our education system is in disarray, and we are being told that the health system is on the brink of collapse, both tainted by the darkening shadow of co-governance. – Caleb Anderson
The point is not whether these are majority or minority instances, and none of this should undermine the critical, and often selfless, work being done by some iwi. The point is, what might this tell us about where co-governance could end up? What does it tell us about what happens when an embedded sense of victimhood is coupled with political muscle?
The separation of powers inherent within the Westminster system of government, protection of property rights, the right to a fair trial, application of common law principles, and the sovereign rights of individuals, are things we take for granted, and yet these are historically the exception. – Caleb Anderson
The concept that every individual has rights total and indivisible is a radical idea, it is not an accident of history, it is the product of a thousand years of common law, and of bloodshed on many a battlefield. The sovereign rights (not tribal rights) of each individual make these individuals accountable for their actions, and the state accountable for its actions. The whole concept of human rights is derivative of the very system that some of our politicians seem hell-bent on dismantling.
Democracy requires that even the most powerful people are accountable, that issues are debated openly in the public domain, that we can rid ourselves of our politicians when we want to, and that no person’s vote should be worth more or less than another’s. Human nature is constant, people are often self-interested, and nepotism and corruption are not the exclusive domain of any one group, Maori included … we need safeguards. Maori themselves need safeguards.
The Maori party has called democracy a tyranny. Well if democracy is the tyranny of the majority, just wait for the tyranny of the minority which may just be around the corner. – Caleb Anderson
Comments by Kieran McAnulty, and others within Labour’s caucus, that it is safe to play around at the edges of democracy are dangerous in the extreme and stunningly ignorant. Co-government and democracy cannot co-exist. Co-governance is antithetical to democracy.
While differentials in power, status, wealth, intelligence, health, propensity for political engagement (etc) will always exist, democracy remains a beacon to the inalienable right of the weakest among us to stand no higher or lower than others, and to hold to account those who seek to rule over us and to rid ourselves of them when we choose.
This beacon has shone brightly in our past but it flickered over the weekend, a reminder to us of just how much is at stake. – Caleb Anderson
Ultimately in a democracy if there is also a conflict between elected representative and officials, so in this case we have a conflict between the mayor and the chief executive, that we are strongly of the view that the elected representative is the one that stays if there is a choice. – Callum Purves
That’s completely unacceptable – this government has a history of spraying large amounts of money around, but unfortunately they have a very poor history of accountability for that spending. – Chris Bishop
We should have had independent reports from Treasury about the quality of the spending about the benefits that may have may or may not have been realised as a result of that spending. – Chris Bishop
Accountability and transparency are core tenets of an effective investment management system. Independent reports on the performance of those projects, all high risk projects, would tell us how the projects did against their budgets, their schedules, and the benefits they promised in their business cases.
These types of projects are known to be poor performers globally. This is why this type of reporting is directed to happen by a Cabinet circular, but it hasn’t been happening. If Cabinet had the reports they would learn critical lessons for future projects, and have a tool for driving better project performance through transparency of accountabilities. – Grant Avery
We seem intent on destroying one of the world oldest democracies as fast as we can by creating two classes of citizenship based on ethnicity – absolutely nuts, and if the present Government wins the next election that destruction may prove irreversible short of serious civil strife. But Australia too, though some decades behind us in that respect, also seems determined to create a constitutionally preferred status for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
But with growth in productivity (output per hour work) continuing to be persistently higher in Australia than in New Zealand, the gap in living standards continues to grow. – Don Brash
In my own view, there are four policy areas which need major reform.
First, our education system is failing, and failing more seriously as every year passes. Truancy rates are far too high and basic literacy and numeracy are far too low. Too many teenagers emerge from taxpayer-funded schools barely able to read, write or do basic arithmetic – and therefore essentially almost unemployable.
Second, our planning laws are a nightmare, something recognized by successive governments almost since the Resource Management Act was passed in 1991. Governments have been tinkering with that law in an attempt to improve it ever since. The current Government, to their credit, recognized that a complete rewrite of the RMA was required, but alas the three laws they have proposed in its place promise to make the situation much worse while giving effective veto power to those with some Maori ancestry.
Third, our tax system, while admirably simple in many respects, does much to encourage speculation in real estate and little to encourage investment in productivity-enhancing capital.
Fourth, we have a legal and regulatory regime which goes out of its way to discourage foreign investment in New Zealand. Indeed, the OECD judges that our policy towards inwards foreign investment is one of the most hostile among all developed countries. For a country which loves spending but doesn’t have much of a taste for saving – so that we have a persistent tendency to spend more than we earn, resulting in balance of payments deficits in every year since 1974 – a policy which discourages inward foreign investment is a policy we can ill afford.
Of course, none of these policy changes will be achieved unless we have a government which takes reducing the gap with Australia seriously. Clearly, the current Government does not take that goal seriously.
Unless we soon do have such a government, New Zealand is at serious risk of drifting off in the direction of irrelevance, perhaps a nice place to retire to (though even that is not a given), where our children and grandchildren come to visit during school holidays. – Don Brash
The Human Rights Commission, for which Meng Foon works as the Race Relations Conciliator, is already under considerable scrutiny for being perceived as increasingly political and biased. This latest scandal will only erode public trust in the government entity. After all, the Commission is supposed to be independent of the Government, holding it to account as a watchdog. But when one of its most senior staff is found to be giving significant funding to politicians, this brings its independence into question. – Bryce Edwards
The fact that Foon also gave money – a much lesser amount – to a National Party candidate takes nothing away from the seriousness of the problem. If anything, when wealthy individuals give money to both sides, it raises public suspicions that they are trying to cover their bets, to gain influence with both possible winners. And the fact that such benefactors do not fund other parties shows that it’s not a case of being even-handed.
Foon has been asked if it’s appropriate for someone in his role to donate to politicians, to which he responded: “It didn’t cross my mind. It’s just a thing that we do automatically.” Such flippancy should raise questions about Foon’s judgement, especially since he is unable to see the problems of wealthy and senior public servants intervening in the electoral process. – Bryce Edwards
How much confidence can the public have that ministers declare their conflicts of interest when they occur? The Foon-Allan donations case shows that the Beehive simply doesn’t have adequate procedures in place to make sure conflicts of interest are identified and managed. – Bryce Edwards
The stench of this latest episode isn’t something that will hang around for too long. Attention will move on, and there will be more scandals involving different politicians, from other parties too. But this latest episode shows how money in politics is still a major problem in New Zealand. Although the current Government claim to be cleaning up political donation laws, it’s a worry when the person in charge of that tidy-up has such a poor grasp of the issues. – Bryce Edwards
A final investment thought for readers to ponder. On my lifelong observation, everybody wants to get rich. But everybody isn’t rich, ergo don’t do what everybody does. – Sir Bob Jones
But it’s not all about the money. New Zealand is home. Connections run deep. It’s a huge wrench to upsticks and go and make a new life in a new land.
But to stay here you have to feel like you belong here. That you have a place here. That you have a future here. Is that how you feel? I haven’t heard so much I’m off to Australia chat since – well, since those years between 2004 and 2013. That might be just so much letting off steam.
It will be interesting to see the figures next year. But really the question might be not why would you leave for Australia. But why would you stay in New Zealand. – Kerre Woodham
The prime minister’s announcement that the revised government proposal was to be called the ‘affordable water reform’ has fallen like a dead balloon. Everyone still calls it ‘three waters’, a shorter and more accurate description. Curiously, the underlying concern driving the changes – sustainability – is not a part of the brand. Too often this government has seen branding as a substitute for policy substance. Sausages are not bought for the sizzle. – Brian Easton
The new proposal seems to imply a greater role for local government. (How the folk of Tasman were to be involved in the governance of East Cape defeats understanding, unless there was going to be no local input.)
The PM has also announced that the new water entities will be governed by a ‘skills-based board’. That would be a welcome development from the current practice of appointing a mixture of generic managers and self-important political know-nothings.
Even so, the representation is to be way out of line with population numbers. Perhaps the sponsoring Ministry of Local Government could be renamed the ‘Ministry against Local Government’. – Brian Easton
What is intended is unclear. The whole area is a muddle, with a lack of clarity distinguishing ‘co-governance’, ‘co-management’ and ‘self-government’. (Iwi may be less enthusiastic for ‘co-governance’ when they realise that it may undermine ‘self-governance’.) I leave you to ponder on how co-governance relates to skills-based government.
The Minister of Maori Affairs has announced that there would be no statement on the meaning of co-governance until 2024. The government cannot think that by leaving co-governance until after the election it has killed popular discussion. To the contrary, the most likely outcome is that people will vote upon their worse fears. – Brian Easton
The ‘affordable’ in the new branding is a weasel word. Sustainabilty is not cheap, especially when there has been years of unsustainability. – Brian Easton
First, the promise is hiding that water charges are going to rise under the new regime, as they must once the infrastructure rundown ceases and a regime of maintenance and replacement is introduced. (The catchup is substantial.)
Second, any promises to reduce local body rates in total mean that water charges are being imposed (or increased). The water must still be paid for.
Third, almost half of this year’s voters will be dead in 2054. They are unlikely to be moved by the long-term promise of cost savings; the other half will probably treat the promise as meaningless anyway. – Brian Easton
In a bill before Parliament, the government proposes that the borrowing be secured on local body rates, that is if something goes financially wrong, ratepayers will pay; without some such security the loans will not be forthcoming. That is the practical reason why the water entities should be accountable to local authorities. The notion of no taxation without representation is a central part of our political arrangements. (Which, not incidentally, makes the previous co-governance proposal peculiar unless the iwi appointing to the governing boards were to be responsible for half the debt.)
It appears that the ‘cheaper-to-run’ urban centres are expected to cross-subsidise the expensive rural ones. That appears to be one of the reasons for the muddled representation proposals. Almost certainly, there needs to be central government equity funding to support areas of low population density.
Reflection
Explaining how the government has got itself into such a muddle requires another column. It will tell us much about deep structural failures in the government. – Brian Easton
The policy will now be called “Affordable Water Reform”, despite the fact that it is less affordable than its predecessor. The PM however, is no doubt hoping to imprint in the mind of voters that the only thing that matters is that their policy will deliver cheaper water in the future – conveniently downplaying the tribal rule aspects.
But the fact is, the modelling purporting to produce affordable water, has been roundly discredited. Quite simply, the projected savings in thirty years’ time are imaginary.
No sane analysts would claim any degree of certainty when projecting 30 years into the future, and few would be bold enough to suggest the projections justify a major upheaval of New Zealand’s entire water management system.
What has also been conveniently supressed by Labour – and indeed by the mainstream media – is the fact that instead of carrying the financial risk of its own dodgy scheme, the Labour Government, through legislation that is now in front of Parliament, is forcing ratepayers to underwrite the massive borrowing that the water entities will undertake, even though they will have no control over them. – Muriel Newman
They alleged the country had such poor quality water that 34,000 New Zealanders a year were getting sick.
And even though the Ministry of Health’s annual water quality audits showed excellent results – as did the regular surveillance reports from the ESR – no journalists held the Prime Minister and Local Government Minister to account for their misleading claims.
Back then, the lies were about water quality. Now they are about affordability.
In reality, Three Waters was always a trojan horse used by Jacinda Ardern to hide the fact that Labour was passing control of water to Maori.
Since Chris Hipkins’ Affordable Water Reform does not change that, Maori control of freshwater is set to become a major election issue.
And the choice is now clear: if you don’t support Maori being given the power to control water in New Zealand – through what will become the greatest transfer of wealth to iwi ever – don’t vote for Labour, the Greens, or the Maori Party in October! – Muriel Newman
This is an entirely economic move by Australia, designed to hold on to the hard-working New Zealanders it’s until now grudgingly tolerated.
Australia knows our people are more likely than their own people to have a job —any job— maybe partly because for the past 20 years they haven’t been able to get welfare.
The Australian government also knows its health system and so much else in its economy relies on ex-pat New Zealand workers.
And now, in the midst of a global skills shortage, it’s reluctantly taking steps to keep those it’s already got and make itself more attractive to others it wants to poach from here. – Tim Dower
We need to ask ourselves why, on a GDP per person basis, Australians are one-third wealthier than we are. And we need to fix that.
Otherwise this deal will take new Zealand back 20 years to the days when we were a clearing house for people ultimately wanting to live across the ditch. – Tim Dower
The numbers are apparently down in the past few months, but the Aussies are keeping the character test in their citizenship process.
That’s what they use to chuck out New Zealanders they don’t want and there’s no change there.
Australia will cherry pick the best and carry on sending back the riff-raff.
Can’t see one good thing in this for us. – Tim Dower
In recent years there has been a concerted effort by activists to debunk the longstanding scientific consensus that the categories male and female represent real and discrete biological categories in humans. The Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, for instance, rejects the notion that biological sex is “natural,” “pre-political,” or “objective,” claiming instead that it is “a cultural thing posing as a natural one.” UC Riverside’s Gender and Sexualities Chair, Brandon Andrew Robinson, claims that we “should stop teaching that sex is biological” because we “assign meaning to certain things…because of dominant gender ideologies.” In this view, categorizing people as male or female is not only biologically incorrect but also harmful and oppressive.
For a long time these ideas festered away in humanities departments without serious inroads with the hard sciences. But as Queer Theory and social constructivism became entangled with notions of “Social Justice” and Left-wing politics, and as political discourse has become increasingly polarized, many activist scientists have been attempting to provide an imprimatur of legitimacy to these anti-scientific beliefs. – Colin Wright
Because the sex binary has been deemed “oppressive” and invalidating of transgender identities and experiences—cardinal sins of our age—this has started an arms race among activist scientists to come up with a model of sex that is the least binary thing imaginable. Since the “bimodal spectrum” concept still entails two of something, this must be abandoned as it may be seen as problematically implying a fundamentally binary underlying property that’s producing the bimodal distribution of sex-related traits—and they’d be right! – Colin Wright
The arguments presented throughout the paper are not just poor, but are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the universal defining property of all males and all females across all taxa—having the function of producing sperm or ova, respectively. That any individual scientist, lab, or “survey team” could claim to be expanding the boundary of our knowledge on a topic that they do not understand at its core is embarrassing. – Colin Wright
A common tactic activists scientists use to bolster their new models of biological sex is to construct a scientific opponent who simply does not exist. When attempting to debunk the binary nature of sex, this is typically done by misconstruing and over-applying the fundamental binarity of sex relating to gametes (i.e., sperm versus ova) to sex differences generally. For instance, they might point out that while there are only two types of gametes (sperm and ova), height differences between males and females are nevertheless not binary. Thus, what they often portray as being exceptions to the rule of binary sex categories are actually just gross conflations of two very distinct concepts—sex itself (i.e., the state of being male, female, or both) versus any and all measurable sex-related differences. But not all sex differences are differences of sex.
To my knowledge, no biologist has ever claimed that males and females differ discretely and absolutely in every conceivable way. And if a biologist were to claim such a thing, they would be immediately laughed out of the room as it is so obviously untrue.
This is the strawman the authors begin constructing in their introduction when they claim that “the common assumption is that there are two sexes, strictly classified as female or male” that’s rooted in gamete size. – Colin Wright
The sex binary, however, does not require that the two sexes exist in separate bodies. The authors are simply conflating the sex binary with a phenomenon called gonochorism or dioecy, which is “the condition of individual organisms within a species existing as one of two possible sexes, specifically male or female.” The existence of hermaphroditic and gonochoric species just represent different ways a species can utilize male and female reproductive strategies. Regardless of whether an organism is only male, only female, or both male and female, there are still only two fundamental functions—the production of sperm and/or ova. – Colin Wright
Because they believe “binary language” is fueling “legislation targeting [transgender and gender nonconforming] people,” all binary language must be abandoned. As scientists, the authors say we are “best situated to communicate how nature is a rich tapestry of diversity that affirms, rather than invalidates, human experience.”
As biologists we should not be engaged in erasing, invalidating, or affirming people’s identities or experiences. Our job is simple: describe and explain the natural world as accurately as possible.
This paper may be an attempt to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into their research program. Many scientists are now required to state explicitly when applying to faculty positions how their research relates to DEI. It should come as no surprise that forcing scientists to inject political initiatives into their research to remain eligible and competitive for grants and promotions comes at the cost of scientific rigor. – Colin Wright
Good academic reputations are built over decades and even centuries, but they can be destroyed in an instant. – Colin Wright
When we get people walking up the drive, legitimately offering their time and labour to help clean up the massive damage and mess that the cyclone left behind, it brings with it such a huge boost to our morale – that someone cares. It lifts our spirits so much. – Rob Wilson
Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. – Lauren Smith
Academic freedom is under serious threat. Instead of standing by their academics and defending their right to pursue the truth, universities are caving into trans ideologues at every turn. They have become nakedly ideological institutions, where intolerance is given free rein. We need more academics to speak out against this shameful behaviour. – Lauren Smith
For years, I have been watching left-wing twentysomethings, who claim to be protecting the little guy, scream, destroy property and attack anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. These are not so much political activists as wannabe tyrants. Also last week, for example, a mob at the State University of New York at Albany attacked an event hosting a conservative speaker, hurling obscenities at him and destroying a Bible in the process. The speaker was there to discuss free speech on campus.
Yes, these young people are the aggressors, and they should face consequences for whatever violence they commit. And yes, their authoritarianism is unhinged and terrifying. But they are also, in part, products of the failures of older generations, including my own. Adults have abdicated their responsibility for socialising these young people in sane, commonsense ways. Instead, these young people’s incivility, threatening behaviour and neo-Maoist dogmatism has been tacitly encouraged or blithely ignored. – Jenny Holland
We have seen again over the last week that this Government possesses an unshakeable belief in the power of its own rhetoric. On both Three Waters and the economy, ministers are clearly of the opinion that if they repeat anything often enough and with enough conviction, the voters will in turn believe it to be true.
They are likely to be wrong.
Whoever thought up the idea of re-labelling the unpalatable Three Waters reforms as “affordable water reform” should hang their heads in shame. And so should the ministers who had sufficient contempt for the public that they thought simply re-badging something this contentious would achieve a positive reappraisal of the reforms. To say nothing of the Prime Minister denying Three Waters even included co-governance “as it is traditionally understood” at the announcement of the grand relabelling.
It had been assumed by many that the Government’s willingness to argue that black is white had been quietly shelved with the departure of former Prime Minister Ardern, but we have now been treated to a masterclass in sophistry courtesy of new Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. – Steven Joyce
The water assets will still be confiscated from local councils and placed in organisations over which they will have only a figleaf of influence. The water organisations will still be co-governed, with an unelected Mana Whenua Group given 50 per cent control, and veto power over the appointment of directors for each entity. Iwi and the Mana Whenua groups will still be able to issue guiding statements to the water companies which they “must respond to”, and the denuded councils will still not be able to do the same. Local government will be further weakened by the reforms, which continue an ongoing power grab by central government that stretches across health, the polytechs and local government.
The much-heralded savings from the reforms are as unlikely as before, albeit apparently reduced as a result of the increased number of water organisations.
Let’s be clear. The investments in new infrastructure will be paid for by ratepayers and consumers, no matter who builds them. You can pay through your rates, through your taxes or through water levies. But you will pay.
Also, the idea that the new entities will be able to borrow more cheaply is also largely bunkum. – Steven Joyce
The current reforms are a recipe for discord and disharmony. When more people work out that their access to water is effectively controlled by one part of society who have the right whakapapa, then the proverbial will truly hit the fan. Also, nobody knows how a water services organisation will be required to respond when the first mana whenua group declares, for example, that Auckland should take no more water from the Waikato River. That ambiguity allows people to assume the worst.
All this could easily have been avoided. It would be entirely possible to recognise the rights and interests of Māori in water without excluding the rights of all others, if it was done carefully and with respect towards everyone affected. However, I fear that opportunity has been lost as the debate becomes increasingly polarised.
Just like the previous Labour Government with its flip-flopping from one extreme to the other on the foreshore and seabed, this one has recklessly put the interests of Māori on a collision course with those of everyone else, and unnecessarily inflamed race relations in this country. – Steven Joyce
Of course, it’s not just the water reforms where the Government is continually trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes. Ministers are fond of declaring all the inflation-fuelling expenditure they have overseen in the last six years is completely justified. They even defend the money spent on failed restructurings and, somewhat ironically, the explosion of government spin doctors.
Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson can’t see anything they would do differently with the economy despite food inflation running at 12 per cent, CPI inflation stubbornly staying up around 7 per cent, an eye-watering current account deficit and an emerging international consensus that New Zealand is becoming one of the worst economic performers in the OECD. Instead, they are rumoured to be planning to fire up a debate on tax in the Budget to distract everyone from their economic record.
After what seemed to be a positive start to the new regime, it will now be dawning on the public that even with a tiggerish new Prime Minister, the overall Government policy direction and its attitude to voters remains unchanged. In that respect, the re-badging of the Government may turn out to be as unsuccessful as the re-branding of Three Waters.
New Zealanders who want a genuinely new approach to the economy, inflation, Three Waters and race relations are starting to realise they will have to vote for it rather than relying on this lot changing their tune. The current lot are prepared to pretend to change, but then carry on regardless. – Steven Joyce
It’s all a little too little, too late, frankly. This is a government that over the last five-and-a-half years has become the second-biggest-spending government in the developed world, it was the fourth-biggest government in printing cash, and it restricted and shut down our economy like nowhere else.
Again, four months out from an election, Chris Hipkins has all of a sudden discovered that actually controlling and being disciplined spending of taxpayer money is actually important. Well, it’s always been important. – Christopher Luxon
It was horribly confusing. I mean you had David Parker come out yesterday and give a speech, and the two reports launched. He’s had two years at it and spent $3.5 million and yet again it looked like the Labour Party and the Labour government were shaping for a capital gains tax, a wealth tax, an inheritance tax, a death tax, whatever.
Then Chris Hipkins coming out this morning saying ‘no, no it won’t be happening’ but then leaving it open for the next term of government … that causes huge instability and uncertainty.
It’s a massive distraction because the real issue is the middle income people I’m talking with that actually are struggling to pay their mortgages, this doesn’t help them one little bit.
He should be like every other prime minister – including Jacinda Ardern – and said ‘look, we’re ruling it out while I’m prime minister’, and that’s what I haven’t heard from him today. Let’s be clear about why they are having to look at a bigger tax grab, they have to raise more taxes because they are spending like we have never spent in this country before. – Christopher Luxon
The Prime Minister promised to be clearer about the detail and the reasoning behind co-governance. Again, many believed that Hipkins was back-peddling on the hectic rush since the 2020 election to Maorify everything in sight from departmental titles, to geographical names, to road speed limits, to tried and tested methods of governance. There was an air of expectation.
However, we now know that that optimism was misplaced. Maorification continues and every aspect of the policy survives. – Michael Bassett
Chinese New Zealanders, Indians, even Pacific Islanders with traditionally overlarge families, and other newer immigrants, manage to benefit from the services made available to them on the same basis as to Maori. Why? All of them value family responsibility more than Maori appear to do. As things stand now, those other ethnicities can’t understand Maori demands for special treatment. What those others also notice is that the more the government does for Maori, the more that Maori bite the hand that feeds them. The people the Police deal with every day are three times more likely to be Maori than non-Maori.
The idea that society will improve if more cash is poured over Maori obviously isn’t working, and hasn’t ever since the Domestic Purposes Benefit was introduced in 1974. Labour’s out-of-date answers to today’s problems are having the opposite effect to that intended. If Hipkins could empanel a group of experienced Maori along with a few other ethnicities to come up with proposals for streamlining access to welfare, while examining why so many current policies are failing Maori, there could be some cautious optimism. But first of all, Hipkins needs to acknowledge there is a problem that current policies are only making worse. The news that he has nothing new to offer is depressing in the extreme. – Michael Bassett
Still puzzled by the existence of child poverty some years after PM Ardern decided to abolish it? You might be interested to know that the question was addressed at the same time by a couple of Brits. More transparently; and – one imagines – with much the same success.
In fact, they went a bit further in ensuring the experiment would tangibly impact on the decision-makers themselves. They made a bet of it.
In the red corner, Jonathan Portes wagered £1000 that withdrawal of state benefits would propel the UK’s child poverty rate from a dreadful 31% to an appalling 41%. It doesn’t work that way, said Christopher Snowdon from the blue corner, accepting the bet.
Five years later, the measured UK child poverty rate was 29%. Snowdon had won. – Point of Order
Another quirk of relative poverty rates is that – paradoxically – the rate can go up in good times as median incomes rise, then decline in hard times, because of slower growth in higher incomes.
But perhaps the most insidious problem with using a sweeping relative poverty measure in a rich welfare state is its obfuscation and cheapening of the language. Misuse of the word poverty, coupled with overuse, will detract from more meaningful and therefore more powerful terms like indigence, want, and destitution.
For sure, the currently limited use made of these terms is a welcome reflection of the enormous progress made in the reduction of their occurrence in our societies.
But their greater deployment by politicians today might just reflect a genuine focus on tackling stubborn pockets of misery and the tremendous challenge of family dysfunction so often associated with them.
More attention to language would surely have helped protect Ardern’s legacy from criticisms of ignorance and hypocrisy. It might even – although this may be stretching it a bit – have led to some meaningful policy. – Point of Order
There has been much handwringing in the press lately over the progressive rewriting of Roald Dahl’s books, as though this were a bad thing. If I had my way, every copy of every book by every straight white male would be incinerated. Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism.
Dahl’s books are compendiums of violence masquerading as “fiction”. For instance, he describes the character of Augustus Gloop as “fat”, which is extremely offensive to People of Girth. Thankfully, the sensitivity readers at Puffin Books have replaced the word “fat” with “enormous”. This is much more empowering. I’m forever congratulating my friend Janine on her enormous hips. – Titania McGrath
Ultimately, the problem isn’t Dahl — it’s the English language. I genuinely believe that writing or speaking English is an act of colonial terrorism.
So instead of simply tinkering with children’s literature, why not just stop teaching children how to speak in the first place? Dangerous language normalises hate and wrong opinions. To live in a truly free society, there must be limits on individual forms of verbal expression. So, if we never talk to children, or provide them with books, they will simply grow up without the capacity to express hateful ideas.
I can’t believe no one else has thought of this. – Titania McGrath
The contract was signed, the deposit was sent. But then something happened: The venue—which bills itself as “inclusive”—got critical comments on social media, and suddenly called it off.
My immediate offense was a tweet criticizing child gender-reassignment surgery, an irreversible act that can permanently sterilize the patient. My criticism was strongly worded, because some things deserve to be strenuously opposed. Children who undergo gender-reassignment surgery are legally unable to consent to sex. They aren’t allowed to purchase cigarettes or alcohol. And yet in gender reassignment, their sexual organs are removed, and they are prescribed powerful hormones. I described the people who engage in these operations as “butchers,” and I stand by my words.
But the venue’s objection went beyond any one tweet. It was about a broader discomfort with my insistence on the inescapable reality and political importance of the physical differences between men and women. The fact that I, a little-known British mum and writer, am considered out of bounds at a New York cultural venue is a sign that the city is losing its intellectual robustness—that New Yorkers are exchanging free debate for stifling orthodoxy.
I am far from the first woman to be targeted for saying these things. Many British women have been deplatformed, censored, unfriended, and fired because they spoke out against transgenderism. Americans aren’t yet fully acquainted with these tactics, but they soon will be. – Mary Harrington
For there is a difference between a commitment to ideas and a commitment to ideology. Pursuing the truth isn’t the same as refusing to notice anything that doesn’t fit your vision. Sometimes ideas and ideology are hard to tell apart, however. I have tremendous sympathy for the young people duped by gender ideology into self-mutilation. I dare say those who now seek to silence the quiet reminder, from a middle-aged mother, that biology still exists, sincerely believe they are making the world a better place.
But just because you find a viewpoint sympathetic doesn’t mean it’s true. Humans still can’t change sex. Even in New York City, embodied sex still matters. Deep down, fast-talking, freewheeling, street-smart, and book-smart New York still knows this. The show will go on. Somehow, somewhere we will hold the book launch. In the face of powerful resistance, we will defend reality. – Mary Harrington
I believe there’s a growing trend of recklessness in so-called “gender-affirming care,” and I think my experience with it exemplifies that trend. I have filed my suit against eight healthcare professionals, including doctors, psychologists, and therapists to have that belief tested by the justice system. Distress related to my gender was treated to the exclusion of other serious mental health issues which went undiagnosed for years. Blind affirmation of my stated identity closed the door to alternative treatment options.
What happened to me should never happen again. I was prescribed testosterone hormone therapy in 2010 after three appointments. My doctors did not do a fulsome screening of me for other mental health diagnoses or developmental disabilities. In 2012, with my doctor’s recommendation, I paid to have my breasts removed.
But the drugs and surgeries didn’t address my mental health needs; the parts of my life that I expected to change never did; and I stopped taking testosterone in 2016. – Michelle Zacchigna
Now even the Women’s Institute (WI) is ‘willy inclusive’. The UK’s largest voluntary women’s group has this week confirmed that trans-identified males are permitted to join. –
Some actual women members are not happy about this. A group called the Women’s Institute Declaration (WID) recently published a petition asking for WI members to be able to debate and hold a vote on whether to include transwomen.
The declaration calls for a moratorium on membership applications from trans-identified males and asks the WI to ‘focus on women as a biological-sex class, rather than as an individual expression of gender’. It also condemns the rolling back of women’s sex-based rights in the name of gender ideology. And it calls on the WI to respect women’s right to self-organise. Some might be tempted to sneer at this as just a spat between the ladies of Middle England, or as ‘handbags at dawn’, but the points raised by the declaration are valid and important. –
This partisan, woke agenda does the WI a disservice. Founded a decade before women had the vote, the WI has a proud history of mobilising its formidable members to good causes. In recent years, it has campaigned against human trafficking and for better research into autism in girls.
Until recently, it had also refused to take sides in contentious political or social issues. Back in 2000, then prime minister Tony Blair came unstuck in front of a WI audience. When he tried to use a speech to the WI for political point-scoring, he faced jeers, boos and slow hand-clapping. He later admitted it was ‘the most terrifying audience I have seen’. –
The Women’s Institute ought to be what it says on the tin – an institute for women. It may be unfashionable to say it, but transwomen are men. WI members have every right to have a single-sex space. – Jo Barstosch
A credit downgrade is a finance minister’s nightmare. The financial impact is severe. It is an international vote of no confidence in the government’s fiscal policies.
NZ has a rating of AA+. Our rating has always been a confidence act. No one who spends more than they earn would have a good credit rating yet NZ every year spends more on imports than we earn from our exports. Our AA+ rating is because we have stable politics, have never defaulted and successive governments have been fiscally prudent. – Richard Prebble
NZ does not get a lot of scrutiny. There are cities with a larger economy. The rating agencies are notorious for being too slow. Lehman Brothers had an A rating until one day before it collapsed.
The minister must hope the May Budget is not scrutinised closely and he can get to October before any rating downgrade.
A rating downgrade would mean higher interest rates on everything from government bonds to mortgages to car loans. The Kiwi is a floating currency. A rating downgrade would have an immediate effect on the currency. Everything we import would cost more. Maybe a lot more. – Richard Prebble
How do you make Three Waters fit to drink?
Easy – rename it Affordable Waters!
Honestly, it’s as simple as that.
At least, it is in Chris’ world, where co-governance, racial discrimination and wealth transfer to iwi is the covert end-game of this He Puapua inspired policy, sloppily dressed up as a fix for essential water infrastructure improvements.
He must think the average Joe Bloggs voter – known as Dick Head in Labour circles – is a complete noddy to swallow that load of old effluent. – Derek Mackie
All the terrible features of Three Waters are still “affordable” and have been retained:-
- 50% unelected iwi representation at all levels,
- effective Maori veto over every decision,
- and likely future royalty payouts to Maori.
Worst of all, Te Mana O Te Wai edicts can still be issued at any time, but only by Maori and these must be complied with.
This is predicated on the fantastical notion that our part-natives possess something akin to a built-in divining rod, which endows them with a greater cultural bond to water than every other human.
Judging by our plummeting achievement standards in science, coupled with decades long top-of-the-table truancy rates among our Maori school kids, many would struggle to define the chemical formula for water, let alone know how to bond with it. – Derek Mackie
Now, after keeping us on tenterhooks for months to find out the fate of Three Waters, he’s confirmed what we knew deep down – that extremist Left-wing leopards never change their spots, they just wear a different fur coat.
Some independent media commentators who were heralding Chippy as the new messiah, ready to lead the Labour faithful from the woke wasteland back to their working class roots, may well be wishing they’d thrown their premature tales of redemption into the giant cesspit our PM is expertly digging for us. And if there’s one thing he specialises in it’s excrement. – Derek Mackie
Hipkins is a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Marxist who fully supports He Puapua in all its anti-democratic forms. If he wasn’t he would have cast Three Waters into the fires of Mt Doom when he had the chance, along with the one ring forged by the Maori Caucus to control all of Middle Earth.
A more unpopular policy you’d be hard pushed to find, outside of the Cabinet Room, yet he clings to “the precious” like Gollum, even though it may very well destroy his political career. At least Gollum had a conscience and attempted to debate right and wrong with his dual personality. – Derek Mackie
What I can’t figure out is what our ginger ninja and his other Pakeha Labourites expect to get from all this co-governance malarkey when they lack even a smidgen of the right DNA for gold-card status. I mean, aside from being totally anti-democratic and racist, and being purely selfish, why would you promote a form of governance that disadvantages you personally?
Is it some bizarre form of political natural selection which weeds out woke, virtue signalling specimens? If so, we can expect to see parliament decimated in 2040, if all goes to plan, He Puapua wise.
Now it’s time for the NZ public – the ones that can be bothered voting, at least – to decide whether they want more of the same race-riddled agenda, disdain for the majority and excruciating minority adulation and entitlement, which has dragged NZ down to record lows of national cohesion and confidence…… or something less extreme. – Derek Mackie
All the opinion polls are suggesting it’s going to come right down to the wire but some writers reckon the pollsters are wrong and the actual election result will be a decisive win for the centre-right, or what passes for it these days. I certainly hope so, because I dread to think what another three years of Labour rule will do to our society, rights and freedoms….let alone our water! – Derek Mackie
We believe fundamentally in moving money out of the bureaucracy and out of the centre and getting it out to the front line to community organisations… this is the way in which we can solve many of our big challenges. – Christopher Luxon
Despite announcing $1.9 billion funding in 2019, Labour has failed to deliver the improvement in mental health services and outcomes New Zealanders urgently need.
“Kiwis have made good progress breaking down the stigma around asking for help with mental health, but when people do ask for help, they often find a mental health system that is too hard to access. – Christopher Luxon
Elon Musk has finally confessed his prejudice. He has aired his bias for all to see. He has admitted that he is in thrall to an ‘ism’. Only it isn’t racism or sexism or any of the other phobias that the woke left is always trying to pin on the controversial Twitter boss. It’s speciesism. ‘I’m a speciesist’, he said in his chat with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. ‘I’m fully a speciesist’, he stressed. That is, he believes in the moral superiority of the human species. He sees humanity as a unique lifeform, possessed of a capacity for consciousness that no beast or machine is ever likely to experience. What a bigot.
Seriously, though, it was sweet relief to see someone as influential as Musk come out as a speciesist. – Brendan O’Neill
. In the face of such extraordinary moral disarray, such anti-civilisational self-loathing, where believing in the specialness of humankind has been rechristened a vile bigotry, it was great to see Musk celebrate speciesism. From one speciesist to another – thank you, Elon. – Brendan O’Neill
‘Why would anyone not be a speciesist?’ – this is one of the great questions of our age. The answer is because we’re living through a colossal crisis of faith in the human project. ‘Speciesism’ is the name our gloom-ridden societies give to any claim that humankind enjoys a higher moral status than other beings. What used to be known as humanism – the celebration and centering of human consciousness and experience – is now called speciesism. Peter Singer describes speciesism as prejudice ‘towards the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of other species’. Why should human beings get to decide the ‘boundaries of morality’, asked AC Grayling in his attack on speciesism. Perhaps, he said, it is not such a huge step ‘from pulling wings off flies to committing crimes against humanity’. Good Lord.
The accusation of speciesism is most often made in relation to nature and the environment. Anyone who issues the old-style Enlightenment cry that humankind should enjoy dominion over nature – so that we might better understand it and exploit its bounty for the good of society – runs the risk of being damned a speciesist. Yet according to Musk, this s-word is being thrown around in Big Tech circles, too. This isn’t surprising. For it might not be a short step from killing a fly to killing a human – get a grip, everyone – but it is a short step from believing human beings are no better than animals to believing we’re no better than computers. – Brendan O’Neill
The elites’ erasure of the moral boundary between man and beast is now replicated in the scrubbing away of any distinction between man and machine. Animals should be our equals, machines will one day be our superiors – that’s the dual rallying cry of a cultural establishment that has completely lost faith in the human species; which sees us as a swarm to be managed, at best, and a plague on the planet at worst. The bourgeois turn against the Christian-cum-modern belief in human uniqueness lends itself very well to new forms of authoritarian control. So the eco-fatalists introduce ever-more stringent social measures designed to limit our polluting impact on our surroundings, while tech fatalists deploy ‘nudge’ techniques, algorithmic manipulation and outright censorship – Musk revisited that issue, too – to limit the toxic influence of our bestial passions and beliefs.
This is the dire end result of the evacuation of moral status from humankind, the reduction of us to ‘just another species’. We come to be seen either as units of pollution whose behaviour must be curbed by the benevolent gods of the eco-elite or as units of prejudice whose online activity must be directed and controlled by the ‘digital gods’ of Google. As emitters of carbon or emitters of hate. No better than animals, inferior to machines. There is no need to panic about AI, of course. – Brendan O’Neill
But we should worry about the war on ‘speciesism’. Which is really a war on the making of any moral distinction between mankind on one side and animals and computers on the other. Let us remind all of them that there is no beast or appliance on Earth that will ever know the consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for joy and pain, and the ability to love and appreciate beauty for its own sake that human beings enjoy. And there never will be. – Brendan O’Neill
It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better.
I’m sorry if I keep harping on about education, but it’s difficult not to when you consider that an entire generation, at least, of kids in this country is being robbed of opportunities their parents and grandparents took for granted. – Peter Jackson
Anyway, the news is that the Government is going to cut Year 4-8 teacher/student ratios, from 1:29 to 1:28. Yep, you read that correctly. This, we are told, will take some pressure off teachers, and allow them to spend more one-on-one time with students, focusing on what they do best, namely teaching young people the basics well. This is something that they are demonstrably not doing now.
The Prime Minister, meanwhile, seems to be pinning his hopes on a declining birth rate to reduce teacher/pupil ratios. Neither he nor Tinetti made any attempt to explain why the teacher/pupil ratio in kura kaupapa Mā ori years 2-8 is 1:18.
Frankly, I don’t believe class sizes have much to do with the reported fact that kids in Year 4 do better in three Rs testing than those in Year 8. In other words, achievement rates fall away as the kids get older. – Peter Jackson
And how many of these kids are actually fronting? If 60 per cent of children are attending school regularly, as we are told they are, 1:29 actually equates to 1:17.4. A reduction of one equates to 1:16.8. And what happens if the Government’s puerile efforts to get more kids in schools actually work? Thankfully, they won’t, but what if they did? Perhaps we can reassure ourselves that the Government is apparently doing nothing at all to make room for these missing thousands, as it obviously isn’t expecting them to start turning up any time soon. – Peter Jackson
It would not be true to say that the education system hasn’t changed over the years, but much of that change has not been for the better. The curriculum has expanded enormously, a fact that some in Parliament finally seem to have wised up to, and what was once a world-leading education system isn’t any more. Class sizes might be a factor in that, but I would bet it’s a small one. If it is a factor, and Ms Tinetti wants to fix it, she will have to do a great deal more than reduce class sizes by one. In fact I suspect she has about as much of an idea about the correct answer as I did in that language lab in 1971. – Peter Jackson
I’m not convinced that the radical path of social transformation that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites wish to force us all down has any relevance, interest or benefit to the good people of that night.
I’m not convinced that they support the amalgamation of our Health Boards into some mega entity based in Wellington with a name few of us can pronounce or spell. I think they just want to be able to see a doctor if they get sick.
I’m not convinced that they want Co-Governance of their sewer pipes or drinking water delivery.
I’m pretty sure they don’t support John Tamihere’s argument that people of Maori descent own the water in this country, and even if they did, it would only be to the benefit of the Tribal Elite. Not one coin would make its way down to the lady buying a spring roll and half a scoop of chips for her Saturday night meal.
I’m not sure these folk want to fund a Restructure of TVNZ because Willie Jackson thinks New Zealand is more than Country Calendar.
I don’t think Marama Davidson announcing inside that shop that Men of European descent were responsible for family violence would have been met with agreement.
Whether a man who wants to identify as a woman is free to use a woman’s toilet or play woman’s sport wouldn’t be on their list of concerns in life I reckon.
It is my belief that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites in this country are driving a social revolution that is completely isolated from the needs and concerns of our people.
Those people in the shop are just pawns in the game.
For those people in the shop, life was hard, it was a grind, there isn’t a lot to look forward to.
As I walked back to my life, I wondered, where has our education system failed? Where have our training institutions and Apprenticeship schemes gone? Where have the manufacturers who provided rewarding employment gone? Why do we make it hard for our businesses to prosper? How did our political system get hijacked by the radicals? – David Clark
The latest IMF Current Account Ratings forecasts that our current account deficit will be proportionally the largest of the world’s 40 most advanced economies.
Specifically, the IMF said it would be worse than notorious cot cases such as Greece and ranks us the 3rd worst performer in its recent years decline among advanced economies.
This is a direct consequence of the appalling financial mismanagement over the last 3 years.
Thanks to our floating exchange rate it will eventually sort itself out, albeit initially at a considerable standard of living cost. – Sir Bob Jones
It all augurs badly for the next few years. All of these dire consequences are a direct result of a truly appalling government, driven by ideology and an irresponsible approach to expenditure.
Perhaps, worse of all, is the creation of a racist society which will take years to mend, if ever. – Sir Bob Jones
Compare and contrast. Our government and media have brazenly condoned the abuse of UK women’s rights activist Posie Parker by transgender protesters. But UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has ramped up his support for women’s rights, speaking out against the trans extremism movement where words like ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘mother’ are being censored, replaced by ‘pregnant people’. – Wendy Geus
Journalist Jenna Lynch may swallow transgender bullsh*t labels such as “white cis men” (quote: Marama Davidson, painstakingly giving us a forensic definition during her propaganda slot on a Newshub bulletin).
I do not.
As more than 99.9% of people in the world born male or female identify in adulthood as a man or a woman, we do not have to adopt new labels when talking about a man or a woman. We know who we are. If when talking amongst themselves, transgender people wish to use their own labels: fine, but don’t force them on us. However, the media, working in sync, are happy to oblige them.
I don’t know how Simeon Brown managed to keep a straight face on the Breakfast couch beside Labour MP Arena Williams when she looked down the camera and said, with a straight face: “A man transgendering to a woman, is a woman”.
And there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, Arena. – Wendy Geus
Chloe Swarbrick comes across as eloquent and presentable. However, it seems cynicism and political expediency is never far from the surface when she can describe the Albert Park riot as an experience of ‘love and affirmation’, thereby condoning an elderly woman being bashed in the face; the guest speaker shut down, covered with tomato soup and run out of the park; and the police refusing to protect her until after the assault.
Anarchy was the word she was looking for.
Auckland Central folk need to give much consideration to whom they elect this year. Their current MP may call herself green but, like a watermelon, she is red on the inside, just like her more radical roommates. – Wendy Geus
It’s proof that free speech is very limited in New Zealand and tyranny introduced during Ardern’s ‘transformational’ government is alive and well. Like Stephen Joyce said, we now have to say ‘black is white’.
I recently saw an advertisement on TV for a medical product with small print warning against certain people taking it, including ‘pregnant people’. Another example of the ideological lunacy that is being forced upon us and taking over our country. – Wendy Geus
With all this tax the rich talk and naysayers wanting punitive measures dished out to anyone showing signs of success or ambition, I just wonder if we’re shooting ourselves in the foot here.
Are we not at peak tall poppy syndrome now?
Because where does all this “it’s not fair, woe is me” whining actually get us? So far all I can see is that it sends our best and brightest off elsewhere. We have the 5000 nurses who’ve registered to work in Australia, the net migration loss of more than 8000 Kiwis to Australia just last year, we have those who’ve discovered cost of living is actually cheaper overseas. – Kate Hawkesby
I think we have to adjust this complacent mentality we have that we’re the best little country in the world and we’re invincible. –
A head in the sand approach to what is going on around us is not going to help. We need to recognise what’s on in order to be able to act. –
How bad are we going to let things get? And how much do we want to give our country up to the lowest common denominator? We have to admit that we need to flip it – we need to shift the focus to productive aspects of the economy.
We need less David Parker driven ideological tax attacks on those who are productive, employ people, and get this economy going. Because guess what? They’ll just leave top.
You can’t keep propping up the bottom end, reducing penalties for crime, and ignoring all the stats going against us.
Because by ignoring it, we run the risk of waking up when it’s all too late. – Kate Hawkesby
In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.
In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom? – Joel Kotkin
Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.
The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. – Joel Kotkin
Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.
This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth by chasing implausible Net Zero targets. – Joel Kotkin
California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.
Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. – Joel Kotkin
Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise. As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children will do better than their generation, while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.
The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term. – Joel Kotkin
This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric. It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens. Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’ – Joel Kotkin
These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It’s no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens. To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports, which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.
More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.
We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.
Unless people’s concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate ‘measure’ of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not. – Joel Kotkin
The striking thing about all this is that if the commenters are to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt them, freedom of speech in New Zealand is far more precarious than most of us imagined. When people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of adverse consequences, we are effectively no better than Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. You could be excused for wondering how long it will be before people start circulating New Zealand-style samizdats – the clandestine newsletters published by dissenters in the Soviet Union.
Things may not be so bad here that people risk arrest or imprisonment for speaking out, but the chilling effect is no less real. The threat of ostracism, career derailment or denunciation on social media can be almost as powerful as the fear of a knock on the door from the secret police in the middle of the night.
In fact in some ways it’s more insidious because it’s not declared or overt. Limitations on free speech are imposed not by statute or government edict, but by unwritten rules policed by vindictive zealots determined to make an example of anyone who challenges the dominant ideological consensus.
This is something new. Even during the prime ministership of Robert Muldoon, which is generally considered the high-water mark of authoritarian government in modern New Zealand history, people didn’t feel this intimidated. You have to go back to the Public Safety Conservation Act, which was used to criminalise pro-wharfie comment during the 1951 waterfront dispute, to find a more oppressively censorious political environment – and that legislation was invoked on that occasion in response to a singular and relatively short-lived event. This time it’s open-ended. There’s no fixed time frame beyond which we can assume free speech will be permitted to flourish again. – Karl du Fresne
I still lament that many people hide behind pseudonyms for no better reason than they lack the courage to stand up for opinions they are legally entitled to hold. I also deplore the tendency for anonymity to result in commenters engaging in cheap shots and puerile slanging matches – a fate that has befallen other blogs (though not this one), and which wouldn’t happen if commenters had to be named. Accordingly, people who identify themselves are far more likely to get their comments published here. Opinions carry far more weight when there’s a name to them.
But what’s even more lamentable than people sheltering behind pseudonyms for reasons of timidity is that many commenters are genuinely fearful of repercussions if they identify themselves. Freedom of expression is not served by denying them a voice – and ultimately, freedom of expression must take precedence over secondary concerns. –Karl du Fresne
As a parent, do you have confidence the education system is delivering?
Do employers understand what all the different levels of NCEA mean and what the results tell us about a job candidate?
Would it be better to maybe toss a real-work document in front of someone during the interview, and see if they understand it.
If it really matters to the role that the person can read and write and do simple numerical reasoning, you might be better off paying for a private test. – Tim Dower
Are we at the point where NCEA has lost its credibility? Not that it’s ever had much of that.
Is it time to just give up on NCEA, and go back to using recognised qualifications like GCSE – the advantage of those being they’re portable – and that matters in a global employment market.
Bottom line, as the Herald recently found, New Zealand students have been going backward against their overseas peers for the past 20 years.
NCEA was introduced in 2002.
Point made? – Tim Dower
He is wrong in his opinion that the Courts have decided that Māori have a legal right to the co-governance of naturally flowing freshwater.
He is also wrong, in my opinion, when he asserts that New Zealanders are cavalier about the destruction of their democracy by stealth which he has conceded is what is happening under the Affordable Water Reforms.
He is contemptuous of the intelligence of New Zealanders that they can be duped by the promise that in 30 years’ time they will save $2,000 dollars per annuum on their rates bill.
His claim to be a prophet is a shallow and insincere political stunt which will not go unnoticed by an astute electorate come election day. – Graeme Reeves
So now we know the difference between the woke West and theocratic Iran. Between our own cultural elites that are in the grip of the religion of ‘social justice’ and Iran’s religious elites that believe they’re doing Allah’s bidding. It’s a difference in liquids. Over here, women who step out of line are doused in tomato soup; over there, they’re doused in yoghurt. Here, their hair is turned orange as they are ritualistically humiliated with soup by fuming sexist mobs. There, their hair is turned white as they are punished with yoghurt by angry men for the crime of being unveiled in public. – Brendan O’Neill
The look of the men might differ – Iran’s yoghurt-thrower was conservatively dressed, Auckland’s soup-thrower was in a dress. The religion might differ, too – the misogynist in Iran was motivated by the Islamist ideology where the misogynists in New Zealand were fuelled by the trans ideology. But a strikingly similar zeal and bigotry unites these two acts of public witch-shaming. In both instances, either by yoghurt or soup, women were violently reprimanded for deviating from an ideology invented by men for the benefit of men: the unveiled women for refusing to be modest, as per the rules of Islam; Parker for refusing to check her white cishet female privilege, as per the rules of the gender cult.
There’s one striking difference between the Shandiz and Auckland witch-shamings, though. In the former, men took action against the misogynist. The shop owner and another citizen angrily rebuked the yoghurt-thrower. In the latter there was far less male solidarity with the women under attack. In fact, mobs of men howled in glee at the sight of the souped witch. And they’ve been cackling ever since, for example by tweeting images of tins of tomato soup. I wonder if religious zealots in Iran are likewise sharing images of tubs of yoghurt as an underhand warning to any bitch who’s getting ideas above her station? That there was more male support for the women in Shandiz than there was for the women in Auckland is a searing indictment of the moral disarray of the woke West. – Brendan O’Neill
One murder by cops in the US moved them more than hundreds of murders by cops in Iran.
How do we explain this dearth of agitation with Iran? Those two sexist drenchings, in Shandiz and Auckland, give us a clue. It’s because, disturbingly, the woke West increasingly resembles theocratic Iran. No, women in the West do not face anything like the tyrannies endured by Iranian women. But in both vibe and belief, our cultural elites mimic Iran’s religious elites. Both are agitated by women who think and speak freely, Iran’s ayatollahs viewing them as a menace to the Islamic order, our woke ayatollahs viewing them as usurpers of the new gender order. Both bristle at any demeaning of Islam, though where Iran calls it ‘blasphemy’, the woke call it ‘Islamophobia’. Witness the suspension of a schoolkid in Yorkshire for scuffing a page in the Koran or the hounding into hiding of that Batley Grammar schoolteacher for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad – acts of intolerance Iran would be proud of. And both believe it’s wrong to oppose the hijab. Iran says it’s a sin punishable by arrest to be anti-hijab; right-on Westerners brand criticism of the veil ‘hijabophobia’, yet another expression of ‘racist’ hatred for Islam, apparently.
It’s hard to escape the sense that in both Iran and the West right now, men in dresses are persecuting women. Islamists in the thobe harass unveiled women. Trans activists in women’s clothing punish women who talk about sex and gender. Nothing better captures the moral corrosion of Western society than the fact that radical activists here now spend more time defending the right of men to define themselves as women than they do standing up for women in Iran whose liberty is being violently crushed by men. In Iran, young people fight for the right of women to be treated as human beings; in the West they fight for the right of men to be treated as women. Religious hysteria is addling minds everywhere. – Brendan O’Neill
Inflation is not under control, and the OCR is not doing what it is supposed to do. In the 1990s, the RBNZ introduced the revolutionary idea of inflation targeting – later adopted by many central banks across the globe – in response to the destabilising impact of high inflation during the 1980s. It seems the RBNZ has forgotten its history. – Christoph Schumacher
Social-justice ideology is having a growing and pernicious influence on our educational institutions.
For example, many UK schools are being encouraged to become ‘actively anti-racist’, which would mean adhering to the precepts of critical race theory. A significant number are promoting the contested concepts of gender ideology, and some are keeping children’s gender identities hidden from their parents. So prevalent is trans ideology, in fact, that one girl was recently hounded out of her school for arguing that biological sex is more important than gender identity. Even nurseries are busy ‘decolonising’ the minds of staff, and ‘decolonising the play spaces’. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
To a greater extent than ever before, it seems that schools, nurseries and other educational institutions are now being used for directly political ends. The cumulative result is not education, but indoctrination.
Teaching seems to have lost its purpose. It is no longer about disseminating knowledge to the young. It’s about instructing them in correct thought, versing them in the political orthodoxies of the age. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
To resist this woke instrumentalisation of education, we need to return education to its foundational ethos. Schools should be places for the passing on of knowledge to the young. They should expose eager minds to the best which has been thought and said – not force them to recite questionable identitarian orthodoxies. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
Identitarian indoctrination should have no place in the classroom. – Alka Sehgal Cuthbert
We’ve just found out today that up to 10 police officers are now dedicated to dealing with these protestors.
Up to 10 police, between 7am and 9am daily, waiting to find out where the protest is, then responding quickly to get them off the road and get traffic flowing again.
Those are ten police officers who are now unable to do their actual jobs, which is to deal with crime.
Harsh at it sounds, I’ll say it again, these people should be put in jail so that this stops. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Labour’s industry transformation plans are proving transformational only to the consultancy industry – Michael Woodhouse
Almost four years on, only two of the eight plans have been completed. The ITPs are vague or in some cases non-existent. Only seven reports have been completed or released in draft form, meaning the process has so far cost more than $72,000 per page.
With an eye-watering $140 million budgeted to write and implement the plans, we can expect millions more will end up in the pockets of consultants or wastefully taking up endless time of officials.
Rather than being transformational, the plans have been described as tentative, half-hearted and telling us what we already know. Given the huge budget, taxpayers deserve better.
Industries know what they need, which is for the Government to set a nimble regulatory framework that allows large and small businesses compete and grow, then get out of the way. We do not need to line the pockets of consultants to learn this. – Michael Woodhouse
Labour has repeatedly taken credit for funding extra nurses. However, they have refused to admit how many nurses have left – and now it is clear why.
“New data shows that almost 19,000 nurses have left over the last five years under Labour.
“What’s worse is that the number of nurses leaving has been steadily increase each year, jumping from 2,963 nurses in 2017 to 4,752 in 2022 – a 60 per cent increase. – Shane Reti
The health sector is in crisis and has been crying out for more workforce support, but the Labour Government took too long to act and refused to put overseas nurses on the straight -to-residency pathway, even when they had this worrying data showing how many nurses were leaving the profession.
At a time when there is a global war for talent, New Zealand should be doing everything it can to be an attractive destination for essential workers. While countries like Australia and Canada were offering health workers easier immigration access, Labour refused to act.
The Labour Government has failed the health sector and refused to take accountability for inaction. Sick and injured New Zealanders are going to be paying the price this winter. – Shane Reti
New Zealand’s once world-leading school education system is in a state of deep malaise. Objective international measures show an ongoing decline in key achievement areas, including literacy, numeracy and science. Too many students are leaving school ill-prepared for tertiary study, work and life. – Dr Michael Johnston
The reports compare apples and pears. They compare actual income of middle-income earners to unrealised hypothetical capital gains of wealthy New Zealanders. Presumably this means the Government is planning to try again with a Capital Gains Tax, but not just on realised gains but on unrealised gains – which would be I think unique in the world.
The research also ignores the effect of inflation on assets. So if an asset increased by 7% and inflation is 7% it is worth no more in real terms, but Parker seems to think it should be taxed. – David Farrar
One thing the research did so, was highly progressive our tax system really is. If you take into account income tax, GST and transfers, the net effective tax rate for each income decile is:
-
- Decile 1: -52%
- Decile 2: -55%
- Decile 3: -36%
- Decile 4: -2%
- Decile 5: 6%
- Decile 6: 18%
- Decile 7: 21%
- Decile 8: 23%
- Decile 9: 26%
- Decile 10: 29%
So the bottom 40% of income earners receive more in transfers than they pay in tax. Even those in the 5th decile only pay an effective tax rate of 6%, because the vast vast bulk of tax is paid by those in the top deciles. – David Farrar
Hipkins’ sausage roll scoffing small town social democracy is one many New Zealanders increasingly want to leave behind, figuratively, societally and increasingly, literally.
Those who choose to stay in this country for Hipkins’ reasons probably lower the 1Q of New Zealand – while we lose the best and brightest, the entrepreneurial, the innovators, the trained and talented, the ambitious, to Australia.
To put it another way, if this is Hipkins’ vision of New Zealand then the old tourist cliche of ‘Welcome to New Zealand, put your watches back 20 years’ is sadly true, or rather, actually now out of date. It’s ‘put your watches- and your expectations and ambition back 50 years.’
Working in the New Zealand tertiary system I can tell Hipkins that his vision of New Zealand and his idea of what will make people stay in this country has no resonance with the bright, ambitious, educated young people it is a privilege to teach. All such rhetoric and attitudes do is increase the sense that our universities are just ‘adding value for export’. – Mike Grimshaw
I think that it’s really important for children to read books and have some sense of when the books were written. You just cannot go on rewriting Dickens and rewriting Shakespeare to suit people. – Sir Michael Morpurgo
“Rich people”. The term conjures up a variety of thoughts. Many will run to the immediate vision of the “Trumpesque” character — brash, arrogant, sometimes even obnoxious.
While that description may apply to a few, the great majority of our wealthy people are considerate and respectful of others. Most are bright and some can be quite charming. That’s how they became successful.
In New Zealand, we don’t have a great attitude towards wealth and wealthy people. But then, we don’t have a great attitude towards success either. In fact, our collective distaste for tall poppies is a longstanding and negative part of the Kiwi culture. – Bruce Cotterill
In the 1980s, our business high-flyers flew visibly. We had Bob Jones, Tony Gibbs, the Fletchers, Fay, Richwhite, Myers and the like. But with the exception of Jones, we wore them down and ultimately they and their successors retreated to the shadows. As a result, our wealthy people tend to hide away or leave our shores.
But where would we be without them? You see, the great majority of our very wealthy people get to where they are because they do something extraordinary. Simply put, they do things the rest of us don’t do. They take risks we won’t take, think of things we don’t (or can’t) think of, and build things we cannot conceive.
They are variously productive, creative, constructive and accumulative. Mostly their success comes as a result of doing things very well over a long time. They make their money from the land and from the movies, from our construction sites and from technology. They sell us our cars, jewellery and sports equipment, the packaging that wraps around it, and the transport that moves it all around.
Those who operate on the spectrum of envy and jealousy don’t like them much. Many of our politicians fall into this category. – Bruce Cotterill
But we underestimate them at our peril. Elected officials don’t build our cities, property developers do. Can you imagine our cities without the developers who visualise something better, who borrow millions and build our urban landscapes and heavenly skylines? Every time the economic cycle dips, a few of them go broke. They take thousands of people and millions of dollars down with them. There’s a reason this happens. The risks they take are huge. But if they pull it off, the rewards are huge too. And that’s okay. And whether they succeed or fail, they usually leave the city behind them looking better than it did before they arrived.
Then there are the technology entrepreneurs who make our book-keeping easier, our purchases more streamlined, or even our sports viewing more engaging. The brilliance of the creative minds whose work entertains us on the big screen and those who conceive and make the toys our kids play with. They are people who change our lives for the better and they make plenty of money in the process. And that’s okay too.
They’re also the people who keep our charities running. If you think that building and running hospitals is the government’s job, consider the following.
Starship Children’s Hospital would not exist or operate without the contributions from our wealthy. These are the same people whose contributions make sure that our swimming pools get built and our universities get their new buildings.
Many of our young athletes, golfers, motor racers or cyclists would not have made it to the world stage without the generous contributions of our wealthiest people. Surf life saving clubs wouldn’t have inflatable rescue boats and communities would be without their netball courts or basketball gyms. – Bruce Cotterill
I’d like us to be better at celebrating all of our successful people, including those who are our wealthiest. But sadly, the aforementioned politics of envy has been on display this week and seems set to continue. In a week when the Aussies made it easier for us to join their economy, I’m puzzled that our Government, led by Revenue Minister David Parker, has chosen to declare war on that small portion of our population who are deemed “wealthy”.
Parker’s tax review, supposedly of New Zealand’s 350 wealthiest people (although only 311 participated), presents a major signal that we should all be concerned about. The most staggering aspect of the review was that they chose to include “unrealised gains” in their assessment of income.
Since Wednesday’s announcement, I’ve been asked what “unrealised gains” means in this context. Simply put, it means the increased value of an asset that you own, but have not yet sold. Such assets may include property, shares, a business or a farm. To this writer’s knowledge, there is not a country in the world that seeks to regard unrealised capital gains as assessable income for the purposes of calculating tax. Doing so would mean that a taxpayer has to find or borrow money from another source in order to pay the tax on the increased value of an asset which they continue to own.
Imagine you buy a few shares. In my view, the intent of Parker’s analysis and his subsequent interview comments suggests, despite the fact that you may choose to hold onto those shares for the long term, you may be asked to pay tax on any gains made in a 12-month period, even though you haven’t sold them. Most people would have to sell a few shares to pay the annual tax bill. The end result would be that your little nest-egg disappears over time. This is the opposite of encouraging savings. It discourages savings. In fact, it discourages anyone who wants to do better.
Of course there is a flip side that this Government doesn’t seem to be talking about. What if we make unrealised losses on our investments? Is the government going to allow us to claim a tax deduction on unrealised losses? – Bruce Cotterill
It compared tax paid by our wealthy few, on all income, including that which is unrealised, to come up with a percentage of tax paid against assessed income. The result was 9.4 per cent. This was the headline number that the Government and many media commentators jumped on. However, if unrealised income was excluded, the result was 30 per cent.
They then compared that to the tax paid by an average person earning $80,000 per year. That proportion was 22 per cent. They did include the GST that middle-income earner paid, although it’s not clear whether they included GST in the tax contribution of the higher-spending, wealthy person. Their analysis didn’t appear to include an assessment of whether the $80,000 earner had a few shares, an old sports car that had gone up in value, or heaven forbid, their own home which might have appreciated as well.
In other words, so desperate are they to demonstrate that the wealthy aren’t paying their way, that they have analysed the figures on one basis for the wealthy — including unrealised gains — and a different calculation for everyone else. The result is a misleading deception which in my view is designed to move public opinion further against our tall poppies. – Bruce Cotterill
They’re not going to come up with a new tax for the 300-odd uber-wealthy survey participants. They’re likely to use this study to come up with a new tax for the top 10 per cent of Kiwis, those who already pay just under half of the country’s personal tax bill. And they’ll base that tax on what they think the top 300 should be paying. And you know who will carry the can.
The great shame here is that New Zealand’s tax policy is already well-regarded internationally. We sit in the middle of the OECD’s tax-to-GDP analysis. And the Tax Foundation’s “International Tax Competitiveness Index”, which measures the extent to which a country’s tax system is competitive and neutral, suggests that we have things about right.
Competitive means that marginal rates are kept low, to attract capital rather than pushing capital elsewhere. That’s important for a small country.
Neutral means that our system doesn’t favour consumption over saving, as happens with investment taxes and wealth taxes.
In 2022, New Zealand ranked third in the world for tax competitiveness. – Bruce Cotterill
The moves being considered would represent a major and aggressive change to our tax policy. And despite the minister’s protests to the contrary, they don’t do press conferences like the ones they did this week, if they are not considering such revisions.
The Tax Foundation suggests that uncompetitive tax structures will drive people and their capital away. At a time when our productive young people are leaving for brighter pastures, the risk our Government is taking is that we will also lose many of our wealth creators, and with them, the contributions to the communities they serve. I’m sure many of our wealthiest people will happily pay a bit more tax. But we should be cautious. If we continue to abuse those people with lopsided commentary and poorly structured debate, they too will leave our shores. And they will take their money, their ambition and their generosity with them. – Bruce Cotterill
Everyone who contributes to traffic congestion already pays for it in about the worst way possible: through their time, and through excess wear and tear on – and emissions from – vehicles idling in stop-and-go traffic.
Shifting to congestion charging would help ensure freer-flowing traffic. It would make buses run more reliably, unhindered by peak-time congestion. Achieving net-zero climate goals would be less costly with fewer congestion-related emissions.
And by shifting some travel to times when the roads are otherwise less used, it would encourage better use of existing road capacity. The roading system could handle more trips, overall, with less need to add new lanes. If a movie theatre is full at peak times when ticket prices are zero, it makes a lot more sense to start charging for tickets than to build more screens. – Eric Crampton
A congestion dividend could rebate collected revenues back to those road users scaled to their use of the roads, but without regard to time of use. Drivers who only drove at peak times would receive a dividend, but one that would be small relative to the congestion charges that they had paid. Those driving at off-peak times would receive a dividend while paying little in congestion charges. And households with Community Services Cards could receive a higher dividend.
That kind of system could not be a revenue grab. The congestion dividend would offset cost-of-living pressures. And it might help strengthen continued political support for the charging system overall. – Eric Crampton
We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares. – Brendan O’Neill
We definitely live in strange times when it comes to democracy and capitalism. Everything has been turned on its head. Democrats and even self-styled radicals cosy up to big business, imploring it to put its money where its mouth is and Do Something about social injustice. Meanwhile, ostensibly pro-market right-wingers behave like student agitators of yesteryear, condemning the capitalist elite for its political overreach and threatening to boycott its wares. –
Many parents agree that under-10s should not be told there are 72 genders. DeSantis won a landslide victory in the midterms in November, securing the votes of many Latinos and working-class whites: the kind of people who are deeply opposed to the ideological capture of education by the purple-haired ideologues of the new elite. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the views of these voters should hold more weight than the views of Disney’s clique of aloof bosses.
The second reason we should support DeSantis against Disney is because this clash might just be the start of a much-needed fightback against the woke corporate assault on democracy. –
This is an oligarchical onslaught against the workings of democracy. It is an attack on citizens’ fundamental rights to raise money for political campaigns, to freely associate with one another, to express their political views, and to expect that their voice will count for as much as the voice of richer people who run big businesses like Disney. GOP members who cry ‘But what about the rights of private companies?’ have failed to clock the existential nature of the battle at hand, which is between an unaccountable elite on one side and reason, democracy and the common sense of the electorate on the other. I know which side I’m on. Cry more, Disney. – Brendan O’Neill
We didn’t spin off out of a university or Crown research institute. We only had what money I’d saved. It was very difficult. We’re a materials company, we needed chemicals. I was ordering chemicals from overseas to my residential address – they didn’t want to give me any chemicals without being a proper laboratory.
We started as a medical devices company because I wanted to help my dad walk. He has polio. I’ve always wanted to help my dad walk since I was young. His name’s Dennis, and we’ve named the company after him.
But it now goes far beyond assisting people out of wheelchairs. The material benefits robotics as a whole. We have a lot of interested organisations in medical robotics, aerospace, military and industrial robotics, and we’re building them prototypes. – Anvil Bañez
Science, for me, is the latest evidence base of what works and what doesn’t work and what we can do better in the future. – Rachel Barker
There is a lot of focus on scientific research, but not necessarily enough focus on the integration of that scientific research into society. We publish a lot of stuff. But the number of science-based startups, for instance, is much lower than you would expect for the kind of research output that we have. I think the commercialisation of that research needs a lot more funding and attention than it currently has. – Imche Veiga
Upholding freedom of expression and academic freedom, and facilitating an environment where students and staff can discuss and debate challenging topics is at the heart of our purpose as a university.
We refuse to be intimidated by the unreasonable behaviour of those who sought to prevent lawful discussion of challenging topics on our campus.
We have already stated publicly that ensuring respectful dialogue about controversial topics is critical to our raison d’être as a university. – Sir Peter Mathieson
A question that has gripped this country these past five years is how former Prime Minister Ardern, who touted kindness as her brand, became so divisive.
The explanation may be simple. Political rulers with strong moral viewpoints have long created discord. Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke explained the dangers of governments exercising authority in the realm of individual conscience. Leaders who claimed to represent the moral high ground created the impetus for the separation of Church and State in Europe.
Yet Jacinda Ardern put matters of conscience right back into the heart of affairs of State. – Robert MacCulloch
Ardern became more like a charismatic leader of a spiritual movement, promoting passionate conviction, than a traditional party boss. She converted many National Party supporters from her pulpit. They joined her congregation, better known as a “team”, singing her praises, at least for a time.
She even won over the hard-nosed Harvard University academics and graduating students. They gave her a standing ovation. However, a stunned silence would have likely greeted our former Prime Minister had she argued that the world’s economic challenges, in addition to its culture wars, could be solved by kindness.
Yet that is what she did three years before in an article in Britain’s Financial Times newspaper, which the Beehive called “the economics of kindness”.
It caused a problem. No-one had heard of kindness economics. No-one knew what it meant, including our own Treasury. Is it kind to reward effort? If so, is it kind to force hard workers to pay back their extra reward in taxes to support lazy ones? During the pandemic, was it kind to pay the wage subsidy to big firms? Was the Reserve Bank kind when it flooded financial markets with liquidity, causing inflation? Is it kind to now hike interest rates?
The meaninglessness of these questions reveals a lot about “kindness economics”. It was a brand-name for a product that was never built. –
This article is not debating the importance of kindness as a personal virtue in our dealings with others.
It is arguing that the non-existence of kindness economics meant Arden had no framework to leverage the stand-out success she helped deliver during the pandemic’s first year into an enduring economic prosperity for the nation. – Robert MacCulloch
The International Monetary Fund has now confirmed our GDP growth rate this year is below the average and our current account deficit the worst in the developed world. It never had to be that way, since we had been the world’s stand-out success in 2020. The billions subsequently thrown away could have been used for health-care, infrastructure and an education system of which we could all be proud.
Incredibly, we now face recession when most of the nations that did far poorer than us during the pandemic do not.
Meanwhile, Ardern’s Minister of Finance and Governor, who bear direct responsibility for our economic mess, stay on. Both defend themselves against accusations of error by saying others are also doing badly. When you copy folks worse than you, that’s what you get.
The Kiwi story these past years is one of our leaders snatching an extraordinary economic defeat from the jaws of the people’s amazing Covid victory. It reminds us that competency is important, not just kindness. – Robert MacCulloch
David Parker’s envy report, digging into the wealth of 311 talented individuals who didn’t squander their productive years in politics, journalism or worse, the insolvency profession, revealed something interesting.
Net worth in the land of the long-white cloud is heavily concentrated in the elderly. – Damien Grant
In the last 50 years, according to the published report, of the 311 wealthy families, only 62 enjoyed an inheritance in the last 50 years, and the total that was transferred was just $411 million, a fraction of the net worth of these individuals. Most received little or nothing at the start of their commercial lives.
The majority of those with serious capital in New Zealand today made their wealth in a free market by providing goods and services on an industrial scale that others were willing to pay for.
This is something that should be celebrated. These are Kiwis who have enriched our lives, who built the homes in which we live, the logistics companies that deliver food to our supermarkets and, indeed, built the supermarkets that provide the calories without which we’d be all be a lot thinner.
None of this matters to a political class seeking cheap political points and the report is replete with ugly undertones: “Our tradies, nurses, school teachers, hospitality workers, hairdressers, cleaners, engineers and small business owners all pay much higher effective tax rates than their wealthier fellow Kiwis.”
Not only is this statement wilfully inflammatory, it is untrue. The wealthy do not pay a lower percentage of tax than nurses. – Damien Grant
If you own a farm and the market value of that farm goes up, then this is treated as “economic income”. Haig-Simons does not measure the post-sale value, only the estimated rise in the value of an asset.
If your day job was as an accountant, and you paid tax on that income but not on the increased value of your farm, then your rate of “effective tax” is lower because the income of the rising value of the farm was tax-free.
This type of analysis is so flawed, its only practical use is to demonstrate how degraded and actively political the Treasury has become.
To compound the perception of unfairness, the report explicitly ignores the effect of inflation on their analysis, despite this data being readily available and easy to factor in; which makes the report’s conclusions little better than junk. It seems probable that the conclusion was written before the analysis was undertaken.
The research, and I am being generous in calling it that, also suffers from “survivor bias”, because it excludes past families who had been extremely wealthy but whose riches has been lost, squandered, or dissipated. – Damien Grant
In a moment of lucidity, the report states an awkward fact: “Further, when considering the tax and transfer system jointly, many individuals in low-income deciles receive more in the form of government cash transfers than they pay in tax.
“If such transfers are netted off tax paid, these individuals will have very low or negative effective tax rates.”
A large percentage of the population receive more from the state in goods and services than they pay in tax. The state spends about $120 billion, or $24,000 per resident. You need to be earning $100,000 a year to cover this and if your household has five people in it, the household needs to be bringing in half a million. – Damien Grant
The number of citizens who pay more than their “fair share”, if we consider that to be sharing the tax burden equally amongst all of us, is low. There is a small number who do most of the heavy lifting, who pay a huge percentage of the tax burden.
Despite the hysterics of the report, the 311 maligned families paid, according to a graph included in it, roughly $1 billion in tax in the 2021 financial year.
So 311 families paid 1% of all state revenue. This was higher than in past years, where the average has been 0.5%.
We have the analysis back-to-front. These small number of citizens are the engine of our economy. They are the superstars both in terms of fuelling New Zealand by their innovation, risk-taking and the contribution to employment and commercial life. And on top, they massively subsidise the rest of us with an outsized contribution to the Crown’s reserves.
The fatal conceit of the tax report and those who have been salivating at the prospect of a bit of asset-stripping is to assume that we would be a better society if we took capital away from the most productive and creative members of our community and gave it to the likes of David Parker to manage. – Damien Grant
The real failure has been the decision to engage in this sort of disgraceful and dishonest analysis.
Politicians who seek to gain short-term advantage by pandering to the baser instincts of the electorate deserve the strongest condemnation.
New Zealand deserves better from our elected representatives, the bureaucracy and from those commentators who either don’t understand the economics or, worse, who do but cannot resist luxuriating in the warmth of the flames they are helping to stoke. – Damien Grant
In effect, Three Waters delivers much of what the iwi is seeking through the Courts, especially as the territory of the Southern Water Entity was drawn along Ngai Tahu boundaries, and tribal control of freshwater will be delivered through co-governance and Te Mana o te Wai Statements.
Furthermore, in order to better influence water allocation decisions, Ngai Tahu persuaded the Labour Government to legislate two permanent seats on the regulator – the Canterbury Regional Council – in addition to two existing Council advisory positions. In their oral submission on the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngai Tahu Representation) Bill, they admitted that the two seats were just a first step towards securing greater influence in the future. – Muriel Newman
Let’s make no mistake – Three Waters will deliver control of freshwater to Maori if Labour is returned to power in October.
But that will not be the end of the matter for Maori.
Tuku Morgan and John Tamihere have made it very clear that if the Maori Party is the kingmaker after the election, they will not settle for anything less than full ownership of New Zealand’s freshwater. – Muriel Newman
In 1363 Edward the Third an ancestor of the present King Charles decreed that henceforth all court proceedings must be in English. Prior to that they had been written in Norman French (a change that the French have never really got over.) For the past six hundred and sixty years this has been the norm throughout the common law world and it has been so in New Zealand since 1840 when the tribes accepted British sovereignty and enjoyed all of the benefits of citizenship and the Common Law. But it is no longer so in New Zealand. Increasingly Maori tribes are bringing cases in the courts seeking common law remedies relying on proceedings which are written partly in English and partly in Maori and often using words to express ideas which are not only ambiguous but are used to describe things which did not exist in Maori society pre-1840. – Anthony Willy
Overwhelmingly the people bringing these proceedings have assimilated into our multi-cultural society and are indistinguishable from other New Zealanders either by appearance or the way in which they live. They understand that our country in 2023 is so distant and different from that which existed here in 1840 as to be unrecognisable. We all now live in a democratic prosperous settled society governed by one law for all enjoying the benefits of a thriving market economy which is a far cry from the violent tribal society which existed here when Captain Hobson arrived. True some of those world class privileges have been under serious threat over the past five years but with a change of government, which there surely will be most if not all of the damage can be promptly repaired. One of the existential threats which notwithstanding much back peddling by Ardern’s successor government is a concerted effort on a number of fronts for a small group of persons claiming some Maori blood to secure ownership of our fresh water. Increasingly this spurious claim is based on a fictional reinvention of the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi and after a brief flirtation with the United Nations convention on Human rights those seeking in effect to own our economy now rely on rights, they say were guaranteed to them in 1840. This is patent nonsense, and leaving aside that, any constitutional status the document might have once had has been fully performed. That said it is being increasingly relied on by a small group of greedy tribalists to secure ownership of assets which are crucial to the survival of our democracy, our market economy, and the Rule of Law. – Anthony Willy
Cases such as this highlight how the law which since 1840 has been common to all New Zealanders and has been conducted using the English language with the emphasis on precision and clarity is becoming subverted by introducing words which are understood by a vanishingly small proportion of the public and which have no fixed, precise meaning. It is as if Alice in Wonderland has come to town and like the Red Queen Maori litigants feel they are free to contend that words mean what they say they mean on the day but tomorrow they may have a different and more advantageous meaning. We have seen this in the foreshore and sea bed litigation where the meaning of the word “Tikanga” was crucial to the outcome of the case but the judge (encouraged by a Supreme Court Judge, Williams J. in his extra judicial writings) refused to give the word any defined meaning to the word, leaving it open to later litigants to claim some meaning or usage different from that which attracted Churchman J. in the case at hand. In the result the Judge felt able to hold that the word was capable of meaning “shared exclusivity.” Which is an outstanding oxymoron in any language.
It doesn’t stop there. Increasingly statute law is becoming larded with elastic language invented to suit modern circumstances. The three waters legislation is a unique example of what one can only suppose is deliberate obfuscation. Something called “Te Mana O Te Wai statements” confer on all Maori tribes and subtribes the right to dictate how freshwater is allocated and used in New Zealand. My research into what these words mean (one translation is simply “water”) has proved fruitless involving as it does perusal of the Water Services Entities Act and a number of National Policy Statements. Yet these directions are binding on all New Zealanders and must be complied with by all relevant local authorities within two years. – Anthony Willy
That said Maori is an “official language” and no doubt it will be contended that a Maori litigant, or perhaps any litigant should be free to bring court proceedings using the language. But then sign language is an “official language” and it has not yet been suggested that it be used to bring and conduct court proceedings. The simple answer is that if a litigant does not speak English, then it has long been common practice for them to use the services of an interpreter to render the pleadings into English, in conducting the case in Court then it is routine for the Court to appoint an interpreter to ensure that a litigant or witness is able to convey their case to the judge or jury. It is also commonplace for a court to be called on to decide as a matter of fact, not law what is English language meaning of some claimed custom in a dispute between parties contending for different outcomes. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has become expert at it in cases drawn from across the Empire and later Commonwealth. But at the end of the day these customs do not become part of the law they remain solely questions of fact.
And the lesson to be drawn from these mendacious attempts to subvert the judicial and legislative process and ensure that the law is no longer common to all is simple; bring back Edward the Third’s edict (shared as it is by Winston), and for the Court Rules of procedure and Parliament to require that all court proceedings shall be solely in English while preserving the right to the use of interpreters and translators for those who speak only 1840s Maori. – Anthony Willy
It is perhaps ironic that government attempts to impose its will on the citizens of this country, aided and abetted by a compliant or even sycophantic media, will be the main reason for its downfall.
Hopefully, if that happens, we will be able to return to an environment where individuals can respond to measures that are in fact human rights abuses without worrying if their families will suffer the consequences.
I’m too old to worry about that happening to me and will carry on making my small contribution to the common cause as long as l am cognitively able to do so but l am concerned that too many of my colleagues will be intimidated out of the business if continuing under duress becomes too hard.
We must not allow that to happen. – Clive Bibby
Still, there is one election year constant: the Greens are in a self-sabotaging mess.
The peacenik party loves a good civil war. If its members aren’t trying to depose a co-leader, then they are cheering on the gruesome jousting tournament that ranks their MPs. – Andrea Vance
The musterers (they don’t like whips, not very “co-operative”) are investigating, in a very messy, public inquiry that will drag negative headlines out for weeks, before culminating in more messy headlines.
Green, mean and drama queens. To quote Succession’s Logan Roy: these aren’t serious people.
Which is a shame, because this is the year they really should be serious. For the first time in their history, they are within grasp of serious influence. – Andrea Vance
The prime minister will always sacrifice the Greens to tame the public mood. Hipkins threw Shaw under the bus during the 2017 Green Schools debacle (where $11m of taxpayer funds went to a private Taranaki school), and did not hesitate to humiliate Marama Davidson over her comments about white men.
There must be a truce between the competing power blocs within the party: the caucus and grassroots activists. They need to resolve ideological conflict around the fundamental direction of the party, including uncertainty about their position within government. And, once and for all, end personality divisions in the caucus, which percolate down to the grassroots.
As Chris Hipkins’ Labour is intent in camping in the middle ground, that leaves its traditional radical base looking for an alternative.
The Greens could be it: if they start fighting for it, and not each other – Andrea Vance
Last week Radio New Zealand promoted an activist demand by the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) that the government should invest more in transgender “healthcare” – that’s sterilisation and genital mutilation to the rest of us. Radio New Zealand knows very well the harm that is being done. It actively chooses not only to ignore it, but to whitewash it. (This is the same media that tells us daily that our health system is on its knees. Actual women – the old fashioned sort – sit on long waiting lists for operations for endometriosis, breast reductions for chronic back pain, and all those silly ailments of the female embodied. Read the room guys?)
PATHA is a group whose membership appears to contain not a single medical professional, in fact very few professionals of any kind, yet the Ministry of Health uses its guidelines as standards of care for vulnerable, confused kids who are questioning their gender because that’s what kids do these days – they’re taught to at school. PATHA is just one of many activist groups funded by the public service to shape policy and deliver community services for which they appear to be entirely unqualified, apart from having very firm opinions and “lived experience”. PATHA, Gender Minorities Aotearoa, Rainbow Youth etc. etc. – it’s almost as if the government wants to outsource everything difficult or potentially problematic so that it can dodge accountability. But it is spending our money on these extremists and it is to blame for this mess. We need proper, rigorous standards in healthcare and across government, from leaders who take our wellbeing seriously. Some voices are marginalised for a reason – they are unqualified, unwell, untethered, and certainly not representative of any sensible section of society. We need to be protected from their misguided influence, they are not positive role models. When will our public service leaders locate their discernment and common sense?
As for Labour, no wonder it has had to dump so much of its mandated work programme. It’s been too busy implementing the one we didn’t vote for and by that measure it has been wildly successful. – Citizen Science
While world governments and financial institutions go Woke and Broke, we are left to try and make some sense out of what is left.
Are we heading for a world-wide recession that is a result of incompetent management by those in whom we have placed our trust? It would seem that the likelihood is real.
Who then can we turn to in a crisis where the bulk of the world population are innocent bystanders but will be amongst the first casualties of the pursuit of policies that wouldn’t be tolerated in a kindergarten seeking the advice of four-year-olds? – Clive Bibby
I had an enjoyable experience yesterday here on our farm that is struggling to get back to normal after the devastating Cyclone Gabriel floods.
I had asked a local trucking firm to deliver some posts and fertiliser we will use in the rehabilitation process that is taking place to a greater or lesser degree on virtually every farm in the local Uawa district.
My Maori neighbours are facing a clean-up bill of at least $1 million dollars on just one property and my guess is that most of the repair funds will have to come from their own financial resources.
Most properties have been offered a max of $10,000 by way of government assistance. At that rate, it will take the hardest hit ones years to get back to operating as usual.
For many it will be “walk off” time. – Clive Bibby
The driver arrived with a truck fitted out with attachment mechanical extras – including a “hi-ab” that would allow it to complete our job in conditions that would normally cause a basic unit to fail.
As soon as he jumped out of the cab and surveyed the site looking for hazards that would limit his ability to dispatch his load, l knew that this (relatively speaking) young man had skills to burn when operating his machine.
When he finished, l was moved to discuss his employment situation with him given that he appeared to be satisfied with the terms and conditions offered by the company he worked for.
Having used his family-owned trucking company on countless times during our 43 years running our farming business here on the East Coast, l wasn’t surprised to hear his comments about why he remained loyal to his employer.
It comes down to the things l have tried to identify as the factors that, if implemented on a nation-wide scale, would transform our failing economies into something that could lead us to the promised land.
They are the simple things that would make a real difference to the work force and as an extension, the nation’s coffers as well. – Clive Bibby
Basic things like:
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- recognition of skills even at the most basic level of employment;
- recognition through salary increases for loyalty and years of service;
- an acknowledgement and awareness that there are limits to what should be expected from people being asked to go the extra mile during daily operations – perhaps incentives that would make the difference as to whether the job is done well or finished with the bare minimum of effort;
- a recognition that each employee is a human being with family considerations that need to be addressed by management in a way that makes employees feel they are valued.
Those are just a few that are basic to the successful operation of any business. – Clive Bibby
Our future will depend as much as anything on whether we consult and listen to those who are being asked to drag us out of the mire once more.
If we don’t do that history will mark us down as another failed generation who were unable to recognise the power of working together towards a common goal.
The current “Them and Us” mentality is limiting our growth towards future prosperity for all. It has to go! – Clive Bibby
Unpopular governments are often tempted to find an enemy they can unite the country against. For Putin, it is Ukraine. For Labour, it is the nameless 311 richest families that Revenue Minister David Parker accuses of not paying their fair share. – Richard Prebble
Those who advocate fairness as the goal of the tax system need to remember that the only truly equal society is a monastery, where every monk has nothing. – Richard Prebble
The IRD study was designed to show the rich do not pay their fair share. Under urgency, the minister changed the law so bureaucrats can demand to know everything we own. A scientific study would have looked at a cross-section of taxpayers, but that would have alarmed middle New Zealand. The minister picked the enemy – the richest families. Then the result was rigged by saying changes in the prices of assets are income.
Using the same methodology, the minister could scapegoat the poorest 311 families by saying government services are income.
He could say the poorest families are benefit-led, with many children. That there are 311 families which receive more than $2000 a week in benefits, accommodation allowance and special payments. Then there is the cost of education, whether the children attend school or not. Such families are often known to social agencies, police and courts, and some are guests of His Majesty. The big cost is health. Being poor is bad for your health. Many of our poorest families suffer from third-world illnesses. Frequent hospitalisation means there are at least 311 families that receive more than $1 million of taxpayer services a year.
If we follow the minister’s logic that anything of value is income, then those families owe – in income tax and ACC levies – $372,113 a year.
This is absurd. Services are not income. – Richard Prebble
Assets are not income either. Even the richest families could not pay, from their income, an annual capital gains tax on the increase in the price of their assets caused by inflation.
Extreme cases make bad law. The richest and poorest families are not the norm.
The second tax report was from Sapere Research. It found that less than 2 per cent of all taxpayers pay 9.3 per cent of all income tax. The 21.2 per cent of taxpayers earning over $70,000 a year pay 68.5 per cent of income tax.
Most of the 311 richest families that the minister wants us to believe are freeloading pay many times their share of income tax. They are no cost to welfare. They often pay for their own health insurance and for their children’s education.
The third tax report was from Treasury and found that a third of all households receive more in tax credits and benefits than they pay in tax.
If the minister has his way, the new norm will be that everyone’s KiwiSaver will be reduced by capital gains taxes.
We will be taxed twice: once on our income and then on the price inflation of any asset that was purchased with that tax-paid income. – Richard Prebble
New taxes, like acorns, start small and grow into mighty oak trees. Income tax started in 1799 as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic wars, at 2 pence in the pound. Despite campaign promises, GST is now 15 per cent.
The Greens demand the capital gains tax rate be 39 per cent. The minister says it would not be on the family home. What is fair about a $20 million mansion being tax-free but the family bach being taxed? First, the mansions will be taxed, then our homes will be taxed. Labour is unleashing the politics of envy. They could consume us all.
Labour is also desperate for more revenue to feed its addiction to spending. It is irresponsible to feed an addict’s addiction.
The only fair tax is a flat tax. – Richard Prebble
But in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members, and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger Leftists than among older Leftists. Over 8 in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading US colleges say speakers who say BLM is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What’s more, 7 in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.
The steady erosion of free speech values is generational. Today’s young people are far more censorious than the young people of 1980 or even 2000, and they won’t grow out of it. While Zoomers are scared of being cancelled, figure 2 shows that they accept this risk as part of their political ideology.
Administrations’ occasional rebukes of student activists or adoption of high-minded academic freedom resolutions will make little difference to this speech climate. The situation in universities increasingly reflects a transformational current of illiberalism, guided by the generations who will one day form our elite. – Eric Kaufmann
68% of business owners believe the current state of the New Zealand economy is either poor or very poor. Over half (54.5%) expect the economy to decline over the next 12 months, with only 14% expecting an improvement. An indication that the tough times are set to continue for the foreseeable future, – Simon Bridges
Meanwhile, businesses are grappling with a range of challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers, increasing supply chain costs, and the impacts of recent weather events. 50% of respondents are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, while 72% expect to be negatively impacted by changes in interest rates and inflation. – Simon Bridges
The results of this survey show New Zealand businesses continue to struggle with significant challenges amidst the current economic climate. Confidence is on the decline, and raising costs are exerting mounting pressure. It’s crucial for political parties in this election year to propose concrete policies that promote growth, instil certainty, and restore confidence – Simon Bridges
Of course, that’s not how things are at all. For the vast majority of people, losing a job — even piecework, one show, one publishing deal, one temporary contract — is an enormous deal. In my own life, I know women with multiple dependents, sick relatives, no safety nets, who’ve had their livelihoods threatened for expressing such controversial views as “biological sex is politically salient” and “rape crisis centres should offer female-only counselling”. I know brilliant women, with amazing reputations, who found themselves ghosted, losing contract after contract, having wondered out loud whether lesbians ought to be threatened with violence. Nobody cares about these women because they’re not famous (and are unwilling to put themselves through the additional exposure and trauma of fighting back, as Maya Forstater so bravely did). No one thinks their lost jobs matter because to a certain mindset, if they’re not silencing the big fish — the JK Rowlings of this world — the little fish barely count (which doesn’t mean they won’t go for them anyway).
This is not to say that Rowling’s own experience has not been harmful enough. As Özkirimli notes, the author “may continue to sell books, but this does not mean she is unaffected by the death or rape threats she has been receiving on a daily basis“. It is beyond the scope of Cancelled itself, but there is much more to say about the human cost of cancellation as a form of psychological abuse, taking place in plain sight and rubber-stamped by people in positions of authority. Some women find it reminds them of abusive childhoods, school bullying or being in a controlling relationship. For many – and I would include myself among them – it destroys trust in others that has been hard-won. It reminds us just how many people, friends, colleagues, family members, can end up persuading themselves that yes, you must just be some crazy bitch who deserves it, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. – Victoria Smith
In her book Hagitude, Sharon Blackie describes women’s growing fear “of being ‘cancelled’, or publicly excoriated” for their views on sex and gender in terms of the “witch wound”, a legacy of centuries of witch trials, leaving behind a “deeply ingrained and often very visceral fear of the consequences of holding unpopular beliefs, or challenging the cultural orthodoxy“.
For the rest of our lives, many of us will know we’re only ever one statement of fact away from abuse and ostracism from people we thought were on our side. Yet I fear there will be no point in telling them this; they’ll only think it shows they were right. – Victoria Smith
Men who identify as women are riding roughshod over women’s sports. The latest example of this came at the weekend, in the result of the Tour of the Gila, an elite women’s cycling race in New Mexico, US. The winner was Austin Killips, a biological male who identifies as a ‘transgender woman’. – James Esses
Killips’ win at the Tour of the Gila tells us all we need to know about the question of trans inclusion in women’s sport. Here we have someone well into his twenties, who only took up cycling four years ago, and yet is now winning elite competitions by a considerable margin. Had Killips competed in the male event, as he should have, there is no doubt that the result would have been vastly different. – James Esses
Clearly, this is an ideology that does not care about fairness for women, and is dismissive of those who do.
If we want to make women’s sport fair again, we must keep male athletes out of it. – James Esses
The integrity of family life is a fundamental human right. Yet officers seem to have decided that Jones was entitled to try to have Creasy’s children taken away simply because he disagreed with her views — and the police quoted the European Convention on Human Rights at her for good measure.
Why have the police gone through the looking glass like this? Creasy believes such tactics are a way of pushing women out of public life and raise further concerns about how the police deal with crimes against women in general. Other women have suffered similar attacks. – Melanie Phillips
However, the problem is surely broader and deeper. Hate crime, which developed in the 1980s as part of the emergence of group identity politics, made certain views illegitimate and turned those opinions into thought crimes. For example, Christians preaching the words of the Bible against homosexuality had their collars felt by the police; on at least one occasion when a crowd of objectors assaulted such a street preacher, he was arrested while they were not.
The offence was no longer an action but an opinion. The attackers weren’t seen as the problem. The person who expressed the opinion that had enraged his attackers was viewed as the problem instead, for provoking the attack upon himself.
In today’s victim culture, this dividing line between victims and attackers is drawn up by approved groups who declare themselves oppressed by the majority and whose claim to victim status can’t be challenged. Subjective feelings trump fairness and facts. – Melanie Phillips
In recent months there has been a tsunami of evidence that the police have lost their way. There’s a widespread culture in the ranks of bullying, intimidation, cruelty, prejudice and corruption. Officers acquiesce to disrupters such as Black Lives Matter or climate protesters, either from ideological conviction or a wish to ingratiate themselves with the dominant culture of coerced opinion.
The police have lost their way because society has lost its way. When moral boundaries dissolve and informal social policing collapses, the actual police implode. First, opinion became crime. Now crime has become opinion. The culture itself is being trolled and anarchy is the result. – Melanie Phillips
What a sordid, sloppy mess, eh?
Meka Whaitiri is off, we still don’t know why and, somehow, she escapes the party hopping laws, so gets to stay on as an MP.
Does that, or does that not, sum up the malaise and general mess with which this country is currently run? – Mike Hosking
How can you have a senior player in your party and have literally no idea they are bailing and, when they do bail, no idea why?
It speaks very poorly of Whaitiri. Not telling anyone is the height of rudeness.
The fact Kiri Allen was dispatched to try and get some details, and failed, tells you that must have been one spectacularly dysfunctional relationship.
What does it say about Chris Hipkins leadership that he didn’t have a clue?
What does it say about Whaitiri’s mindset that she didn’t think it necessary to offer any explanation to anyone? – Mike Hosking
Then we have the so-called party hopping laws. I thought we had dealt with this? I thought Winston Peters had railed endlessly about the shabby way some MP’s treat the system?
And yet all these years after Turia and Alamein Kopu, here we are still watching them watch their back, feather their nests, protect their interests and collect the taxpayer’s money.
From a broader point of view this is a Government in its death throes.
The economy is shot, the previous leader has run for the hills, the imagery around their promises and delivery is laughable and now another minister has up and scarpered.
In a way, they must be secretly longing for October 14 to be put out of their misery. – Mike Hosking
In a free and open democracy politicians people feel are subpar end up on toilet seats and the like. I had an extremely unflattering Piggy Muldoon Piggy Bank as a kid. The real story here, which it will be left for me to write, is why are so many wanker journalists want to protect society’s most powerful by enforcing appropriate etiquette towards them from ordinary citizens?
One of the superpowers of the West is our freedom to tease and ridicule those in power. I’m talking political cartoons, the comedy of McPhail and Gadsby, impersonators, online memes, and, yes, cardboard masks being attached to toilet seats. Such ridicule worked a treat on organised religion, loosening its shackles on power and forcing many groups to progress, though some in society seem intent to walk that back now. The exact same deeply conservative impulse drives outrage over this toilet seat. – Dane Giraud
When a politician is considered saintly, to the point their image can’t be tarnished by satire or even the lowest forms of comedy, this says people are caught up in a brand and not the leader’s substance. You could argue Ardern’s protectors are the ones dehumanising her, as well as straying into misogynistic attitudes around the need for greater decorum towards female leaders. – Dane Giraud
The mask on the toilet seat scandal is an example of the wealth class trying to impose its sectarian imperatives on the general population. The goal is to make the parameters of how people criticise their preferred leaders so narrow, that it becomes near impossible to make meaningful attacks. But politicians need criticism – ferocious criticism – and to be ridiculed, otherwise, they have no reason to do the right thing.
Why a responsible media would seek to protect the powerful from low-level offense is beyond me. But this co-president announcing an investigation makes him a massive, if not the key part of this problem. And what would this ‘investigation’ look like, anyway? Will he be calling in Hercules Poiret??
I’d flush this silly co-president pronto because he’s thrown his club under the bus. My official statement (if the thunderous wind didn’t suffice) would’ve been “There’s not a politician, living or dead, whose face doesn’t belong on a toilet seat”. And then I’d commission a run of framed embroideries displaying the same maxim, which I’d gift to every media outlet to hang in their newsrooms. – Dane Giraud
Everyone who contributes to traffic congestion already pays for it in about the worst way possible: through their time, and through excess wear and tear on – and emissions from – vehicles idling in stop-and-go traffic.
Shifting to congestion charging would help ensure freer-flowing traffic. It would make buses run more reliably, unhindered by peak-time congestion. Achieving net-zero climate goals would be less costly with fewer congestion-related emissions.
And by shifting some travel to times when the roads are otherwise less used, it would encourage better use of existing road capacity. The roading system could handle more trips, overall, with less need to add new lanes. If a movie theatre is full at peak times when ticket prices are zero, it makes a lot more sense to start charging for tickets than to build more screens. – Eric Crampton
I speak English, not American. To me, a republican is someone who wants to abolish the monarchy, not a supporter of a transatlantic political party. As for ‘neoliberal’, I’m blowed if I can see how something can be both itself and its opposite at the same time (neolib/neocons presumably being opposite). What I do know is that I am a man of the Enlightenment who believes in silly things like freedom of speech – a classical liberal, which is a conservative position today; but in Amurrican quasi-English, liberal is the antithesis of conservative, meaning, amongst other things, support for PC totalitarianism in which conservatives have no freedom of speech. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek
We are still left with a quandary: it is perfectly possible to be a conservative and a liberal (in British English) at the same time. Indeed as I have noted above, this is the position of the classical liberal today. A mistake we should not make is confusing conservatism with stick-in-the-mud-ism. I have always remembered something Margaret Thatcher said to a radio reporter in 1985: “A modern conservative is someone who looks at what we have from the past and holds on to what is good” (a paraphrase as I cannot find the quote on the web). Conservatives can be sticks in the mud (as can so-called radicals) but they can also be progressive, looking for better ways of going about governance. But they do not believe in change for change’s sake. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek
The meanings of terms such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ have been changing over the past few decades. Their definitions have not quite settled down, although I fear that the American language pandemic is doing the redefining other than for true-blue stalwarts like yours truly who will always be true to the real thing (they can’t even get the colours right – blue being Democrat!). In the meantime, when you come across these words in print or speech, it does pay to enquire as to exactly what the writer or speaker means. It might also pay to ask yourself exactly what you mean by them – you may be surprised at the answer. – Barend Vlaardingerbroek
What to make of the Bud Light boycott? What was a few weeks ago dismissed as a conservative tantrum that would go nowhere and soon calm down has turned out to be the most successful consumer boycott of recent years. And in our culture-warring era, in which even booze and ice-cream brands feel compelled to lecture the rest of us about how to think and live, that really is saying something. – Tom Slater
On 1 April, America’s formerly beloved watery beer brand unveiled a new ambassador: transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. As part of a ‘March Madness’ promotion, Mulvaney was given a ton of money and a personalised Bud Light can in exchange for a short promotional social-media video, sporting his trademark ditsy shtick.
The backlash was swift. Prominent anti-wokesters called for a boycott as reports began to surface of punters snubbing Bud Light en masse. Naturally, the great and good dismissed all this as a big, fat nothingburger. Until now.
According to trade figures, Bud Light’s sales outside of hospitality venues fell by a whopping 26 per cent in the week ending 22 April, compared with the same week last year. – Tom Slater
Inevitably, this has all been chalked up to the alleged transphobic bigotry of beer drinkers. ‘They [are] upset because Mulvaney is transgender’, is the oh-so-nuanced take from Vox.
But to suggest that people have stopped drinking Bud Light because Mulvaney is trans is like suggesting liberal rich people who stopped vacationing at Mar-a-Lago post-2016 did so because Donald Trump is white. The point is not how Dylan Mulvaney identifies, but what he says and represents.
Mulvaney has essentially become America’s most prominent trans activist – proclaiming to the teeming masses of TikTok that women can have penises, and going to see President Biden to ensure he’s fully onboard with subjecting gender-confused teens to irreversible and discredited medical interventions. – Tom Slater
What people object to about Mulvaney’s sudden ubiquity – his celebration in the media and his portfolio of lucrative endorsement deals – is not Mulvaney per se, but the creep of this secular, sexist, biology-denying religion. A religion which they resent being pushed on them and their family. Especially when they’re just trying to relax, watch the game and have a beer. – Tom Slater
The left-liberals currently mocking this sudden politicisation of consumer brands should remember that the boycotters are not the ones who started this. For years now, corporates have taken it upon themselves to lecture their customers about social and political issues. A pushback of one kind or another was inevitable. – Tom Slater
Now, as various commentators have pointed out, consumer boycotts rarely work and even fewer last. There’s every reason to believe this one will peter out, too. Not least because most people have bigger things to worry about. The Very Online right-wingers hailing the Bud Light boycott like it’s the new Boston Tea Party really need to get out more.
But there’s something undoubtedly positive about this quiet revolt against woke capitalism; against the creep of identitarian activism into every sphere of life; against all the imperious corporations that want to impose their values on everyone else. Long may the pushback continue. – Tom Slater
It took a lot of hard work for Key’s National government to drag our immunisation stats up from the woeful depths they reached under the Clark administration, to levels expected of a Developed Nation – or First World Nation if you prefer.
And now look at it. Look when the drop started, 2017. – Tom Hunter
As one survey respondent remarked: “I can’t afford to work – If I work 40 hrs a week, after paying childcare I only earn $100 more than on a benefit, that’s $2.50 per hour.”
It’s worth exploring that comment. If their household budget required $100 more, surely the beneficiary couldn’t afford not to work? What the respondent seems to be saying is the marginal difference is so small they can’t afford to put in 40 hours effort at just $2.50 per hour. Someone else can put in the effort and pay the tax required to furnish their income.
Another respondent says, “We don’t just want a job, we want a career and opportunities to study/work that fit our lives as sole carers for our tamariki.”
So, people doing the ‘jobs’ should provide you with ‘careers and study opportunities’? You do know where the money for your benefit comes from, right? – Lindsay Mitchell
Another said, “MSD treat me like I’m a desperate Māori trying to milk them – You would think you were asking for money from their personal bank account.”
Well, hello. Your case manager toils to pay taxes. It feels exactly like their personal bank account. – Lindsay Mitchell
Despite the continuing elevated poverty and poorer health experienced by lone parents and their children, we are exhorted to “celebrate” this family form by embarking on a “nationwide media, marketing and communications campaign … to change behaviours; mobilise communities; and address social attitudes that stigmatise single parents.”
Single parenthood is stigmatised by society because of the hardship, loneliness and vulnerability it entails for mother and child. The moral disapproval exists because many (though certainly not all) single parents expect to live at the expense of others. This societal displeasure is only exacerbated by the increasing ease with which to avoid pregnancy or find work to support a family. – Lindsay Mitchell
This latest advocacy project is yet another bad idea from the poverty activism industry which creates lucrative employment/funding opportunities for those with an eye for riding the gravy train. It’s cynical and relies on perpetuating victimhood. We are trapped in a culture of faux kindness and silly celebration. It is sacrilege to suggest to anyone they made a mistake, or a poor choice. They don’t have to own it because we all ‘own it’ – we are all made responsible for the consequences of decisions of others we have no control over. This is the inevitable upshot of compulsory collectivism.
There is another option, but I’d be laughed out of the room for suggesting it. Avoidance and prevention just might be a better approach.
Which makes more sense? – Lindsay Mitchell
In an election year you expect political spin and deflection, but the Health Minister’s claim at the weekend that patients and people advocating for access to modern medicines are ‘on the take’ by pharma is a botched and brutal attempt to muddy the waters and deflect criticism away from Pharmac’s shoddy tactics and poor performance. – Rachel Smalley
There is an irony here – just before Ayesha Verrall became a minister, she resigned from a 4.5 year paid role with Pharmac – she worked under CEO Sarah Fitt and Chair Steve Maharey, two people she now says she has full confidence in.
To this day, neither Fitt nor Maharey have commented on the significant failings in leadership and governance that were highlighted in the Pharmac Review. And, worse, OIA’s have revealed communications advice telling them to “look hurried” as they leave select committees to avoid the waiting media, and to “look coy” if they are questioned about the medicines budget.
How is that for ‘transparent government’?
Right now, there are significant failings in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. In 25 years, we haven’t funded a bowel cancer drug. Kiwis with MS have to ‘prove’ their health has declined in order to get medicines that would have STOPPED their decline, and I recently reported on a pharma company which has packed up and left New Zealand after trying for 13 years to get a meeting with Pharmac – their drug to treat pancreatic cancer is funded in every other western nation on earth. – Rachel Smalley
However, what is most concerning right now is the attitude and commentary of the Health Minister – Labour’s fifth Health Minister in 6 years. Minister Verrall, you made the conscious decision to avoid addressing New Zealand’s position at the bottom of the OECD for access to medicines, and instead attempted to muddy the waters around who’s paying patients who are sick or dying with cancer, rare disorders and chronic disease.
Labour, you came into power in 2017 on the mantra of “Be Kind” – what a sham that was. New Zealanders suffering from cancer and disease have enough on their plate without being accused by their Minister of trying to capitalise on their disease by earning a few bucks off pharma. – Rachel Smalley
The Human Rights Commission (HRC) is charged with upholding all New Zealanders’ human rights. Fundamental rights include free speech, non-discrimination, and equality before the law.
However, the HRC has declined to take action against racist acts hostile to non-Māori. It did not defend effectively Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s free speech rights in New Zealand. Rather than focusing on its core legal obligations the HRC has now set as a strategic priority the elimination of racism from New Zealand. It believes this will require race-based constitutional change. – Peter Winsley
He Puapua denies that the Treaty of Waitangi/Tiriti o Waitangi transferred sovereignty/kāwanatanga to the Crown. In a footnote (p.28) it states incorrectly that “tino rangatiratanga” means “sovereignty”. In fact, tino rangatiratanga means chieftainship or ownership of properties, and this sits within a higher-level Crown sovereignty framework.
The HRC has restructured itself along He Puapua lines. This involves a CEO as ‘kāwanatanga leader, and the appointment of Dr Claire Charters, a He Puapua working group leader to a new role as an indigenous rights governance partner.
In recent publications the HRC has diagnosed racism as a white problem with Māori victims. It indicts white people for racism and argues that Māori can hold negative beliefs about others, however this is not racism because Māori lack power. The argument is that “prejudice without power is not racism.” There may be merit in this argument, however in absolute numbers there are likely to be more impoverished and powerless white people in New Zealand than there are Māori. – Peter Winsley
The Treaty/Tiriti was the starting point not the end point for New Zealand’s constitutional development. The1986 NZ Constitution Act confirmed the democratically elected Parliament’s authority and made clear that the Crown has only a symbolic and procedural role.
Sadly, the Crown violated Te Tiriti’s property right guarantees, leading to conflict and land loss. Rightly this required restitution through the Waitangi Tribunal and through direct settlements negotiated between government and Māori. Of course, Māori also violated Te Tiriti, however two wrongs do not make a right. Treaty settlements are about upholding the integrity of our government system and about showing respect to Māori and restoring mana.
Confusion in today’s Te Tiriti discourse largely arises from activists ignoring the 1840 document and substituting their own interpretations and wishes. For example, in 1840 taonga meant real property such as a tool or a waka, not intangible “property” such as broadcasting spectrum, language or water.
Te Tiriti is not a constitutional partnership between Pakeha and Māori or the Crown and Māori. Māori are subjects of the Crown, not partners with it. There are no principles stated in Te Tiriti. There is no “Aotearoa”; Māori are citizens of Nu Tirani (New Zealand). They are not referred to as indigenous nor as tangata whenua. – Peter Winsley
To demonstrate balance, the HRC could prepare a report on the impact of the Musket Wars on Māori in New Zealand, as documented by Ron Crosby, a distinguished historian and Waitangi Tribunal member. The death toll from these “Māori on Māori” wars likely exceeded that from all other conflicts New Zealand has been involved in combined. White supremacists slavishly following the dictates of 15th century Papal Bulls can hardly be blamed for this violence and devastation.
The HRC shows little understanding of the psychology underlying phenomena such as conflict between and within groups. The human mind has evolved modules for coalition recognition and formation. These coalitions can include nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, avocational and sporting affiliations, social class as well as race. Tribal affiliation not race was the major source of violence in pre-European New Zealand. Religious hatred more so than racism led to the mass murder of Muslims in Christchurch in 2019. Despite these complexities the HRC focuses on eliminating what it labels as white racism by promoting race-based constitutional change!
History shows that race-based societies fail. No tribally based society has ever succeeded in the modern world. And yet New Zealand is rapidly racializing and tribalizing its system of central and local government and other institutions.
It is time for the HRC to return to its core statutory obligations. In doing so, can we be spared from future “education” about the relevance of 15th century Papal Bulls and doctrines of discovery to the real problems New Zealand faces, such as low productivity, housing affordability, child poverty, mediocre education and decaying social cohesion? – Peter Winsley
What happened to the art of disagreement? In 2017, I addressed this very question in my stand-up show, Thought Crimes, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. My main topic was the aftermath of the Brexit vote and how so many of my friends had developed a strange new determination to reduce all political disputes to a matter of good vs evil, with those who voted to leave the EU falling firmly in the latter camp. I felt there was something inherently amusing about this sudden surge of mass infantilism.
I performed the show every evening during the fringe at The Stand comedy club, and I very much enjoyed working with such a pleasant and professional team. I remember, on one occasion, chatting to a member of staff who completely disagreed with my political views. The conversation was stimulating and, above all, amiable. Had I suggested at the time that, just a few years later, a show at this same venue would be cancelled because members of staff found the opinions of those involved offensive, she would have laughed. I’m confident that nobody at The Stand, either performers or staff, would have considered this a remote possibility. Surely it would be absurd for a comedy club, of all places, to reject the principle of free speech?
Yet this is precisely what happened this week when The Stand cancelled the booking of SNP politician Joanna Cherry, who had been scheduled to appear as part of the club’s ‘In Conversation With’ series. Cherry is a lesbian who campaigned against Section 28, and has recently been vocal about the threat to women’s rights and single-sex spaces posed by the rise of gender-identity ideology. – Andrew Doyle
Novels by Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have since been rewritten by ‘sensitivity readers’ (newspeak for ‘censors’). The Irish government is currently passing new hate-speech laws that are similarly draconian to those passed by the Scottish government in 2021. Prestigious scientific journals are publishing pseudoscience in order to uphold this new ideology, too. Only this week the Scientific American ran a piece entitled ‘Here’s why human sex is not binary’, illustrated with an image of the male and female gametes that prove that it is.
It’s difficult to keep up with these baffling developments. Most of us have noticed the rise of this new ideology that is now dominant in all of our major cultural, educational, political and corporate institutions. We can see that its impact is divisive, regressive and illiberal, and yet it describes itself using progressive-sounding terminology, such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘equity’. When language becomes unmoored from meaning, we are all at risk of mistaking change for progress.
We have seen that the disciples of this new religion are pushing for more and more censorship, whether that be through the cancellation of comedians, the deletion of potentially offensive scenes in old television shows, or stronger ‘hate speech’ laws. We have seen women physically assaulted for standing up for their sex-based rights. We have seen how anyone who questions the new orthodoxies jeopardises their career prospects and risks being publicly shamed. The existence of what we now call ‘cancel culture’ is often denied by those who indulge in it the most, but its list of casualties expands by the day. – Andrew Doyle
Who cares if a few zealots are demanding that we attend ‘unconscious bias’ training sessions? Who cares if civil servants and teachers and staff at the BBC are being encouraged to announce their pronouns in emails and at the beginning of meetings? Who cares if the Ministry of Defence is holding LGBTQIA+ coffee mornings to discuss pansexuality? If we let them get on with it, the logic goes, all of this will just go away.
But this is very wrong. If we ignore these developments, the culture warriors won’t fade away – they’ll win. These activists are promoting an authoritarian creed, and are doing untold damage to our world, while believing they are making it better. If your toddler starts smashing up the crockery, you don’t just politely wait for it to finish. Sometimes you have to intervene in order to prevent further damage.
I wrote The New Puritans in the hope that the book would become obsolete. Judging from recent events, this won’t be happening any time soon. – Andrew Doyle
For months the country has felt as if it’s under a state of siege – not from a hostile foreign power, but from extreme weather.
This week, the north of the country has been pummelled again by torrential rain, gale-force winds and high seas. RNZ reported this morning that more heavy rain warnings had been issued for the west coast of the North Island and the top of the South.
But please, whatever you do, don’t mention Hunga Tonga. – Karl du Fresne
We’ve become familiar with scary colour codes denoting storms of varying severity. Meteorologists whom no one had previously heard of have been thrust into national prominence in the same way that epidemiologists became household names – celebrities, almost – during the Covid crisis.
But the experts don’t say anything about Hunga Tonga, and quite rightly. We wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea. – Karl du Fresne
The statistics tell the story. In January, 182mm of rain fell at Masterton Airport compared with the historical average of 83mm. In February we got 159mm compared with the average of 25mm. And when it wasn’t raining, it was threatening to rain. It was a summer of gloom. NIWA figures show that Masterton had 536 hours of bright sunshine during summer compared with the average of 649. That may not sound like a huge difference, but ask any family camping on the coast how much fun they had this summer. Not bloody much, they’ll tell you. But Hunga Tonga? Nah.
By now you’re probably muttering, “Hunga what?” and wondering what the hell I’m on about. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai is the underwater volcano that erupted near Tonga in January last year. I wrote about it here.
To recap a couple of key points from that blog post, Hunga Tonga was the most powerful eruption so far this century. According to NIWA, it was the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded in more than 100 years, measuring nearly 6 on the volcanic explosivity index – roughly equivalent to that of Krakatoa. The eruption created a volcanic plume that reached 58km into the mesosphere.
An article in the scientific journal Communications Earth and Environment – one of many devoted to the event – noted that major volcanic eruptions are well-known drivers of climate change and said the magnitude of the Hunga Tonga explosion ranked it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era. Researchers calculated that it resulted in a 13% increase in global stratospheric water mass and a fivefold increase in stratospheric aerosol load – the highest in three decades.
One study estimated the amount of water displaced as 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about 10 percent of the entire water content of the stratosphere. That’s a helluva lot of water and it has to go somewhere. – Karl du Fresne
It seems reasonable to conclude that an eruption of that scale might at the very least be a factor in the freakish weather patterns of the past few months. Yet I can’t help suspecting that the eruption of Hunga Tonga is the climate event none of the New Zealand experts want to talk about, possibly because it cuts across the official narrative that the extreme weather of the past few months is all due to climate change.
In a New Zealand Herald article published two months ago, New Zealand meteorologists seemed to go out of their way to play down the Hunga Tonga factor. While acknowledging that eruptions can have climatic impacts, they attributed our wayward summer weather (and now autumn as well) to other causes. – Karl du Fresne
Obviously I can’t contradict them. They’re experts and I’m not. But can we rely on the likes of Renwick and Salinger being rigorously objective? I’d like to say yes, but both have nailed their colours to the climate change mast and the subject is so politicised that we can be excused for having doubts. Science is not immune to ideological contamination, as we learned from the shameful gang-up that followed the Listener letter about matauranga Maori.
Setting aside all the arguments about whether climate change is human-induced, and to what extent (if at all) we can mitigate it by riding bikes, buying Teslas, planting trees and punishing farmers, I think most people can accept that the climate is changing. Even my own amateur observations suggest it’s happening. One admittedly crude measurement is the frequency with which the Remutaka Hill road is closed by slips. When we moved from Wellington in 2003, such events were infrequent. Now they happen regularly. That can only be the result of the ground being saturated and destabilised by constant heavy rain. The frosts, too, are fewer and less severe.
But what’s happened lately feels different. Gabrielle was New Zealand’s worst weather event this century. – Karl du Fresne
Climate change is surely a gradually evolving trend, and that doesn’t gel with what New Zealand has experienced this year. The recent extreme weather events have been freakishly violent and abrupt. They feel like outliers – striking departures from the norm – rather than the predictable continuation of a long-term pattern. If I’m wrong, such events are the new normal and we face an unimaginably dismal future.
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Just by suggesting this, I probably risk being labelled as a conspiracy theorist from the alt-Right and put on the watch list of the Disinformation Project (which, incidentally, has so far failed to respond to my requests for information about who funds it – a novel approach for activists who like to promote themselves as champions of transparency). But where climate change is concerned, as in all issues where ideology intrudes, I’m inclined to follow the advice of my late colleague Frank Haden: doubt everything with gusto. – Karl du Fresne
Microsoft’s software allows users a degree of utility that is incomprehensible, incalculable and immeasurable.
Obviously if Gates hadn’t done it, we’d be using a similar product, but that is to miss the point; successful entrepreneurs sell you something for a price that is lower than what you believe it is worth.
Word, Excel, Exchange and similar products have allowed office workers to do in hours what formerly took days. These innovations have made every person who uses them more productive. The difference between the cost of what you are buying and the value you receive is vast. – Damien Grant
Microsoft is valued at over US$2 trillion and this is perhaps less than 1% of the value it has provided to mankind.
The advances in productivity made possible by the sorts of products sold by Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and so many others have allowed billions of us to live lives of such comfort and excess that obesity is now a greater problem than hunger in many nations.
Gates has, nobly, committed himself and his vast capital to making the world a better place, and his achievements in this area are outstanding.
Millions of lives have been saved thanks to his efforts against measles and malaria. And yet Gates can devote a dozen lifetimes towards philanthropic endeavours and these achievements shall be as dust to the sand dunes of utility Microsoft has gifted to humanity. Further, Microsoft is merely one of thousands of companies and entrepreneurs that drive our civilisation forward.
We celebrate, and we should, those who use their capital for good works, but we should not be blinded to the real value of these remarkable individuals.
This week Wellington property developer and philanthropist Mark Dunajtschik has announced he is giving his fortune, estimated at $450 million, to charity, with a focus on serving those living in the Wellington region with a disability.
This is, self-evidently, a fantastic thing to do and is more evidence of that this remarkable New Zealander is deserving of the knighthood wisely bestowed on him earlier this year; and yet he received his award for services for philanthropy, and not his efforts that allowed his to be philanthropic.
It is my perspective that his enduring value to our beloved capital is the buildings he has built, refurbished and developed; for each is remarkable, its real value obscured because such achievements are now so commonplace.
We take as given so much of the accomplishments of those such as Dunajtschik that we fail to really comprehend their value to our society.
An apartment complex, an office building, even something as mundane as a domestic house requires hundreds of businesspeople covering a wide range of skills and resources, to design, construct and maintain.
That we look at such marvels without wonder and awe is itself testament to the achievements of past generations of entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, we honour those whose accomplishments amount to little more than the outstanding quality of their character while failing to comprehend the contributions made by those whose business skills, willingness to risk and to fail, have produced a magnificent bounty.
We are too quick to acknowledge the politician, the activist and the worthy citizen who toils for the benefit of others, and too slow to acknowledge those whose contributions provide more tangible and enduring results.
A dozen of the most gifted social workers cannot match the contribution made to a community by a thriving retail store or a McDonald’s. Such outfits offer employment, they offer things of value people wish to acquire.
They create the opportunity for individuals to build their own lives rather than having one designed for them by someone whose only knowledge of true hardship has been acquired in a lecture room.
Charitable works never achieve as much good as honest traders do when, in pursuit of their own profit, they seek to sell to others goods and services at a price lower than that which their customers value their wares. – Damien Grant
Sowing the winds of racial tension in New Zealand began decades ago under careless governments. Now we are starting to reap the whirlwind. Maori aristocrats have built up such a sense of entitlement, with a cornucopia of fabrications and grievances, that they are starting to fall out over how rapidly they can clap on the pace of the gravy train. Meka Whaitiri’s desertion of the Labour Party is the latest sign that radicals are at sixes and sevens over pushing even harder for a Maori take-over of New Zealand. – Michael Bassett
All of a sudden, in October 2020, New Zealand started incorrectly being referred to as Aotearoa. Radically revised versions of the Treaty of Waitangi were circulated, the authors inventing new principles as they went along. The four main cities that were all colonial creations because Maori didn’t live in towns suddenly had Maori titles forced upon them. Government departments sprouted newly-invented Maori names. On radio and TV it became mandatory for announcers to spout Te Reo that few listeners understood. Because of Jacinda’s new policy the daily papers started cozying up to ministers and suppressing anything that could be deemed critical of Maori. Their failing circulation figures necessitated access to the government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund. The word “racist” was now bandied about by genuine racists supporting Mahuta’s racially divisive policies like her Three Waters programme. It aims to give the tribal aristocracies control over water, leading to private Maori ownership. And the full shape of a new health system emerged with its twin sectors, one Pakeha, the other Maori, with Maori who constitute 17% of the population having veto rights over everything. Teaching of Te Reo in schools stepped up; a new history curriculum that is grotesquely skewed against 83% of New Zealand’s non-Maori population began being taught in schools.
Underpinning the whole Maorification programme is a prize piece of mischief called “He Puapua”. Hatched in secret by Mahuta, it aims at giving Maori effective control of New Zealand by 2040. It is the work of several radical Maori academics who believe they are doing their bit to further the interests of New Zealand’s “Indigenous” people. No matter that almost alone around the world, New Zealand never had indigenous people. We are a land of relatively recent arrivals. – Michael Bassett
Ardern gave Maori radicals free range from late 2020. She was woefully ignorant of her country’s history and was conned into the notion that it was “fair” that Maori should be given paramount status in our country, and that the whole process was certain to improve Maori lives, and solve any disadvantages they suffered. Not only was this never going to occur: it was woke nonsense of a high order. Instead, as more ministers talked up Maori policy, it stoked the notion amongst them that all national resources belonged to them as of right, and that their MPs could provide easy solutions to anything they happened to want. No exertion was required of them other than to board the gravy train’
Once it started moving, a rag-tail fringe of second raters began shouting “faster”. Before long bits started flying off. – Michael Bassett
Meantime that bizarre collection of misfits, the Maori Party, under the influence of its president, John Tamihere, was cooking up plans to decouple the Maori seats from Labour and attach them to the tattooed twins, Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer. For personal reasons that Meka Whaitiri doesn’t wish to reveal, she decided to leap aboard the accelerating Maori Party gravy train. It is now conspiring to force King Charles to come up with free “reparatory justice” for “centuries of racism, oppression, colonialism and slavery, now…recognized by the UN as Crimes Against Humanity”. Coming from a party whose own paramount chief, Te Rauparaha, slaughtered a slave as the centerpiece of a feast only a year before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, this sets a record for chutzpah!
Increasingly, it looks as though Chris Hipkins is unable to free himself from Jacinda’s unfortunate post 2020 policies. But the Maori Party’s efforts are even crazier, and it is still possible that others in Labour’s Maori caucus might fly off in search of even greater extremism. The new Prime Minister might yet be hit by a flying object. On its recent form, KiwiRail could easily oblige….
Whatever, surely it should be clear to every Kiwi that if a racially more harmonious New Zealand is something you want, defeating Labour in October is an urgent necessity. – Michael Bassett
Here’s a small observation from travel to major cities over the last few weeks – cops work.
Visible police on the street, work.
I never felt unsafe in London and I never felt unsafe in New York.
New York has the most crazies, they have a lot of homeless and they make a lot of noise and come across as aggressive at times.
But there is a cop on every corner.
There is a patrol car, a series of patrol cars, seemingly permanently parked wherever you are.
They wander the street, they arrive in minutes and their sirens are too loud and too permanent. But you can’t argue they don’t make you feel safe. – Mike Hosking
I can’t remember the last time I saw a police officer on the streets of this country, plus their cars are hard enough to spot.
Somewhere along the line someone decided walking the beat wasn’t good policing any more. They talk of community policing but I just don’t see it.
Further, I am convinced of the power of imagery. Get a cop with a stab-proof vest and an arsenal of weaponry, whether it be a baton, handcuffs, pepper spray or a gun, and you send a message. As I’ve told you before, the flash shops in San Francisco have guards with guns and dogs.
God forbid we ever end up there. But I’m still reading about the ram raids and the daylight attacks here. I didn’t read about them in New York or London and I didn’t, I suspect, because a cop was never far away.
At some point, someone has to add up the cost of all the crime and insurance and repair work and fear we have these days, versus the cost of actually getting some more police on the street.
The model is there to be seen. Visibility works.
I wouldn’t have thought it was that hard. B – Mike Hosking
With only a few exceptions, nothing has the capacity to leave us with a lasting feeling of warmth and gratitude for having had the privilege of being there when it happened.
That is why I find the writing and performance of music is one of those rare human qualities that will have a lasting influence on how we adjust to the pressures of daily living.
It is the solace that can, even fleetingly, take us out of ourselves to a place where we feel no pain.
Without that opportunity and, given the state of the world, we might as well all go mad. – Clive Bibby
The EV subsidies going to brand-new Teslas alone total $80 million. Every dollar subsidising the world’s richest toddler, Bubba Musk, is a dollar that hasn’t been spent on, say, hiring more bus drivers and paying them well. Or buying a train track inspection.
Reporters this week established that the recipients of EV subsidies live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs. People who live in struggle street do not buy brand new $80,000 motors, or even relatively affordable brand new Toyotas.
And it is not just an $8000 handout to buy a new Tesla. They also get an ongoing $2000 a year top-up bonus of unpaid road user taxes. EVs still use the roads, don’t they? – Josie Pagani
The commission does a good job of setting carbon budgets and holding government to account on whether it’s reaching them.
Then we get to its menu of ideas for how to reduce emissions, which are a bit zany.
Its manifesto reads like it’s been put together by people who spend their mornings glueing themselves to motorways: Bans, subsidies, nothing measured to find the most efficient.
It instructs that ‘mindsets’ and the “values of businesses and consumers” must be ‘redefined’. I have been around the far left for much of my life, and I have previously seen the movie that tries to persuade us we are living in false consciousness. I won’t spoil the ending for you. – Josie Pagani
The commission encourages us towards ‘active transport’, formerly known as ‘walking’. Not popular among voters who live 20 kilometres from work and do night shifts. They should buy new Teslas. – Josie Pagani
Greenpeace suggests the Climate Change Commission should run the ETS. But the commission wants something more revolutionary than the ETS, and we prefer elections when deciding how to run our economy.
I would take its policy advice role away: It should stick to setting budgets and pronouncements on whether we are meeting them.
You will never get the majority of people to support a clean energy transition that makes them pay more for less. Better to spend the EV subsidy on working out how to make electric vehicles cheaper than petrol cars. Only then will most of us switch.
It is hard to have a debate about which climate policies work best without being called a ‘climate delayer’, as if doing the wrong thing quickly is better than doing the right thing more carefully. But let’s at least have a debate about who pays.
If donating to the rich to save the planet works, I only ask that Teslas give way to me at intersections. – Josie Pagani
The most amusing language abuse by these lefty types is “activist” usually applied to protesters lying about in groups, holding signs complaining about this or that. Their major characteristic is inactivity.
The current fashionable ludicrously dishonest term these losers use to smother their now unfashionable “socialism” is “progressive”. Nothing could be more inaccurate. Collectivists are literally the very opposite of progressive; rather they’re ultra regressive, seeking to resurrect tried and failed big government statist policies of yesteryear. – Bob Jones
If I could wave a wand and solve just one of these problems, it would be teacher training. High-quality teaching is the most important determinant of learning – and high-quality teaching depends on high-quality training.
Most teachers do the best they can with the training they had. They are not to blame for their inadequate preparation. It is the fault of a system that gives universities an effective monopoly on teacher training. – Michael Johnson
I recently visited one of very few non-university providers of initial teacher education, New Zealand Graduate School of Education (NZGSE). I saw there an exemplary model of how we should prepare new teachers for the profession.
Teachers-in-training at NZGSE spend the bulk of their time in classrooms, gaining practice at being teachers. NZGSE teacher educators observe them frequently, provide coaching and feedback, and assess them against a long list of things that competent teachers can do. When teachers-in-training can do all of those things to the required standard, fluently and consistently, they can graduate.
But providers like NZGSE have a problem. Postgraduate qualifications are desirable to prospective teachers. And it is difficult for non-university providers to have these qualifications approved. It is expected that postgraduate qualifications will be taught by research-active academics.
It does not take academics to train teachers. What it does take, are people who know how children learn, and can impart that knowledge to teachers-in-training. – Michael Johnson
We should relieve university lecturers involved in teacher training from any expectation to be ‘research-active’. That would make it easier for institutions that don’t have research-active staff to have postgraduate teaching qualifications approved.
To improve the quality of teacher training, we must break the universities’ near-monopoly on initial teacher education and open the door to competition from providers like NZGSE. – Michael Johnson
Sex education has changed. Long gone are the days when an embarrassed teacher fumbled his way through a couple of lessons on the facts of life. As recent reports have highlighted, puberty, periods and pregnancy barely warrant a mention nowadays. Instead, anal sex, fisting, rough sex and polyamory are the order of the day. Classes involve children ‘stepping away from heteronormative and monogamy-based assumptions’ in order to appreciate that ‘there are a variety of sexual preferences and practices’. On top of this, many children are also being taught that they have a gender identity that may be different from their biological sex. – Joanna Williams
The assumption that even the youngest children have a sexuality leads UNESCO to claim they have ‘sexual rights’. The SSAUK review spells out what this means: ‘The child is considered to have a right to sexual “pleasure” and the same sexual knowledge as adults.’ Here UNESCO is eroding the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. This has the potential to expose children to serious harm.
For sexuality education to be considered fully ‘comprehensive’, it must cover gender identity. The SSAUK review explains that UNESCO and the WHO promote ‘the social construct of gender identity over and above the physical reality of biological sex and propose the medicalisation of children as a necessary response’. Clearly, UNESCO and the WHO are engaged in political activism masquerading as scholarship. No thought is given to the damage transitioning can do to children.
The SSAUK review argues that comprehensive sexuality education has sexualised children and undermined child safeguarding. The counter-argument repeated time and again by the WHO and UNESCO is that sexuality education empowers children. They claim that giving children a vocabulary to describe bodies and sexual behaviours enables them to speak out about sexual abuse. But, as the SSAUK authors point out, this shifts the burden of responsibility away from adult abusers and on to child victims. The onus is placed on children to say no. This shift in emphasis is compounded by UNESCO’s framing of age-of-consent laws as ‘restrictive’.
Comprehensive sexuality education teaches that consent is key to all decisions around sex. In the context of lessons normalising a wide range of sexual practices, this implies that the young can consent to behaviours far beyond their comprehension. Children are similarly trusted to declare their own gender identities, even though it is impossible for them to comprehend the long-term repercussions of this. As the SSAUK review notes, adult judgements and responsibilities are being pushed on to children.
SSAUK shows the extent to which the policies shaping sex education in UK schools are intended to undermine parental authority. According to UNESCO and the WHO, parents are not just lacking in knowledge – they also pose a threat to their own children. The WHO asserts that shame associated with sexual activity is often the result of ‘family background’ and ‘moral development’. Rather than leaving childrearing to parents, these global organisations want to shape the personality and behaviour of every child.
Safe Schools Alliance is absolutely right to describe comprehensive sexuality education as ‘an exercise in global social engineering… that pays no regard to child safeguarding’. We need to kick these pernicious lessons out of schools. – Joanna Williams
No one, neither king nor pauper, should surrender to the jealous god of identity politics. – Brendan O’Neill
There are a fair few things I’d like to see King Charles apologise for. Those meddlesome ‘spidery letters’ he wrote to government ministers. His green doom and gloom. Prince Harry. But slavery? The British Empire? No. Never. Charles should utter not one word of contrition for those historical events. For if even he, the literal king, were to cave to the woke insistence that ‘the privileged’ must self-flagellate for the crimes of their forefathers, it would set a terrible precedent. It would represent the final victory of that jealous god of identity politics, with disastrous consequences for democracy. – Brendan O’Neill
The first weird thing about the recent explosion of angst over Charles’ shady ancestors is how surprised everyone sounds. Magazines publish breathless pieces on how Charles ‘descends from rulers who waged wars, built empires and extracted wealth from colonies’. Yes, we know – he’s the king. Kings and queens were bastards. They chopped off heads, imprisoned princes, taxed people to within an inch of their lives, conquered countries, put down rebellions. That Charles’s family tree is pock-marked with iffy people is literally the least startling thing about him.
But he still shouldn’t apologise for any of that stuff. For one simple reason: he didn’t do it. Charles has never owned a slave, sent ships in search of booty, put a wife on the chopping block. It is nearly 3,000 years since Ezekiel said, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’. Now the noisy identitarians of the 21st century want to reverse all that. They far prefer God’s implacable rage in the Book of Exodus, in which He seethed: ‘[I] am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.’ That the woke are so infused with Old Testament fury, with such a severe urge to punish even the descendants of wrongdoers, confirms what a menacing and regressive movement theirs is. – Brendan O’Neill
The identitarians don’t seem to realise that the thing they want – the king weeping for old wrongs – would be a new form of colonialism. Emotional colonialism. Where once monarchs sought to deliver foreigners from ignorance, now they’d deliver them from PTSD.
Elite empowerment is a key part of the showy penitence of the modern era. This is why so many political actors, from Tony Blair to the Vatican, enthusiastically seize every opportunity to let their lip wobble. Blair expressed remorse for the Irish Famine. Pope Francis begged for forgiveness for ‘the offences of the church’ in the colonial era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was essentially institutionalised contrition. Australia holds an annual National Sorry Day in which everyone’s expected to quietly atone for the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples. All of these things are best understood not as genuine expressions of sorrow, but as arrogant displays of emotional literacy; as declarations that one has ascended to the plane of therapeutic correctness, and is thus fit to rule in the era of emotion.
Yet while the cult of contrition might be helpful to elites looking for new ways to justify their rule, it’s a disaster for the rest of us. It is divisive and anti-democratic. The woke rehabilitation of God’s jealous visitation of the crimes of the father on to the son is utterly destructive of public life. It is a form of racial collective guilt – and racial collective pain. All whites come to be seen as the morally stained sons and daughters of ancient crime, and all black, brown and Indigenous people are reduced to the morally scarred sons and daughters of those crimes. This depressing, deterministic creed turns us from equal citizens into either ‘the privileged’ or ‘the oppressed’, where the former must forever repent to the latter. – Brendan O’Neill
Such a debased spectacle would not be a challenge to monarchy at all. On the contrary, it would represent a kind of Battle of the Bloodlines, where two different versions of historically determined authority would be fighting it out for control of society – the historically determined divine right of King Charles vs the historically determined divine pain of the woke. My turn to apologise: sorry, but I prefer equality and democracy to the rule of any given identity. – Brendan O’Neill
Male athlete Austin Killips has won the “Tour of Gila’”women’s road cycling race in New Mexico. After an overwhelming reaction by the public and female athletes alike, the UCI (International Cycling Union) is reconsidering its policy of allowing trans-identified men to compete in women’s cycling competitions. It says it will undertake further consultation and reach a decision in August. What consultation could possibly be necessary to understand that men competing against women in road cycling, or any other sport, is unfair to those women? It is cruel to female athletes, and every sporting body representing women should call an immediate halt. It is the ultimate act of patriarchal entitlement to steal something from a woman, just because you can. – Jean Hatchet
Adult men have secured advantages over women in their muscle development, lung capacity, bone density, the Q angle of the hips, and the ratio of fat to muscle, to name but a few areas. When Killips uttered the magic words “I am a woman”, he was not able to hand back these advantages in exchange for a packet of female hormones. They are banked, baked in, going nowhere. As he marches with the women’s prize money to the bank, female competitors feel the searing injustice.
Startlingly, the outcry this time has included many commentators suggesting women themselves should boycott their own sports teams to prevent men who identify as women from competing in them. This is an unsuitable suggestion for many reasons, not least because some of the people suggesting such a tactic seem to have little understanding of the incredible work being done by campaigners on this issue such as the Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies and the tennis legend Martina Navratilova. These women have sacrificed their reputations and faced incredible backlash, including being smeared as bigots and “transphobes”, in order to speak out on behalf of younger female athletes who simply want the right to fair competition.
If the women themselves speak out, they risk even worse. – Jean Hatchet
Asking women to leave the sporting field so that men have women’s competitions to themselves is grossly unfair. Many elite sportswomen began their sporting career as young girls. They have faced and overcome numerous barriers to compete at the higher levels of their chosen sport, including the financial risk which comes with prioritising sport over a more typical career path. Many elite sportswomen must find employment to fit alongside their rigorous training routines to ensure they can afford to compete. Lucrative sponsorship deals, available to elite sportsmen by contrast, ensure that their male counterparts are not required to do the same.
When cycling competitions are available to women, the attention they receive is often minimal, races not televised and prize money often significantly lower. The Tour of Britain, a men’s road cycling race, is covered live by ITV4, Eurosport and GCN. It achieves an International audience. Its partner race for women, “Women’s Tour” has just been cancelled due to lack of commercial support, despite a fundraising appeal to “rescue” it. Women can’t walk away from events that don’t even take place. By asking women to boycott the sports events they work hard to compete in and establish, you’re asking women themselves to ensure that there will be no more sporting events for them to compete in. – Jean Hatchet
When women first began to cycle in the late 19th century, men raised concerns that there might be health risks including exhaustion but also, quite ludicrously, dysentery. Men were outraged that women might experience sexual arousal, and so bicycles for women featured cut out saddles but also pedals which ensured that women rode side saddle. No woman would ever have been able to climb mountains in a race like the “Tour De France Femmes” with these ridiculous impediments to free cycling. Women have come a long way since those days, and modern men know it, just as certainly as the men who hung an effigy of a woman on a bike out of a window at Oxford University in 1900 in order to object to the “new woman” gaining a full degree. – Jean Hatchet
Women made space for themselves in the world with their demands and their feminist activism. They gained the right to vote, the right to own property and the right to divorce men. They forced laws that prevented men they were married to from raping them. They created refuges to escape men who were hurting them. They managed to secure public toilets they could use, which freed them from the urinary leash of their time allowed out in public. Time and women marched on, and some women’s rights were taken for granted. Sporting women made some obvious achievements, women circumventing the imposed stereotypes of femininity by becoming more physically powerful and competing with each other. – Jean Hatchet
If Dworkin was right, a few men see these advancements as a threat. Being told that there are some areas of women’s lives that men cannot access, being told no, is an affront to these men. When men are able to declare they are women, they can reverse some of these annoying exclusions they face. These men found a solution to pesky feminism. As a result, all too frequently, women are being forced into spaces with these men, who can now enter women’s domestic abuse refuges, become the CEO of a rape crisis centre for women, rape women and still demand to be placed in prison with women. Men can enter women’s toilets and changing rooms and force women to go home again to change or urinate. Men can enter women’s sporting competitions and win them. They can take the prize money and demolish women’s boundaries.
Outrageously, at the same time, these men will demand public sympathy. – Jean Hatchet
How do you win when you aren’t good enough to win as a man? Go and beat the women, take the money and cry victim when called a cheat. How do you erase feminist gains for women? Say you are one.
Too few elite sportsmen have stood up for the women being cheated out of fair competition. Imagine what would happen if male cyclists refused to get on their bikes for just one stage of the Tour De France this year? What would happen if just for one Saturday, men refused to play Premiership Football? Imagine if the men playing in America’s Superbowl walked off the field for just ten minutes? There would be outrage from sponsors and fans alike, and the financial toll would be too much to bear. It would take just one day or ten minutes. The power to give women back their sport is at the fingertips of sporting men, and they should use it swiftly before it is too late.
No, women will not get off our bikes, out of the pool or off the pitch. Sport is a form of freedom and independence for us. We will not return to our homes or to the past. We will play on. – Jean Hatchet
First a minister decided she would leave, giving scant reason. Clearly the new PM didn’t command enough respect (from Whaitiri at least) to be given any sort of warning.
It also makes Labour looks like a party and Government fraying at the edges. The sheen provided by the Hipkins ascendancy is quickly wearing off as politics roars on into the election. There is no doubt that the intensity of the past few years has left Labour looking like a Government that has held the treasury benches for significantly longer than its six years. – Luke Malpass
The other question left open is the extent to which National or ACT thinks about framing up its election campaign as: a vote for Labour is a vote for the Greens, a vote for Labour is a vote for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.
Leaning on the idea that the tail might wag the dog (as it certainly has in every government Peters has been a part of) can be a powerful message for voters unsure which way to fall, perhaps liking National but unsure about Christopher Luxon. – Luke Malpass
It’s been a while since National had been handed such an opportunity. Under former PM Jacinda Ardern, Labour had mostly resisted taking potshots at National when it was in strife – apart from Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s occasional speeches in Parliament.
If Labour had thought that would earn it some reciprocation, it can think again.
It’s an election year. It’s Hipkins instead of Ardern and Hipkins has taken no vow of kindness.
The polls are even – and as far as National is concerned, that clearly means the gloves are off. The Act Party never had them on.
For Hipkins, the job now is to try not to give them any more ammo. He will be hoping Labour’s patch of turbulence was just that – a patch, rather than the first few rocks before a landslide. – Claire Trevett
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down. – Bryan Leyland
Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed; emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable; more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables; more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.
None of this is difficult to work out. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening.
Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem. – Bryan Leyland
The conclusion is simple. Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame. The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably and correctly likened to “jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and hoping that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to save you before you hit the ground.”
Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable. If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.
But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn’t need the wind and solar plants at all.
Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless. – Bryan Leyland
The carbon market has come back to bite the Government in the bum.
As part of their fiscal update this week we’ve seen that the last carbon auction produced nothing and cost the Government $1.2 billion, which simply adds to their ever-growing deficit.
I asked at the time whether this was bad news. They told us it was the market working as markets do.
The trouble with the answer was, although technically that is true, it was in fact a direct reaction, or reflection, of the lack of faith in the Government’s climate change polices. – Mike Hosking
You have a number of competing factors here. On one hand the commission wants to send us all broke because they are obsessed with carbon emissions. You have a Government that can’t live with their zealousness because they actually want to get re-elected.
But, you also have a Government that has made climate their nuclear moment and are now being caught out as being fraudulent when it comes to delivery on the rhetoric.
Somewhere in the middle is the carbon market, which is an invented rort, designed to raise money from polluters who are forced to offset their emissions by buying credits, with the money raised goes to climate positive projects.
Trouble is when the auction is held. The question is asked – why would I spend money on something I don’t believe is going to come to pass?
So they don’t.
Hence the auction fails, nothing is sold and all those credits get shifted to the next auction. So that means double supply, but how much demand? – Mike Hosking
The carbon market is a mess because the Government are a mess. The Climate Commission look increasingly out of touch and radical, offering up theories no one is taking up
And slowly but surely, the reality of crazy ideas invented to address issues that don’t have full buy in are exposed for all to see.
A failed auction, a court case and over a billion dollar not realised.
What a shambles. – Mike Hosking
When you can find the courage to condemn a tie as a symbol of past colonisation, but lack it to condemn Russia for abducting children and ethnic cleansing, I suggest it is time to reset your moral compass.
Putin’s war is an old-fashioned colonial grab, and as the world waits for the Ukrainian counter-offensive to begin, we should be clear what side we are on, not just in the past, but in the present. – Josie Pagani
Victories for freedom of speech are rare and therefore worth acknowledging. Cherry is keen to see the event proceed, which is good news too. There are two opportunities created by this episode that, if taken with good will and an open mind, could be very beneficial. The first is the setting of an example for other organisations. Bowing to the clamour for cancellation and censorship may seem like the fastest route to an easy life but it is more likely to open you up to legal problems. You can’t discriminate against a woman for knowing what a woman is and being willing to say so out loud.
Political debate is sometimes uncomfortable. That’s the way of it in a free country. The way to deal with it is not to shut down discussion but to have more and better discussion. Ideas, values, disagreements: these are not threats to a liberal society, they are its very lifeblood.
The other opportunity that arises from this is one for Joanna Cherry’s critics. There is a demographic out there that has convinced itself that Cherry is a froth-flecked, beyond-the-pale bigot, a conclusion most of them seem to have reached without ever hearing a word she has said. We can be sure of this because however hard you strain to hear the worst in Cherry’s contribution to the women’s rights and gender identity debate, you will pick up nothing more than an old-fashioned feminist of the liberal-left.
But Cherry, like so many other women who hold her views, has been Rowlinged: an entire vocabulary of hatred has been put in her mouth that she has never spoken. Ask one of her detractors to quote a single example of her expressing or encouraging hatred, as those terms are generally understood, and you will be met with suspicion, then frustration and finally inarticulate rage. Cherry is vilified not for anything she has said but because of what her critics say about her. A postmodern ideology of feels and vibes cannot withstand the demanding precision of reasoned debate. – Stephen Daisley
It’s comforting to caricature and dismiss your opponents, to protect yourself from the seeds of doubt they threaten to sow in your thoughts. Approach them instead with an open mind, a tolerant ear and a graceful heart and they might just surprise you. – Stephen Daisley
Ten years ago, John Humphrys made a documentary about the welfare state for BBC2. When he was growing up in Cardiff, he said, hardly anyone was on benefits. Now, vast numbers are. Why? What had gone wrong? A good question – but, as he found out, a suicidally dangerous one for any BBC journalist to ask. He was hauled in front of a BBC star chamber, accused of supporting Tory policy, then found guilty of breaching guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. I spoke to him about it afterwards: his lesson, he said, was never to do something like that again.
He had run up against a new trend of our time: political correction. If you engage in frank discussions about certain topics – climate change, jihadi finance, immigration, transgenderism – then you can expect the equivalent of a lawsuit. A breed of investigators or self-appointed fact-checkers will swoop, posing as judges of the truth – even if they often get it wrong. What was intended as a test of objectivity, a remedy to “fake news”, has ended up becoming a new form of bias. – Fraser Nelson
The BBC’s own team of truth-deciders, modestly called “Reality Check”, are rather selective in the realities they check. When David Attenborough’s excellent Wild Isles documentary claimed that “60 per cent of our flying insects have vanished”, it was a starting claim – but one the fact-checkers let slide. It can be tracked down to an amateur study asking motorists to count splats on their number plates. Had Attenborough said that more people die each year from cold than from heat, he’d face outcry and a full Nigel Lawson-style inquisition. The former chancellor faced a three-month investigation by a press regulator for making precisely this claim.
Some facts are seen to be too exciting to check. When the French economist Thomas Piketty claimed that inequality was certain to rise because of his formula r>g (ie: that the return on assets exceeded the rate of economic growth), it was hailed worldwide as a breakthrough. Time to tax the rich! But when the IMF produced a study showing Piketty’s claim to be nonsense, this seemed to generate no interest at all. – Fraser Nelson
The rise of fact-checking is powerful and helpful in many ways, but is most needed in areas where there is a fashionable and unchallenged consensus. Whenever all parties agree (as they did on lockdown, and still do on net zero and international aid), the biggest policy errors are most likely to creep in. So it’s more important than ever that the major claims are held up to scrutiny. When fact-checkers instead target those who go against the grain, it serves to enforce groupthink.
The Swedes have a word for it: the “opinion corridor”. If you step outside it, you can expect investigation, harassment or to be flattened. The digital era has put rocket boosters on all this as offending articles are more easily shared by activists. There are now professional campaigners who spend all day referring opponents to fact-checkers, regulators or university authorities. And not just for facts. It can be for hate speech or an offence against hazily defined “community standards”. In this way, the political correction phenomenon can multiply, ending up embedded into algorithms. –
The most controversial questions defy black-or-white answers. The vaccines were good for stopping the spread of earlier variants, but not later ones. Channel Four fact-checkers ask if university tuition fees are “progressive” which is, of course, a matter of opinion. Much of this seems to stem from a technocratic view of the world: that it’s possible to burrow away, find facts and come up with an objective answer. But such questions are almost always a matter for debate: hence, politics.
The Online Safety Bill, now going through the Lords, will make all this far worse by threatening huge fines for Silicon Valley firms that publish anything deemed to be “harmful” and visible to children. What does this mean? It’s unclear: so the censorship bots will work overdrive just to be safe. – Fraser Nelson
A decade after John Humphrys documentary, the question still hangs unanswered: what went so wrong with welfare? But given what happened to him, it may be quite a while before anyone makes a television documentary asking the question again. It would be tragic if, as the digital world opens ever-more possibilities, the opinion corridor ends up narrower than ever. – Fraser Nelson
How does a Prime Minister not know what the Government is spending? He’s been in the job for yonks… he’s two days out from a Budget and he can’t tell you it’s $129 billion and it’s up about $1 billion a week.
I thought that was just a total disrespect for taxpayers and just says that he’s treating them like a bottomless ATM. – Christopher Luxon
Trans students would have no reason not to feel welcome in my feminism class..
“There is one lecture where we tackle head-on the question of the relative priority that should be given to sex versus gender identity, which essentially is whether sex ever matters. – Holly Lawford-Smith
How easy it would be if transgender ideology really was the benign force it claims to be – if trans activists really were campaigning for more love and kindness, and that those who stand in their way were merely hate-filled extremists. – Nick Carter
What is certain, however, is that the activists will not be appeased. Transgenderism as a political cause still seemed like an absurdity until relatively recently. Who knows what absurdity the identitarians will attempt to mainstream next – and who is going to stop them. – Nick Carter
If your neighbour tosses that polystyrene cup or dirty peanut butter jar into the rubbish, don’t tell him he’s going to NonRecycling hell. Just smile, assume he is an economist who argues that recycling usually wastes resources, and toss your own IKEA polystyrene peanuts mixed with broken wooden slats into the blue bin. Just don’t think about how much labour it will take to pick them out of the recycling conveyor belt to be tossed into the landfill. – Bruce Rottman
When it comes, to money, the inevitable response by the “fundamentalists” and alarmists is “this time it’s different”. But history shows us that’s always wrong. It’s never different, as at root it’s about unchanging human behaviour. – Sir Bob Jones
The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally, and the freedom to publish books that ought to be published and sometimes are difficult to publish because of pressure from this or that group.
It’s very important, I think, that such pressures should be resisted. And we live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish, has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.
Obviously there are parts of the world where censorship has been prevalent for a long time: Russia, China, in some ways India as well. But in the countries of the West, until recently, there was a fair measure of freedom in the area of publishing.
Now, sitting here in the United States, I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools, the attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It’s quite remarkably alarming and we need to be very aware of it and to fight against it very hard. –
I have to say it has also been alarming to see publishers looking to – how can I put this – bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.
I have to say the idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time and, if that’s difficult to take, don’t read them. Read another book, but don’t try and remake yesterday’s work in the light of today’s attitudes. – Sir Salman Rushdie
In America, as I’m sure you know, property belongs to the owner of it: third parties cannot just demand it be given to them, as perhaps kings can do.
Perhaps you should sit down with your client and advise them that his English rules of royal prerogative to demand that the citizenry hand over their property to the crown were rejected by this country long ago.
We stand by our founding fathers. – Backgrid
We ended up sliding closer to third world electricity supply because we forced this to happen.
Look, it’s abundantly clear that the climate luvvies are going to chase decarbonisation come hell or high water.
But couldn’t they have got the replacement batteries ready before they started forcing things off, so we could at least have guaranteed electricity supply on cold days? – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Be wary of anyone wanting to make tax “fairer” because the bottom-line is that they just think that they (or people they support) are better placed to spend your money than you are. Oh and the spin-merchants of so-called “wealthy” people who say they “want” to pay more tax (but wont actually do it unless others are forced to) are a bizarre breed who actually think politicians and bureaucrats can spend their money better than they can, for benevolent purposes. – Liberty Scott
Women have a well understood need – which we learn from childhood – to protect ourselves when vulnerable such as when in states of undress; hospital wards; toilets and so on.
Any man transgressing this norm raises a red flag for us.
It doesn’t matter whether or not a man is innocently seeking to use women’s spaces or services or whether he has an ulterior motive.
Women want the norms of privacy, dignity and our need for safety to be respected by Government.
It’s not “hatred” for women to assert this. – Women’s Space Ireland
And finally, the magnitude of criminal activity will hopefully stop people judging the victim’s decisions. To make a difference we need to continue the prevention ‘keep-yourself-safe’ messages for women; but equally, we need to amplify the same messages to men around alcohol, drugs, women and respect.The abuser is always at fault, but realistically we all need to take responsibility to stay safe. – Francesca Rudkin
We don’t necessarily have to agree with each other on our opinions but you are entitled to have one.
You can’t be punished for the rest of your life for having an opinion that most of us disagree with.
I’ve always believed that you can’t help somebody change by leaving them on the outside. – Steve Hanson
The flag is being brought to the attention of people, and the awareness of why it is there is to support the people that are judged and treated poorly because of who they are.
They deserve to be loved and cared for as much as anybody else. If we all did that it’d be a happy place, wouldn’t it?
The big lesson there is just treat everyone with kindness and love. – Steve Hanson
NZ Post told me ‘We do not give refunds’. I know of no other enterprise that gets away with taking customers’ money, then refusing both service and refund. It is surely a breach of New Zealand law? – Richard Green
We should never allow politics to divide our relationships.
I would like to think that, despite the political divide, I think you can build really strong trust in relationships. – Tariana Turia
We’re making history with the Freedom of Speech Act, ensuring that fear does not undermine the rights of students and academics to debate controversial ideas and securing the right to an open exchange of ideas in universities.”
Getting this balance right is not always straightforward or easy, but by working collaboratively we can protect the important role that universities play in the pursuit of truth and free exchange of ideas. – Claire Coutinho
I wouldn’t want to be starting out today. I would worry, if I was starting out, that the story I was picking was going to offend people. But it shouldn’t. You should be able to write about anything you want… I would say to people, if you believe in what you’re writing, at least when you’re writing it, don’t worry about it. – Sir Tim Rice
Some of the people complaining about things today, I’d be absolutely delighted to offend. – Sir Tim Rice
People aren’t allowed to… speak or give lectures before they’ve even said anything. That cannot be right. It’s censorship. – Sir Tim Rice
Personal, nasty, grubby – Labour’s attack on National leader Christopher Luxon over women’s access to contraception tells you everything you need to know about the ground on which the election campaign will be fought.
Stupidly, I was hoping that with so many big issues for us to grapple with this election the campaign would be a fair fight on real issues – the economy, immigration policy (suddenly at never-before-seen record levels), infrastructure, education, hospital and cancer waiting lists to name a few.
But in just two social media posts, Labour blew me out of the water. – Tracy Watkins
New Zealand must hold some sort of world record for the time required to clear roads after serious accidents. Before we even got to Stratford, we found ourselves stuck in a tailback stretching several kilometres following a crash involving a logging truck and an ambulance. The accident happened at 5.20am. We joined the queue at 9.10am. Nothing was happening. It wasn’t until 10 o’clock that a mobile crane headed past us to the crash scene, presumably to move the logging truck. Why the delay? This is a major state highway; re-opening it after a crash should be treated as a matter of urgency. Meanwhile, Waka Kotahi’s website was advising travellers to delay their journey or go the long way around Mt Taranaki on the Surf Highway – not very helpful when we were already committed to our journey and didn’t want to risk taking a two-hour detour around the mountain only to then learn the road had been cleared five minutes after we left, which Sod’s Law suggests was bound to happen. At 10.30, more than five hours after the accident, a traffic control truck moved slowly along the line of waiting vehicles with the news that we still faced an indeterminate delay. No explanation why. The guy in the truck was sympathetic but didn’t appear to know any more than we did. At that point, everyone turned around and dispersed. Most headed back toward New Plymouth, but we found a way around the crash site using rural backroads and took less than 15 minutes to get back on track. We’d probably still be stuck there if it wasn’t for Google Maps. The incident not only confirmed my sceptical view of Waka Kotahi’s traffic management expertise, but also raised questions in my mind about the role of the police serious crash unit. There was a time when the main priority after a crash – that is, once ambulances and firefighters had done their vital work – was to get traffic flowing again. Now accident scenes seem to be frozen until the serious crash unit arrives (however long that takes) and completes whatever it is that serious crash units do. In the meantime traffic backs up, people miss vital appointments and tempers get frayed. The Wairarapa Times-Age this morning reports a similar incident yesterday: SH2 over the Remutaka Hill was closed from 7am till 11.45 am – the peak morning period for commuters to Wellington – while police investigated a fatal crash scene. Waka Kotahi lamely suggested motorists take the Saddle road via Woodville, a journey of an extra three hours. Is this another example of the cult of box-ticking, form-filling managerialism that the police seem to have succumbed to, and which prioritises protocols and process over people? I suspect it is. There must be a point at which any benefit derived from time-consuming crash investigations is outweighed by the disruption and inconvenience these investigations cause to thousands of people. – Karl du Fresne
Overall impressions: New Zealand may be going to the pack in multiple ways. Its infrastructure is collapsing, the economy is sick, the education system has been ruinously contaminated by extremist ideology (even maths is now apparently treated as an expression of white privilege) and the deranged culture wars are raging to the point where democracy itself is at risk. But physically it’s still a beautiful country – no one can change that – and the people are friendly and good-hearted. They deserve far better from those who purport to represent them. – Karl du Fresne
Offence number five (which should possibly be number one): The truancy data.
The Ministry of Education’s data shows in term three last year just 46 per cent of students attended class regularly. The fact that more than half of our kids are not attending school regularly is the main offence and one that this generation will feel the effects of for their lifetime. – Paula Bennett
Teachers are being bullied not to question trans-affirming policies when evidence shows that the actual result of the approach is to put the welfare of children at serious risk. – a teacher sacked for not using 8 year-olds trans pronouns
If we are going to feed children in NZ schools it must have three features:
- The effects need to be monitored with regards to attendance and achievement.
- The time period much be limited. We should never have go to this situation in a rich nation in 2023.
- It must be deeply understood and communicated daily to students, families and staff that “We are feeding you today – so that you can get a good education and then feed, clothe and house your own children.
Anything less than that is simply not acceptable. If I had not taken all that my parents did for me – and not found my own way – it would have been a disgrace. – Alwyn Poole
If you can’t run your own affairs properly, then how do you run your portfolio? Or the country?
I think, in that, lies the real truth. The reason this lot are so hopeless is because that’s simply what they are. They’re hopeless, in life, as in politics.
The Government are a bewildered mess that can barely get through the day. They are shabby, hence the country is shabby.
You lead – or fail from the top. – Mike Hosking
The problem for Hipkins here is he’s in a constant state of mopping up ministerial muck ups from Stuart Nash, to Kiri Allan, to Jan Tinetti and now Wood who was supposed to be one of Hipkins’ safest pairs of hands.
The series of small scandals distracting from the bread and butter is becoming a pattern – National’s laser focussed on casting the left as a coalition of chaos.
The risk of all these – in the scheme of it relatively minor indiscretions – is the cumulative effect of them.
The Government will be worried that the sheen of shambles sticks – that is nowhere near what they want four months from election day. – Jenna Lynch
At the turn of the century there was a great deal of speculative journalism making predictions about the new century ahead. I recall my surprise when many of the forecasts picked Turkey as destined to be one of the great 21st Century growth nations, for reasons I can no longer recall.
But assuming there was validity to their prophecies, then the Erdogan disaster shows how a single dominant personality leader can stuff a country up, as we’ve witnessed throughout history and today in numerous nations. – Sir Bob Jones
We need people. Here is the deal – New Zealand stopped replacing itself in 2016. I encourage all of you to go out there and have more babies if you wish, that would be helpful. – Christopher Luxon
But it’s disingenuous to totally miscontextualise comments from a political leader for the sake of playing into unease over his personal values. There are MPs across the house who personally oppose abortion and none have been subjected to anything like the same treatment.
Few who saw headlines about Luxon ‘urging’ New Zealanders to have babies would have appreciated the context of his comments. Election campaigns are nasty affairs, but voters still deserve the truth. – Jack Tame
The greatest value of democracy and election years is ultimately the public is always right.
Even if you ever gave them the benefit of the doubt, that what they were trying to do had any merit or maybe even had a chance of working, that’s all up in smoke.
This is a country full of people who are afraid, afraid of crime, of violence, of being a victim.
No government survives that. – Mike Hosking
Mr Orwell couldn’t have designed a more labyrinth system that robs a population of their greatest power, the ability to express themselves, and impose bureaucratically sanctioned Newspeak as a way of expunging thought-crime (illegal thoughts) and individuality.
There’s no denying that online content causes the proliferation of harmful hate. But rather than suppressing such speech, the answer lies in more speech – the cleansing disinfectant of counter-speech. – Janet Wilson
We’ve got to get our mojo back… a lot more ambition and aspiration. – Christopher Luxon
I think New Zealand is a country of endless potential, it’s the best country on planet Earth, we’ve got amazing people, we’re in an exciting part of the world in the Asia-Pacific region. . .
We want to be a government that’s going to turn it around and get some ambition and some aspiration and some positivity and optimism in the country going forward. – Christopher Luxon
A recession is when your neighbour loses their job. A recovery is when Chris Hipkins loses his. – David Seymour
While the impacts of the severe weather events earlier in this year will have damaged primary production, the Government needs to shoulder much of the blame for this economic contraction. Its spending addiction has driven inflation to record levels and forced the Reserve Bank to hike the Official Cash Rate repeatedly, which has undoubtedly hampered economic activity.
“New Zealand might have only just entered a technical recession, but without drastic and urgent action from the Government to rein in its spending, this situation may well persist for some time to come. – Callum Purves
Undoubtedly there are people struggling. But a policy of ever-increasing income redistribution via the tax system has been in play in New Zealand for generations.
Shouldn’t such a good idea have worked by now? Or will it continue to be ramped up to the point where there are too few productive, independent people left to fuel it all?
Then … I hope and pray that voters do. – Lindsay Mitchell
Ahmed and Cook have both stated they don’t want to engage in the “culture war”. Both of these professors need to acknowledge that the battle against aggressive trans activism isn’t a war over culture; it is a defence of women’s rights according to UK law. Women aren’t a “culture” — we are a sex. Our rights are not “cultural”; they are essential to our safety, privacy and dignity as female people. – Jean Hatchet
Taxpayers work long and hard to earn the income that is taxed. They go without worthwhile things to pay their taxes.
All governments should hold themselves responsible for ensuring that their spending provides commensurate value for taxpayers. Taxpayers are not geese to be plucked with a minimum amount of hissing.
Taxpayers are already paying vastly more in taxes than Labour told them to expect back in 2017. Under its electioneering fiscal plan, it proclaimed that its policies would only increase Total Crown tax revenue for the five years ended June 2022 by $10.2 billion. We now know the actual increase. It is $29.3 billion.
The full cost is much greater. That is because Labour’s planned five-year spending increase of $11.7 billion was much greater at $65.3 billion. The extra borrowing represents deferred taxation.
Take a bow Mr Hipkins.
Everyone is demeaned when governments hand out money as if it is free. – Bryce Wilkinson
It is now the time to ask – if it wasn’t before – whether there is something a bit rotten in the political system where falling short of the highest levels of probity are treated with a shrug.
Or, where they are treated seriously, those who fall foul of the rules don’t see what is wrong.
None of these things are crimes of the century and there’s no evidence of any graft, but the accretion of them just gives the whole government – and some of those it appoints – an entitled, arrogant and slightly smelly vibe.
It’s another bit of bad news for Labour. – Luke Malpass
Work hard, do your job properly, turn up to select committee well prepared, get off your phones. – Jacqui Dean
And I’ve come to the conclusion that we can change as many rules as we like, but I think we as Members of Parliament have to remember why we’re here and act honourably and respectfully towards each other. And I think that might be helpful. – Jacqui Dean
We should be less concerned as to how we elect parliament and how well it represents the demographic makeup of the electorate, and concentrate instead on how much absolute authority it now possesses and how it elects to apply, or abuse, that power. – Damien Grant
While there has been historical inequity that has disadvantaged Māori and Pasifika people, the idea that any government would deliberately rank ethnicities for priority for surgery is offensive, wrong and should halt immediately.
The way to improve Māori and Pasifika health is through better housing, education and addressing the cost of living, not by disadvantaging others. – Shane Reti
The only possible effect of racial discrimination is to make sure a person in greater need waits longer for an operation and may die on a waiting list because they had the wrong ancestors.
A person who is in great clinical need, has waited a long time, lives far from major medical facilities, and is poor could be Māori, European, Pacific, Indian or Chinese, and they should all be treated equally. – David Seymour
Voters are generally prepared to go along with policies to protect the climate. But there comes a point at which it is no longer enough only to have the right goals. That point is certainly reached when economists and climate change researchers agree there is a more cost-effective way of achieving emissions reduction targets. – Oliver Hartwich
Somehow Australia managed to have a grown-up conversation about pensions that we still haven’t managed. I know we don’t like admitting this as Kiwis, but maybe it’s time we agreed that Australia is beating us hands down on this one. – Tracy Watkins
It is an increasingly inward-focused economy, where policy (such as it is) is only tending to reinforce such developments. It doesn’t have the feel of the foundations for a prosperous and highly productive economy for New Zealanders – this generations, or our children and grandchildren. – Michael Reddell
Because, while politicians now strut and preen on the national stage in campaign mode, it’s how they behave between elections that’s of most concern. Where real debate is squashed in favour of the side-show of Question Time, where consultation occurs once a decision has been made and is only weeks long, where select committees rubber-stamp policy rather than challenge it.
To create that cohesiveness in our political system we need more intelligent debate and compromise without rancour instead of what we’re getting now – less democratic, more petty, scrappy politics. – Janet Wilson
People are allowed to express cranky ideas provided they don’t harm anyone. It’s called freedom of expression.
In a free society, you’re allowed to get things wrong. In a free society, people can assess ideas for themselves and decide which ones make sense and which don’t. But that freedom is exactly what alarms the woke elite. Freedom to make up your own mind is dangerous. The far-Left elite, of which Daubs is an exemplar, don’t trust people to make their own decisions. They claim a monopoly on “factually correct information” and would prefer that the proles take their cue from the academic priesthood. – Karl du Fresne
We cannot duck the issue by hiding behind the (misplaced) shield of parental consent: if socially transitioning children does not meet accepted ethical standards then it should not be done. To many this may sound harsh; it is certainly firm. I have been accused of being “unloving”. But the root cause of this tragedy is that, as a society, we have lost sight of what it really means to love a child. Giving a child whatever they think they want is not love. Love is wanting what is best for a child and telling them the truth even if it’s hard to hear. Love is setting boundaries that keep children safe, and then patiently and kindly enforcing them. Love is defending children against ideologies that mean them harm, even when as adults we may pay a price for doing so. – Miriam Cates
If you feel anxious while you wait for the total at the supermarket checkout, if you dread the two days before pay day because there’s so little money left in your account, if you’ve had to give up on your plan to buy a home, then know this: you are not alone.
Even Kiwis who are doing everything right, who are working hard and being incredibly careful are struggling. You are struggling because the economy is failing you. – Nicola Willis
In the months ahead, hundreds of thousands of mortgage holders will have to move off a home loan with a 2 or 3 per cent interest rate to a loan with 6 or 7 per cent interest. Many homeowners will be left scrambling for the hundreds of extra dollars they will need to make their mortgage payments each fortnight.
When that mortgage bomb goes off, the whole economy will shudder. – Nicola Willis
Other parties might like to tell you they can fix New Zealand’s problems by robbing Peter to pay Paul. That they will drag the bottom up by tearing the top down. Or that we’ll all feel better if they punish the wealthy hard enough.
The truth is those reckless tactics would only further weaken our fragile economy, scare our best and brightest away and divide us one against the other. – Nicola Willis
We know that success is good for the country, it’s good for the Government and it’s good for every New Zealander.
This election the choice is clear.
New Zealanders can vote for Parties that use tax as punishment and that seek to load more and more cost on fewer and fewer shoulders or they can vote for a National-led Government that will always strive to let you keep more of what you earn, that will value work and celebrate effort.
You can vote for careful investment that grows stronger families and communities or you can vote for more growth of Government agencies and the red tape they create.
You can vote for policies that will push more and more of our kids to become citizens in Australia or for a National Party that will fight to ensure this is a country our kids can live their dreams in.
New Zealanders can stick with what we have today: a damaged economy that is failing its people, or you can vote National for a stronger economy that delivers for you and your family.
Faced with these choices I have faith that New Zealanders will choose a better way. They will vote to change the direction of this country and elect a National Government that will fix our economy and put New Zealand back on track. – Nicola Willis
I don’t want the biggest suburbs of young Kiwi families to be in Brisbane.
I don’t want older New Zealanders aching to hug their grandchildren, that they talk to on Zoom, but who are growing up in Australia because their parents were forced overseas. And I certainly don’t want more New Zealanders becoming victims of brazen offenders riding a crime wave across our country. – Christopher Luxon
During Covid, Labour’s printing of money was the fifth highest in the world. Their spending was the second highest, per capita, among developed countries. The pandemic is over, but the spending has not stopped.
Labour’s spending is 80 per cent higher than National’s six years ago. That explosion equates to an additional $28,000 per household a year. But nothing, absolutely nothing, has improved by 80 per cent. In fact, most things have gone backwards.
To pay for all that spending, Labour’s taxing more, and borrowing more.
The Government is collecting an additional $100 million a day in tax. But even that’s not enough. Debt has exploded from $5 billion in 2019 to $71 billion today. This is credit card economics.
We’re now spending more on the interest on our debt than we’re spending on primary schools or police. Servicing debt is this Government’s fourth highest expense. – Christopher Luxon
Farmers and growers are the backbone of our economy – but Labour’s obsession with new rules and regulations has put them under siege.
A National Government I lead will get Wellington out of farming. We have set out 19 actions to make life easier for farmers.
And we’ll put hard limits on forestry conversions of prime agricultural land – that are devastating rural communities and driving young Kiwis out of farming.
But above all – we will bring respect back to the relationship with farmers and growers that has evaporated from Wellington.
Because if you’re working every hour of the day feeding New Zealand and the world, your business matters, your voice matters, and your community matters. – Christopher Luxon
It makes sense that if you have people locked up, you should do what you can to turn their lives around. That’s ultimately better for them, and better for all of us. The more offenders who change their ways, the safer our communities will be.
But not all rehab programmes are available to all prisoners. Remand prisoners – the ones who are awaiting trial or sentencing but are locked up because they are deemed a risk to society – can’t access all rehab programmes.
With nearly one in two prisoners on remand, that means a significant proportion of prisoners are missing out on the opportunity for proper rehabilitation, or are starting it too late.
Therefore, I’m announcing today that under National, all prisoners will be eligible for all rehabilitation programmes.
If you want to try to turn your life around, we’ll help you do that. But if you re-offend, be warned. Under National, you’ll face tough consequences. – Christopher Luxon
We don’t just live in Māori things, we suffer the same health stuff as everybody else, we go to the same schools as everybody else.
What electoral roll I’m on didn’t change my Māori blood, didn’t change my Māori genealogy, didn’t change my Māori language, didn’t change my Māori family. None of that changed. What’s changed is my ability to choose more widely who I can potentially vote for. – TeRata Hikairo
New Zealand farmers are in a better position to be able to identify the combination required than anybody in the central city. Allowing them to be innovative to achieve the required outcomes will bring back a sense of worth. And maybe then the next generation of agribusiness professionals and food producers will appear. – Jacqueline Rowarth
We must inject some common sense back into the classroom and society more generally. The classroom is a place where fact should be taught as fact and opinion as opinion. Children should be able to indulge their imagination in the playground, especially when they’re little, but it goes without saying that absolutely no child should be forced to affirm a classmate’s identity as an animal or inanimate object. – Gillian Keegan
Against National’s weekly churn of new policy, we’ve seen basically nothing big from Hipkins since the Budget. At best, Labour has been invisible. At worst, it’s been making headlines for ministerial conflict of interest scandals.
Labour will need to seize back the narrative soon, if it wants to bolster its chances going into campaign season. Otherwise Luxon, armed with his array of policies on all of the key issues, starts to look like the Prime-Minister-in-waiting. – Marc Daalder
There’s absolutely no doubt that Labour has reduced the numbers of people in prison. The prison population has fallen by 20%. And they’re saying it’s going to be really expensive to put more people back in prison. But the cost of crime on society is expensive. I mean, just look at the numbers of security guards having to be employed by just about every retail store.
And criminals have to be punished, otherwise we lose faith in the justice system, and we lose faith in our authorities, and we lose faith in each other. If you do wrong, you have to be seen to be being punished. But at the same time, criminals must be rehabilitated as best they can be. Otherwise, it’s just an expensive money-go-round and a complete and utter waste of human potential. – Kerre Woodham
A $8000 rebate, as prescribed by Government policy, is a story of rank hypocrisy.
But two planes, one empty, to transport 45 people is somehow not news?
I just can’t work out how it is the media has ended up with such a questionable reputation.
Go figure.- Mike Hosking
Banks have had a big target on their backs because they make big profits, and banks should be making big profits because they’re really big entities. – Cameron Bagrie
You look at credit card charges… those numbers are pretty eye-watering – up around 20 percent – but, if you want to make a really big difference to what happens across retail banking, one of the big steps we should be pursuing is actually improving financial literacy.
Where the banks make a lot of money out of credit charges is because people don’t know how to manage their credit cards from month to month. – Cameron Bagrie
Free speech is not the tool of the elite but the marginalised, who have not money nor power to set the agenda, but simply their voice. – Adam Young
If you’re an academic and your college or university has issued a ringing statement in favor of political, ideological or moral positions, that might make you feel good. But in the long run it’s bad, for taking institutional positions (as opposed to personal ones) acts to chill the speech of others. – Jerry Coyne
We all need to join together, and push back against it. My own experience galvanises me, and my resolve in maintaining a system of sex-based rights.
We are united] in the face of a society that is captured by a movement that is determined to erase [biological women] as a legal class. – Katherine Deves
Our society is legislating away the reality of biological sex, redefining women to include biological men; encoding legal fictions into law.’ It is also punishing those who refuse to comply.
‘The moment we favour gender identity rights over sex-based rights, is the moment we deny the basis of human existence. Sex-based rights must have primacy. – Katherine Deves
Not one police officer, judge, politician, journalist, or medical practitioner can ever prove a male has become a female. All they can do is appropriate stereotypes and use brute force, threats, or intimidation to try and force us to accept the lie. Regardless of how captured anyone else is, I will not bow down [before this] altar of lies. Truth matters. Sex is binary – male and female. – Kirralie Smith
In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four there were four Ministries – Love, Peace, Plenty, and Truth – which respectively promulgated hate, war, scarcity and propaganda. Our Ministry of Education, which seems determined to promulgate ignorance, would be right at home amongst them. – Michael Johnston
Should schools teach children (through the RSE curriculum or by transitioning a child) that subjective identity is real and objective reality is false? If the answer is yes, we can expect many more confused children who can’t distinguish between feelings and reality, with many more different genders, nationalities and species proliferating in schools. – Stephanie Davies-Arai
I call attention to this because I love New Zealand and its people, but deplore what they’re doing to themselves. Further, this decline is an object lesson for the U.S., as ideology is increasingly creeping into our academics, now seen as a branch of Social Justice activism. “It can’t happen to us,” you say? I’m not so sure.
I’m sad to say this, but I don’t think the academic problems of New Zealand will be fixed. They are circling the drain, but the politicians and academics don’t seem to care (except for those who dare not speak of the problem). – Jerry Coyne
My theory is if you give them enough chores to do in the morning they will make the most of their free time ’cause they know I can find them more if they say they’re bored! – Tofiga Fepulea’i
Parenting is always going to be a lot harder because generally if you’re a nice parent, your kids know you’re going to love them regardless, so you will often actually get the worst version of them at home. – Karen O’Leary
Cancel culture is relentless and cruel – and it is chilling free expression. It has nothing to do with holding the powerful to account. It is a weapon deployed by an intolerant minority to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. All this is obvious to almost anyone at this point. But the world of arts and culture has been particularly slow to catch up. – Fraser Myers
All of these women — a journalist, a psychiatrist, an artist, a politician, and a philosophy professor — have expressed the once normal and now rapidly taboo view that a woman is an adult human female and that children’s psychological and bodily integrity (and future fertility) should be protected. That these views have become ‘incendiary’ speaks to the draconian absurdity of our present cultural moment.
For too long the spurious notion of ‘inclusivity’ has obfuscated the conflict of interest between trans rights and women’s rights, with horrible repercussions for the latter. Unfortunately, it would now appear that ‘inclusivity’ has become the language of cancellation. – Petra Bueskens
The anti-free speech movement has become openly Orwellian in claiming to protect freedom by limiting freedom. It also employs using terms like disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation to obscure their effort to silence those with opposing views. Rather than use “censorship,” they refer to “content moderation.” – Jonathan Turley
Why did this incident involving Tory Whanau attract scrutiny? Because Kiwis are utterly fed up with the arrogant and entitled behaviour of elected officials and public servants. If you want to be Mayor, act like one. If you want to be a Minister, understand that words, behaviour, actions and rules matter. If you want to be a public servant, then answer to the taxpayers who fund your career. If elected officials need some guidance, then perhaps look to some of the professional values that guide the private sector.
Kiwis deserve so much better than this. – Rachel Smalley
I vividly remember every election since 1949 and unhesitantly say the current government is the most incompetent and damaging in the country’s history. In a little over 3 months time they will be wiped out, to such an extent they may never recover. – Sir Bob Jones
Unlike cultural change, restructuring doesn’t solve crises.
Consequently, we have a new health system largely devised by business consultants. This is akin to panel-beaters designing a roundabout. The main beneficiaries are business consultants or panel-beaters…surprise, surprise. – Ian Powell
The tragedy of the ‘health reforms’ is not just that they threw the baby out with the bathwater. They also threw the bath out. If our hospitals are to be protected and enhanced, the bath, baby and some of the bathwater need to be retrieved. – Ian Powell
No, the world is not looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues (I’ll name two of these issues: development of vaccines and global warming). Indigenous knowledge, if relevant, can surely be folded into the science mix to solve problems, but it’s usually more tradition-based than forward looking. And the mention of Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing” is a bit disturbing, for MM that’s more than just empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science. MM includes, as I keep saying, religion, ethics, morality, tradition, and superstition. It is not a “way of knowing” but a “Māori way of living.” – Jerry Coyne
We understand both charities hold opposing views, but when engaging in public debate and campaigning, they should do so with respect and tolerance. Demonising and undermining those who think differently is not acceptable behaviour from any charity on our register. – UK Charity Commission
When competing views, opinions and policies are publicly debated and exposed to public scrutiny, the good will over time drive out the bad and the true will prevail over the false – UK Charity Commission
When someone very close to you is going through that and living with such a diagnosis, and you don’t quite know how it will pan out, it does make you think, actually. Certainly made me consider my own mortality.
“Maybe it brings those things into sharper relief because you focus then on what’s important and you try to sift out the things that aren’t, and you then perhaps focus on the things that make you happiest.
“Because happiness of course is elusive, it can be slippery, mercurial, how do we pin it down? I think a lot of times people don’t quite know what it is. – Bill Bailey
When I was in office I had something called the ‘front page test’: if you were doing something you wouldn’t want on the front page of the newspaper you really shouldn’t be doing it. – John Key
In true science there are no facts – only theories that have not been disproven yet. This is often hard for people to understand as we are often coerced into seeing conclusions as “facts” or “settled science” and scientists as deeply reliable people. The truth is that if a “scientist” is calling his/her finding factual they are out of line with their disciplines.
Human beliefs/faiths are important and there has been much controversy over the years when people have asserted that there is a conflict between belief systems and science. They are two different things and many great scientists have been, for instance, Christians, who understood that. For something to be “scientific” it MUST be open to being refuted.
There is also a significant difference between a scientist and an activist. A person can do both, but they should clearly understand, and communicate, which role they are playing at any time. – Alwyn Poole
So, we are spending more while earning less and pretending, if you listen to Grant, we are in a good position to do so. Which, of course, we are not.
The only other good news, apart from our collapsing currency, might be the fact that the Reserve Bank looks at this mess and decides not to bump interest rates this week.
All in all, it’s ugly.
The mismanagement is shocking and the report cards don’t lie. You simply can’t run your household, far less an economy, this way.
We are sinking and the tragedy is, once the clowns who got us in this mess are gone, we are the ones picking up the pieces and paying off the bills. – Mike Hosking
The bigger issue, frankly, rather than the language, is actually people being able to get the public services they need, and understanding their government and being able to navigate it. – Christopher Luxon
Only individual human beings have a physical presence within a community. Only individuals may consult or be consulted. Only individuals may represent others. They may do so as a group, with one or more spokespersons, with whom others agree, but they nevertheless speak and agree, as individuals. There is no such thing as a collective mind. Such a thing does not exist.
That, at root, is why racism is irrational and evil. It pretends that a category of people distinguished in some way by the nature of their ancestry are a collective mass with collective ideas, behaviour, etc. It proceeds as if there were one mind doing the thinking for all persons with that ancestry, dictating the ideas and actions of them all. A moment’s thought reveals this to be a ridiculous proposition. – Gary Judd
The only valid entitlement to anything is an individual entitlement. In a rational and just society, that entitlement must be earned by achievement.
No one can claim an entitlement derived from something done by someone else. The exploration of the Pacific and the discovery of New Zealand some 800 years ago by those great Polynesian navigators and explorers were monumental achievements. They are entitled to admiration and honour. They earned it.
Their achievements are not the achievements of their progeny, even of their children. No one living today is entitled to anything by reason of that achievement. – Gary Judd
It is one of the ironies of this election campaign that Chris Luxon is being painted as a religious zealot who will allegedly force Christian beliefs on the nation even as Chris Hipkins is actually introducing mātauranga Māori into education — and most controversially into science. – Graham Adams
Public servants report ministers are setting demands as if they will not return. Two-term governments are not unusual but Labour is far from confident it can fight off National and Act. Or, importantly, confident it has anything left to wow voters with to get them over the line. News this week that the deficit is $2 billion worse than forecast leaves little in the election kitty for the Government to play election games with.
Labour’s record, just in this year, is difficult to campaign on. Even the less controversial measures in the Prime Minister’s statement from the first sitting are struggling to be delivered. Funding for school attendance officers, meant to correct the wave of rising school truancy, has only delivered a third of the number of officers it promised. The Consumer Data Framework was just released as an exposure draft, despite the Government stating it would introduce it this year. – Brigitte Morten
Paul Keating famously described greens as “opportunists and Trots”. Labour MPs loathe the Greens as the radical left masquerading as environmentalists. Labour’s Māori MPs, meanwhile, believe Te Pāti Māori MPs are reckless shock jocks, saying anything for a headline.
A Labour/Green/Te Pāti Māori coalition would mean the Deputy PM, Cabinet ministers, associate ministers, the assistant Speaker and committee chairs losing their jobs to accommodate MPs they despise.
Many Labour MPs would rather go into opposition than into a coalition with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.
For every ministerial error of judgment that we know about, there will be three more we are yet to discover.
What is surprising is that there are not more Labour MPs taking mental health leave. – Richard Prebble
“Labour campaigned on a promise not to introduce new taxes, but it turns out they were secretly designing new taxes for this year’s Budget. That’s totally inconsistent with the commitment they made to New Zealanders … What this shows is that, under pressure, Labour will always resort to more tax, even when they’ve promised not to. – Nicola Willis
In more than 30 years working in and around politics, I thought I’d seen every extreme of incompetence, cynicism and indifference. It has left me deeply sceptical of governments’ tendency to achieve anything, tell the truth, or care about either.
KiwiBuild quickly won the Ardern Government the gold star as New Zealand’s most incompetent, but mostly, it was assumed to mean well.
Labour better hope the public accepts that abject incompetence alone explains its failure to stop dawn raids after its 2021 apology to the Pacific community. The alternative is that it also wins first prize for cynicism and indifference. – Matthew Hooton
There are two upsides. Ardern and Faafoi are at least no longer in Parliament, and Wood will surely follow when Labour works out that his idiocy cost them a third term.
More importantly, the Pacific youth Ardern purported to address so humbly and sincerely have at least learned never to rely upon a politician’s promise. – Matthew Hooton
I certainly think New Zealand’s finest days are behind it. We’re not at our peak. You don’t feel the same vibe or energy any more.
New Zealand feels as if it is being pulled apart at the seams. I thought we were egalitarian and unified but some people who feel slightly disenfranchised use that to exacerbate rifts for political reasons.
There is the cost of living problem and it has become a heavy place – it’s not the New Zealand of five years ago to me.
I’m among the more fortuitous people… but you get twice the product at half the price in Europe. It’s incredible really – it should be the other way around. – Marc Ellis
I didn’t want to just be a chilly breeze that swept occasionally through the familial home. I wanted to be a regular whirlwind of glitter, warmth and icing sugar. – Verity Johnson
When the Labour Party says “In it for you”, will the voter say “no thanks”?
Already Labour’s slogan has delighted those with a sense of humour. As one fan re-worked it, shouldn’t it be: “what’s in it for you?” Answer: “Very little”. – Point of Order
In the last half of the previous Labour-led Government, New Zealand lost an average of 30,000 people net per year. It took time to turn that around, but from 2014 to 2019 it was down to a net 3000.
Now it’s 13,000 and climbing again.
Voting with their feet, as this is characterised – another way of measuring the government’s popularity. – Point of Order
Well, Labour are a second-term Government looking like a third-term one. That is to say out of ideas, hostage to internal disarray, and so risk-averse they wouldn’t cross a road without focus-grouping the traffic. – John Campbell
I’m from South Africa … we left there not to have this. – an unmaed construction worker
Doing good isn’t always about coming up with some new innovative thing. Sometimes it’s about taking the thing that you know works … and just making sure more people get to it.
There’s 2,500 people in Enabling Good Lives and I have to say after 10 years, that’s bloody disappointing. That wasn’t the original vision because, actually, it’s not that hard to do. – Sir Bill English
I think there’s a huge opportunity there for the people who service these 45,000 plus their families and carers to drive the policy process through much deeper knowledge of our customers and through adopting the kind of technology and data systems that will enable those choices, rather than waiting around for the government, any government, to come up with the answers, because I don’t think they will. – Sir Bill English
There’ll be more documents about strategy, there are strategies everywhere … so let’s get out of that kind of double public speak stuff because we just keep saying the same things, and come back next year and say there’s 2,500 in EGL now why can’t there be 10,000 in 12 months’ time? It’s just a matter of focusing on the right issues. – Sir Bill English
As the French gilets jaunes were fond of saying: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’ Our governing class has long thought it can get away with squeezing people’s living standards, taxing them off the roads and generally making life more miserable, so long as these measures are dressed in green garb. The drivers’ revolt in Uxbridge ought to shatter those illusions. – Fraser Myers
Quite frankly, I think we are a bit over the cute tricks of “humanising” our politicians through sausage roll eating and I am happy for them to be serious about the job interview on who should run the country in October. – Paula Bennett
No party can reflect all of the beliefs and values of any individual.
Voting, like dating, is about making the optimal choice given the options available. – Damien Grant
My worldview has been turned upside down in the last few years, and I clearly understand that no one is safe from being ‘cancelled’ if there are no brakes applied to it. It might be an organisation you disagree with now, but it could be any of us next week. And just a parting word of wisdom, because I flatter myself I have a few of those now as a b’older woman (😊) — sometimes we have to hear things we don’t like, in order to be clear in our hearts and minds about what we do like, what our own boundaries are, and why. – Katrina Briggs
This is what those older politicians and commentators are really talking about when they gush over the youth in politics. They don’t mean that we should actually engage with the young people of Britain. After all, young people, like any other age group, have a diverse range of views, backgrounds and life experiences. What they actually want to hear more of are the views of mainly middle-class graduates – that is, those young people who share their own prejudices and preoccupations.
This elite pandering to ‘the youth’ does young people no favours. It pretends that everyone under 30 holds the exact same dreary views. Rather than taking the young seriously as individuals and citizens, it simply uses them to ventriloquise high-status opinion. It deploys them as a stage army in the culture war. It’s a tired, old act that we are all starting to see through. – Lauren Smith
They look like they are out of ideas; worse, they have no ideology, and their only quest is to stay in power. Labour has built themselves a little pedestal that they like to stand on and look down at National and its supporters.
They have tried to say they are the more principled party, I have always known it wasn’t true and this week they proved it. Their pedestal has toppled over. If they don’t know what they believe in and what they stand for then how can you? – Paula Bennett
The Prime Minister is continuing the mantra that we should overlook everything about the performance he and his team have delivered over the past six years, and instead have confidence in the fact that he is there for us. Really?
But we can’t overlook the past six years, Prime Minister. In fact, we must remember those years and their impact forever more. Our wallets will certainly be feeling the pain caused by those six years for a long, long time. – Bruce Cotterill
As much as our recent health ministers — namely Hipkins, Little and now Verrall ― have refused to use the word “crisis”, there is no doubt that it is the right description for the current status of our health service.
Note the word “service”. Our politicians are prone to calling it a “health system”. It is, and should always be intended as a “health service”. Pedantic? Perhaps. But to me, a system represents flowcharts and diagrams. A service is about looking after people. Perhaps that would be a good place to start. – Bruce Cotterill
During my executive career, I developed a specialty for what I called “fixing broken businesses”. One of the things I learned was that nothing ever improved because you complicated it. But things can improve a lot if you simplify them.
Centralisation means complication. Too many people end up doing business with each other, while that person at the coalface, the patient, gets lost and forgotten. – Bruce Cotterill
We’re spending almost 10 per cent of our total GDP on healthcare services. That’s almost double the rate that Singapore spends on its world-class health service. – Bruce Cotterill
This is a] government that is very unstable, meanwhile, Kiwis out there in New Zealand, up and down this country, one in two of us are worried about money on a daily basis.
This is the only country in a recession in the whole of the Asia-Pacific region. You’ve got crime out of control, you’ve got an education and healthcare system falling apart, that’s where the focus should be of the government, that’s where a National Party government focus will be. – Christopher Luxon
We are in a tough, tough place and as a result, we need a strong, stable government.
While there will be disagreements and while there will be things we don’t agree on, there will be a way in which we are able to get a stable government, and that’s what New Zealand desperately needs right now. – Christopher Luxon
These health reforms were supposed to end the post-code health lottery for rural areas like Reefton.
All we’ve seen so far is a loss of services and a decrease in well-being for our old people. – Moira Lockington
A quarter century back in the days of Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzgerald, Sue Bradford and Sue Kedgley, the Party commanded well-deserved public respect, albeit they were seen as overly idealistic at a time when there was a great deal less public concern on global warming and the like. Now they trade on their Green name although notably, their recent manifesto announcement was confined solely to the politics of envy rather than green issues. – Sir Bob Jones
You end up with a slippery slope and before you know it GST, which is currently a very regular, very stable, very forecastable collection of revenue for the government is suddenly not collecting what you need and you turn around and the cupboard is bare. – Allan Bullot,
When Allan was defending herself in response to allegations of inappropriate behaviour, she explained that she was “definitely not a Wellington politician. That is something I am not. I am from the regions.” Which was a little too cute: Allan was a former staffer in Helen Clark’s office, a former lawyer with Chen Palmer, the quintessential boutique Wellington law firm co-founded by a former prime minister.
But her statement draws attention to the high rate of attrition suffered by politicians from Allan’s region. So far this year the East Coast has lost Kiri Allan, Meka Whaitiri and Stuart Nash from Cabinet. Nash resigned after leaking confidential Cabinet information to donors, while Whaitiri defected to the Maori Party. And the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti based Green Party MP Elizabeth Kerekere resigned from her party’s list process after allegations of bullying. A troubled and damaged region of the country has lost most of its political representation, due to the failures and self-destructive antics of its politicians. – Danyl Mclauchlan
A target to halve driving is Stalinist and bad policy. It also will never ever happen by 2030, unless they start shooting motorists (as Bob Jones suggested in the 1980s, as an alternative policy to carless days). – David Farrar
Not only do I not know if the business is going to be here next year, I don’t know if I’m going to be. – Maz Kumar
You believe now you’re not wanted to run a business by this government. I don’t want to raise my kids in this country any more. – Maz Kumar
There is a focus on the offenders and their tough upbringings but a the end of the day, when are we going to take into account the harm that comes to the victims? It is simply not happening. – Brett Wilson
You can sense the pain, because you’ve gone through it. It just brings elements of it back, because certainly in my case – and I can only ever talk about my case – mental health recovery is a journey. It’s not like flicking a switch. You don’t fall over then have a pill or two, or go for a walk and do some yoga, and the switch gets flicked up again. It’s a long process of self-reflection and building resilience, and having days which are not as good as other days, and realising actually that’s okay, it’s just being human. – Todd Muller
Don’t take it too seriously at one level. The job is important but you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. The other thing is, be really interested in other people and build relationships, because we’re all here trying to do a job, and actually understanding the story behind the public face is fascinating. – Todd Muller
Those who are shifting the focus away from the basics of education pay no price for being wrong. Rather, that price is paid by those children who rely on a good education to improve their lot in life. In other words, the price is paid by those who can least afford to pay it. For that reason alone, we owe it to New Zealand children to be firm about the purpose of education, and that’s to provide, at the most basic level, children with strong literacy and numeracy skills, and the ability to actually think. – Melissa Derby
A designer was also quoted at the weekend moving with her husband and 4 children to Australia – again for better opportunities and a better way of life. we also got reports of the ex-pat who came back with his family only to discover how backward the NZ school system is, and in disgust, moved back to Europe for better education.
There will be people who say ‘good riddance’ to this, and you know what, that’s everything that’s wrong with where we’re at right now. Because what is happening when all these people take their business and their brains out of NZ? They take it elsewhere. Our loss.
Ben Cook’s “looking to expand in Australia” it was reported, the designer’s taking her business to Australia, brains and investments are leaving this country.
So a big loss to us, a loss of productivity, jobs, development, drive, intelligence, and money. How many people like that are we prepared to lose, and what does that leave us with? And is that the sort of future you want for your kids here? – Kate Hawkesby
Nothing can be allowed to grow faster or slower than the Ministry of Education projected.
And even though transport emissions are fully covered in the ETS so residents of car-dependent places will have to pay for their own emissions, NZTA doesn’t want to let it happen.
What a mess. – Eric Crampton
Having been handed the reins of government by Winston Peters in 2017, the party that Helen Clark and Michael Cullen had carried for nine years, almost entirely on the strength of their own prodigious political competence, took less than five years to demonstrate a heartbreaking degree of political ineptitude. Not even an unprecedented (under MMP) parliamentary majority, delivered in recognition of Labour’s initial success in handling the Covid-19 crisis, could help it get whatever “this” was, done.
If this Labour Government really is in the business of government for us, then we can be forgiven for wondering just how much worse-off we might be if they were actually in it for somebody else! – Chris Trotter
As far as I’m concerned, we need the roads, so build them. I don’t care what it costs. We will never regret it.
And how to pay for it seems pretty simple to me:
Cancel the Light Rail stupidity. Just getting rid of the Auckland project saves $28 billion, and I’m not even counting the cost from the Wellington project.
I don’t about you, but I’ve had absolutely enough of dropping speed limits, of being told to walk, of dodging potholes and of driving windy backroads when we should be and could be on world class highways.
This is ambitious and it’s building New Zealand for future generations. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Labour are in no position to talk about infrastructure or spending. Ask them how much they have spent on light rail in Auckland and what they have to show for that.
Ask them how much they have spent in Wellington on getting Wellington moving, which isn’t moving at all. Billions have been wasted going exactly nowhere.
It’s a joke.
As for where National get the money; well the aforementioned examples double here as well.
There’s $7 billion+ for Wellington and hundreds of millions for light rail. This Government has spent more than any Government, it’s taxed more than any Government and there is no shortage of billions to be redirected.
This is the Government of the $300,000 speed hump. Three of those are a million bucks!
It’s a treasure trove of money just waiting to be used for productive reasons, on economy growing ideas.
For National, campaigning on things like infrastructure has never been easier, for a party that has an opponent with the record as bad as it is. – Mike Hosking
There are various theories about what went wrong with Labour over the past year. One of the more plausible is that their previous lists didn’t bring enough talent into the caucus. They had a tidal wave of new MPs in 2020, but most of them weren’t any good, and most will wash back out again this year. This meant that capable ministers were given impossible workloads, while the handful of promising new MPs were promoted too quickly, without any mentoring because no one had time for hand-holding.
You can see them trying to fix that here: they’re shuffling out underperformers – at least as far as they can without upsetting the party’s different factions – and they’re bringing promising MPs forward and injecting new blood. Trying to build a party that can help its leadership run the country. Or, if that tidal wave runs out too fast, take over as leaders when they’re swept out to opposition. – Danyl Mclauchlan
The Government’s Three Waters reforms are failing its own litmus test – reducing costs and delivering services more efficiently. There is no efficiency or transparency in Government officials trying to keep secret what they are spending on CEOs for organizations that don’t yet exist.
“This is precisely what the Taxpayers’ Union warned about. By taking control away from local communities, faceless bureaucrats in their ivory tower head offices tend to snub transparency and accountability. – Callum Purves
This election’s important. We need a change of Government to stop the tide of people packing up and leaving.
But we also need the next Government to truly change the country’s fortunes. National, if they get in, cannot tinker. They cannot fool themselves that a bit of change is enough and they can otherwise hold the status quo.
If they do that, voters will see through it and the number of people leaving will pick up again. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
The Blog was largely a consequence of lock-down. Its aftermath and particularly the mindblowing nonsensical Jacindamania phenomenon made me embarrassed to be a New Zealander so I joined the exodus, at least part of my time to avoid the nation’s pervading gloom, a consequence of the worst government ever inflicted on our country. History will not treat it kindly, not only for its staggering incompetence, but mostly its divisive race policies which will take a long time to correct. – Sir Bob Jones
As, Tyson points out earlier in the interview (see link above), that you can with substantial accuracy identify someone’s biological sex from the “gender role” (earrings, makeup, clothes, etc.).
Where he’s right here is that nobody cares, or should care, whether someone conforms to the expected behavior and appearance of members of their biological sex. (People do care, of course about children being treated medically with hormones and surgery so their secondary sex characteristics conform to their own view of their gender.) And, in fact, do people really care that much? I thought most of the kerfuffle was about transgender people and not genderfluid people. – Jerry Coyne
Tyson is correct in pointing out that a person’s sex doesn’t inevitably dictate how they might choose to express themselves through clothing or makeup; but this is banal and rarely, if ever, contested point. From the context, it’s evident that Tyson is using the term “gender” to describe the ways in which people express themselves through grooming, attire, and makeup choices. Given this, it’s ludicrous to imply that people are “assigning” others a “gender.” No one is campaigning or attempting to enforce binary dress codes for males and females across society. So who is the “you” to which Tyson believes he is responding?
Tyson’s take appears to be the result of a successful Left-wing fear mongering campaign to dismiss and downplay legitimate concerns over gender ideology. Progressive gender activists wants to portray their critics as ignorant, backward bigots who retch at the mere thought of a man wearing nail polish. But this depiction strays far from reality. – Jerry Coyne
As far as I’m concerned, we need the roads, so build them. I don’t care what it costs. We will never regret it.
And how to pay for it seems pretty simple to me:
Cancel the Light Rail stupidity. Just getting rid of the Auckland project saves $28 billion, and I’m not even counting the cost from the Wellington project.
I don’t about you, but I’ve had absolutely enough of dropping speed limits, of being told to walk, of dodging potholes and of driving windy backroads when we should be and could be on world class highways.
This is ambitious and it’s building New Zealand for future generations. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Effective, efficient roads are the arteries of this country.
You simply cannot clog them.
You cannot neglect them.
You cannot let them wither and die or the economy itself will die. – Kerre Woodham
Book reading is highly addictive and it saddens me that so many young folk these days have never experienced it. – Sir Bob Jones
Much like Bill English in 2017, Hipkins will roar around the country on the campaign trail hungry to win, scrapping it out for every last vote.
Luxon has four weeks left to prepare for that fight and Hipkins has the same amount of time to patch the punctured tyre that is his party. – Jo Moir
What can’t be quantified, but most definitely felt, is the malaise that has swept the country, the abject disillusionment of so many who have seen the place they loved, shafted, in six short years.
It’s that anger, disappointment and sense of overdue revenge that will see Labour swept from power.
One of the many advantages of having been around a while is I have seen the tide go out on governments and I know what it looks and feels like.
I saw it in 1990 after David Lange, I saw it in 2008 with Helen Clark.
The difference this time is it’s worse.
Kieran and his $1.87? The easiest money I’ll make all year. My odds would be there can’t even be a book, because Labour are unbackable. – Mike Hosking
Let’s Get Wellington Moving has as much credibility as “affordable housing”. Its only notable achievement is a pedestrian crossing on the way to the airport that literally stops us moving.
Making us travel on a 1920s roading system, or worse, use buses and cycling to travel regionally, is a subtle way of shutting working class kids out of the choices middle class kids have: freedom of movement.
If you have a cleaning job where you finish at 2am, or work in a bakery with a 4am start, you can’t take the bus.
If you live in regional New Zealand you more than likely can’t take the bus.
You take your life in your hands cycling on a country two-lane road. – Josie Pagani
Roads are crucial to the strength of our regions. Development depends on connections and the ability to move products and ideas around fluidly.
If we want to reduce commuting times and emissions, and take the pressure off land prices, we should build more motorways to open up regional cities instead of more trams across Auckland.
We don’t live in New Zealand to live like a European capital. We live here for the grass and the space to run around. – Josie Pagani
Anti-car people don’t get this. Worse, they don’t respect it. They want to crowd us into dense urban precincts where we can walk and subway to the library, craft brewery and transport policy discussion group.
These are the people who tell us we need to subsidise EVs and then tell us the roads to drive them on are bad. What they really don’t like is cars.
The solution to congestion is not banning cars or roads. It’s being clever. – Josie Pagani
The thought of Winston being able to choose or influence the next Government actually terrifies me.
I don’t care how many times and in how many ways he tells me- like he did on air on Tuesday- that he will not support a Labour Government into power. I do not believe him, as far as I’m concerned, Winston Peters cannot be trusted. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
This country is headed in completely the wrong direction. We need some serious change, but Winston’s not a change guy. Winston’s a handbrake guy.
He’s spent the last 35+ years complaining about the reforms of the 1980s which saved this country’s bacon. We need reforms again, to save us once again, can you imagine him allowing that to happen?
Plus, we are broke. We are out of cash. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Winston’s a spending guy. He’s the guy who forced Labour to give him $3 billion in provincial growth fund money, which his party splashed around the provinces trying to win votes. And which the auditor general looked into and found was so sloppy officials weren’t keeping proper notes
So no, I’m with David Seymour. I don’t mind a bit of Winston in Parliament to spice things up, but I’d prefer if he stayed the hell away from Government.
Especially now, when we do not have the time or the money for his game playing and expensive pet projects. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
- chris hipkins is, by a significant margin, the worst performing Minister of Education I have ever seen in 30 years in the sector.
- Jan Tinetti could well be worse but jumped into the slide well after Hipkins started the flow and may not have time to catch up.
- The long term consequences for the young people, their families, and NZ as a whole will be catastrophic.
- Change from the new government cannot be tinkering. – Alwyn Poole
It’s time for New Zealand’s scientists, both Māori and non-Māori, to stop this nonsense. Indigenous knowledge has its place, but it’s not equivalent to modern science. And the taxpayers of New Zealand continue to throw millions of dollars away on worthless studies funded only to propitiate the indigenous culture. Is that worth destroying science in New Zealand? After all, this $2.7 million could have gone for real science or medical research instead of trying to prop up a confirmation bias based on spirituality and tradition. – Jerry Coyne
Why would anyone with get-up-and-go choose to stay in what is increasingly becoming an inward-looking, narrow-minded and petty economic backwater where success is treated as a sign of dishonesty and merit treated with suspicion?
The great challenge of our age is not to change the government and, briefly, move our economic and social policy settings to a more rational basis.
The real ambition must be to re-engineer the way this country thinks about how we can generate wealth, and away from the current obsession with redistributing it. – Damien Grant
It’s hard to know who to blame for the unhappiness in Labour. Is it Jacinda Ardern for running such a loose ship that ministers had the freedom to dream up and implement virtually any crazy policy they wanted to? Or is it Hipkins for trying too hard to win the election by putting not only crazy ideas on the policy bonfire, but also Labour’s heart and soul?
Or is it the ministers and MPs themselves? Those, like Allan, who don’t know how to do what it takes to win? Or those like Parker who don’t want to do what it takes to win? – Heather du Plessis-Allan
We don’t need a capital gains tax. We need freedom from crazy council rules. – Don Brash
I had never imagined that one word is so powerful – forgiveness. Forgiveness is the result of just common sense. If we just question ourselves, what is going to benefit me in the future? Anger or forgiveness? – Farid Ahmed
We have two options. Be broken down, be miserable, or be resilient and move forward. Which path should we take? – Farid Ahmed
Life without her is … not full. I could take the path of depression because I miss her, but I remember her and her memory is inspiring me to contribute. Definitely I am optimistic. Life is still beautiful. The world is beautiful, the sun is shining. There are a lot of things to be thankful about. – Farid Ahmed
In theory, in an MMP environment, a so-called centre party like New Zealand First should be an ongoing prospect for both sides. But by behaving the way they have over several Governments they have wrecked the theory and now look more trouble than they are worth.
That is of course if they make it, which if you are a regular, you will know I don’t think they will.
But for a party like National who have now worked themselves into a position of being a Government in waiting, the last thing they want to do is muddy the waters, to offer a reason to a swing voter not to vote for them, because they are equivocal on such an important matter.
I am actually surprised they have not worked this out. It’s not hard. – Mike Hosking
It would be interesting to see evidence that the biology of pregnancy and childbirth is different for those who imagine they are men, but there is none. – Citizen Science
Kerekere has done it again in a Bill she introduced into Parliament last week (3 August) to amend the Human Rights Act “to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi by taking steps towards ending discrimination against takatāpui and rainbow (LGBTQ+) people.” Setting aside the forced teaming for a minute – is this Bill a back door to breaking down single sex spaces for women? Is anyone planning on taking it up when Kerekere leaves Parliament? Will any journalist ever do their job and find out? – Citizen Science
Pregnancy, childbirth and the care of infants are the most biologically determined experiences of womanhood. To prioritise trans men – a group of women who reject this material reality even as they experience it – over the enormous unmet needs of all others, is just laughable. – Citizen Science
Today in New Zealand, nearly 60% of those employed feel they are working hard but struggling to get ahead. Tomorrow, they’ll want a new path forward. Longer-term political shifts will probably be uncovered if the nation is forced to run an ultramarathon across a bruising economic landscape.
When it comes to social and economic inequality, there’s a bleak outlook – things are getting worse, not better, in the minds of most. – Peter Stahel
As a nation, we were sold the importance of co-governance as being THE solution for resolving inequity.
Friday’s MHA report demonstrates everything we have criticised in co-governance – added cost, increased bureaucracy, lack of accountability – and NO IMPROVEMENT IN OUTCOME.
For better outcomes, and for New Zealand, we must end co-governance.- Don Brash
What can be said with certainty is that a union of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will readily agree on one topic: further embedding co-governance in law and policy, which will push New Zealand irrevocably along the path to an ethno-state. – Graham Adams
Good, sustainable, and efficient transport infrastructure is not some “nice to have” optional extra. It is a critical part of our national fabric, enabling, and helping all aspects of our society and economy to function properly. – Peter Dunne
There is only one strand of mainstream grassroots activism today that threatens intimidation and violence against its political opponents. While Just Stop Oil and other eco-activists are willing to break the law by blockading roads and disrupting cultural events, only the trans mob poses a violent threat. Needless to say, this is a threat aimed almost exclusively at women. – Robert Jessel
So what’s driving all this? It may have something to do with the fact that, over the past year or so, trans activists have suffered a succession of defeats. Sporting bodies are increasingly putting a stop to males’ participation in women’s sports. Gender self-identification – the trans activists’ No1 demand – now appears to be dead in the water in the UK. It seems the more that ordinary people get exposed to the trans movement, the more they dislike it. – Robert Jessel
The downside is that these defeats for the trans movement only seem to have ratcheted up the danger women face. Like a wounded animal, the trans lobby is most dangerous when it is cornered. Tragically, until its full defeat, and maybe for some time thereafter, knife arches and metal-detecting wands could well be a fixture at events where women meet to discuss their rights.– Robert Jessel
We have to stand up to the smears. The truth is that Rowling has never said anything untoward about trans people. She has been critical of the behaviour of some trans fanatics. She has been vocal in her support for single-sex spaces for women and girls. And yes, she has vociferously defended herself against hourly abuse. As she damn well has a right to do. But she is not the bigot she has been made out to be.
It’s time we all speak up for what is right. It’s time to break the cycle of fear. It’s time we called out this public assault on JK Rowling – and on all the other gender-critical feminists who’ve been similarly maligned. We need to put a stop to this authoritarian movement. – James Dreyfus
If it had been prepared to learn: words pregnant with meaning. Is there any of us who could not utter those words about ourselves? Theodore Dalrymple
If you’re a socialist, you’re someone who believes that collectivism and centralisation is the best way to run economies as this Labour government has shown – they’ve centralised the polytechs, they’ve centralised the health system, they’ve centralised the management of water.
They’re just natural centralists. They don’t believe people are better at making decisions on their own behalf. The government needs to look after them, government needs to tell them what to do. That’s what socialists do; and these are pretty serious socialist-type people. – David Kirk
I think economies need entrepreneurialism. They need people to risk their own capital. If you want innovation, growth and productivity, that’s the most important thing. . .
You need to give people the opportunity to make mistakes and lose money, build businesses, actually be free to lead … and that goes on the social side, be free to lead their own lives, not to be weighed under by too much red tape and bureaucracy.
All of that said, for a cohesive society, there needs to be protection for people who are out of work, people who are hungry. – David Kirk
We want to sell but no one wants to buy this shop right now. Yep we are stuck.
This is the hell place. – Jay Patel
We are helpless. We pay the tax, we are working hard and still – look – we are in the jail … it’s unfair. – Jay Patel
For a long while I hedged my bets. I never had any intention of going back, but I tried not to be too emphatic. But I’m at the point now where the answer is ‘oh my god, no’.
But anyway it’s somebody else’s turn. It’s the ultimate conceit to believe you can settle the political arguments. – Steven Joyce
I’ve met a number of politicians who say that the price gets higher the longer you stay, and at some point the price is too high. And so you either lose touch with your kids and your family or you actually rearrange things and prioritise your family over politics. – Steven Joyce
I think we did a pretty competent job in hindsight; it wasn’t perfect, but it was as my old friend Wayne Eagleson [former National Party chief of staff] says: ‘politics is not a game of perfection. . .
I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking ‘gosh, what a lack of aspiration’. I would say the aim is to leave New Zealand in a better place than you found it, and I think we did. – Steven Joyce
National would cut out the middle-man – instead of passing tax cuts through the local Pak’nSave, we would put the relief direct into people’s bank accounts with income tax reduction. – Nicola Willis
The best thing about our GST system is its simplicity.
When Labour lose this election that simplicity will remain. – Peter Williams
The last thing he needs is a lawyer letter. He probably needs a cup of tea and a lie down. – Nicola Willis
A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”– Richard Dawkins
I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?
Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. – Richard Dawkins
But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other. – Richard Dawkins
The Labour strategy is to come after me personally each and every week.
And we’ve known that for a long time.
We know that that’s part of their campaign strategy, and they’re doing that because, let’s be clear, they don’t have a record to run on, and frankly, they don’t have the ideas to take the country forward.
It doesn’t impact me personally because I’m focused on what we’ve got to do, which is get this country turned around, sorted and back on track. – Christopher Luxon
In two polls last week, Labour fell below the hugely psychologically important 30 per cent level. Labour has lost economic credibility.
The party is now like a hapless whale being attacked by sharks. The sharks are the Greens and New Zealand First, who are ripping voters off Labour.
Chris Hipkins has only himself to blame. – Richard Prebble
And Luxon must always remind us that if Peters can install Jacinda Ardern as PM, he can also install Chris Hipkins. – Richard Prebble
If these so-called ‘experts’ and tax purists, as Chris Hipkins puts it, are so wealthy, so comfortable, their answers and advice so irrelevant, then why for the love of a fresh banana would you spend $2 million commissioning a report and $1000 a day per expert to ask them anything in the way of questions at all? – Ryan Bridge
What could possibly be worse than having your flagship cost of living policy leaked and announced by the opposition?
Finally announcing your leaked and already announced flagship cost of living policy but buggering up the cost.
C’mon Labour! The Finance Minister pitched his election year budget as ‘getting the basics right’.
Someone hand that man a calculator. Just a basic one mind, let’s not confuse things with all those extra buttons on a scientific calculator. – Tova O’Brien
If Labour a) can’t get its numbers right plus b) doesn’t tell us when they have, it adds up to diminished trust.
It’s very simple political math. No calculator required. – Tova O’Brien
I’m often accused of being rude to trans-rights activists. But JK Rowling proves that there is no tone polite enough for these zealots. On the gender-critical side of the debate, we used to always preface our statements by saying that we believed trans people should be free of discrimination. After a while though, it became clear it didn’t matter whether we said that or not. The trans activists didn’t want to hear it. Of course, they are never able to show any statements we’ve made that are supposedly so offensive. And these are the same people who send death and rape threats to women and who support the mutilation of children. They then try to destroy people’s livelihoods by getting them cancelled for causing offence.
I feel very differently about trans people and detransitioners who have undergone medical gender-reassignment than I do about the trans movement. The problem comes when the word ‘trans’ also includes fully intact people. Despite having no intention of receiving surgery themselves, these people are telling their followers that it’s vitally important for children to have these surgeries. It’s the most cynical and grotesque movement. And it puts children in harm’s way. Look at the human wreckage that’s left behind. You hear testimonies from detransitioners about how perfectly healthy young women are getting hysterectomies and cutting off their breasts in their twenties. They are going into men’s gay clubs because they’ve been told that male homosexuals will accept them as men. They don’t understand why the lies they’ve been told haven’t turned out to be true. The human cost of all this is going to be immeasurable. – Graham Linehan
What was particularly galling though was the way the Prime Minister tried to brush off the tough times so many New Zealanders had endured over the last three and a half years. As Covid19 Minister he was the one who presided over the concentration camp system that MIQ became. He was the one that kept families divided, unable to be with dying loved ones or attend family funerals. He was the Minister who suggested that Aucklanders might require permits and have designated times to leave town for their summer holidays at the end of the long 2021 Auckland lockdown. And who will ever forget his shameful treatment of mothers-to-be like journalist Charlotte Bellis, to whom he was obliged to subsequently publicly apologise, when she wanted to return home to have her baby? – Peter Dunne
Hipkins knows that the pandemic and Labour’s handling of it is no longer the election winner it was in 2020. Rather than invoking it at every opportunity as was the case then, Labour today barely mentions it. Getting rid of the last Covid19 restrictions this week was therefore about consigning the pandemic to the past, so Labour can focus unencumbered on the future as the election nears, without the reminders of the dark years.
But whether all those whose lives and businesses were disrupted or ruined by MIQ, the lockdowns, and border closures regard this week’s decision as just an anticlimax as the Prime Minister does, remains to be seen. Their answer may come on election day. – Peter Dunne
So I think we can safely say that the GST thing’s been a real cluster for Labour this week.
But then, it takes the cluster next level with this announcement that it wants us to pay more tax on our petrol and diesel.
Taking the GST off fruit and veges and then adding more tax on fuel is utter nutbar behaviour. – John MacDonald
It’s almost like Labour has decided that yeah, it was really cool winning that huge majority last election, so let’s see how far we can go in the opposite direction this election.
Because that’s what it’s going to do with this plan to rob Peter to pay Paul. The stupidity of it all blows me away. – John MacDonald
Edinburgh’s principles are the values of an open and liberal society. But free expression and artistic liberty requires those virtues to be protected against those who would menace them. In a depressing number of instances this year, those values are threatened by a puritanism that, while in keeping with Edinburgh’s Calvinist past, is wholly at odds with the festivals’ founding credo. – The Times
The sum of these controversies is greater than their parts. A rising tide of intolerance risks curbing the frank and free exchange of ideas upon which the arts depend for their vitality. The expression of wholly legal speech now too often comes with significant jeopardy attached. Those who deny the existence of so-called “cancel culture” are also those most likely to seek other people’s cancellation.
If debates cannot be had in a spirit of free and frank inquiry in Edinburgh in August then where, and in what circumstances, might they be had? – The Times
These days the clamour for silencing contrary views more often emanates from self-styled “progressives”. But they, too, betray the spirit of the Festival.
The lesson is that liberalism cannot be assumed and must always be defended. Edinburgh in August cannot be a city for scolds and puritans, while those who seek to silence others should be reminded that they betray the founding principles of the greatest show on earth. – The Times
At a time when this country is in desperate need of genuine leadership, of thought-provoking transformative redirection, of experience, of maturity, of a fairly major reset, we have the vacuous thought bubbles of attention seekers and desperados.
One of them – in my view – is a gnarled old hack who has ravaged the political landscape for far too long, and the other is the Prime Minister.
Ah, democracy. They say every election is the most important ever, I have never personally said that or indeed believed it, until this one. – Mike Hosking
You don’t fix roads, or for that matter schools and crime and hospitals, by continuing to tax those who can’t or won’t pay. In fact, you don’t fix anything unless you create an economy that can pay the bills. Hence the old quote from that Bill Clinton aide who said: “It’s the economy, stupid”.
A government will deserve the money it raises when its policies ensure the country is successful. That will be when the people, their businesses and corporate New Zealand are all making money and paying tax. Increased success means increased tax. – Bruce Cotterill
In other words, the incumbent Labour Government does not look like a group of people who desperately want to make a major difference to the country’s outlook. Rather, they appear to be an unqualified, shoddy and desperate group, grasping for power with nothing but their own interests in mind.
We have eight weeks to see something different. I’m not holding my breath. – Bruce Cotterill
But government is currently spending more than three percentage points of GDP more than the Labour coalition had forecast in 2019.
It’s a very substantial increase in the government’s share of the economy.
Even getting back to what Labour had promised the path would be gets portrayed as terrible cuts. Was the 2019 path really that draconian? – Eric Crampton
Many powerful media organisations today regard LGBT+ and some other issues, such as climate change and aspects of race, as matters about which the normal idea of impartiality is suspended. There can only be one right approach, they believe. This is clearly the attitude of Openly, which may well provide a useful service to people interested in these matters, but is emphatically not impartial, invariably following the line of LGBT+ lobbies.
So long as such organisations think this way – and that is how Nick Robinson’s own BBC thinks – projects like “Verify” will be more like vigilantism against rivals than the disinterested pursuit of truth. What they see as “disinformation” will often be little more than their preferred word for attitudes they dislike or stories they wish to suppress. – Charles Moore
In one sense, the framing of this election is now looking like competence versus diversity. It isn’t explicit, and it isn’t a campaign slogan, but it is happening. Both from National and ACT – it isn’t that diversity is a bad thing or that it doesn’t matter, but that perceived competence matters more. – Luke Malpass
I suppose we should never be too mad at the wrong people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. – The Blue Review
There are so many competing priorities for our tax dollars right now, and over the next few years, that we simply cannot afford to throw good money after bad. I want to know if these projects are working. If they’re not, we get rid of them, we try something else.
But are there any pitfalls in requiring the public service to perform professionally. – Kerre Woodham
Voters have gone, and I don’t know what they can announce that will make voters come back.
The GST policy was supposed to be that big announcement, they genuinely thought it was going to be huge. But this poll captured voters’ reaction, and it wasn’t good- it drove Labour under that 30 percent mark.
So brace yourself, because Labour might be about to take a historic – or close to historic – spanking. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
Personally, I’d rather pay a maximum of $100 a year on my prescriptions than have to sell the house or, heaven forbid, set up and Give-a-little page to keep a loved one alive. – Kerre Woodham
Work hard, read your papers, put your phone down and remember why you are here. – Jacqui Dean
You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave.
They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer. – Matthieu Ricard
One thing I’ve learned (though I still let it control my emotions sometimes) is that anger is a toxic and generally useless emotion, which can stand in the way of fixing either personal or societal problems. Another is that if you want to cooperate with others, and have them do what you think is best, treat them with respect and never, ever call them names. Also, never accuse someone directly of bad behavior: simply tell them how their behavior makes you feel. – Jerry Coyne
This is our future. But it’s also been our past. This is not new to the world, it’s not new to built up communities.
Our ancestors, dating back to the day dot have had to deal with precisely this. The floods, the pestilence, the fire, the natural disasters.
As communities, we’ve learned to live with nature and those that survive have evolved with nature. The danger is thinking that things can stay the same. – Kerre Woodham
Nothing wrong with thinking about things like climate change, maybe even worrying a bit about climate change.
Just this week we have seen the Auckland flood damage buyout deal, on the back of the Hawkes Bay buyout deal. Disruption is real, storms are real and change and an element of upheaval for some seems an increasing reality.
But setting off the alarms screaming “fire” 40 years in advance and taking in no real estimates of scientific advancement strikes me as being ever-so slightly premature, if not immature. – Mike Hosking
Perception is going to be a big part of Labour’s problem. When a party in government drops into the 20s just weeks out from voting, the psychological effect can be huge. It will affect both voters and politicians. Increasingly, the public will not believe that Labour can win this election. Such a mood will risk becoming a self-fulfilling factor in the campaign. – Bryce Edwards
However, even if Labour manages to fight back with bolder and more inspiring policies over the next few weeks, it might just be too late. After six years of being in government, Labour has developed a reputation for not being able to deliver, even to its own supporters. Hence, more promises on the campaign trail aren’t exactly going to be fully believed and embraced, even by those on the progressive side of politics. – Bryce Edwards
Chris Hipkins is talking today about turning the tide around over the next few weeks and beating National. Few will be convinced that he can do this. In fact, there’s every chance it will only get worse. Labour might well struggle to mobilise and motivate its activists and voters.
A low voter turnout at the election is therefore Labour’s nightmare. Supporters are probably starting to tune out. – Bryce Edwards
At the last election, the bookies gave National very long odds – paying about $5 for every $1 bet on National winning, whereas they were only offering Labour bets $1.16. This time around, bets on National winning the election and forming a government are paying out $1.25 for a $1 bet, while the TAB is offering $3.75 for a Labour win.
It’s hard to disagree with those odds. Although the Australian TAB is promising a big payout to anyone successfully backing a Labour win, it’s unlikely that you’d find many in Labour willing to take that gambling bet. – Bryce Edwards
What’s easy for political parties to do is spout promises and get headlines and make stuff sound appealing in a generic sense. What’s harder though, is cutting through the spin, and making it a reality. Making it part of the landscape.
I can tell you, having spoken many students who’ve looked to go into the education sphere at a tertiary level, that the key message they’re given by school, is that in order to be part of the education sector in any way, the most crucial thing they can do is learn Te Reo.
It’s not just students who say that, it’s teachers, careers advisors inside schools, and it’s Universities too.
The message current students who want to teach future students are getting, is that the most important thing they can learn, is Te Reo.
To have fundamentals and basics taught well, and to get the sort of cut through the Labour party now allegedly wants in education, means they have to look long and hard at where they misdirected that focus the past six years. How they aim to turn that around, is the key question. – Kate Hawkesby
What matters most and what swings votes is credibility.
Whether that is credibility through your record, through your ideology or through your consistency of message and policy.
Making stuff up and hoping no one will notice isn’t credible.
In election campaigns, too many people are watching. – Mike Hosking
It’s an extraordinary decision but it’s the truth, and the truth doesn’t keel over like a lie. – Alexandra Purucker
We cannot repair the wrongs of yesterday by creating fresh grievances. That is not a path towards reconciliation nor towards partnership.
New Zealand has made many mistakes, but we have an exceptional record in confronting the failures and sins of past administrations and have instituted a regime of addressing these wrongs.
The Waitangi Tribunal is imperfect but given the complexities of our past, the mixed genealogy of our population and the willingness of people of good-will on all sides to find a resolution for the past and to forge a common future; it has been a powerful instrument for progress. – Damien Grant
Te Pati Māori’s policy and agenda deserve more sunlight; and when they tell us what they believe in, and what they stand for, we should believe them. – Damien Grant
Have you heard about the latest injustice in women’s sport? No, I don’t mean the disparity in pay or prize monies in comparison to men’s professional teams, or the relative lack of access to high-quality facilities. There’s something even worse going on. Women are being banned from competition — banned, I tell you — simply because of the way their bodies look. Specifically — and I don’t know how to break this to you — some sporting authorities are trying to exclude all the women with penises. I know. I can’t believe it either.
Such is the tear-jerking tale presented to us by the cyclist and trans woman — that is, biologically male — Emily Bridges in this month’s edition of Vogue, objecting to British Cycling’s recent move to make the elite female category actually do what it says on the tin. – Kathleen Stock
Had Peters not ignored the voters’ clearly expressed preference in 2017, we would have been spared the most harmful government in living memory.
To put it another way, Peters, by going with Labour, is ultimately responsible for everything that has happened in the past three disastrous, chaotic years. Voters have notoriously short memories, so need to be constantly reminded of that.
He now has the effrontery to present himself as Mr Fixit. But putting Peters back in government, in any capacity, would be like calling back the same builder whose dodgy workmanship caused your house to collapse the last time you employed him. – Karl du Fresne
By way of contrast, the defining feature of the Maori Party is that all its candidates are (and presumably are required to be) Maori. But can you really exclude 84 percent of the population and present yourself as a unifying force? I suspect that when Ngarewa-Packer affirms the value of unity, she means unity on her terms. If there was an award for cant of the day, she would be runner-up to Peters. – Karl du Fresne
My impression is that most RNZ reporters do a conscientious job, but as an institution it leans sharply to the left, like all public broadcasters, and ideology inevitably seeps into its news bulletins. This is more likely to happen when there’s a skeleton staff on (I’m told RNZ newsrooms are scarily empty at weekends) and editorial checks and balances are probably not applied as rigorously as they might be during the week.
As a publicly funded news outlet, RNZ has a unique obligation to ensure fairness, accuracy and balance. This becomes even more important at a time when public trust in the media is dangerously frayed.
It’s also worth noting that RNZ recently went through an expensive, high-profile inquiry that resulted in an embarrassing mea culpa for illicit editorial tampering by a rogue journalist who has since been dismissed. Has the organisation learned nothing, or do different standards apply when the influence exerted by biased journalists is deemed to be ideologically acceptable? – Karl du Fresne
If there is anything to learn from 2017, it is that voters seeking to vote ‘strategically’ rarely engineer the outcome they want. They are much better off just voting for the party they support. Then the press gallery’s obsession with ruling parties in and out doesn’t actually matter. – Brigitte Morten
And that is the danger of polls – who do you believe? How much do they affect the narrative and are they actually accurate, or just a vehicle for spin?– Mike Hosking
The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.
Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science. – Dr. John F. Clauser
Asking people if they support an idea in principle is quite different to asking if they support the trade-offs necessary to make that idea work in practice. – Josh Van Veen
That’s been our view and our position [that we would repeal Māori wards],” Luxon said.
“Our position is that we are one country, we have a democracy where it’s one person, one vote, so we’ve opposed that through the course of the last Parliament. We don’t believe that that’s fair or democratic. – Christopher Luxon
There’ll be no change to any of our abortion laws, funding or access – I’ve been really clear about that. That is not our focus.
In Government, we need to be focused on rebuilding this economy, we need to make sure we restore law and order, deliver better health and education. – Christopher Luxon
This is why I am so vocal about the gender identity issues that we have. Because I know that these are issues that need addressing with mental health care and not puberty blockers. – Corina Shields
That’s how bad it has got. Desperation from a broke Government, mad ramblings from a geriatric, fringe player, yelling and screaming from conspiratorialists and revengeful sideliners. – Mike Hosking
Chris Hipkins has made it clear he is out of touch, out of ideas and is set to take Labour into its most negative campaign in history. – Chris Bishop
There was also a big policy announcement: free dental care for under-30s by 2026, which the Labour leader said was the first step to universal dental care. The $390 million costing for the policy looks implausibly low, and the labour force too small and too difficult to grow for the timeline given. – Luke Malpass
In a free country, journalists and the media in general need to be trusted to “speak truth to power” on their readers’ and viewers’ behalf. Prostrating themselves before Mammon, in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund, should be beneath them. Television and radio editors and communicators have considerable influence. They should use that power honestly. When interviewing, it isn’t necessary always to find fault with the interviewee. Teasing out a policy, its origin and its possible effect can be revealing. Constant negativity is the way our media succeed in blighting all politicians, giving the triennial election process in our lives a bad name. Why not leave trolling to social media? – Michael Bassett
We feel quite abandoned actually. I think that schools have been left to their own devices and there’s really been a complete vacuum in leadership from the Ministry of Education or from the minister.
We’ve got a curriculum refresh that’s not a curriculum refresh at all, it’s a complete curriculum rewrite that masquerades as a refresh. Schools just feel like they’ve been let down. There’s been little to no support for kids with additional needs, while the Ministry of Education staffing is just ballooning. – Lorraine Taylor
Now you might think that doctors earn quite enough. Well, quite frankly, when I’m lying unconscious on an operating table while skilled surgeons have spent 15 to 20 years honing their skills to do their best to improve my quality of life, or even save my life, they can earn what they like.
Cabinet ministers get more than our senior surgeons and I know who gives a better return on my taxpayer dollar. – Kerre Woodham
A two term Government with a record that too many will have decided is not for them; whether it’s crime and ram raids or health and ED’s you can’t get to or clinics that are closed because of lack of staff or they’re on strike or the recession we have been in, and perhaps the second one we are about to battle through, – that’s what drives votes.
Policy is a distant second to the mood. Specifics are well down the list to the emotion of how you are feeling.
It’s why we don’t read the fine print. – Mike Hosking
Luxon looks like a Prime Minister – and perhaps more importantly – he’s feeling like one. – Amelia Wade
To my mind, what we need from this election is a clear decision, one way or the other.
There’s a lot at stake. It’s not a game. – Tim Dower
We’re not voting for Chris Hipkins, simply because his Government will forever be our disappointing ex. The one who promised us everything, delivered nothing, and feels like they’ve just been ignoring our broken relationship for the last few years. – Verity Johnson
The Government is clearly worried. It has attempted to influence the numbers with its pantomime announcement of some expenditure cuts just 12 days ago, right before the Prefu numbers were finalised. Those were timed to be included in the report so as to improve the outlook, but they are about as real as any other attempt by Grant Robertson to curtail government expenditure. This Finance Minister has a track record of always talking a good game about cost control next year, while spending up large this year. – Steven Joyce
We used to have a rule in government that if you needed extra work done in a department, you had to find the capacity for that work already in the department, if necessary by stopping other work. That discipline is needed again. – Steven Joyce
With his back to the wall as Labour’s fortunes plummet in the polls, it seems very likely Hipkins will show yet again that his principles will always be subordinate to possible political gain. But if he thinks that encouraging — tacitly or explicitly — a repeat of the shameful silencing of Parker and her supporters on March 25 is a wise career move he should really think again.
The Prime Minister seems to have little idea of how much of the trust that many held in the government, the mainstream media and the police was destroyed that day. Or how much simmering fury it unleashed among voters — female and male — who simply want the right and opportunity to hear women speak. – Graham Adams
Sure, some voters will hear the fibs and not hear the corrections and will be freaked out enough to flip away from the centre-right and back to Labour.
But there are plenty of other voters who will see the desperation and nastiness for what it is and find it sad and ugly. It’s especially bad for Labour because it’s so off-brand. They’ve just pushed the “Be Kind” schtick for five years. It’s whiplash-inducing to go from Jacinda hugging everyone to Chris’ troops spreading misinformation on Facebook with a brazenness that would make the anti-vaxxers blush.
If Labour’s going to lose, it’s probably better to lose with dignity than to lose dirty. – Heather du Plessis-Allan
We live in such an infantile world it is only a matter of time before the people who sell you milk will have to ensure you are not lactose intolerant least you sue them for the ensuing gastro turbulence. – Damien Grant
Rating agencies are not good at predicting events, more recording when market sentiment has soured, and for the moment they remain either confident or oblivious to the unravelling fiscal and economic reality of Aotearoa.
This benign neglect may not end on Tuesday, but it will end. – Damien Grant
There’s no simpler way to put it- when you set a target, you have a requirement to hold yourself accountable, you hold providers accountable, you hold the system accountable. At the end of the day, that’s what politicians should be doing – Shane Reti
Labour and the Greens have instituted irrational and extremely damaging economic and social policies that have torn the very fabric of our once cohesive society apart and that I fear will take years to repair. – Gilda Kirkpatrick
Fresh from winning 50 per cent of the vote in 2020, becoming the most popular party in the MMP era, Labour looks set to follow that record with a rather more ignominious one, the lowest polling of a major party after a stint in Government. – Thomas Coughlan
Hipkins, while appearing like a competent and normal human in more traditional political settings like Parliament and broadcast interviews, appears stilted and awkward when pretending to be normal in public. The campaign, alas for Hipkins, is showing up his flaws and Luxon’s strengths. – Thomas Coughlan
I’ve been very careful throughout my campaign to speak well of my opponent. I think that we can disagree agreeably and be civil towards each other. – Nicola Willis
There are other positives to a National win. Their MPs who will hold key ministerial portfolios are of a much higher calibre than the current dispirited and unimpressive lot. Six years of ‘all talk and no trousers’ has got us where we are today, second to last in the OECD for projected growth, and having the world’s worst current account deficit – approaching ten per cent of GDP. National knows what needs to be done to turn things around. They have the people needed to carry out the tasks. – JC
Even though the National Party has been effective in Opposition, to the point where it is shaping up as the next government, the news media is not yet accepting it as the ministry-in-waiting, and instead treats its leader more harshly than it does his opponent. Chris Hipkins gets praised for what he has achieved, despite having presided over a string of disastrous decisions and failed policies, including co-governance, huge deficits, and what in previous eras would have been regarded as a balance-of-payments crisis. – Point of Order
This is what happens when people keep voting for councilors who take money that should be going into maintenance, and flipping it into flashy convention centres, library rebuilds that cost a hundred million dollars more than they should, do-ups of every minor ‘heritage’ public building. People of Wellington, the enemy is us. Stop voting for councilors and mayors who promise anything other than fixing the pipes. – Eric Crampton
There is simply no hiding what has happened to our education system under this Government.
It has been Maorified, kids don’t turn up, results are shocking, standards have slipped and international testing shows the parlous state we are in. – Mike Hosking
Let me tell you this for nothing – a lot of the media have been kind to Labour and even kinder to “Chippy from the Hutt”.
That has turned. They see what we see.
They see a bloke from the private sector, a success story who at last is delivering with confidence and detail and aspiration. And they see a political lifer, out of puff with a record in tatters. – Mike Hosking
The government and its surrogates continue to spin the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update hard. The government is to be congratulated on making a mess of the economy but not completely destroying it. – Liam Hehir
It used to be considered an iron-rule of elections that undecided voters would usually break for the challenger. The theory was that it is harder for incumbents to win back wavering support. As the election draws near and the incumbent still hasn’t been able to secure their vote, these undecided voters are more likely to take a chance on the challenger, hoping for change. The challenger represents a new possibility, a potential for improvement over what’s currently in place.
The extent of this effect has been cast into doubt from time to time. In this context of this election, however, it may well be a factor. It’s hard to see many people with doubts about the government deciding from this point on that they like the government after all. – Liam Hehir
We country folk are also the ones having to live with the reality of wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines ripping up the landscape, and replacing bush and production farmlands with acres of silicon, fibreglass and concrete. – Lushington D, Brady
The instant they built a wind farm in front of the harbourside mansions, carpeted Fitzroy and Brunswick in solar panels, or bulldozed a massive new transmission line through the middle of Canberra, “Net Zero” would be dumped like the toxic potato it is.
Instead, it’s country folk who have to wear the consequences of the urban green-left’s deranged obsessions.
And they’ve had enough. – Lushington D, Brady
Buried within the Prefu came a stark warning: although there’s money set aside to cover the critical cost pressures of government, that’s about it – so any future decisions around additional spending will need to be made in the context of raising more revenue or spending cuts elsewhere. That means there’s enough to keep the lights on, but maybe not enough to buy a new lamp. – Brad Olsen
Treasury also, said, diplomatically, that “in recent times, government’s final allocations have exceeded the signalled Budget allowance. If this trend was to continue and there was no corresponding offset from either an increase in revenue or a reduction in expenses, there would be an adverse impact on the fiscal outlook.” In other words, governments often spend more than they had anticipated or signalled, and unless there’s A) more revenue coming in, or B) something else not being funded, then C) it’s got to be funded by debt.
Which means that although there’s always more money spent each year, it will become increasingly difficult to announce new policies without removing old policies, generating more revenue, or further adding to debt. None of these options stand out as an obvious appropriate or “right” choice – hence the warning of “significant trade-offs”. – Brad Olsen
Are we willing to increase government revenue somehow to pay for our spending? Are we willing to adjust our expectations of what the government provides, and doesn’t provide, to citizens? Or do we just keep kicking the can down the road, funding new investments through debt to be paid for by someone else in the future?
Because that’s what we’re doing. Essentially, Prefu 2023 showed that future Kiwis face a higher debt burden to keep the lights on today. The operating allowance is sufficient for funding the rising cost of current public services, but there is little headroom for any new spending going forward. There are no easy options, apart from the easiest but worst option of them all – worry about it later. The longer we delay making the difficult choices, the more painful that adjustment will be. Treasury has clearly signalled that changes are becoming increasingly necessary. – Brad Olsen
Based on the polls, attacking Luxon is needed because there’s not much else Hipkins has going for him: he hasn’t got much money to bribe the electorate with, he’s not that much more popular on headline preferred PM figures than Luxon – although swing voters are more interested – and on current polls he’s heading to comfortably be out of government. – Glenn McConnell and Luke Malpass
So why did the current Labour government go so wildly off the rails?
Blame the public for that, specifically a phenomenon that saw the nation lose its head; the only time I was embarrassed to be a New Zealander. I refer to the ludicrous Jacindamania phenomenon which induced in Labour a thousand year Reich, faith in their longevity and a corresponding dictatorial mentality resulting in sheer totalitarian insanity in so many ways. – Sir Bob Jones
But in summation, you can see poor, old Hipkins looking more and more deflated and Luxon looking more and more bullish. Seymour overplayed his hand a bit on the confidence thing, James Shaw called an Act MP a “clown show”, Winston Peters refuted the polls, again, and I think one of the Maori leaders went surfing. – Mike Hosking
But there are times when radical measures are required, such as the appalling mess the current government has left us with. Normally this is a job left to the occasional Labour governments so it’s ironic that this time it’s the reverse. That’s a direct consequence of Winston putting them in office when they simply weren’t ready. It was like handing the keys to a bus to a 10 year old to drive. – Sir Bob Jones
If I had to guess at the, or an, underlying cause of the inability to manage anything, I should suggest the spread of fatuous tertiary education, which has dulled the practical intelligence of millions and returned them nothing of value either intellectually or spiritually. – Theodore Dalrymple
National understands that innovation and growth doesn’t come from government per se it comes from the hard work, the innovation, the risk taking, from the entrepreneurs in the private sector. – Christopher Luxon
The media are exercised by the Nats tax cut plan. They’re exercised by it largely I assume because the Labour party are exercised about it. And the Labour party are exercised about it because they hate it because it’s popular. It’s seen poll surges for National, and they’ll do anything to try to stem that tide.
Problem is, as the feedback I’ve received this week would attest, and as the polls would suggest too, it is popular. And people seemingly do not care how it’s costed, or what a handful of economists say about it, or how much Grant Robertson bangs on about it being flawed. – Kate Hawkesby
If a white New Zealander said that “colonialist genetics were stronger than Māori genetics”, it would be all over the Kiwi news as an arrant example of racism, which it would be. So it’s telling that when a big-time Māori politicians says something equivalent, it’s ignored by the press, the government, and the public. That is what is known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and all decent Kiwis, whether Māori or “colonialists”, should be demanding retractions and apologies.
Don’t hold your breath. It would be considered racist to call anything said by a Māori “racist.” That’s how far the fear has spread in New Zealand. – Jerry Coyne
It’s a vicious environment for Labour to campaign in.
It’s all happening under Labour’s watch and people are over it. On 14 October they’re very likely to show they’re over Labour as well. – Peter Wilson
This goes to the heart of the country’s current economic problems, as identified by the PREFU. Rather than use the additional post-pandemic borrowing to improve the country’s health and physical infrastructure, the government undertook too much unproductive expenditure that has shown no long-term return to the country, while still incurring debt that must be repaid. As in earlier times, initial relief that people were being spared the immediate impact of the worst of circumstances, quickly evaporated when it was realised that the debt incurred not only lives on long after the crisis has passed, but also limits the scope of future government actions. Belatedly, both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance seem to be acknowledging the public frustration their approach has bought about.
This is Labour’s dilemma. The poor quality of much of its additional spending is becoming clear, leading it to announce billions of dollars of spending cuts to reduce the debt it has run up. And proposals, like this week’s announcement to train more doctors, simply invite the criticism of why these were not priorities when the first pandemic recovery borrowing occurred three years ago. Despite the Prime Minister’s lament to the contrary, the public’s yearning for something better is perfectly understandable. – Peter Dunne
Why, you may wonder, is it necessary for someone who wishes to teach maths to teenagers to hold a politically correct interpretation of a document signed in 1840? The ideological capture of the profession is not limited to this most important of the six principles. – Damien Grant
Treasury’s latest pre-election economic and fiscal update this week forecast cumulative fiscal deficits of $17 billion for the four years ended June 2027.
These forecasts are far too optimistic. – Bryce Wilkinson
Most government spending provides a private benefit to the recipient.
Why not just let them spend more of their own money?
Too often, there is no clarity about what the answer is to this question. That impairs accountability.
Poor accountability guarantees waste. People know their own needs best.
Claims that tax cuts cannot be responsible treat all existing and planned spending as sacrosanct. There is no basis for such an assumption. Read the Auditor-General’s scathing assessments. – Bryce Wilkinson
That particular answer was historic. It’s a rare thing for a multi-millionaire to beat a Labourite on the issue of tax fairness. – Thomas Coughlan
Labour’s 2017 election spending promise was exceeded by $16b.
Robertson did it again in the 2020 election. In the pre-election forecast, government spending was forecast to be $116b in the year to June 2024. Last week, that spending estimate was revised upward to $139b.
In other words, the 2020 election spending forecast was exceeded by $23b.
On the Finance Minister’s record, the latest spending forecasts will be massively exceeded. The promised return to a balanced budget in 2027 is a fantasy. – Richard Prebble
The Howard League has a programme that assists prisoners to get driving, forklift and heavy vehicle licences. Over 90 per cent get employment. Reoffending is minimal. If it is possible to get convicts back into the workforce, how hard can it be to reintroduce beneficiaries to work?
We know mass immigration does not work. Why not try something that we know does work? Doing the work ourselves. – Richard Prebble
In the last decade or so, we’ve reduced carbon emissions, we’ve increased the output from renewables, and we are seen as a world leader. But it’s also right that we put economic growth and household budgets and the cost of living ahead. And fundamentally, we’re not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people. – Suella Braverman
These days there is an awful lot of dismissing. It ranges from ignoring news that does not fit a particular world view to ruining the careers of gifted academics who believed it was their role to speak out.
I’ve written before about being dismissed on a variety of charges, most of them beyond my control (Old white man guilty on three of four counts).
Dismissing, in its varying stages of severity and consequence, is another way of saying we have forgotten how to tolerate our fellow human beings. – Gavin Ellis
‘Co-governance’ – incompetently articulated by the Labour-led government – should have been a matter for free and open discussion in which the myths and realities could be explained and debated. Instead, any opinion that does not cede significant control to tangata whenua is slammed as ‘racist’.
Even group discussions on the forthcoming general election have become more measured, hesitant, noncommittal, or non-existent. It has become much safer to shut up and keep to yourself any thoughts that might be marginalised.
And I detect in our news media the same reticence, a ‘better-left-alone’ zone in which to park topics that might prompt adverse public reactions. Better to stick with the current ‘orthodoxy’. – Gavin Ellis
Zero tolerance is a misguided belief that the potential to take offence must not be tested. It takes long-overdue protection of stigmatised groups to illogical ends. It presumes an inability to respectfully dissent or disagree, and in so doing privileges one group in society over another. – Gavin Ellis
We need to start discussing our differences and our differences of opinion and our approaches to life. There is no better place to start that dialogue than in our news media. However, media will need to disabuse themselves of the notion that their own staff should have a greater footprint in the public sphere than those within society itself. – Gavin Ellis
Commentators said Christopher Luxon needed to look Prime Ministerial. He did. What commentators forgot was it was also important for Chris Hipkins to look Prime Ministerial. At times he looked like a boy in a man’s job.
Psychologists say we are not who we think we are. We are the riders on an elephant. It is our subconscious that really makes our decisions. We the riders just rationalize our subconscious decisions.
Our subconscious minds were asking “who looks the most Prime Ministerial?” – Richard Prebble
There’s a whole series of young deaths in the family and I suspect that probably all of them had the issue that I’m confronting now.
And like me, they didn’t go for a test because they are males and they thought ‘it’s okay – I’m just a bit short of breath, I’ll get over this’.
I think men tend to do that more often than not. I think the lesson out of all of this is, listen to your body, read your body, but more importantly, listen to your wife. – Barry Soper
Not a single economist supports Labour’s GST policy. This is a flimsy band-aid that won’t even take fruit and vegetable prices back to where they were a year ago.
The Government’s own tax working group also found that only 30 per cent of GST reductions are passed on to consumers – meaning per cent of the $2.2 billion policy becomes a subsidy to producers and supermarkets. – Nicola Willis
If this is what success looks like, then the current government is lending new meaning to the tyranny of low expectations. – Steven Joyce
To fire up our economy again, we need to spend much less time on grand visions, and much more time on releasing the animal spirits that drives the risk-takers. – Steven Joyce
We’ve tried the government-led, over-regulated, anti-foreign investment, closed shop and it hasn’t worked. If we don’t change something our economic melancholy will clearly get worse. It’s time to embrace the world and let our risk-takers loose on it. Let them find their own niche and stop holding them back. After all, who dreamed we’d be sending rockets into space before we did. – Steven Joyce
This obstruction and wokery cannot continue: it is designed, quite simply, to stop democracy working. – Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg
Labour’s biggest problem right now is that nobody is talking about them as a potential government at all.
Instead all the focus has been on what shape a National-led government might take.
That has left Labour trying to fight the ghost of a foregone conclusion. – Claire Trevett
I am not a climate change denier, but the system is unfairly skewed in favour of those who have more power and money than farmers.
We shouldn’t follow like sheep, trusting that the cherry-picked information provided to us will have our best interests at heart. We are being manipulated into changing what we do, so everyone else can carry on as normal.
Net zero will happen a lot quicker if the general population changes its behaviour and, until there is a massive reduction in flights and car journeys, no-one will convince me that cows are the problem. – Cath Morley
Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of the rarefied class.
Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth. – Rupert Murdoch
This election, like all elections, is about finding the balance between taxing the productive to buy the votes of the poor, but not overtaxing them so that the flow of output is degraded.- Damien Grant
You’ll not get a job if you turn up in your pyjamas and that’s what I heard from an employer last week, – Louise Upston
Perhaps governments are loth to acknowledge their past failures. But incoming governments should welcome opportunities to wipe out their predecessors’ errors. – Eric Crampton
Bits of regulation that have failed to achieve their purpose and continue to impose cost can remain in place for years after they have been shown to be obviously futile. – Eric Crampton
Peters cites his experience. But he is like the man who killed his parents and then cites his experience as an orphan. Peters’ experience is that he created this Government he now rails against.
Peters claims he could not pick National in 2017 because Bill English told him in confidence that he was about to be rolled by Judith Collins. Sir Bill says the claim is a “fabrication” and that it indicates Peters “could find a reason to go with Labour again”.
Only those who believed Billy Te Kahika’s conspiracy theories will believe Peters. – Richard Prebble
When government programmes unabashedly distinguish “Maori” from “public” components of the community, it is hard to see how social unity is among the Hipkins Cabinet’s considerations. – Point of Order
It is strange to watch from where we watch it, because it is like the New Zealand electorate goes one circuit around the goldfish bowl and then utterly forgets where they were. ‘Oh, this guy was great. Look at his smile’. – Guyon Espiner
The problem for Hipkins is that voters are all too familiar with his and Labour’s record in government. He has had key portfolios, Education, State Services, Covid and Police, among others, hardly distinguishing himself in any of them. – Point of Order
Government debt – which in 2017 stood at $112bn – has doubled to $224bn. That is a load which in servicing alone will be a heavy burden for the next government: yet there is precious little to show for it. – Point of Order
The tone of Labour’s overall campaign – more attacks on National than promotion of what it has been doing in government – confirms Labour’s focus is increasingly on being a viable Opposition than remaining in government. That makes sense, given doubts now emerging among even its own MPs that Labour can win the election. This approach will intensify over the next couple of weeks. – Peter Dunne
National’s biggest risk now is complacency – the sense among its supporters that the election result is a foregone conclusion, so voting is not the priority it should otherwise be. That is why Luxon is spending so much time warning voters that all MMP elections are close, and that the prospect of a Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori government is still a live one, unless people proactively vote for change. – Peter Dunne
For all parties, the next three weeks will be the grimmest of the campaign, but for different reasons. The common challenge facing all of them, though, will be how they continue to swim strongly upstream when most people have probably voted already and therefore switched off listening to what any of the parties have to say, let alone promise. – Peter Dunne
What I want you to do to for me, is I’ve been talking to my customers as well, and I want the wasteful spending to stop. We’ve had a gutsful. – Glenys Hoskins Hill
Alas, the mainstream media are subsidised by the state on terms which require them to endorse the government’s interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and policies which flow from this, spreading “partnership” and “co-governance”.
Thus they are egregiously selective when headlining claims and counter-claims that involve racism, and seem to be turning their spotlight only on anything inflammatory involving ACT, National or New Zealand First candidates, or which those parties have not condemned to the satisfaction of left-wing politicians and their media champions. – Point of Order
How about some honesty and integrity? How about focusing on the most recent science that tells us our ruminant methane emissions are not a problem? How about checking that science carefully – not some science that is now seven years old. How about putting a much greater effort into what is happening with sequestration? Farmers deserve better. – Owen Jennings
No words can ever actually bring comfort in this situation. – Simon Barnett
It’s one foot in front of the other. It’s learning how to breathe again but every day is walking with a limp.
I miss being able to run and unconsciously laugh and that’s what I fear: Will I ever laugh again?
Like a belly laugh that isn’t tainted or tarnished through this filter of real worry and pain. – Simon Barnett
So many people have said you’ve just got a genuine love story.
Unfortunately, it’s just got such a tragic end and I never saw it. I just never saw this.
But as the Bible says, love never gives up, love never loses faith, love is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. –
People seem to think, ‘You’re a Christian, so you must be a fundamentalist, raving Christian.’
My Christianity is pretty simple. It’s just, ‘Love God, love people.’ It’s that simple. – Chris Luxon
It’s just basically about a set of values about how you treat people and how you help people. – Chris Luxon
If I couldn’t do that, if you can’t lead yourself and you can’t lead the party, why the hell would people trust you to lead the country – Chris Luxon
Those who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans. That’s true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students getting distracted during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it’s hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body. – Jonathan Haidt
All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools. – Jonathan Haidt
Believing you can ‘send a message’, or ‘take out some insurance’ or ‘punish’ a party, is deluded.
To vote ‘tactically’ against a party you traditionally support or to counter the perceived threat of another minor party, means you’re at the same time ignoring a raft of potentially crazy economic and social policies, to tick a box which you mistakenly believe will ‘hold the new government to account.’ – Kate Hawkesby
Based on latest polling, a coalition of Labour, Greens and Te Pati Maori gets 45 percent of the seats in Parliament, even though 66 percent of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction.
Head scratch.
A coalition of National and Act, which would arguably change the direction of this country which two thirds of voters think is heading in the wrong direction, on latest polling has only 50.8 percent of the seats.
This makes no sense. – Kate Hawkesby
Any government involving NZ First will go in no direction, it will stall as Winston looks to negotiate, grandstand and play games – hauling on the handbrake of progress in any and all directions. – Kate Hawkesby
The stakes for New Zealand have never been higher, we are at a cross-road – and we cannot afford to stall now in the middle of the intersection. – Kate Hawkesby
When it comes to political bias, the results are definitive – journalists overwhelmingly identify as left wing: “There are very few strongly right-wing journalists, but a substantial number of moderately or strongly left-wingers.”
The survey reveals 5 percent describe themselves as “extreme left” and 15 percent as “hard left”. Of the rest, 22 percent say they are “left”, 20 percent are “mild left”, and 23 percent are “middle left”, while 6 percent identify as “middle right”, 4 percent “mild right”, and only around 1 percent all up say they are “right”, “hard right” or “extreme right”.
In other words, nine out of ten New Zealand journalists are socialists, with one in three hard-core. Only one in ten journalists claim to have no socialist inclinations. – Muriel Newman
While the public wants journalists to report the news in an unbiased manner, presenting both sides of the argument on contentious issues so they can make up their own minds, that’s no longer how most journalists see it.
They regard ‘educating the audience’ as their most important role, followed by ‘countering disinformation’. But in some cases, this has led to a concerning development: hard-core left-wing journalists describing information they disagree with as “fake news” or “disinformation” in order to discredit those with alternative views. – Muriel Newman
The role that rose the most sharply, albeit from a low level, was ‘supporting government policy’.
In other words, the gulf that has opened up between what the public has traditionally expected from the media and what the media themselves believe their role to be, is no doubt responsible for the decline in public interest in the mainstream news.
Making things worse is the fact that journalists overwhelmingly believe the Treaty of Waitangi should be a key part of their reporting. – Muriel Newman
With journalists now advocating politics rather than merely reporting it, it’s little wonder that they are now being berated with the same contempt the public has for politicians.
While thankfully the media lovefest with Jacinda Ardern began to wane before she actually left Parliament, the impact of her incompetent leadership on our society has been devastating.
More than anything, what Labour’s time in office has taught us is that for our democracy to function properly, we need balanced journalism. – Muriel Newman
The Ardern legacy is about to come to an end and a new government will need to set about correcting a multitude of wrongs. But the media should also reflect on the status of its industry and what it needs to do to restore public trust. The damage done is such that restoring their reputation will be no small task.
Predominantly journalists need to go back to their role as neutral observers and reporters of the news. And with regards to contentious issues, they need to return to providing a balance of perspectives so that their audience has reliable information on which to make up their own mind.
In particular, they need to recognise the dreadful division within our country that Labour has created – with their assistance – and they need to help rebuild our society and heal the harm.
In summary, we don’t need the media to advocate political agendas – we have politicians for that. But what we do need is balance and truth in the news. – Muriel Newman
I’ve had heaps of challenges over the past 40 years, no money, low product returns, the risk of going broke for about 10 or 15 of those years.
But I was young, it was a challenge, and I had the opportunity. It was either work hard and get better at farming or go broke. – Steve Wyn-Harris
That’s their challenge. We’ve had a good few years with a long period of good returns, so I’ve warned him there’s inevitably going to be a drop. But it’s not a bad thing to start off tough.”
“We are producing quality products and just want to carry on feeding 35 million well off people with good quality products. We not going to try and feed everyone. – Steve Wyn-Harris
I actually love voting. I love exercising our right to democracy, I love that we can, I never take it for granted. Every time I’m in the polling station I think of all the places where they can’t do this or can’t do it with any freedom or integrity anyway. I mean it might not always go your way, and you might not like the system, but at least you have the right to do it. Nothing’s stopping you from doing it. – Kate Hawkesby
If you can’t run on your record, you have to fake it. – Not PC
As we reflect on the —let’s be frank— end of this government’s tenure, I can’t help thinking about all the stuff they dropped the ball on, that I wonder if they regret.
Mental health, the $1.9 billion none of us know where it is. Light rail. Child poverty. Kiwibuild, a tangible disaster. Not taking the country with them when they had a majority, an unheard of opportunity to take us with them, and they blew it.
The MIQ shenanigans, the shutting of the borders for so long, the crime levels, the co-governance, three waters, they had so much promise, and they just dropped the ball on it all. Too many consultants, too many reviews, too many ministers with scandals and issues that saw them off one by one, just too much chaos. – Kate Hawkesby
Politics is downstream of culture, and I do not expect political leaders to create currently non-existent demand for a more traditional culture.
So, anyone wanting a stoutly conservative leader is going to be disappointed by prime minister Luxon. You don’t be a successful chief executive at firms like Unilever Canada and Air New Zealand by putting culture wars at the heart of your mission. The opposite, actually. – Liam Hehir
I have met Luxon several times and my views were changed pretty much straight away. He really did seem to take a methodical approach to his diagnosis of our national problems and how to turn them around. There is a middle ground between being “relaxed” and being a micromanager too obsessed with detail to get much actually done.
Luxon struck me as somebody with a good understanding of the balance between autonomy and accountability – Liam Hehir
We seem to be afflicted with a distinct “New Zealand disease” characterised by an inability to improve outcomes no matter how much public money is gobbled up in the process.
We’ve fed Wellington well, but generated flab instead of muscle. The capacity that were there have been atrophied to the point that even basic policy can no longer be conceived and implemented without the intervention of consultants. They have become the orderlies of public affairs, supporting a paralysed bureaucracy to do no more than move around to prevent bed sores. – Liam Hehir
What we need now isn’t necessarily a roadmap, but a leader. We need someone who can delegate responsibilities while insisting on accountability and productivity. These are traits that successful corporate leaders have. Luxon has a better history of that than any other leader on offer. – Liam Hehir
How you vote depends on what we believe our country truly needs at this juncture. If you believe that the status quo is serving us well and that more of the same is the path to prosperity, then by all means, cast your vote for a party that promises continuity. If you think New Zealand is fundamentally rotten and needs to be made into something radically different, there are plenty of options on offer.
However, if you, like me, believe that what our country desperately needs is repair and revitalisation, then you should probably vote for a government led by Christopher Luxon. – Liam Hehir
With all the conflict and negativity of this election campaign, we shouldn’t forget the extent to which Kiwis still agree on a few simple things – family, sport, BBQs and the beach.
It’s important to celebrate our shared values and the things that unite us as a nation.
A great example of the broad political consensus that still exists in this country, is the enduring unpopularity of New Zealand First and its leader Winston Peters.
Statistically speaking, Peters unites Kiwis like almost no one else. – Liam Dann
Peters dislikes having his style compared to populist US politician Donald Trump, which is fair enough. Peters might be populist but he isn’t actually popular.
Trump won the US Presidency in 2016 and still polls in territory that could see him win it again.
For the past 30 years, despite having the strongest personal brand in New Zealand politics, Peters has never come close to winning an election. – Liam Dann
That degree of political consensus around Peters should be heartening. But, unfortunately, we’ve got a political system that seems almost purpose-built for him.
MMP isn’t necessarily a terrible idea but Peters has found the glitch in it, which he continues to cash in on as if it was a dodgy pokie machine down the back of a quiet RSA.
Around 3 or 4 per cent of New Zealanders seem to be consistently sold on his 1950s school-master schtick and the “pull your socks up” policies he promotes.
To get beyond that, Peters has proved a master of tapping into disaffected voters every three years, whoever and wherever they might be. – Liam Dann
The answer to the bigger question of how we deal with a political system that keeps throwing the balance of power to this one unpopular political figure is more complex.
Hoping that Peters might quietly retire has proved futile. He looks more than capable of sticking around until the technology allows us all to upload our brains to the internet. So it is safest to assume that some version of Peters is built into the system for the foreseeable future. – Liam Dann
Peters was, is and always will be, good copy for a journalist.
But it is a great shame for the overwhelming majority of Kiwi voters who’ll once again cast their votes for candidates who are not Winston Peters. – Liam Dann
Can there be a more poetic end to this government than its Prime Minister, confined to his hotel room, the last soldier of a forgotten war stranded on an isolated island while the rest of his people prepare to vote his party back to the Stone Age?
Hipkins was central to many of the worst aspects of the lockdowns, mandates, failed procurement processes and state-overreach of the Covid era. To see him grounded, a prisoner not of Covid but of his own past, while the nation looks forward to whatever regime will assume power next month, is somewhat ironic. – Damien Grant
Covid revealed something ugly about ourselves. About how easily we will comply with the most absurd directions and how few of us are willing to take even the mildest stand for our, or our neighbours’, liberty.
We dressed up this compliance as a necessary commitment to save the vulnerable. But was it, really? Or did we just enjoy, for a moment, being part of a mob. – Damien Grant
When those pushed to the margins finally revolted, erupting onto the lawns of parliament, our media were not even willing to get close to what, in the public mind, was a leper colony, in every interpretation of that phrase.
Here were those, many already on the margins economically and mentally, driven to a public act of desperation and self-destruction and all we could do was wait until the truncheons were finally deployed to drag them from the parliamentary lawn and our consciousness.
And we have paid a terrible price. Closing schools has coincided with a spike in truancy that has remained stubbornly resistant to resolution.
A generation has been locked out of the property market thanks to the asset-shock caused by quantitative easing. The explosion of government debt that will never be re-paid because neither major party has the stomach to bring the finances back to surplus will blight our sovereign accounts for generations.
And so we come back to Chris Hipkins, languishing in his hotel room, face pressed metaphorically against the glass, as the nation moved on without him and shortly without his party. It is the perfect farewell to his administration, to the Covid-era, and away from any reconciliation for what occurred and our individual part in it. – Damien Grant
Four times out of the last ten elections it looks as if an ancient throwback to former times, with ideas no more substantial than can be committed to the back of a postage stamp, is likely to decide the future of our country. – Michael Bassett
If only we could get a new government led by ACT and National we would have a good chance of restoring New Zealand’s reputation as a country of achievers. Let’s all do our best in the days that remain before the polls close. – Michael Bassett
That’s how rural New Zealand works. You’re better off to get on. There’s not many people I can’t get on with. – Suze Redmayne
It’s pretty simple, really, this government is doing irreparable damage to rural and provincial New Zealand – and it’s got to stop,” – Suze Redmayne
As an Aucklander who felt like they got locked down for way too long I can tell you from where I sit, I’d have liked to think he would have felt they could have handled that better. He didn’t mention any regrets around slow procurement of PPE or RAT tests or locking Kiwis out of their own country for so long, or having the borders shut seemingly forever, but he did think they could’ve managed the costs owed for MIQ better. He still doesn’t know how much money is owed from that, interestingly. But he does back his government’s approach to crime, co-governance, and management of the economy.
He puts a lot of the criticism of his government’s performance down to international headwinds or global pressures, doesn’t take much responsibility for what their part in it all has been. But when asked if he backed his Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, he said he did. Now her appointment was odd from the get-go. – Kate Hawkesby
She also yesterday put her foot in it when she didn’t condemn the attacks on Israel. While other international leaders condemned them, she described it as ‘an outbreak of violence between Israel and Gaza…’ and called for ‘an immediate end to all violence.’
Now alongside being so embarrassing that the PM and leader of the opposition had to jump in immediately and correct that statement, it also got picked up by overseas media. Sky News Australia reported that she failed to condemn the attack. . .
But here’s the weird thing, she didn’t even run that statement past him, they didn’t even talk before it went out. Hence he had to put out another one straight after it. But he backs her on the international stage, said he has absolute confidence in her. Which I think helps explain why his party is so often accused of not reading the room.
If you think that’s an acceptable offering from your foreign minister, and you don’t even want to pick up a phone to each other beforehand, then you’re probably not aware of how low the bar has sunk. – Kate Hawkesby
The trouble with MMP, apart from its potentially bizarre outcomes, is it is too complicated. The sheer amount of communication I have received from people this year clearly confused about the value of their electorate vote as opposed to their party vote, is frightening.
And 99.9% of us would not have even known about the dead person rule. And there is nothing wrong with a dead person rule if the dead person rule isn’t complete and utter insanity, which it is.
Which makes it not only confusing but stupid as well.
Yet an entire country could be run as the outworking of that one new entirely invented seat we don’t actually need.
Go figure – Mike Hosking
Kiwis aren’t just voting at the ballot box, they’re voting with their feet. And while New Zealanders are fleeing high taxes, a weak economy, and decaying public services, Labour continue to blame everything on global factors.
“It’s only with a strong economy that we can deliver the opportunities that allow everyone to get ahead. That’s why National will rebuild the economy so New Zealanders and their families can build a life here rather than in Brisbane and Sydney. – Nicola Willis
Are the Business Editors at Newshub, Stuff & NZ Herald going to call the PM to account for his false claim on Newstalk ZB that our GDP growth put us ahead of “every country other than Japan”? It was misinformation on steroids. Hipkins is the guy who went berserk about misinformation about the Covid vaccine, yet I cannot conceive of a greater piece of misinformation than telling 5 million Kiwis a few days before a General Election our country is ranked top of the world on GDP growth figures when we’re ranked almost bottom.
How is he getting away with it? – Robert MacCulloch
The existence of the seven Maori seats in parliament is an element of inequality in our constitution which the next government should remove.
Both Maori Party (Te Pāti Māori) MPs have recently shown their contempt for democracy: Rawiri Waititi describes it as “a tyranny of the majority”. An obvious reason for their attitude is that if the separate Maori electorates were abolished, their Party would win no seats in parliament. – Roger Childs
The misinformation and negative campaigning is part of modern life, I suppose, and part of the final days of election campaigning. But it is a bit dispiriting. You roll your eyes, and you think surely people know that that is not strictly true. You only have to go to any of the parties’ websites and see their policies for yourself, it’s really not difficult to find.
But people don’t do it. They’d rather take the snackable bites that come through the media as advertising and believe them to be true. Even though mistrust in the media is huge, according to polls, doesn’t matter, people will believe what they want to hear. If they perhaps are biased against Labour or biased against National, they will hear what they want to hear. They will stop all deductive reasoning and critical thinking.
If you still haven’t voted yet, just have a long hard think about why are you going to vote? How you want the country to look? What direction you want it to go? And don’t listen to the ads. Because that’s all they are, they’re ads that are, at the very best, gussying up information to try and appeal to you. To try to frighten you into voting.
It’s a bit of a shame, really, it it’d be better to go for the positives. This is what will happen. This is what we can do and to represent it truthfully. But I guess that is too much to hope for in 2023, Anyway, only three days to go. – Kerre Woodham
Whatever happens this Saturday, despite the warnings of the political class, it’s unlikely the public will see chaos.
Parliament can be a chaotic place at the best of times, and part of the skill of government is appearing publicly like a swan gliding gracefully over the surface of the water, regardless of whether underneath it is paddling furiously or an eel is in the process of biting its foot.
What will also be left, however the parties arrange themselves, is two fundamental problems for a new government to deal with, both of which involve the public’s experience of spending more and getting less in return. – Ben Thomas
Despite significant government spending increases (only some of which represented one-off Covid response funding) there is a widespread understanding that public services are on the brink.
A new term, “ramping”, has been coined for patients left waiting at ambulance bays because there is no capacity for them in hospitals; educational achievement is bad and deteriorating; Covid absenteeism, fed by left-behind learners, persists.
Mental health services face worse challenges than ever despite record investment. When the immigration tap was turned back on to feed skill-starved business, scammers brought in houses full of exploited migrants for non-existent jobs. – Ben Thomas
While National’s social investment approach has barely been mentioned during the campaign, it could ultimately transform the public service. Social investment is an iterative approach striking a balance between using data for policy and experimenting with innovative programmes which can be ditched, tweaked or scaled up after proper evaluation.
The swollen public expenditure since 2017 has demonstrated that more money is only ever a part, even if a necessary part, of repairing deteriorating services. Both parties also share an aspiration for setting concrete targets for the public service based on outcomes (in the shopping analogy, lunches for the week), rather than inputs (spending whatever amount of money you have), or outputs (two lettuces!).
On the other hand, there are numerous mathematical possibilities that will mean not even the possibility of significant change in this area after Saturday. In that case a bigger worry for voters is not sensational short-term chaos, but slow decline. – Ben Thomas
What a miserable state of affairs.
By all means criticise and critique politicians for their policies — and there’s always room for light-hearted questions to politicians — but that undertone shows that some think grasping at rumour and innuendo is a reasonable response to poor polling.
New Zealand deserves better. – Felix Desmarais
Playgrounds have been a part of my life, and part of my children’s lives. There is something about me that has never grown up and I fit a playground beautifully.
The child in me will never die. – Joy Crowley
They never really did anything for us ordinary New Zealanders. They were so busy being kind and giving things to Maori and poor people they forgot about the rest of us. – Kevin Hunter
As they plod toward today’s general election, New Zealanders have become dispirited and fearful, facing a cost of living crisis with rising food costs, rents and interest rates, an apparently out of control crime wave (a 720 per cent increase in retail crime since 2016) and a crumbling health system.
Kiwis who can’t get to a doctor or pay their rent and mortgage can’t see any way out of the crises building around them and don’t trust the Labour government to help them. – Anne Barrowclough and Cameron Stewart
They promised the moon, and delivered a flashlight. – Chris Trotter
People liked Ardern’s intentions, what they never saw from her was delivery. Ultimately, you can make all the promises in the world but if people don’t see a change happening in their own lives, then eventually they grow tired of the slogan. Nicola Willis
Ardern was the worst prime minister in New Zealand’s history. She talked a big talk and did nothing, she was the cause of the biggest problems we’ve got. This country is in a bloody mess as a result, we have serious financial problems, crime is soaring and she bought in co-governance (a decision-making model which gives equal rights to Maoris and non-Maoris) which is anti-democratic. The country suffered because of her radical left ideology and Hipkins was one of her disciples, so he is just Jacinda-lite. – Ewen Richie
You can’t really be the prime minister of excuses. You’ve got to be the prime minister of delivery – Nicola Willis
The Labour government has pushed a cultural ethnic agenda quite strongly in lieu of making more substantive transformational decisions.
Standards in health, education, housing, the Maori standard of living, their place in life has not been improved by this government. It has used more easy wins – (the Maori language), co-governance – that are easy to deliver rather than building more houses or making other, tougher decisions that would deliver. – Bryce Edwards
Taken together, the departure of five ministers (including Jacinda Ardern) in the same number of months, gave the impression of a government in crisis. – Bryce Edwards
There will be some temptation to put the blame on Covid or ill economic winds. Those factors are part of the story of Labour’s decline, but if Labour doesn’t look at some of the more difficult factors in their fall from favour, they could face a very long road back to power. – Bryce Edwards
Thank you so much and thank you New Zealand … you have reached for hope and you have voted for change. – Christopher Luxon
My pledge to you is that our government will deliver for every New Zealander. – Christopher Luxon
New Zealand is a high-cost place to live, work and do business and one which now clearly does not generate enough wealth to continue to fund first-world services at current levels of taxation. – Luke Malpass
So who does Labour represent today? A few middle class academics and beneficiaries?
In opposition, how does Labour win back young progressives from the Greens? Do they outflank them?
How do they win back Māori seats from TPM, who will always be more uncompromising than Labour.
Given a choice between the working class and the woke class, they will always go for the woke class.
For Labour to have a real chance of becoming a party that polls out of the 20s, they need to wrestle with an identity crisis – who do they actually represent, as opposed to who they claim they represent. – David Farrar
This is why people turned against Labour, because they could see all of this ineptitude. Not because they’re racist, or anti trans, or venal money grubbing capitalists who want to squeeze more out of the oppressed working men or women.
Basically, it’s because Labour were completely and utterly hopeless at delivering all the myriad promises they made to New Zealanders. And when it came down to it, they simply could not deliver what New Zealanders needed and wanted. – Kerre Woodham
I vacillate between being mildly surprised and hoha that so many ‘Kiwis’ just don’t realise or don’t want to accept that Māoridom is a broad church. Many times, over the years, I’ve been asked, ‘why can’t you Maoris just get along with each other?’ The inference being we should always agree on everything, usually because that would be convenient for someone.
I always reply; you bring me all the denominations of the Christian church – you know, Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, agreeing on everything in the Bible, and I’ll bring you on a silver platter Māoridom agreeing on everything. – Chris Wikaira
Even when it ended, the moment felt like it just passed unremarked. There was no grand statement of gratitude to the city for its national service when the lockdown ceased. It just stopped. In conversations that summer with people from out of town, you would frequently hear surprise expressed at the length of the lockdown. Which is natural – if you didn’t go through it, you wouldn’t really recall it.
Those who lived through won’t ever forget it, though. Many people are still carrying some level of scar tissue from the myriad downstream impacts. Ultimately, while casting about for specific blame for electoral defeats is invariably inexact, the cause of the wipeout in Auckland feels traceable to those anguished months two years ago. When the city ached, and felt like Wellington barely knew. At least, until Saturday. – Duncan Grieve
Labour deserved to lose. Not because there are bad people in Labour. I’m sad at some of the talented Labour MPs and candidates who have lost, for they are good people. But Labour deserved to lose on the simple basis of incompetence. They failed to deliver on numerous iconic promises, and managed to increase taxation and spending by $60 billion a year yet produce worse outcomes across the board in health and education. While Bill English managed to produce zero spending increase budgets which saw improved outcomes in health and education. Labour’s first and worst mistake was abandoning the Better Public Services targets in 2017. – David Farrar
If that land class is better suited to growing pineapples in the future by all means I’ll grow pineapples.” He pauses. “I’d love to grow pineapples. – Rhys Roberts
I guess we feel a bit like we’re getting told that we need to pay for a prevention of a disease we already have, whilst also trying to prove that we could be the cure. – Rhys Roberts
I don’t think we have a rural divide in New Zealand, I really don’t.
We have a divide in the way that we interpret our challenges, and at the end of the day, that’s quite common.
In a highly functional community, you’re going to have difference of opinion. If you don’t have difference of opinion, there’s going to be issues. – Rhys Roberts
It’s really hard for people to understand what farmers do and don’t do – both good and bad. – Carl Davidson
People in Christchurch are much more aware how much we depend on the rural sector: I think the earthquakes taught us that; the Covid recovery taught us that.
“The reason we’ve done OK is because we’ve got a really strong rural base. – Carl Davidson
We quickly learned as a sector that we don’t know how to tell our story, because our story is quite complex and technical and scientific, and distilling down into bite-size messaging is really hard. And so since since the 2017 election to now, we still haven’t worked out how to do that effectively, in my mind. – Sarah Perriam-Lampp
You learn a lot about the reasons why the media have been that way to date. They simply don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s not their fault. –Sarah Perriam-Lampp
The rural media has a huge amount to play in that rural-urban divide rhetoric. And I am really vocal to my colleagues in rural media about how much they contribute to a narrative that may actually be not true.
You talk to any farmers across the country, I would hand-on-heart say about 90 percent of them think they are hated, and that there is a rural-urban divide. That hasn’t been a constant message in mainstream media, that’s been a constant message in rural media.
I want to hold them to account for the detriment that they’re doing to mental health of our farmers by reiterating a rhetoric that serves them really well – the them and us. –Sarah Perriam-Lampp
When the identity of the farmer is under attack, they feel under attack. – Sarah Perriam-Lampp
These terrorists want to scare us into silence and obedience. But that won’t happen. They hate our free societies. We must protect our open democratic society. We are not the ones to adapt to terrorists … We must face the threat with more openness and democracy. – Ulf Kristersson
Chippie do the math’s ,the smaller the country’s population the smaller the total number of Covid deaths will be ,so stop Wowserising about how good New Zealand’s Covid response was.
As for having kept NZ moving and protecting those that need more help the facts don’t support your political propaganda.
In comparison Luxton and Seymore seem passionate about making measurable improvements that will benefit “all” New Zealanders and to misquote Sir Winston Churchill “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the failure that is the Labour Party and the beginning of a new future full of promise.” – Sir Ray Avery
Here are a few lessons for the new National-led government: set clear policy objectives and communicate them well; be consistent and principled; prioritise and sequence the desired reform agenda; keep a close eye on emerging and creeping policy problems; expect multiple ‘black swan’ events and be willing to change tack; demonstrate high ethical integrity; respect legitimate protest; and avoid short-term tactical decisions that undermine vital long-term goals. – Jonathan Boston
Over the other side, Jacinda was ready to sell her grandmother – and she did. – Ron Mark
Jacinda was prepared to sell her grandmother”.. read the headline yesterday.
A statement made by Ron Mark when interviewed about how coalition negotiations have gone in the past with NZ First. Unfortunately, he went on to say in the article that not only was she ready to sell her grandmother, but she did.
Ouch.
What an indictment on an already unpopular leader. But it should serve as a warning to Luxon and co as they head into the rocky, murky waters, that is the negotiation of coalition deals. Hopefully they don’t feel they need to sell the grandparents. – Kate Hawkesby
For the 28th month in a row, the Reserve Bank has failed to hold inflation to within the target range. With inflation still sitting at an unsustainably high 5.6%, hardworking Kiwis struggling to make ends meet will be hurting most from this news and the only question that will matter today is for how long they will keep being punished for flagrant and wasteful Government spending?
“Whilst other nations are nearing a return to the 3% target range, Kiwis are still seeing food and fuel prices spiral out of control. Any incoming Government must hold the Reserve Bank and its leadership accountable for their failure to meet their targets. Moreso, this is simply proof that Labour’s introduction of a dual mandate for RBNZ has not worked and the Reserve Bank must return to its single focus on inflation. – James Ross
With most of the English-language global media dominated by progressives, it can be hard to get the straight story when voters reject the left’s priorities. But the votes in the Antipodes on Saturday represent victories for common sense over ideology. – Wall Street Journal
Given that the Right already commands the loyalty of New Zealand’s farmers and businesspersons, the electoral defection of skilled working-class Pakeha, along with New Zealanders of Indian and Chinese descent, threatens to be decisive. Statistics New Zealand calculates the European plus Asian share of the New Zealand population at 85 percent, adding for good measure that nearly 30 percent of New Zealanders were born somewhere else. While the Right clearly does not command the entirety of those demographics, the Left’s hold on what remains: essentially, the Professional-Managerial Class, Pasefika and Māori; is unequal to the task of reclaiming the power it has lost.
What the Right has won it is unlikely to lose any time soon. – Chris Trotter
If the only discourse allowed is between fellow travellers who nod heads in agreement, then it will never be robust, it will never challenge, it will never change things and you certainly won’t get the chance to argue your case or defend your corner.
Rounded out, human beings relish the debate, and I would hope that would be one of the basic criteria for any public representative; that you relish debate and you are rounded out. – Mike Hosking
We have hard times ahead to heal our country when much will be asked of us, I suspect, and we will need to do a lot more than make up our minds about our nation’s direction based on a single image and a knee-jerk reaction. – Penn Raine
I had bought my tickets in a matter of minutes without having to leave my desk. This will no doubt seem perfectly ordinary to people who do not remember what a performance buying airline tickets once was. On the other hand, when I arrived at the airport terminal all the doors except one, on the other side of the building and far away, were closed, for “technical” reasons.
Is this not a metaphor for modern life: tickets to go to the far end of the world in a matter of minutes and doors that won’t open? – Theodore Dalrymple
In a world possibly untethered from its moorings, we retain the ability to derive joy from those events that remain within our control and to cherish milestones, large or small, or our own lives. – Damien Grant
Fortunately, our democracy is strong. We have frequent elections that are administered independently by the Electoral Commission with clear rules and regulations.
There are always winners and losers in elections and that is determined by the public via the ballot box. We accept the result and get on with our lives, safe in the knowledge that there will be another election in three years.
On Saturday, Kiwis stood up and said enough of the division and lack of delivery, what an incredible result.
We have a democracy we can all be proud of. Our goal for the next Parliament and beyond is to unite New Zealanders and ensure we grow and develop as a nation. – Stuart Smith
Before the Herald argues our democracy is failing and the election was bought, with no analysis of the total sums spent by all Labour-aligned compared to National-aligned institutions, the paper should refrain from undermining trust in our nation’s integrity. My impression is that overwhelmingly more money & power was brought to bear by Labour, using its affiliate organizations in the unions, media & educational “establishments” than National to try to swing the election. Even with it, the people were not fooled. – Robert MacCulloch
The rugby they play in Heaven was played by the All Blacks against the Pumas.
The rugby they play in Purgatory was played by the Springboks against England.
The rugby they play in Hell was played by England against the Springboks. – Spiro Zavos
Well no disrespect but that’s what happens for the rest of the country, New Zealanders…work up till Christmas, they take Christmas break and then they get back into it in the new year. It’s very similar here I think. . .
New Zealanders voted for change, we’ve got a lot to get through, if we start earlier and have to finish later, so be it. – Christopher Luxon
Along with the pursuit and retention of power, the essence of politics is also about the art of the possible, that is, recognising current reality and adapting to it. The awkward truth for Wellington is that while it shifted left at the recent election, the rest of the country shifted right. Wellington is now a political outlier and no amount of virtuous clinging to previously held positions is going to change that. Wellington’s leaders need to quickly come to grips with the new political realities and develop the pragmatism required to achieve at least some of what they want. Simply shouting from the sidelines about what “should” be rather than acknowledging what now “will” be, will leave them looking impotent and irrelevant. – Peter Dunne
Wellington will only get moving once it has a coherent and financially robust plan to put before central government. This will require much more realistic leadership than holding cosy little meetings between the Mayor and the city’s local non-government MPs to mourn the loss of LGWM as they want it.
It is the reality of who holds political power and who does not, and Wellington now looks set to learn that the hard way. – Peter Dunne
Democracy should not be rushed, and caretaker governments can do no harm, even if they can do no good. – Brent Edwards
You could call it decentralisation, meaning Wellington should no longer be in the driver’s seat for everything.
You could also call it localism, which means the same but stresses the role of local communities.
Call it subsidiarity if you want to show off your command of Latin. That means that issues should be dealt with as close to the people affected as possible.
That latter term, especially, sounds a bit academic. But really, it is just common sense. If the rubbish collection can be organised locally, there is no need for a national minister for rubbish collection. Just keep it local, thank you very much. – Oliver Hartwich
Instead of improving public services, Labour’s centralisation agenda has made matters much worse. It destroyed a few functional polytechs to create a dysfunctional mega bureaucracy. It has shifted resources from the frontline to feed an ever-burgeoning public service in Wellington. – Oliver Hartwich
If we have learned nothing else from the Election result, the following is true:
Overwhelmingly, Kiwis have made a choice that is an emphatic rejection of pretty much all the radical left plans for our future.
We and they should suck it up. – Clive Bibby
https://twitter.com/damienmgrant/status/1717255927383183758
You’ve got to think there’s something very rotten in the state of the public service in this country that they’re carrying on —in some quarters where they know full well they’re getting cancelled— that they’re carrying on hiring people, working on projects, spending money, commissioning work.
Why? They’re not going anywhere. Three Waters, light rail, Let’s get Wellington Moving… why are people on these projects persevering when they must know it’s over? They’re gone, surely the spending stops. It’s reckless and wasteful, and smacks of a deluded sense of entitlement that they can carry on in the false belief —or maybe just arrogance— that wasting taxpayers’ money on contracts and outlay trumps the reality, which is they’re toast.
Give it up. Stop already. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on things that will be completely irrelevant and non-existent. There is a guy, as we know from yesterday, at Three Waters hiring people. What a waste of time and money. – Kate Hawkesby
It just feels to me that while all the excuses and hot air is getting bandied about, yet more money’s being spent, or should I say wasted. And I think we as taxpayers deserve better.
Hopefully a change in direction and a shift in priorities with this new government will refresh outdated attitudes within the public service, and this nose-in-the-trough-to-the-bitter-end mentality, will stop. – Kate Hawkesby
On her website, she says
Gender expression can be quite fluid, and just because a child chooses to express themselves in one way now does not mean that they have to remain with that gender identity for the rest of their lives.
No – that’s not gender identity. That’s personality. That’s expressing your likes and dislikes. Girls can be more masculine-like. Boys can be more feminine-like. Girls can be doctors. Boys can be nurses. But that’s nothing to do with choosing your gender, chemicalising and castrating healthy bodies, and ignoring biology. – Bob McCoskrie
Hateful speech is not the problem. It is a symptom of a larger malaise and one that will require more than a simple legal remedy to overcome. – Damien Grant
The freedom that many people now cherish above all is the freedom from the consequences of their own actions, while other people are only too eager to take on the role of guardian and protector of the weak and supposedly incapacitated—which is to say, a large proportion of the population. Through taxation, I may be my brother’s keeper; but I am not even my own keeper. – Theodore Dalrymple
As with so many discussions these days, one feels a sense of gloom even as one enters into them. Propositions that even a few years before would have seemed so outré that no one would have thought them worth refuting become almost unchallengeable orthodoxies in a matter of a few years, if not of months; it requires courage to dispute them, at least if one has a position in an institution or organisation to protect. A subliminal fear—which sometimes is not even subliminal—stalks intellectual life. One does not so much disagree as pronounce heresies. For the moment, luckily, burning at the stake is only metaphorical. – Theodore Dalrymple
These days, one is obliged often to argue against evident absurdities. If you argue against them, however, you confer dignity upon them; but if you don’t, they go by default. I have more and more sympathy with Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist who wrote millions of words, when he was asked what he thought of Hitler. When it comes to Hitler, he said, I can’t think of anything to say. Hitler was beneath criticism. – Theodore Dalrymple
Never let what you can’t do stop you from doing what you can do. – Jonathan Wallis, quoting his father Sir Tim.
Climate change should not be a left/right issue. But it is, and the fundamental reason for that is not, as the Left claim, that the Right is filled with “science deniers”, but because dealing with Climate Change offers the ultimate lefty wet dream of the State controlling our lives in at least as intimate detail as the old Soviets. – Tom Hunter
These people, these Leftists, for all their crying about how much they care about humans and human society, are lying in the same way that they lied about caring about South Africa or now about Palestine or … well, pick any issue they’ve pushed over the last few decades. Agnes Walton is John Minto is Marama Davidson is Elizabeth Kerekere is…
They hate our society and wish to destroy it. That’s the real reason they’re hot on Climate Change. Science has nothing to do with it. – Tom Hunter
Believe it or not, being exposed to opposing opinions is actually more healthy than harmful – as the good Lord noted, we appear to be “in for a period of growing authoritarianism and growing bullying of one sector of fellow citizens against another”, in part due to “a growing intolerance of dissent, a growing intolerance of opinions” that we don’t share”. – Nick Grant
My mum actually she said to me if it was my boy who’d been in [that] situation, how would you want him to feel and you wouldn’t want him to beat himself up.
Try not to be too hard on myself. I think it’s something I’m going to have live with forever, unfortunately. It’s going to hurt for a while. – Sam Cane
Look the headlines are disturbing, if you group them all together you’d just be living in a state of worry all the time.
And I know there are a lot of people getting great care with our wonderful health workforce, and deep down I still hope that the care will be there when I need it, but I’m certainly not counting on any longer in the way that I used to. – Tim Beveridge
The new National-led coalition can only pay for the additional demands on healthcare and pensions coming from the ageing population if it gains far greater tax revenues from rapidly accelerating economic growth. – Robert MacCulloch
It’s a good thing to cut back all of the rules imposing costs on our society greater than the benefits. Labour has loved red tape, as much as lawyers have loved making money out of it. – Robert MacCulloch
Cleaning out the waste that came with the 15,000 additional bureaucrats hired under Labour will be endorsed by most of us who don’t live in Wellington. Labour enabled time-wasting and gave away power to legions of highly-paid, working-from-home, public sector managers who flourished under its lax governance.
National must do so since it has no other room to move on spending. – Robert MacCulloch
Three Waters is a business case lesson in how to take a problem and complicate it beyond recognition and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
A problem that, badly mangled, is never that hard to actually sort – Mike Hosking
The seeds of Labour’s election defeat were sown before the 2020 election. Labour’s extraordinary victory in 2020 on the back of its initial handling of the Covid-19 response masked the fact that the polls had been turning against it from the start of 2020. Failure to deliver on key 2017 election promises such as Kiwibuild and light rail in Auckland by 2020 had already marked the Government down as all talk, but little action. – Peter Dunne
National comes to office at a difficult time, and with a policy agenda that will be hard to achieve. Labour’s defeat shows clearly that voters treat policy failure by governments harshly. They will be no different when it comes to assessing National’s performance at the next election. Alongside that, just holding the line will not be enough. National must not only deliver on its policy, but also substantially grow its party vote if it is to win again.
Christopher Luxon says he thrives on challenges. They do not come much bigger than the one he has just embarked on. – Peter Dunne
For a decade or so I have trained the wisteria along one side of the house, rigging a stout wire for it to cling to and urging it on. It has responded to love as most of us do, to such an extent that it is now warping the purlins, sagging the soffit, fouling the spouting and other sins against home maintenance. And as long as I occupy this house it will continue to do so. For every October it pays its rent with a bloom-profusion, a lilac extravagance, a petal-profligacy that lifts the heart. – Joe Bennett
It is a cool morning and the bees working the wisteria are the best-named bees, the most beeish bees, bumble bees. They are chubby, hairy-bodied, bandy legged and they go to work in temperatures that leave honey bees still huddled in the hive. Some boffin once famously opined that, according to physics, bumble bees ought not to be able to fly. But that says more about physics than it does about the bees, who’ve been happily flying for 25 million years. – Joe Bennett
Bees are insects and we tend to look down on insects. We spray them and slay them. We call them bugs or creepy-crawlies or reasons not to visit Australia. But they rarely seem to resent us. And they specialise in profusion. – Joe Bennett
Insects are wisteria flowers by another name.
I watch the bees for a while, see how they crawl over the petals, mauling and fumbling, famously busy, monomaniac like all wild things, doing what they do and only what they do. Such clarity of being, such singleness of purpose in the mess of my own back yard. – Joe Bennett
Asked about caucus, Hipkins responded, “I think everybody will understand that it was pretty rough.”
That would make a change from the typical Labour Party caucus meeting. Labour MPs recount in private that during the Ardern years, caucus was generally a time for genuflection and deference. Questions were routinely used by MPs and Ministers to praise and flatter the party leadership in a manner than one MP described as “North Korean”. On the rare occasion that MPs did try to raise concerns, they were brushed aside by Ardern amidst a chorus of “tsk tsk” and shaking heads. – Philip Crump
When things are really hard I remind myself what a privilege it is to be here and to be able to use my voice when so many women aren’t here to use theirs. They give me the strength to carry on. – Jane Ludemann
But one thing that’s certain is that as soon as we are relying on a government agency to provide all the answers, we’ve demonstrated that we’re failing as a society and as communities. When that government agency surely can only be as effective as the willingness within communities it serves to help them do their jobs.
Personally, I think the problems go a lot deeper. The ongoing narrative that people’s problems are always someone else’s fault – the lack of demanding personal responsibility, entrenched reliance on the welfare state, the list goes on. – Tim Beveridge
Luxon has to be congratulated for consolidating everyone together in a way that seems clean and tight. Winston hasn’t been playing it out in public, Seymour has kept his cool, it all seems, so far, tickety boo.
If they can keep it that way, they’ll manage to prove all the naysayers wrong. Every person who said it would implode and that it’d be a cluster and they’d all be at war with each other… so far, so good. None of that.
The true test is if Luxon can keep it that way – if he can, he’ll be seen as a genius. I mean who’d want to wrangle Winston and David Seymour on a daily basis? Not me. Best case scenario, they don’t need Winston, and NZ First can just stay out of the fray altogether. Worst case, he’s in and he goes nuts wreaking havoc and making it all about himself and the whole thing implodes. That would be disastrous not just for Luxon, but also for our country. – Kate Hawkesby
Great nations don’t force citizens to buy heavier cars with shorter ranges and bigger repair bills in order to stop bad weather one hundred years from now. – Jo Nova *
* Hat tip: Not PC
For a crucial fraction of the electorate – the fraction that gave Luxon victory – the election was about saving their country, about pulling it back from the brink of disintegration and disaster.
What those hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders are expecting from Luxon, in his first 100 days, is a full explanation for the changes and policies that so alarmed them. They want to know who made the decisions; when they were made; and why?
If Luxon wants to govern on his own terms, rather than the Woke Establishment’s, then, to borrow another Trumpian term, the “swamp” of Wellington will have to be drained. Let all the poisons in the bog come out.
Allow New Zealanders to gaze long and hard at all that was hidden from them in the capital’s dark and stagnant waters. – Chris Trotter
My impression of the health system is based on conversations with GPs struggling to keep up with patient demands, with the ED doctor who, after my son and I waited 5 hours to be seen, couldn’t stop himself telling us Auckland hospital is always at capacity for bed and waiting times, the PICU Starship nurse who felt demoralized by losing two of their PICU specialists to burnout and better options … the list goes on.
It’s those working in the system who are crying out to be heard. I’m all for taking a positive, solutions-based approach to solving problems, and yes let’s keep it in perspective, but ignoring the pleas of those working hard to provide care and services to us all is not going to boost morale. – Francesca Rudkin
Was this an example of the precautionary principle that appears to have taken hold of the bureaucratic mind? The precautionary principle holds that all risk must be mitigated by appropriate safeguards – even, it seems, in emergencies where insistence on following the officially prescribed procedure can be the difference between life and death.
Thank God there are still situations where human initiative, courage and compassion kick in and the rulebook is set aside. Dean Brown was a shining example and so were the helicopter pilots who defied a bureaucratic edict by risking their lives rescuing survivors from Whakaari-White Island – another tragedy that showed by-the-book New Zealand officialdom in a very poor light. – Karl du Fresne
On the upside, we shouldn’t forget that Tarrant was arrested only 19 minutes after the shooting started by two courageous and quick-thinking country cops who happened to be in Christchurch for a training day. Their actions, which thwarted Tarrant’s intention to attack the Ashburton mosque, served as a reminder that for all the benefits of thorough planning and training, there’s sometimes no substitute for intuitive, decisive, on-the-spot action.
But in other respects the response appears to have been almost scandalously shambolic, which may shake New Zealanders’ confidence in the people we rely on to protect human life. – Karl du Fresne
The crucial part of the agreements will not be what is specifically agreed on, but how the parties handle things that are not specifically agreed on.
Labour’s mistake was assuming there was an implicit agreement that NZ First would support all of its policy programme, barring the things NZ First had negotiated away in coalition talks.
Big mistake. It learned very quickly that was not the case when the repeal of the three strikes law popped up. Little announced it would be repealed. NZ First announced it would not.
NZ First’s view was if an initiative was not specifically referenced in the agreement, then it had to be negotiated on separately. It meant three years of ongoing negotiations for Labour, watching its plans being scotched or watered down.
It would also pay for all three parties to remember the old “tail wagging the dog” metaphor for MMP: When small parties make demands or have an influence that goes well beyond the strength of their public support. – Claire Trevett
Just as markets are elevating people from poverty, India’s telecom industry is eliminating the so-called digital divide.
The estimated 1 billion Indians with a smartphone have access to more information than the US President had in 1980. – Richard Prebble
A few days in India was long enough to realise that it is determined to become a developed nation. The world’s strategy of fighting climate change by restricting economic growth will fail. The answer to climate change must be technology. The world could start by assisting India to switch from coal to safe, carbon-free nuclear energy.
It is also obvious that trade with India is the way to reduce our dependence on China. – Richard Prebble
India has 12 times more dairy cows than New Zealand. India’s farmers are a powerful voting group. We will not achieve a free trade agreement that covers milk, but our trade is more than dairy. An agreement that lowers India’s high tariffs must assist two-way trade. –
Personal relationships do matter. New Zealand has a lot of catching up to do before India becomes a core trade, economic and political partner. It will take time to achieve, so the sooner we start the better. – Richard Prebble
I don’t have any reason to think she [Willis] won’t be good. Robertson was pretty awful, and Cullen was deeply prejudiced against business, the rich, and tax cuts, and the like. She’d be less prejudiced than either of them – Bryce Wilkinson
I don’t think it’s helpful to be honest and I don’t think it really reflects any kind of reality for any side.
I think there are other ways of expressing strong opinions about the humanitarian situation and the need for a solution to the crisis without anything that insinuates genocidal kind of consequences and that’s the way people are taking it unfortunately. – Dr Leon Goldsmith
I think that our social cohesion is being severely tested at the moment and I really urge political leaders to demonstrate leadership and to keep in mind all communities,” Hunt said.
Of course they’ve got the right to protest, but without making others feel unsafe. . .
You can protest, you can make your views known, but without inflaming the situation, without generating fear amongst our neighbours, colleagues and constituents. People are protesting for peace, so let’s protest peacefully. – Paul Hunt
People are clearly feeling strongly about this, and what they don’t need is a political leader in this country with a high profile jumping on stage and whipping up that anger or that fear.
That’s exactly what Chlöe did by using that phrase. She might argue she didn’t whip up any anger and we can’t argue against her because we can’t measure it- but I can tell you for certain that she whipped up fear.
The Jewish community, who heard what she said, had members saying that it made them feel scared. That is objectively the opposite of calming things down- which is what Chlöe should be using her position for.
Chlöe doesn’t need to apologise if she doesn’t want to, doesn’t have to back down if she doesn’t want to, she can defend the phrase and she can keep saying it- but if she cared about the New Zealand Jewish and Palestinian communities, she shouldn’t say it. – Heather du Plessis Allan
Politicians are the oldest influencers in the world. TikTok is the place where influencers are thriving at the moment. You need to start taking pages out of TikTok influencers’ books to try and be an effective influencer in this day and age. – Sean Topham
It’s kind of funny to read some of the reckons. It’s actually quite good for my self-esteem and my ego. They make me sound a lot better than I think I am from time to time, in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch and everyone else, stringing the world together and, uh, pulling the strings. But that’s just not the case. – Sean Topham
The Domestic Purposes Benefit has been variously described as a “disaster” (David McLoughlin 1995), an “economic lifeline” (Jane Kelsey 1995) and “an unfortunate experiment” (Muriel Newman 2009).
Its effect on family formation can never be definitively ascertained. But the growth of the sole parent family dependent on welfare has correlated with more poverty, more child abuse and more domestic violence. Each of these was intended to be reduced by the introduction of the DPB. – Lindsay Mitchell
Police report that family violence is at record levels – single welfare dependent females are the most vulnerable to partner violence according to victim surveys. The correlation between substantiated child abuse and appearing in the benefit system is incredibly strong. – Lindsay Mitchell
While benefits became more generous, easier to access and stay on under Ardern’s regime of “kindness”, any remaining obligations to the taxpayer became passe. There is no sign whatsoever that a resumption of deserving and non-deserving considerations will make a comeback. In fact, morality is ever more remote. Widows who become sole providers through no fault of their own are no longer differentiated from gang women who produce children as meal tickets. No distinction is made between reasons for ‘need’ and the taxpayer is expected to like it or lump it, despite the fact that fifty years of trying to solve social problems with cash payments has only made them worse. – Lindsay Mitchell
There are always people who say I’m not a proper Māori because I don’t go to a marae. The way I look at it, some people have a religious faith but don’t necessarily go to church every Sunday. And I don’t think it’s right to tell people they’re wrong about their identity because they don’t live it the same way that you do. I think we need to be a bit more accepting of people and a bit more accepting of difference.
I did notice that Māori, on average, are disadvantaged. But I’ll make a couple of points. One is that it’s not only Māori who are disadvantaged. There are also non-Māori who are disadvantaged economically and socially. And some people live with a disability that makes their life harder for them.
And the second is that not all Māori are disadvantaged. Growing up in Northland, I’d see Māori who were extremely successful and don’t face much disadvantage at all.
When people say Māori are disadvantaged, that does a disservice to non-Māori who face the same challenges. So, I don’t think we should be looking at disadvantage and categorising people according to race.
The number one thing that I’m opposed to is the thinking that there’s a Māori world or a Māori way of thinking. Well, for some people there might be, but it doesn’t make you any less Māori if you don’t subscribe to that world view.
And it’s not helpful if your true commitment is to address disadvantage for all people. Disadvantage and Māori are not one and the same. – David Seymour
New Zealand does need to have that debate, because the way the Treaty is currently interpreted is increasingly divisive – and I agree with Dame Anne Salmond, who says that the Treaty would never have required the public sector to be split down the middle and co-governed by two races.
That debate needs to occur, even though there are some people who don’t want it exposed to any sunlight. – David Seymour
There are a lot of vulnerable people in desperate need, and everything is just focused on someone’s ancestry. – Casey Costello
It is worth analysing the report as it reveals the overall health system performance is very poor and is getting worse. It records what is probably the most staggering decline in health system performance ever. – Michael Hundleby
A Government’s legacy is defined by its accomplishments when it leaves office, not by what is written about it at the outset.
In history, good intentions count for nothing. It is achievements and results that matter. – Oliver Hartwich
There is no point in incremental reform when, for example, half of our students do not attend school regularly and a similar proportion cannot read and write at an adult level.
Incremental reform is not enough when hospitals have long waiting lists and people have difficulty registering with doctors.
It is not enough to make incremental reforms when gangs and retail crime plague our inner cities.
All these social and economic ills require more than small steps. They require root and branch reform.
Future historians will judge the new Government by its results. The new government will only be deemed successful if it fundamentally turns this country around. – Oliver Hartwich
There is, invariably, a huge amount of pressure to close any corporate deal and with that, pressure to concede points or fudge issues. Experienced dealmakers will, however, use every minute until closing to negotiate and re-negotiate the terms of their deal, often to the exasperation of their own advisors. Knowing that they will need to live with those terms for years and that those terms will largely determine the success of the deal, they will often hold out longer than anyone expected to secure the best possible terms.
By contrast, negotiating a bad deal will get you fired from Unilever and any other top corporation. No-one cares if you did the deal quickly if the terms suck. – Philip Crump
But to the larger question being posed at the moment: will Luxon be feeling ‘humiliated’ by the length of time that all this is taking? No, not at all. I doubt he cares a jot.
Political opponents and some commentators are eager to hang that label around his neck but as soon as an agreement is reached – and all indications are that it is still a day or two away – the focus will shift very quickly to the terms of the deal and the business of government. And that is where the party leaders will be judged.
Time spent now agreeing a fulsome coalition agreement will undoubtedly be time well spent. – Philip Crump
The FMG Young Farmer of the Year rewarded me with so much more than a chainsaw.
So if you’re young enough, kind of a farmer, or just love beer and s*** yarns, sign up and see what you can learn.
One day in the future at a pub quiz you might have the winning answer to “What is the name of a baby mussel?” It’s spat.
Or – be able to assist in circulating blood around a body with compressions for seven or eight minutes and actually help someone else with living.
And, if you’re quick enough, your beer won’t even go flat. – Pete Fitz-Herbert
I’m as impatient as the next guy but can we cut Luxon some slack here? He’s dealing with Winston. He’s dealing with two parties, both deeply ambitious, principled and headstrong, and one of them has Winston at the helm.
That makes this entire negotiation of talks that he’s enduring.. all the more harder I reckon. I also don’t buy into the media’s timeline. This is not one of the longest negotiations on earth. Not by a long shot. And I don’t believe it started the day we counted votes either. That’s unfair to start the clock from there. – Kate Hawkesby
I just don’t trust Winston Peters when he says he’s working really hard and it’s constructive.. and he tries to look urgent about it. It feels like he’s just saying all that to put us off the scent .. to make us think it’s not him being the stick in the mud. It’s part of his chameleon character.. say one thing, do another, who knows.
I just know that when it comes to politics, David Seymour and Winston Peters are seasoned pros .. Seymour I believe would play with a straight bat, Peters not so much. But together they could really be forcing National to jump through some hoops. If that’s the case and the deal is shoddy then we can fairly criticize Luxon at that point, but this pasting he’s getting from the media now, just seems a bit premature. – Kate Hawkesby
All mainstream media ideally should strive to reflect the society they serve, but state-owned media especially. Stories that pander to the prejudices of the bullying metropolitan Left strike a jarring note now that the country has moved on.– Karl du Fresne
In the 1990s, international agencies and legal experts finally began to see violence against women as a particular category of war crime. Organizations like UN Women exist to protect women from such crimes, while Israeli experts and activists have been involved in these international efforts. Thus, our second shock: The inconceivable and unforgiveable silence of these organizations when faced with the rape and murder of Israeli women.
It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient – there have been none at all. Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have failed to condemn these crimes. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment. – Michal Herzog
Seriously, Fitch Group, I presume you’re not based in New Zealand.
I presume you haven’t been living here for a number of years because I don’t know about you, and I would really, really like to find out, but even without a government I feel the country is more stable and positive than when we had one that had been elected in a landslide. – Kerre Woodham
I feel more positive than I have for many years. And I don’t know if that’s just because we don’t have to hear of yet more tales of ineptitude, that we don’t have to see money being squandered. The new government may well end up being inept and squander our money, as I say, they are as yet untested, but at least we don’t have to report on it on a daily basis, because that was grinding my gears.
Maybe it’s because we’re not talking about stuff ups and wanton wastefulness, having a break from talking politics, perhaps.
Maybe it is simply as banal as it changing from winter to spring and summer, but I certainly feel far more positive with no government than I did with one elected in a landslide. – Kerre Woodham
Rather than punching above its weight, New Zealand has fallen into widespread mediocrity. It faces significant environmental challenges. The ‘friendly’ people part remains largely true, although New Zealand has many social issues. – Oliver Hartwich
The gulf between self-perception and reality makes New Zealand’s economic decline even more galling. New Zealanders like to think of themselves as free traders and innovators. However, they are only ranked 62nd in international trade, 53rd in international investment, and 53rd in productivity and efficiency. – Oliver Hartwich
But perhaps the most significant chasm between Kiwi self-mythology and reality lies in the social sphere. Yes, New Zealanders are a friendly bunch, but they are no longer egalitarian.
As a nation, New Zealand is being pulled apart. One fault line runs between those who can still afford homes or have owned them for many years, and others for whom home ownership will always remain out of reach.
This is an entirely self-inflicted problem. Caused by restrictive planning laws that empower NIMBYism, made worse by lack of infrastructure funding, New Zealand has built too few homes for decades. This failure produced an entirely predictable housing shortage. Ours is one of the world’s most unaffordable housing market.
Even so, New Zealand’s failing education system is an even more pressing issue.
New Zealand once had a decent, even world-class, education system. It certainly does not today. In international rankings of student achievement, New Zealand has dropped dramatically. – Oliver Hartwich
Housing and education are two areas in which failed policies have created and exacerbated social divisions. Another is health, in which the state now provides some basic cover, but anyone who can buys private insurance on top. In each of these cases, only people on higher incomes can purchase better service whereas those cannot afford that are stuck with poor baseline offerings.
All of this belies New Zealand’s self-image as a relatively class-less society.
The new Government must reform New Zealand to catch up with its self-mythology. – Oliver Hartwich
With a bold reform agenda, the kiwi would grow wings. New Zealand can build an economy, society and environment that lives up to its lofty self-image.
Otherwise, New Zealand’s story about itself will be nothing more than an ancient myth. – Oliver Hartwich
Each party had a specific manifesto that the voters voted for and as part of the due diligence each party has to as far as possible deliver on the promises made to their constituents.
This will be a negotiation of unpreceded proportions to ensure that each party delivers as far as possible on the promises they made to their voters but this common sense perspective has eluded the Mainstream Woke Media who make a living out of muckraking.
Let’s give these parties the time they need to deliver on the promises they made to their voters.
I think it may deliver a better NZ.
What your media guys are doing is not helpful and frankly shows a significant lack of intelligence and perhaps malevolence, perhaps a residue of the Labour Governments media funding.
– Ray Avery
You have to commend, firstly, Chris Luxon. The media gave him a ridiculous serve over his mergers and acquisition claims. Even if you suggest, and I probably do, that he shouldn’t have spruiked his credentials 20 days shows, details pending, he delivered.
But that is the Luxon story so far isn’t it?
The media, who have been shockingly exposed these past six years over their bias, decided Luxon was a clown, couldn’t connect, didn’t know politics and was set for a fall.
Yet, look at the proof. He fixed National, won the election and stitched together a three party deal in less than three weeks.
You also have to commend David Seymour and Winston Peters. There were no leaks, plenty of professionalism and Seymour, as I have said, gets extra kudos for being pretty available to tell us, within constraint, what was going on.
The potential here is huge.
MMP has been ropey. Too many deals have not been delivered, too many people have fallen out and too many parties have been punished, even vanished, as part of deals.
This one might end up the same. But my gut says it’s got a better-than-even chance of actually being a hit. – Mike Hosking
The coolest person in the room now though is Nicola Willis, isn’t she? Not interested in the baubles, more interested in the business of governing, she says she never wanted to be deputy PM, Seymour and Peters can scrap it out between them, she’s back to home to Wellington to see her 4 young kids who’re missing their Mum. I mean she’s all class and so far, looks like the most mature of the lot of them. I think in her saying what she said, she clearly showed the others up for what they are and removed herself from the fray. Good on her.
She’s keen to get on with governing, showing she’s truly about the good of the country, not the good of her ego. – Kate Hawkesby
It is genuinely an awesome responsibility and so I think the ceremony is incredibly weighty that actually every minister understands the responsibility that they have.
As I said, it is a really special privilege to do public service, that’s why we genuinely leave what we’re doing and actually come to this place, to try and advance the lives of all Kiwis, and that’s what we’ve gotta do as a government. – Christopher Luxon
The problem with downward spirals is that they create a population fearful of change. Where people believe in an economy as a zero-sum game, or as a cake of fixed size whose slices can only be enlarged at the expense of other slices, they become desperate to preserve their slice, no matter how small it is because of the very policies that have made it so. Thus, they want the continuation of the policy that guarantees them a slice, even if that slice is ever smaller and cannot expand. – Theodore Dalrymple
As the new ministry goes about improving our economic performance and legislating equal rights for all New Zealanders, those who favour special privileges for themselves and anyone with a Māori ancestor will try a variety of tactics from breaking parliamentary protocols to marching in the streets. There have already been threats of violence.
This will be the new ministry’s first test. Equal rights for all and special privileges for no one on the basis of ancestry. New Zealand’s once proud reputation for being a liberal democracy needs to be re-asserted. Chris Luxon, David Seymour and Winston Peters we are relying on you to stay strong in defence of the package you have put together. – Michael Bassett
Given the hysterical media coverage over the weekend, it appears that the some in the media will be the de facto political opposition in the country until such time as Labour can recover from its shellacking.
But what the press gallery is yet to understand is that neither Luxon, nor his coalition partners, are in the least bit interested or concerned about school yard tittle tattle dressed up as political commentary. It was in fact a key reason why Luxon was able to so quickly establish unity within his caucus after taking over the leadership of the party.
The public will rightly judge the coalition on results. New Zealand cannot suffer another three years of incompetent or dysfunctional government. The country has voted for its team of rivals and it’s now up to the team to deliver for New Zealand. – Philip Crump
It really was quite a staggering feat of linguistic gymnastics to avoid the words ‘women’ and ‘mothers’ in information about maternity, which may be useful to …. er …women and mothers. And this in a country where a Plain Language bill got passed in 2022. . .
So, why do we mangle women’s language, but not men’s? I’m guessing that’s because it’s women’s language, and not men’s. Men who say they’re women don’t like to be reminded that they’re not actually women by the use of language for women; and women who say they’re men don’t like to be reminded that they’re not actually men by use of the language for women. – Katrina Biggs
Anecdotally, I have seen tweets (Xs?) and Facebook posts from well-meaning white people sending “aroha” and even apologising to Māori for the incoming government. There is a bizarre virtue-signalling class who are in a downward spiral and haven’t worked out that a white person apologising to a Māori person about policies put forward by parties led by Māori people is a bit weird. – Ani O’Brien
Why are the perspectives of, for example, Te Pati Māori taken as somehow more valid than the Māori MPs in other parties. Apart from their choice of name, which conveys some kind of authoritative voice, they have no mandate from Māori nor New Zealanders in general to be the passers of judgment on behalf of all Māori. – Ani O’Brien
Is it really appropriate for media to convey that there is one “right” way to think and be Māori and bestow legitimacy on the voices of some Māori but not others?
We certainly don’t want to get into who looks the most Māori nor who has the most “Māori blood”. This takes us down a path of blood quantum, which is an inevitably hideous path to tread. Likewise, counting ancestors shouldn’t be used to rank Māoriness.
If we were to judge on such superficial grounds, people like Mihingarangi Forbes and Kelvin Davis, who are very connected to their Māori heritage, would be considered less Māori than someone with darker skin but equally as Māori as David Seymour. It is a fool’s errand to pursue these measures.
What the past few days have shown us is that there is no single way to be Māori and no single set of politics that should be attributed to Māori as a collective. – Ani O’Brien
The coalition agreements contain matters that relate to race relations in New Zealand, and we should be mature enough to have conversations that take us forward not backward. The media will be reporting on these issues, and it is crucial that, as in all matters, they don’t pick a side. It isn’t any newspaper’s or broadcaster’s role to tell readers “this is what good Māori think”.
Media will play a pivotal role in how far tensions are driven up and it is the responsibility of every journalist and platform to ensure neutrality. Whether they are too far gone down entrenched political positions remains to be seen. – Ani O’Brien
As power and privilege are never surrendered voluntarily, the bureaucracy and interest groups will fight to retain regulations. While the civil service goes on holiday, in January ministers should take the opportunity to make another list of damaging regulations and repeal them. Repealing red tape must be a top priority.
The new Government has inherited a mess. The economy is close to recession. Inflation is still raging. There are huge deficits in health, education and infrastructure. Too many able-bodied adults are on welfare. All those problems are easier to solve in a growing economy.
Cutting red tape is the only low-cost, immediate way to liberate the New Zealand economy’s entrepreneurial spirit.
There is another more important reason why we need a regulatory standards law: unaccountable bureaucrats passing arbitrary regulations make the citizen powerless while transferring privileges to the few. It is corrupting of society.
The power to make regulations has been abused to pander to populist calls that “there ought to be a law” and to grant favours to vested interests.
A Regulatory Standards Act will curb the state’s unbridled power.
The vast expansion of the administrative state is undermining liberty in all Western democracies. The Regulatory Standards Act will be New Zealand’s most significant contribution to democratic government since women’s suffrage. – Richard Prebble
A broken education system leads to breakdowns in other areas of society. It produces young adults who are ill-prepared for working life and university. This results in a generation of workers who are less knowledgeable and skilled than their forebears and easily distracted by the things they have been coached to be confident on, such as grievances.
Even worse than an education system that fails to educate, is an education system that has become deeply politicised. Such a system prioritises producing young adults who think identically politically over teaching them skills and imparting information with which they can form their own opinions.
New Zealand finds itself in the unenviable position of failing to educate as well as being thoroughly politicised. This is the result of decades of internal activism. – Ani O’Brien
Collaboration between Act and National on education will be necessary to achieve the change both parties claim to seek. Their success will depend on how firm Christopher Luxon and his Government are about political neutrality in the public service. Senior bureaucrats unwilling or unable to adjust to the directions of a National-led Government must go. Without emphatic demand for public servants to reform themselves and get on board with the new Government’s programmes, the tail will simply continue to wag the dog.
In this sense, the greatest challenge facing education in New Zealand is also the greatest challenge facing justice, health, transport, etcetera. – Ani O’Brien
We are witnessing a social tragedy in the making. Children are being divided into ethno-religious identity groups and turned against one another. Chanting slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ makes it less likely that those kids in Bethnal Green will ever befriend a Jew, let alone beg their parents to visit a Jewish bakery after church or mosque. Children’s tender arteries are being turned into tributaries of hate.
What is happening in London cannot be laid solely at the feet of the anti-Israel protest movement. The poison of identitarianism must assume the bulk of the blame for the cultural dismemberment of society. We have a mayor who constantly preaches difference over unity. We have a Metropolitan Police so paralysed by fear of being called racist that they make endless excuses for anti-Semitic demonstrators. And we have a national broadcaster that refuses to call Hamas terrorists, while happily instructing non-white children that they are under the yoke of ‘white privilege’.
We are confronted with a choice right now. We can continue pushing children into silos of racial and religious hatred. Or we can start forging a society free of identity politics which aims to bring people of all backgrounds together. I know which path the London of my childhood would choose. – Ike Ijeh
We came back to mainstream and it was horrendous. Largely it’s a different environment working in the public sector.
It’s bureaucratic, the bureaucracy [is] amazing. The thing about partnership schools… it is one of the first times I have experienced what freedom felt like. You were given resources, you were told, ‘Here’s what you need to achieve, how you do that’s your business,’ and we overachieved. – Raewyn Tipene
Individual Maori make decisions every day about their own work and wellbeing. They’re perfectly capable people. Why do they need the patronisation of a government? Or aThere was nothing in Te Tiriti requiring that. Nothing requiring they be in government — even though many are, on their own merits. – Peter Cresswell
She’s conflating two people here. Individual Maori do have control over their own health. And always have, And did just as much before the creation of the separatist health organisation that has missed all its own agreed targets. (Waikato Tainui leader Parekawhi Maclean saying (very kindly): “its inability to put in place the necessary level of capability and capacity to progress its key functions had hampered performance.”)
What she means is that some Maori have control over other the health of other Maori. Why does shared ancestry make that necessary? How does that help an individual’s health outcomes?
I am hardly an advocate myself for a government health system of any kind. But a separatist system seems the worst of both worlds, particularly for individual Maori concerned with their own health, and forced into this system, for whom results have been less than stellar. Suggesting that prioritising kaupapa over medicine is perhaps not the best idea. – Peter Cresswell
She’s not calling for all New Zealanders to be equal as individuals — i.e., each of us enjoying equal individual rights and privileges under law per the third Treaty clause. What she’s after instead — what she and others in her elite strata have worked so hard for, to achieve that momentum — is for Māori as a collective to be made equal in political power to the government. With a Māori elite distributing the spoils.
That, to her and to many others, is what “partnership” truly means. Political power.
It’s a patronising collectivist vision that looks to government for power and largesse, and to individuals of every ancestry to be milch cows. It’s not one envisioned by either treaty.
One-hundred and eighty-three years ago, Te Tiriti emancipated Māori slaves, and put an end to the idea that the mass of men here had been born with saddles on their back, with a few rangatira booted and spurred to ride them. That was the effect of Te Tiriti: to free taurekareka. – Peter Cresswell
The people have spoken, and the people want the country back on track.
The people, as I read it, wanted less divisive policy and a focus on reducing crime and tackling the cost of living. – Tim Dower
Alcoholism is no joke. It is a debilitating disorder and one that can take a mammoth toll on professional and personal lives. Overcoming such an addiction takes hard work and a lot of support. It is simply unfathomable to think that Whanau will be able to do so while in such a high-pressure role and under such intense scrutiny. It is not a fair expectation.
If we learn from Allan’s experience, we should be setting aside all politics to help Whanau take the action that is best for her. That includes the politics of those who benefit from her remaining in office. – Ani O’Brien
The key component in Whanau’s case is the repeated evidence that her struggles with alcohol are affecting her ability to carry out her duties. The right thing for all involved to do is to support the mayor to resign and focus on her wellbeing. It is right not only for her, but also for Wellington. The city is a shambles and desperately needs a mayor and council who aren’t distracted by scandals and pulling out of meetings. – Ani O’Brien
“Smokefree Aotearoa 2025″ is an aspirational goal like “Road to Zero”, to eliminate road deaths by 2050, “Predator Free 2050″ and the idea of a Covid-free New Zealand. Aspirational goals are dangerous. Politicians abuse the power of the state in a vain attempt to achieve the impossible. – Richard Prebble
The Minister of Health, Shane Reti, is correct. Reversing Smokefree 2025 will not stop the steady decline in smoking rates. Smoking is reducing because it is uncool. Even smokers think smoking is dumb. Only the state can make smoking cool again by making it illegal, so smoking becomes an act of rebellion. – Richard Prebble
Last week, critics suddenly discovered the existence of tobacco taxes and claimed these taxes would pay for National’s tax cuts. But the $2 billion in tobacco tax revenue is already in the Budget. Successive governments have used tobacco taxes as a transfer from the poor to pay for policies like tax relief for Hollywood studios and the like.
The most effective way to reduce child poverty would be a reduction in the tax on cigarettes, so they are not cheap, but not ruinously expensive either. – Richard Prebble
Tobacco taxes are a prime reason for child poverty and homelessness.
Poverty kills. A study on WebMD states that as many people in the US die of poverty as they do from Alzheimer’s. As well as counting the lives saved by cigarette taxes, we should count the lives lost through increasing poverty. – Richard Prebble
Smoking is a leading cause of death. The major cost falls on the smoker. The fact that smokers are likely to suffer premature death is not a justification for reducing them and their children to poverty.
Then there are the unintended consequences of Smokefree New Zealand. Do the critics think dairies are ram-raided for candy? – Richard Prebble
Tobacco taxes have caused a rise in crime.
The Ministry of Health is alarmed at the explosion in vaping.
Smokers tell me it is easier to buy P than tobacco. The P epidemic has coincided with the prohibitive price of cigarettes. – Richard Prebble
It is ironic that Te Pāti Māori, which blames all ills on colonialism, is demanding the Government impose smoking policies on Māori – a form of 21st-century colonialism.
Surely there will be a future Waitangi Tribunal claim that by levying so much tax on tobacco, governments knowingly reduced many Māori to poverty. – Richard Prebble
Perhaps to some I am a walking contradiction—you know, a part-Māori boy, raised in a State house by a single parent on the benefit, now a proud National Party MP in a deeply rural farming electorate in the middle of the South Island—but there is no contradiction there. Members opposite do not own Māori. Members opposite do not own the poor. Members opposite do not own the workers. No party and no ideology has a right to claim ownership over anything or anyone.
We, on this side of the House, are a broad church: town and country, liberal and conservative, old and young, and professionals and workers. What unites us is our fundamental belief that it’s the individual family unit that knows what’s best for their family—not the State, not the Government, and not us. It’s not the State that saved my family; it was my mum. She took responsibility for our situation. When we fall on hard times, as we all will at some stage, it’s our neighbours and our community that should rally around in support. Only after that does the State become our safety net, as the neighbour of last resort.
Our system should be one which helps pick us up when we fall but which then gets out of the way when we’re back on our feet and lets us lives our lives. The job of Government must be to create a system which makes it as easy as possible for good people to make the right decisions. But, instead, we have a system which creates broken families and turns good people into lost souls. It’s not right, and it must change.
I truly believe that social investment is that change. When we see people as having agency and dignity in their own right, rather than just as numbers on a spreadsheet, we will have a just society. When we look at spending as an investment rather than a cost, we can focus on outcomes that benefit not only the health and wellbeing of the individual but also the back pocket of the taxpayer. That’s what social investment does. – James Meager
Good programmes should be enriched, and bad ones should be cast aside. We don’t need complicated audits and reporting mechanisms for community organisations to administer taxpayer-funded programmes. The Government has this information. It can do the work to measure those programmes against long-term individual outcomes in health and education, in reduced welfare-dependency and better housing, and in lower crime and lower drug and alcohol use. All we need is to be more reasonable, be more sensible, and be more savvy with the use of this data. – James Meager
This is why we are all here: to debate freely; to have an open, robust contest of ideas; to challenge one another in an environment where disputes are resolved by the showing of hands and not by the throwing of fists. We are here to represent the people who put us here. And some of us are here to disrupt and to challenge the status quo, and I get that—no, I really do. But in doing so, we must respect this institution; we must respect its traditions, and, importantly, we must respect those who have come before us and who have cleared the way for our many voices to be heard. We are here to fight for what we believe in, each and every one of us, without fear or favour, laying aside all personal interests. – James Meager
Unfortunately, the more involved a Government becomes in people’s business, and businesses, for that matter, the worse things seem to get. In life, I have seen how different Governments have impacted communities through business. I have seen years where small businesses have become untenable, mum and pop owners sell to corporates, corporates grow, employment relations break down, unions grow, and service diminishes, and at some point along the way, the wind changes and the sun comes out. Instead of playing political whack-a-mole, I strongly believe in Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand. The argument for limited Government is a strong one, which is one of the many reasons why I stand here on this side of the House. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but you can’t spend your way out of every problem, nor can you regulate your way out of it. All you get is debt and dependency. – Katie Nimon
New Zealand is under new management. We are here because people believe that we are the parties that can get things done; that’s why you elect parties on this side of the House. Just like there are laws of nature and there are laws of physics, there are laws of politics. Because if you want lower tax, you vote for us. If you want the Government books managed well, you vote for us. If you want to create more opportunities for everyone, you vote for us. New Zealanders get it, and New Zealanders want it, and that’s why they elected the parties in this coalition government. They know that we will get things done, and that those things will be the things that matter to them. New Zealanders want National, ACT, and New Zealand First to be the strong government that New Zealand needs. They want us to deliver, and I am telling you, we will. – Christopher Luxon
Now, on this side of the House, we all came to politics to make a positive change for the country that we love, that we are proud of, and that we see so much potential in. We are going to manage the economy well. Now that we’ve rescued it from Labour, we’ll nurse it back to health. We will ease the cost of living. In fact, we’ve already started. We will restore law and order. The coalition parties separately and together as a Government are absolutely committed to offenders facing real consequences for their crimes, and are committed to New Zealanders feeling safe in their homes and their businesses and in their communities. We are going to get public services working better, because when you care about people—and we care deeply about people—you don’t just wring your hands and look anguished and spout rhetoric. Looking anguished doesn’t take an hour off an emergency wait-list in an emergency department. You need to actually get stuck in, sort it out, and actually get things done to make the difference.
We are about attitudes on this side of the House, not platitudes. Our attitude to public money is to respect the people who actually earn it. We’re going to do that by letting the people who earn it keep more of it. That part of it that they hand over in tax, we will spend on helping New Zealanders get ahead, and on making this great country even better, with better education, more support for the stretched health workforce, better and faster roads, less red tape, more renewable energy, and more initiatives to increase New Zealand’s prosperity so that we can all get ahead. We’re about increasing incomes and outcomes. I have to say that I’ve had many impressive briefings already with very good senior public servants in the past few days. When they come in with their good ideas for actually achieving what the Government wants, I say to them, “That’s great, but how do we do it faster?” Because good execution matters, and that’s measured by results and it is measured by outcomes. – Christopher Luxon
And make no mistake, Labour earned its loss. It worked hard for it. Labour wasted time, they squandered public money, and they made this great country and its people miss out on opportunities. MPs on that side of the House put Labour ideology and dogma ahead of New Zealand’s interests and New Zealand punished them for it. Let it be a reminder to all of us in this House that we are actually here to represent the people and their needs—that’s what we’re here to do. – Christopher Luxon
So, I have to say, there is hope. There is a Government that appreciates that businesses provide jobs and opportunities for other New Zealanders. Business owners and managers understand that their greatest resource is their team. It is by working together that the team grows the business, and it creates better wages and more opportunities and more jobs. That’s the National way of looking at it—it’s the aspirational way. We say it takes a lot of courage to start a small business and to employ people, and those who do it well should be extremely proud of what they do. – Christopher Luxon
All this took place against a backdrop of wall-to-wall weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the election of a government that the priestly media caste doesn’t approve of. I can’t recall any new government being confronted with such intense, naked hostility from people whom the public expect to be fair, neutral and balanced. – Karl du Fresne
Note too the deafening media silence over incendiary statements from Maori politicians – among them, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer’s allegations of “systemic genocide” and “state-sponsored terrorism”, which bordered on unhinged, and Willie Jackson’s threats of “war” and civil unrest “five times worse” than the 1981 Springbok tour, which were tantamount to an incitement to violence.
These intemperate verbal eruptions pass unremarked by the media high priests, as did the circus at the swearing-in of MPs yesterday when the Maori Party wilfully made a mockery of parliamentary procedure. Those same Maori MPs would not take it well – and neither should they – if visitors to a marae refused to honour protocol and tradition. Why do they not show the same respect for the institution to which they have been elected? And why do media commentators appear united in their determination not to denounce the debasement of the House of Representatives that sits at the heart of New Zealand’s system of government?
All this follows six years during which the mainstream media gave a free pass to probably the most extremist government in New Zealand history. Time and again under Ardern, dodgy law changes went unreported and issues that reflected badly on the government were either treated as invisible or played down until exposure by online platforms made them impossible to ignore. Now journalists have suddenly and miraculously rediscovered the critical scrutiny mechanism that inexplicably lay dormant for two terms under Labour. – Karl du Fresne
Ultimately, it all comes down to democracy and respect for the will of the people. For six years New Zealand had a government the media approved of. Voters emphatically signalled on October 14 that they wanted a change, but the priestly media caste is tone-deaf to the public mood and can’t bring itself to accept the decision. The petulant media campaign of resistance against the coalition government is, above all, a massive gesture of contempt for the voters. Or should I say the deplorables? – Karl du Fresne
Our recent pitiful leadership on law and order is the product of 5 generations of nearly unbroken civil peace. We’ve been electing contemptible diversity displays. They’ve no understanding of the need for courage and unwavering determination, to sustain tolerant respect for the equal rights of all.
Watching the Greens defend thuggery here as well as rape and murder overseas is helping to bring the necessary changes. – Stephen Franks
With her 2019 recommendations Kiro was instrumental in creating the conditions for the number of beneficiaries to increase.
In March 2018, when she began her welfare investigation, there were 273,387 beneficiaries. Now there are 367,152. What sat at 9.3 percent of working-age New Zealanders has risen to 11.5 percent; most worryingly 168,276 children in benefit-dependent families grew to 216,648.
What a rich irony to hear the architect of such ill-advised reforms forced to describe their result, and advise their removal. One wonders if Ardern had considered this possibility when she appointed Cindy Kiro Governor General in 2021? It is doubtful. Foresight was never her strong point.
Dame Cindy Kiro will remain Governor General until 2026. But she has always been a friend and ally of left-wing governments. Perhaps she deserves kudos for professionally delivering a speech which must have personally rankled. At least she did it with dignity and grace. A lesson there-in for opposition MPs who have showed very little over the past two days. – Lindsay Mitchell
So even if you speak, or understand te reo, are the names “gifted” to govt departments by poets and reified reo speakers understandable? Or unintentionally confusing? Or perhaps the confusion is intentional, to help immunise them against criticism. (Hard to criticise, say, Te Konihana Tauhokohoko, if you have no idea who they are what they do.)
Anyway, here below, to help you out, in no particular order, is a rough literaltranslation of the names of some common departments and ministries (based first on the Māori-English dictionaries of Williams (1844), and then Ryan (1983), and then Google Translate for more recent neologisms like Kaipāho, Manatū, Haumaru, Konihana etc). Many seem more about poetry — sometimes good poetry — than they do about communicating well (“Memory Room” for archives sounds good, and who wouldn’t like the “Power of Distant Lightning”; whereas “Stranger Service” sounds like something that might be offered just off K Rd).
So, often, only those in the know would know… – Peter Creswell
How much of the overall $21 billion that goes on education gets soaked up by ideologues at the Ministry or wasted on endless reviews and rehashings of the system is a mystery.
But you get what you pay for in life and education is no exception.
Maybe this is another area like infrastructure, health, and immigration, where we need less political meddling and to-ing and fro-ing with each change of government, and more of a long term, locked in plan.
Just think what we could achieve in productivity, creativity and quality of life, if every kid had the chance those at our best schools do now. – Tim Dower
Almost every rich country preaches far more than it delivers. This is exemplified by the European Union, which has promised more than anyone else, yet — when forced by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine to cut off gas imports — went looking in Africa for more oil, gas and coal. Meanwhile, almost every poor country understandably prioritizes prosperity, which means abundant, cheap and reliable energy — which still means fossil fuels.
Underpinning the climate summit farce is one big lie repeated over and over: that green energy is on the verge of replacing fossil fuels in every aspect of our lives. – Bjorn Lomborg
As the daughter of a solo mother on the DPB, I lived through the effects of benefit cuts of the 1990s. And I don’t think that miserly austerity works, but I equally detest wasteful Government spending and the blatant disrespect of taxpayers when money is spent carelessly. I believe that only a National Government with evidence-based, prudent spending and with a social investment approach can turn around the fortunes of our country and deliver the public services that we need. – Vanessa Weenink
It turned out there were a couple of values that were important to me that pulled me towards National. First: competitive enterprise and reward for achievement. As a business owner, I know the value of skin in the game and the risks taken for the benefit of a business and the people working for you. Without competition we have stagnation and limited innovation. The other thing is personal responsibility. This is about believing in the autonomy of individuals and their ability to do for themselves. Personal responsibility is not about victim blaming as some might believe; it is about empowerment. – Vanessa Weenink
I believe in less government, personal choice, and responsibility—a Government that sets up the right macro policy settings that enables success, and then gets out of the way. Of course, success means different things to different people.
Please don’t misunderstand me. For those that can’t fend for themselves, we absolutely need to provide the resources and supports to help them—assist them for as long as it takes. And we have a sacred duty to look after our most vulnerable and those that fall on hard times. But to those of us that can, we should; we must. What’s wrong is always available, but so is what’s right.
Ultimately, though, it still requires the individual to foster hope for a brighter future—a desire, even a mustard seed of faith, ambition, and desire for more or better—and they must be the ones that pursue it. They must push ahead. They must choose a different path. And I know some people don’t start at the start line, and I know some people aren’t born with the same opportunity. But if they have that desire, the coaches, the mentors, the community leaders, and the aunties and the uncles, the business community will emerge. If that person, regardless of their background, holds on to that hope within their soul, I do believe they can and will find a better way. A way forward. Because this is still a beautiful country with endless opportunity and support structures. To that end, with my ability, resources, and positions, I commit myself in service to helping those individuals rise. Because when one individual rises up and breaks through, it gives those around them permission and courage to do the same. – Ryan Hamilton
Good is good.
Concentrate on goodness.
Go for the good. Look for the good.
Notice the good and praise it.
Try being as good as you can.
A lot of good things are going on this time of year.
Be part of that.
Don’t be a victim of the dark side of human craziness that also gets loose at this time of year.
That’s not all that’s going on. – Robert Fulghum
I mean; what better way to contemplate environmental concerns than bringing 84,000 people into a city built on petro-dollars that cannot function without round-the-clock air conditioning and migrant workers? – Damien Grant
Shaw is not the co-leader of the Green Party because you cannot lead if others will not follow.
His party is no longer interested in environmental issues. They are engaged in performative theatre. Tearing down the only member of their party who is genuinely passionate about environmental issues over his failure to denounce Zionism, or whatever is the cultural touch-stone of the week, will generate the only thing his colleagues are passionate about: attention. – Damien Grant
The Green Party has become a vehicle for minor celebrities indulging in the pantomime of radicalism. It is no place for someone of Shaw’s integrity and mana; which is why they will destroy him. His continued existence is a hand-brake on their excess.– Damien Grant
The media, having not learned their lesson about being Labour Party apparatchiks, did their best to undo a Government that has barely started by banging on about ignoring Treasury advice over FPA’s, despite yesterday’s revelations about their beloved Labour Party making it a habit on things like uncosted infrastructure.
They also tried their best on Māori bonuses and went to town over smoking. The smoking had some merit given that was, to many, a surprise out of the coalition deal.
But the media, like a lot of the unions and lobby groups who have gnashed their teeth, seem to fail to grasp that a change of Government actually means things get done differently and the reason they are to be done differently is because we voted for it to be so. – Mike Hosking
In the heavily Māori ceremony of swearing in Tama Potaka spoke for National, reminding us that the stereotype of a white male grouping is not remotely realistic in 2023.
That was followed by Meager, who gave a wonderful reminder that too much of the Māori political story in this country is portrayed in a light of misery, deprivation and handouts, when in fact Meager is most probably closer to reality, being young, bright, determined and successful. – Mike Hosking
Perhaps I am more sensitive to them than I once was, but it seems to me that hectoring and badgering semi-political public messages (mostly paid for at public expense, of course) are much more prominent than they used to be. This is a West-wide phenomenon, originating from the United States—because all other Western countries are far too brain-dead to resist the ideological siren song, or songs, of the technologically most advanced country in the world, however deleterious those songs might be. We are to be hectored into virtue, virtue being principally a matter of the opinions that we hold.
One sometimes has the impression that one will not be left alone until one really does love Big Brother—though who exactly Big Brother is remains unclear. We seem to be undergoing, or at least are being subjected to, what the Chinese in the 1950s called thought reform.
If there is an ultimate purpose behind all this—how easily one becomes paranoid!—it is to render us dependent on an unseen power even for our own thoughts. First, we must be convinced that, left to ourselves, we are bad; second, that we are constantly in danger; and third, that there is a benevolent authority that will straighten out our mind and then keep us safe from all danger. – Theodore Dalrymple
We live in a world of precept rather than of example. Religious preachers have declined in number and influence, but they have been replaced by secular ones, often governmental. By badgering and hectoring us at a distance, they prove, or think that they prove, how much they care for us, who are their sheep. Once they have preached at us, they have discharged an important duty. In addition, they have established implicitly that they are in loco parentis to the population in a very dangerous world. – Theodore Dalrymple
It was Apirana Ngata six decades later who reminded Māori that
The Government placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. … it made the one law for the Maori and the Pakeha. If you think these things are wrong and bad then blame our ancestors who gave away their rights in the days when they were powerful.
Those ancestors were not stupid. They knew what they were about, and and had a pretty fair idea of what they were promised.
But perhaps they knew less about what they were agreeing to and signing than the geniuses who took power tools yesterday to Te Papa to make their argument. – Peter Cresswell
Under the previous government offenders assaulted staff and broke out of facilities and fast food was given to bribe them to stop. If people within youth justice facilities cause trouble they should expect to see real consequences for their actions.
By restoring the value of right and wrong we will have better outcomes in youth justice facilities. This government is focussed on dealing with serious youth crime and young people must learn that bad and unlawful behaviour will not be tolerated.
No staff member should go to work and feel unsafe. – Karen Chhour
The honeymoon new governments receive after an election is an important part of democracy. The honeymoon is an acknowledgement that the election is over, and the winner has a mandate to govern.
America demonstrates that when election results are not accepted there is a perpetual campaign. The country becomes ungovernable.
Leading the news with lobbyist propaganda is TV One news denying that the coalition has a democratic mandate to implement its policies. – Richard Prebble
According to the 2020 Democracy Index there are only 23 countries that are full democracies. New Zealand will not remain a full democracy if we pander to those who participate in elections but refuse to accept the result.
Democracy is damaged when the state media does not acknowledge that the coalition has a democratic mandate for their policies. The only justification for the state owning a broadcasting license is to be a source of unbiased news. – Richard Prebble
Sedition is infectious. Elements in the civil service are refusing to accept the result of the election. When a minister, I do not recall a cabinet paper being leaked even before ministers had considered it. The leaking of the paper opposing the repeal of Fair Pay Agreements is sabotage. The same department in 2021 recommended against Fair Pay Agreements saying the costs weighted any benefit. Now a treasury paper has been leaked. – Richard Prebble
Ministers must set the narrative or others will do it for them. The government has an advantage. What ministers do is news, what critics say, even dressed up as a survey, is commentary. Reporters are news junkies. The media will always report news rather than views.
The government will win the 6 o’clock news when it is making the news. – Richard Prebble
Leadership, vision, courage, and bold action is the way for the coalition to lead the news and re-claim their democratic mandate. – Richard Prebble
But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again. As Chou En-Lai famously said in 1972 when asked about the effect of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.” It is not merely that moral evaluations change; so do evaluations of what actually happened and the causes of what actually happened. – Theodore Dalrymple
It is true that there are trends in history, but they do not reach inexorable logical conclusions. Projections are not predictions, and success in war, for example, is no proof that the victor is on the side of history and was therefore predestined to be victorious: nor can the victor be certain that his victory brings with it all that he desired or expected.
Our predictions may turn out to be mistaken. If we make enough predictions that are not absurd, some of them are bound to be vindicated by what happens, but we should not take this as evidence that our historical insight or reasoning must have been correct. – Theodore Dalrymple
Are we now to say that authoritarianism is on the right side of history, as recently liberal democracy was only thirty years ago, because so much of the world is ruled by it?
Does it matter if we ascribe right and wrong sides to history? I think it could—I cannot be more categorical than that. On the one hand, it might make us complacent, liable to sit back and wait for History to do our work for us. Perhaps more importantly, History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour as if we were acting as only automaton midwives of a foreordained denouement. But if history is a seamless robe, no denouement is final.
In short, we should cease using expressions such as “the judgment of history,” or “the wrong side of history.” They are, after all, on the wrong side of history. – Theodore Dalrymple
Is it just me or are the growing number of reports about the ineptitude of the last Government an ever-larger indictment on what might be the most useless collection of buffoons in the modern political age? – Mike Hosking
And so, we end up with yet another reminder of the great calling card of Labour – non-delivery.
Say a lot, do nothing. Announce it, then do nothing. Trumpet it for the news, then watch the crickets chirp.
It is all there. Billions upon billions of dollars, of ideas and disaster, of no planning and even less listening.
Nicola Willis is right, and we will hear all about it next week. The shambles she has been left is almost criminal.
Luxon is right as well, when he said the other day, this lot should not be let within a million miles of the cheque book ever again.
Read the report. If we hadn’t lived through it, you wouldn’t believe it. – Mike Hosking
It feels like at COP28 the delusions of Western greens finally crashed against the shores of reality. The luxuriant doom-mongering of privileged eco-warriors who insist the world will end if we don’t phase out fossil fuels was confronted by a truth no reasonable person can deny: that fossil fuels remain vital to human life. In the gleaming oasis of Dubai it became clear that oil, gas and even coal are not going away anytime soon, however much the Gretas of the West might want them to. Why? Because – brace yourselves – India, China, Brazil and other nations are not prepared to sacrifice their economic health at the altar of our deranged anti-modernism. – Brendan O’Neill
Yet it pays to look at why the idea of a ‘phaseout’ was, well, phased out. It’s because winding down fossil-fuel use would be suicidal for the developing world. It’s all very well for Westerners whose Industrial Revolutions took place 150 years ago to dry heave at the sight of coal-fired power stations, but for billions of people such stations are the difference between life and death, light and dark, food and no food. – Brendan O’Neill
Representatives of India dared to touch on one of the ugliest elements of the annual COP whingefest – the fact that it’s always well-off countries telling less well-off countries to stop being so bloody industrious. ‘Discussions on a phaseout of fossil fuels have been led by developed economies’ and this too often overlooks ‘the economic realities of developing countries like India’, said an official. A spokesperson for G77 – a coalition of 135 developing nations – made it clear that its members will not stop using coal. Why? Because we must ‘meet the energy needs and ensure a dignified life for our people’. Sounds good to me. In the stand-off between rich, bored Western youths who want to keep coal in the ground and a country like India that intends to carry on digging up coal so that its 1.4 billion citizens might enjoy energy and dignity, I know whose side I’m on. – Brendan O’Neill
Let’s be frank: phasing out fossil fuels is a demented dream. Fossil-fuel use has remained remarkably steady over the past 25 years, regardless of all the windbaggery at the annual COPs. In 2000, 84 per cent of the world’s energy came from fossil fuels – in 2022, it was 82 per cent. Developing nations’ use of coal has soared. As a consequence, humanity is now burning more of the black stuff than at any point in history. Coal consumption rose by 3.3 per cent in 2022, hitting 8.3 billion tonnes – a new record. This year, China, India and South East Asian countries accounted for three out of every four tonnes of coal consumed around the world. You think they’re going to stop because New York Times readers in Park Slope don’t like pollution? Get real. – Brendan O’Neill
It’s the ideology of environmentalism we should be phasing out. Its neocolonial arrogance, its indifference to the needs and rights of people in the developing world, stands starkly exposed. This luxuriant creed might flatter the pretensions of Westerners in search of some meaning in their lives, but it is the implacable foe of the billions in the industrialising world who only want what we already have. – Brendan O’Neill
We are in deep trouble.
Shock? It’s been a freight train of fiscal ineptitude coming down the track for the past two years. – Mike Hosking
Oh, it’s fiscally neutral. No, it’s not girl maths Grant. It’s really not. You’re not taking in enough to cover the running of the scheme. Who’s going to pay for it? Taxpayer. All those people buying the bloody utes were getting up at 5am in the morning and going to work. They’re the ones who are going to pay for it. So not only are they paying for the fee-bate so some lovely human has worked very hard and who has got the dosh, who’s got $70 odd thousand to spend on a brand-new car can get a rebate on it.
How does that even begin to make sense? Even with a rich prick capitalist government, how does it make sense? And yet, here you’ve got Labour champions of the poor, who are demanding the poor get in their utes that they’ve had to pay more for, get up at 5am in the morning, go to work to subsidise the scheme that allows rich pricks to buy new Teslas.
Good riddance to the Clean Car discount. Long may it be gone. Fiscally neutral my Aunt Fanny. – Kerre Woodham
For the contemporary antisemite, drunk on anti-Jewish disinformation, I would argue, even for our community, better out than in. The Nurembergian flourishes are already visible, and the more they take their bile public, the more chance their movement will take the next fatal step. Because public protest is a game of Russian Roulette, people. Even a win on the day can start to fester over time and turn a cause gangrenous. – Dane Giraud
The demise of the last Government’s Fair Pay Agreement legislation is a cautionary tale for policymakers. Death and taxes are sometimes called the only certainties.
But so, too, are the iron laws of economics. Governments ignore them at their peril.
As I wrote last year in this column, the FPA policy has always been a lemon. It was born of wishful thinking. Labour’s idea was that the government could improve the country’s productivity and prosperity by introducing compulsory collective bargaining to increase wages above market rates.
However, there is no economic evidence that regulating for higher wages will make a country more prosperous. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. – Roger Partridge
Setting terms and conditions of employment across entire industries or occupations under a system of FPAs would reduce labour market flexibility. It would lock in practices that are unsuitable or inefficient for specific workplaces. It would also add cost and complexity. Productivity would suffer as a result.
It is little wonder that the OECD has cautioned that centralised bargaining systems like FPAs are associated with lower productivity growth if coverage is high. Rather than advancing the former government’s laudable vision of a high-wage, high-productivity economy, FPAs risked undermining it. – Roger Partridge
Some people don’t like democracy when it doesn’t go their way and instead of engaging they act like belligerent buffoons. They go looking for the wrong, they jump to conclusions and don’t bother understanding the detail – instead they believe the sensationalised headlines.
In 2017 they all wanted us to give the new Government a go. Even though some felt aggrieved that the party that got the most votes did not become Government, we were told “that’s MMP” and they were right.
So let’s give this Government a go. Why don’t you all take a breath, have a break, enjoy some sunshine (I hope!) and then let’s pull together next year instead of apart. – Paula Bennett
It’s easy to forget during the brouhaha of this political theatre that only nine weeks ago Kiwis voted for this coalition government based on the very policies they campaigned on and are now executing. The temptation here to insert former Finance Minister Michael Cullen’s famous misquote, “We won, you lost, eat that!”, is great but has to be resisted.
Because if those beating drums of dissent signal that Parliament is more polarised than ever before, we all must fight the most virulent strain of this cancer, found in the US, called affective polarisation. That’s polarisation that goes beyond agreeing-to-disagree, which is so partisan that adherents demand you must agree with them on everything, otherwise you’re the enemy.
What does it look like politically ? Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College in the US, describes it as activists on both sides who’ve reframed political conflict as a battle over moral truth rather than over issue positions: if you disagree, you’re not just wrong but amoral. – Janet Wilson
And while Willis is laying the blame squarely at the feet of the previous Government, clearly various boards and management at KiwiRail over the past few years have questions to answer. There probably needs to be a short inquiry into how this occurred from start to finish – if only to serve as a guide of what not to do in future.
Nevertheless, it serves a valuable political purpose – albeit an unwanted one – for Nicola Willis and the wider Luxon Government. The entire state sector is now on notice that building programmes, projects, lurks and policies out of step with the new regime will be cancelled, changed, pared back. – Luke Malpass
People are saying things like I am a race traitor or a class traitor or an Uncle Tom without even listening to the speech . . . I think that was the point of the speech, you can’t take for granted just because someone has a certain background or upbringing it’s what happened in my life that’s shaped me. – James Meager
It’s enough to make you cry. As someone who had the opportunity to help with building some significant infrastructure in broadband, roading and rail during the term of the Key/English Government, watching what has since happened in this country has been truly soul-destroying. Billions of dollars have been frittered away and so much time and opportunity have been wasted.
Our reputation for building things is in the toilet. We have gone from being a place that could procure some decent kit at a reasonable price to a story of churning plans, blown budgets, constant restructuring and an appalling lack of delivery. All in six years.
Surely the news of the past two weeks means any vestigial reputation for fiscal competence the sixth Labour Government had has been shredded, on its track record with infrastructure alone. – Steven Joyce
It’s hard to understand how they could be so profligate, yet also so ineffective. Other Labour Governments have had a reputation for big spending, but they haven’t been this bad.
I think it comes down to four things. First, Ardern and Co wanted to be transformative. They didn’t have well-developed plans but they knew they didn’t want to do ordinary things. – Steven Joyce
Second, they believed they had a mandate to spend money, particularly as a result of the pandemic. During Covid-19, lots of Governments opened the spending spigots and these guys truly drank that Kool-Aid. Big Government was back. Interest rates were low, so you should borrow more and more. A bike bridge to Birkenhead, no worries. Light rail in Wellington, absolutely. Rainbows and unicorns for everyone.
Third, they had no idea how to execute, and no willingness to trust the private sector in any way to execute and make tradeoffs for them. Their deep suspicion of anyone who didn’t work for the public sector is now legendary across so many fields, but it particularly bit them in the backside on infrastructure, a field where most of the expertise the world over is in the private sector.
And fourth, they were obsessed with restructuring and centralising everything, often for no rhyme or reason beyond leaving their mark. They were obsessive about their legacy, rather than just doing things that worked for the people who put them into office. Ironically, as a result, their legacy will be tiny.
And so we have wasted so much time and so much money. Just think what roads, pipes and hospitals we could have built with the money that slipped through the Government’s fingers over that wasted six years. As I say, soul-destroying. – Steven Joyce
The new Government won’t be perfect of course, no Government is. But already it seems to have a refreshing understanding of the value of a dollar, and a realisation that the money they get to play with comes from the hard-earned incomes of Kiwis across the country. Ministers are killing off some poorly thought-out infrastructure projects and poorly thought-out restructurings. And that’s good. Better that than throwing good money after bad.
None of it’s before time. This week’s anaemic GDP print shows us what happens if you stop focusing on the economy or investing wisely for growth. The infrastructure we build over the next few years needs to be clearly dedicated to helping the country grow faster and build our prosperity. That will require a laser focus on choosing the right projects, funding them and managing them carefully.
Six years of spraying money around on fanciful ideas needs to be put behind us. – Steven Joyce
To me a lot of this is BS.
Are we going to affect our farmers’ livelihoods … right through the valley, just because someone drives up [SH83 or 8] for 10 minutes of their lifetime? We actually live there; we work there. – Guy Percival
In one sense whether sovereignty was ceded or not in 1840 is of second order importance. The reality is that New Zealand has no future at all if some of us are, by the accident of birth, entitled to a superior constitutional status. – Don Brash
Let’s Get Wellington Moving was created and no one, not even the people running the show, knew what they were trying to achieve or why it existed. – Joel MacManus
Let’s Get Wellington Moving was a giant waste of everyone’s time. It was expensive, slow and unaccountable. It was a sick joke at the expense of everyone who hoped that better things were possible in Wellington. What was the point? Why did we put ourselves through this? – Joel MacManus
In the end, LGWM wasn’t ruined by its organisational structure, the bureaucratic inefficiency, or even the bad engagement. Those were all just symptoms of the same underlying problem: it didn’t know what it was. – Joel MacManus
Has there ever been a more co-ordinated media attack on a new government in our history? It’s as if the mainstream media, with one or two very honourable exceptions, has just kept up a non-stop barrage of stories pushing back against government policy, policy that was campaigned on, voted for by a majority on October 14th and then agreed between the coalition partners.
In the eyes of the political left this is not democracy. This is called the tyranny of the majority or a new word which has crept into the lexicon, majoritarianism. – Peter Williams
That the percentage of the population who are smokers has dropped from 29.6 at the turn of the century to just 6.8 percent now suggests that education about its harm, combined with high taxes and its social uncoolness is working. That is real evidence.
Modelling is merely predictive and the precedents for other vices suggest what was planned would never have worked.
But you never get any sort of analysis of these matters from the media. All they have in their narrative is the pushback against the idea. Why not some deep thinking about the issue from the other side.
Hell no, we can’t have the government being seen in a possibly good light, can we? – Peter Williams
Nothing could better illustrate or be emblematic of the earnest suicidal frivolity of the West than the decision of the first female chief executive of the British insurance and pension company Aviva, which has assets of more than $420 billion under management, that the appointment to all senior positions of white men must “be signed off by her”: in other words that there must be a presumption against them—unless, I suppose, they can prove themselves to her to be thoroughly emasculated and in tune with her ideology. – Theodore Dalrymnple
The chief executive’s command of English seems not to be quite consonant with her salary, for she said, in that mixture of Newspeak and langue de bois that we have now come to expect from the nomenklatura class, that she wanted to “make sure that the process followed for that recruitment has been diverse, has been properly done.” People who left school in 1925 at age 14 used to speak better English than this; what she meant is not that the process should have been diverse, but that the candidates chosen should have been diverse, in the technical sexist and racist meaning of the word.
She is too cloth-eared to realize the implications of the word “non-diverse,” with its condescending assumption that to be anything other than a white male must be vulnerable and therefore in need of a bureaucratic leg up, so to speak, from the likes of her. As to the “chief people officer” of whom she spoke, only someone ignorant of Orwell, or utterly without imagination, could use it without a shudder. Human resources is bad enough, as if people were to be mined like diamonds on the Transvaal Rand, but a chief people officer (no doubt abbreviated to a CPO) is one stage worse. – Theodore Dalrymnple
Of course, the demographic features to be taken into account have to be chosen for their supposed relevance, for human populations have an almost infinite number of possible demographic features—intelligence, for example. I presume that not even the chief executive of Aviva would want 15 percent of the directors of her company to have an IQ of 80 or below (though it might make life easier for her), or that 25 percent of the directors should have a criminal record or be obese, with of course the correct proportion of obese criminals, or that 1 percent of her staff should be aged over 90. Clearly, the chief people officer would have quite a lot of extra work to do if staff were to mimic the demographic features of the population in all possible ways; and the only way to ensure it would be to employ the entire population at the same salary. No one could then sue for discrimination. Borges’ story about a map of the world so accurate that it was the same size as the world comes here to mind.
Clearly, then, characteristics have to be chosen from among innumerable others, if any demographic pattern is to be imposed at all. Presumably they are to be chosen in the same way that the World Wildlife Fund chooses which species of animal to protect, namely the animals that are supposedly in some kind of danger of extinction. (The WWF has not yet, so far as I am aware, chosen to protect the brown rat, the cockroach, or the bluebottle fly, as being already adequately present in the world.)
The characteristics of human groups to be protected as endangered species are protected must be considered relevant in some way; and if you are a racist, as the chief executive of Aviva is a racist, no doubt without realizing it or wanting to be one, then race will be considered a relevant characteristic in choosing senior staff. Thus, anti-racism turns 180 degrees and becomes mirror-image racism, and the old joke, that the cop did not care what kind of communist the anti-communist protester was, becomes expressive of an important truth. Unless we are careful, we become what we oppose.
The suicidal frivolity of the West is demonstrated by the fact that no one would apply to a professional sports team the criteria that the head of a giant company (and certainly not she alone) thinks important. The reason for this is obvious: Professional sports teams are concerned only to find the best athletes so that they can win. The spectacle of sport is thus too important in our moral economy to be harmed by the imposition of quotas, but the pensions of 15 million people—of which Aviva has at least partial care—can justifiably be harmed by such quotas. So long as there is good quality sport for people to watch, the fate of their pensions does not matter. All they need is enough for junk food and a sofa from which to watch a giant screen.
It seems that there are all too many chief executives of companies and heads of other institutions and organizations (Harvard, for example) who would like to play the role of Rosa Parks, though with the satisfaction not only of helping to oppose injustice and bring about a more just society, but also to receive vast salaries and pensions for doing so. This is a mediocrities’ charter. – Theodore Dalrymnple
The influential report explained that livestock production should be intensified in nations with a record of efficient production, such as New Zealand and the Netherlands, to help feed the globe. Mr. Torero was concerned that cuts to production in developed nations would likely push production to other areas of the world where efficiency was poorer and emissions were likely to be greater per kilo. – John Sleigh
Whatever happened to “publish and be damned”?
I can’t pretend my inspiration to become a journalist was that 1952 movie, Deadline USA, starring Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a newspaper about to be sold from under him, and who is being threatened by gangsters, but publishes anyway.
But maybe a few of today’s editors and publishers, not to mention their advertising departments, ought to watch it to get a refresher about what journalism is supposed to be about. – Jenny Ruth
Effectively, NZME was telling a victim that, if NZME ran the ad, that victim had to pay to protect NZME from the very mob that was victimising Shalom NZ and other Jewish people living in NZ.
Conditioning in this manner the granting of a voice to the victims of actual mob violence ought to stick in the craw of any journalist.
How craven, cowardly and lacking any sense of morality NZME’s are actions toward both SUFW and Shalom NZ.
It’s actions ought to be anathema to any citizen who thinks NZ should be a peaceful and democratic society in which free speech and the right to be heard is a given.
The NZ Police should also be up in arms – obviously, NZME has no faith in the police force’s ability to keep the peace and guard private property, surely their reason to exist. – Jenny Ruth
This following comment is hardly original to me, but it does look like: “me too, unless you’re a Jew.” – Jenny Ruth
We are going to start a new chapter, we’re going to draw a line and across our Government there will be fiscal discipline. There will be a drive for value for money. There will be a stopping of wasteful programs.
I do want New Zealanders to go into Christmas with some some hope … I will demonstrate the reason why I am confident we can deliver tax reduction next year, which is first that we’ll outline a small collection – a mini collection – of decisions we’ve already made which provide a down payment for our tax plan. – Nicola Willis
They should be confidence-enhancing in that they demonstrate that with decisive action, we can create the room for tax reduction … we will then chart the path to put more money into people’s bank accounts next year. – Nicola Willis
I’m a big believer – in politics and leadership – you’ve got to take people with you.
You’ve got to treat people with the trust that people are smart. If you give them the information, if you help them understand the issues, then people will better understand the decisions you then make. I think transparency with what’s going on with our economy is really important. – Nicola Willis
But being an infrastructure-building government doesn’t mean throwing endless cheques at the wall and saying look how committed we are to infrastructure. It’s not about the spending you do. It’s about whether the investments you deliver that you make, deliver the infrastructure out the other end. –
We will only be a government able to restore fiscal discipline if every single minister is on the same page about that. – Nicola Willis
We can’t govern by press release. And my read of that Auditor General report was that the government had got things the wrong way around – It was far more driven by what the headline would be in the paper the next day than what the outcome for New Zealanders in three years would be – that is not how we want to be as a government. – Nicola Willis
The Bland Leading The Bland: That Labour’s much reduced caucus voted unanimously to keep “Chippie” on as leader says it all. Because, if there’s no alternative in the caucus, then there is also no alternative that matters in the party. Over 15 years, the Clarkists transformed Labour into a neoliberal monoculture. There’s no point looking for red-hot chilli-peppers in a paddock planted with potatoes. – Chris Trotter
In case you are in any doubt, the New Zealand Herald, with TV1 in hot pursuit, has taken over the role of being the Labour-inspired Opposition to the new government. Chippy and Toni can take a holiday until the low-level editorial team at the Herald come to their senses, or the paper collapses. – Michael Bassett
Quite why the new government has been given no leeway as it settles into office and comes up to speed hasn’t been explained by our mainstream media. TV ONE and Radio New Zealand are barely any better than the Herald with their comments, and are almost as quick to assume Chippy’s Opposition role.
Far be it from me to be a defender of the new Coalition ministry. While they get a bare pass mark from me for what they have done so far, they have a long way to go to fulfil the election hopes of their supporters. But if ministers are to receive a constant battering from so-called news reporters then we are in for a dismal three years of “gotcha” journalism. The only bright spot will be that the struggling Herald might well collapse. – Michael Bassett
I think it’s helpful to think about our constitution as an ecosystem. It’s in a delicate state of equilibrium, conditioned by a mix of laws, rules, convention and practice. Adding in something almost alien when nobody was quite expecting it risks upsetting things – especially those important conventions protecting our electoral infrastructure. – Dean Knight
When we engage in matters of government and constitutional law, we necessarily bring some of our own ideological baggage—we have a vision of what the ideal state should be and that ideology in part shapes our sense of what good governance looks like,” he explains. “So I can’t be neutral. But I won’t be partisan. And, be assured, I will be one hundred percent robust. Those are my rules of engagement for entering the civic fray. – Dean Knight
She’ll be remembered as quitting early. She’ll be remembered, I would imagine, for her outpourings of grief on the mosque shootings, but she certainly won’t be remembered for policy.
I think there won’t be a lot of memory about Jacinda Ardern other than, she was a young woman that was appointed to the job of Prime Minister, a job she once claimed she never ever wanted to do. The second term was overwhelming for her. But really it just shows you, given the overwhelming support she had two years ago, how ill-equipped she was to do the job by quitting a year early. – Barry Soper
The health reforms were proclaimed by previous ministers as providing better health results for all New Zealanders but under the previous government have so far spent more money, achieved more bureaucracy and delivered little more than longer waiting lists, dire workforce shortages and worse outcomes, – Shane Reti
There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent. – James Bennet
.I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.
But Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in. In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias. I have no doubt Sulzberger believes in them. Years ago he demonstrated them himself as a reporter, covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people, and it would be nice if they were enough to deal with the challenge of this era, too. But, on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage. – James Bennet
Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles. – James Bennet
Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered. – James Bennet
As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred. This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified. When I was at the Times, the newsroom editors worked hardest to keep Washington coverage open and unbiased, no easy task in the Trump era. And there are still people, in the Washington bureau and across the Times, doing work as fine as can be found in American journalism. But as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters. – James Bennet
For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact. It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other. I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing. – James Bennet
To spend time with the perpetrators and victims of violence in the Middle East, to listen hard to the reciprocal and reinforcing stories of new and ancient grievances, is to confront the tragic truth that there can be justice on more than one side of a conflict. More than ever, it seemed to me that a reporter gave up something in renouncing the taking of sides: possibly the moral high ground, certainly the psychological satisfaction of righteous anger.
But there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were. You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.
This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves. – James Bennet
A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing. – James Bennet
When I first took the job, I felt some days as if I’d parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed. Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters. – James Bennet
Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.
Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation. Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm. – James Bennet
The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left. – James Bennet
In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates. They are generally also motivated by a desire for a more just world. Neither of those tendencies are new. But there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?
Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.
And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role. – James Bennet
The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind. – James Bennet
But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.
Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves. It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too: over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance, will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash. – James Bennet
I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics. – James Bennet
Under the Ardern government, the overall rate dropped to 88.9 per cent but the Māori rate dropped to 78.4 per cent.
You might call that a slump.
Because of a widening of the disparities between Māori and non-Māori health measures, we were told a Māori Health Authority was essential.
Another possibility – of course – was that a change of government might do the trick. – Point of Order
Willis rightly sees her role as reducing the size of the state, encouraging Seymour to limit regulation to that needed to promote competition, smash privilege and protect health and environmental values, and then collect tax from a thriving private sector to fund better schools and social investments, the law-and-order community and the military.- Matthew Hooton
I walked out of that lecture feeling like our country needs a good dose of national pride. And it got me thinking. Why not us? Why aren’t we having those conversations about how we aspire to a better future for ourselves and the global community we’re part of? We don’t have to be the leader. In fact, we shouldn’t be. We’re too small. But we should participate. We’ve earned the right to do so.
As I reflect on 2023, I sense that we have plenty to be proud of. We’re just not very good at talking about it.
Instead, we’ve been focused on each other. Inward looking. Arguing over politics, race, climate and the like. Discussing the politicians we don’t like, the climate emissions or the electric car discounts offsetting taxes on the family ute. Bickering, internally, about ourselves. Meanwhile, the world moves forward. – Bruce Cotterill
Finally, we should be excited by the competence and confidence of our new Government. While the vocal minorities will continue to shout their displeasure, the direct, no-nonsense approach to the new 100-day plan, and the immediacy of the Cook Straight ferry decision shows that we have a no-nonsense Government that is serious about the economic and structural repair job that awaits them. The fear of what might have been, has been replaced by an atmosphere of hope for the year ahead.
And finally, there is us. The examples above don’t even scratch the surface. Because the biggest difference in the outlook for New Zealand will come as a result of the attitude that we bring to our challenges and opportunities alike. Across the broadest possible spectrum, we have a history to be proud of and a contribution to make to the world. Left and right. Māori and Pākeha. Local and immigrant. Educated leader and blue-collar worker. We all have a contribution to make. And we should be excited about what we can collectively achieve, and what we can offer a world in need.
After all, that’s how the world’s leaders think. – Bruce Cotterill
Government matters. Ideas matter. In time, Labour will return to the Treasury benches.
Currently, the agenda is being set by the extremists, by the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and a cohort of incoherent dilettantes who mistake social-media engagement for policy development.
Opposition can be a gift. It is in the nation’s interest that they use this time wisely and the success of Jordan Williams and Dr Hartwich are examples of what, with time and genuine engagement, can be achieved. – Damien Grant
What might be called the psychologization of life had two consequences. First, it encouraged people to examine their thoughts and emotions much as a hypochondriac takes his pulse or attends to the minor sensations in his abdomen, such that minor fluctuations took on major and often sinister significance; and second, that the difference between the major and the minor, the serious and the trivial, the banal and the significant in life was expunged. – Theodore Dalrymple
Psychologization is different from the examination of the motions of a person’s own mind, as Doctor Johnson recommended. While not denying the influence of circumstance, and always allowing for the imperfections of human nature, Johnson never seeks to absolve humans from the inescapable responsibilities consequent upon the possession of free will.
From an early age, children now bathe in a sea of psychology that alienates them and undermines their sense of agency. No doubt, the availability of psychological assessment and treatment helps some children, particularly at the extreme end of any behavioral spectrum; but the overall effect of psychologization is to induct them early into the idea that their problems have a technical solution, and that they are vulnerable and may well have been the victim of something external that explains their difficulties—and thereby that either minimizes or excuses their own contribution to these difficulties. Parents are often too willing to accept this because they believe it of themselves: we are now several generations into the reign of psychology as explanatory sovereign.
Whether coincidentally or not, psychologization occurred at a time when religious belief declined and Western society lost faith in itself, to the point at which shame about, rather than pride in, the past became the default attitude, imparted to young minds by almost every possible means. This takes the form not of reasoned argument but of indoctrination about the past. – Theodore Dalrymple
A historiography of massacre, injustice, slavery, and so forth crowds out the idea of achievement, moral and physical. Either young people take the comfort and privileges that they enjoy for granted—as natural and immemorial instead of the result of prolonged human effort—and thus believe themselves entitled to their effortless continuation; or they come to feel guilty about enjoying these blessings because they are the historical fruit of exploitation, and they feel this all the more strongly, not being able, or even willing, to give them up.
One defense against privilege that is not only unearned but also felt to be the result of injustice is to become a victim yourself: for victimhood wards off reproach, as garlic flowers warded off Dracula. The conditions of human existence are such that everyone has suffered some kind of injustice and can therefore pose as a victim of something. Nothing is easier to let stew in the mind than an injustice suffered; it grows on the recollection, and, however trivial it may seem to others, it can assume enormous proportions for the sufferer. This surely is the explanation of Greta Thunberg’s outburst—“How dare you! How dare you!”—at the United Nations. A young person, who, by the standards of all previously existing humanity, was among the most fortunate of the fortunate, managed to turn herself into a victim, and believe her own performance. And thanks to the regnant sentimentality about the idealism (and fragility) of youth, no one confronted her about her grotesque claims to victimhood. – Theodore Dalrymple
The ideology of climate crisis is calculated to turn the most safely situated people into anxiety- and guilt-ridden neurotics. Already primed by a historiography of slavery and genocide to believe themselves the heirs to a vale of tears, they now also believe that the world is about to end. Climate anxiety among the young, even among primary-school children, is well reported and appears to be rising. This is not a spontaneous phenomenon: no child of six or seven perceives or knows anything about greenhouse gases without indoctrination—but as the Jesuits once put it, give us a child for the first seven years of his life, and we will know the adult.
Thus, a child comes to believe that he or she lives during an unprecedented crisis, the failure of which to materialize in no way dents belief in its existence. – Theodore Dalrymple
With the psychologization of life, young people have ceased to become responsible for themselves; but in return, they have been made responsible for the state of the world.
When they throw a tantrum, it is not their fault, and we must seek the causes; but when they eat a banana, what a weight of responsibility falls on their shoulders! The banana has probably been cultivated by near-slave labor, and most of its sale price will go not to the workers but to the exploitative banana company or to the supermarket that displayed it. Unless the banana is organically grown, its production will also have entailed pollution. Worse, bananas do not grow where they are primarily consumed; they must be transported, at a huge environmental cost. Eating a banana is thus a guilty pleasure, unlike throwing a tantrum, which is morally neutral; and every act of consumption takes on this burden of responsibility for the imminent end of the world. Unself-conscious enjoyment, which we once might have wanted for children, is now a kind of crime. – Theodore Dalrymple
A magnificent, though unconscious, hypocrisy runs through all this. The young’s dependence on electronic screens never causes them to wonder about the environmental cost of their habit; and alas for the children, they increasingly cannot imagine a life without such screens, or even believe that life was ever possible without them. So important have the screens become that the virtual is often more real to them than the real: or rather, the virtual has become the real and the real virtual. It is not unusual to see young people (and even not-so-young people) sitting around a restaurant table, all communicating via smartphones to people not present. Real contact makes them anxious, which the screens relieve by rendering impossible—as does earsplitting noise.
The electronic means of communication not only enclose the young in an eternal present and inflate the significance of the most trivial occurrences in their lives, turning minor inconveniences or setbacks into catastrophes; they render them susceptible to the grossest manipulation, commercial and otherwise. – Theodore Dalrymple
The public response to the Covid pandemic not only enforced a regime of an entirely virtual social life but also conveyed the impression that any other life was fraught with peril, though this was never the case. Face-to-face contact became synonymous with danger, illness, and even death. “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases,” said the old public-health saw; now merely to breathe did so. Children were made vulnerable and responsible at the same time. – Theodore Dalrymple
And children are now not even supposed to accept without question what sex they were born into. Life for them has become a great existential supermarket, without criteria of judgment.
The young, then, are encouraged to believe by psychologization that they are not responsible for their own conduct, but that they are inheritors of monstrous injustice, of whose advantages they cannot rid themselves. Thus, they are inescapably guilty. The world, moreover, is about to end—unless, that is, they wear enough sackcloth and ashes. They live largely in virtuality, which discourages real human contact and gives no sense of proportion or perspective. Finally, their prospects are often not brilliant. They are expensively overtrained in nonsense; many will live worse than did their parents or grandparents. The assumption of improvement had been replaced by that of deterioration. Their lives are enough to depress those who observe them, let alone those who live them. – Theodore Dalrymple
Experts will claim any reduction in spending is a social calamity. Our Covid response should make us cautious of experts who have no knowledge of economics. – Richard Prebble
Health economists measure health outcomes by mortality rates. Death is a statistic that is hard to fiddle with. Sweden, which did not lockdown, had from January 2020 to June 2022 the lowest percentage increase in mortality in the OECD.
New Zealand, an island nation, had an increase in mortality twice the rate of Sweden.
Lockdowns reduced Covid cases, but being locked down in overcrowded South Auckland houses caused other adverse health outcomes.
Swedish children have suffered no educational disadvantage due to Covid. We have a generation of children who face a lifetime of disadvantage. – Richard Prebble
Do not fund what you do not want more of. Fund schools for only the number of pupils schools teach, not the number they enrol. Attendance and educational achievement will immediately improve. – Richard Prebble
Competing in the decathlon – at which I won the gold medal at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games – I’ve seen performances by some inspirational women.
But the truth is, no matter how hard they trained, they could never have matched my times (other than the 1,500metre run, where some women could beat me).
My physique was too different – too male. It would have been grossly unfair for me to compete against them. My victory would have been a travesty.
So when I see trans women like American swimmer Lia Thomas or Canadian cyclist Veronica Ivy (formerly known as Rachel McKinnon) on the podium, I know they are biologically male and physical advantage has helped them to win.
All my sporting instincts rebel against that. For sport to mean anything, it must be fair. – Daley Thompson
I, too, strongly oppose allowing trans women to take part in female sports. I don’t consider this controversial, nor political. It’s about fairness.
Trans athletes say they do everything possible to compete fairly, for instance by taking testosterone blockers.
Let us put aside the fact that I have strong reservations about the use of any hormone-altering drugs in sport.
But it seems patently obvious that no pill can wipe out the benefits that come from growing up biologically male in terms of muscular and skeletal strength.
These trans women have been through male puberty. They have longer limbs, broader shoulders, thicker bones, better power-to-weight ratios and larger heart and blood volumes.
Nothing they can do will change that: they are always going to outperform biological women. – Daley Thompson
My belief is that sport should have a women’s section and a new, open class where transgender women would be welcomed and could compete fairly.
There should be space for trans women in sport – but not at the expense of all women.
Like any decent human being, I fully support the right of everyone to present however they want, use the name and pronouns they feel reflect their true selves, and live their lives as they wish. – Daley Thompson
Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen the emergence of a more compassionate society – but unfairness to women is the unintended consequence.
And ridding ourselves of old-fashioned gender stereotypes should not result in potentially giving biologically male predators – who identify as female – access to women’s prisons or women’s domestic violence refuges.
Women have fought hard to achieve their safe spaces. They have to be respected. – Daley Thompson
How is any young girl going to feel inspired to take up sport if she knows she’ll be competing against – and losing to – biological males?
And how can any parent feel their daughter is safe in a changing room where biologically-intact male athletes are dressing and showering alongside? – Daley Thompson
What I do know is that I’m not transphobic or a misogynist – two slurs that have been chucked at me on Twitter.
If we become afraid to tell the truth, we really are in trouble.
And if trans women are allowed to compete in female categories, then women’s sport isn’t just in trouble – it’s finished. – Daley Thompson
The Coalition’s most important reforms in 2024 will not concern tax, housing, resource management or even race relations. They will happen in schools. – Mathew Hooton
Criminals must be caught and locked up and welfare can’t be a lifestyle choice. But the systems need to care about their clients and genuinely support them to become free and independent of the state. – Mathew Hooton
At every place I’ve wanted to say ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To call out both barbarism and its intellectual apologists. To express Spinoza-style disgust for these new enemies of Western civilisation. For make no mistake, that’s what they are. From Hamas to the radical Islamists in Europe who feel inspired by Hamas to the West’s own sons and daughters of privilege who make excuses for Hamas – all have proven themselves in 2023 to be the adversaries of truth, culture and reason. Surely no one will now deny that Western civilisation is under assault on two fronts: from without and within? – Brendan O’Neill
The apologism for Hamas in privileged circles has been mind-blowing. Hamas’s bestial violence against the Jews has been denied, downplayed or outright justified. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one privately educated pretend radical in Britain described the racist butchery of 7 October. This sympathy with barbarism, this receptiveness to acts of staggering dehumanisation, goes beyond Israelophobia. It speaks to more than the witless hate for Israel that’s been rampant in right-thinking circles for years.
It even touches on something deeper than the scourge of identity politics, though that politics no doubt shapes the infantile hot take that Jews are permanent oppressors and Palestinians are forever victims. No, the sympathy shown by woke Westerners for Hamas’s apocalyptic violence reveals a moral kinship between these two sections of global society. It exposes their shared contempt for Western civilisation, their shared indifference to human suffering, and their shared loathing of freedom. – Brendan O’Neill
The fallout from 7 October brought to the surface a crisis of Western civilisation that has been brewing for decades. It confirmed that when you socialise the young into a system of loathing for their own civilisation not only do you make them indifferent to the threats faced by that civilisation – you make them welcome such threats, to embrace them as necessary moral correctives to our own hubris and misplaced exceptionalism.
Having educated the young to view the West as a racist entity; to fear America and Britain as nations born in the sins of slavery and Empire; to ‘decolonise’ their own learning of those arrogant white men of Enlightenment; to eschew science as a Western conceit that negates more indigenous ways of knowing; and to doubt the existence of truth itself, we cannot now be shocked to find them so cavalier about a violent assault on this awful, unspeakable West. In this case, Hamas’s racist onslaught on the people of a state that is seen to embody Western values in the Middle East. For many today, ‘Western civilisation is synonymous with racism, oppression and exploitation’, as one academic puts it. So why not celebrate its violent humiliation? Why not revel in the degradation of those who enjoy its gains? – Brendan O’Neill
This must be a moral watershed for the West. In turning the young against civilisation, we’ve marched them into the arms of barbarism. We have lost them to Hamas.
The unholy marriage between wokeism and Islamism can no longer be denied. Both scorn the idea of Western civilisation. Both disavow Enlightenment as Western arrogance. Both dread the march of modernity, whether as a threat to Gaia or Sharia. And both hate Jews. One side views them as pigs and monkeys, the other as an oppressor class. Once again Jews have come to be seen as the embodiment of modernity, and therefore the enemies of modernity, whether that’s the civilisation sceptics of our own elite universities or the civilisation attackers of radical Islam, turn on them. Viciously. The woke dehumanise them as oppressors, Hamas dehumanises them with violence. Both are assaults not only on Jews but also on the civilisational conscience itself. – Brendan O’Neill
Today we face not merely a clash of civilisations, but, perhaps more importantly, a clash within Western civilisation. On one side, those who have abandoned reason, on the other those of us who wish to defend it. A movement in 2024 against the barbarorum of our times would be no bad thing. – Brendan O’Neill
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Homepaddock 