Michael Laws chats to Professor James Allan on The Platform.

Michael Laws meets an overseas expert who says New Zealand is undergoing a constitutional revolution

Guy Hatchard: The Grim Covid Industry

Lincoln National, America’s third largest insurance company has announced a 163% increase in death benefits in 2021 paid out under its group life insurance scheme which primarily covers working age 18-64 year olds.

Lincoln National attributes its consequent operating losses to “non-pandemic-related morbidity”. In other words a lot of people are becoming seriously ill and it is not due to Covid infection.

Back here in New Zealand, Stuff reported yesterday:

Eric Crampton: The Government transport policy that gave officials a day to cost it on a Sunday

Just before 3pm on a Sunday afternoon, about a dozen New Zealand Transport Agency and Ministry of Transport officials received a weekend-ruining email. Subject: “Cabinet paper: Urgent.”

It provides a depressing insight into how policy gets made.

The agency that would have to administer a fuel tax and Road User Charge (RUC) holiday had less than a day’s notice that the change was coming.

Important detail had to be filled in after the policy was announced, which also may have prevented improvements that ran counter to what had already been announced.

Point of Order: Flexing the state’s muscle - Māori ministers are admiring as the media are mobilised to inform the masses about Matariki

The state is flexing its muscle in the building and supermarket industries.

In the building industry the intervention can be criticised as long overdue and unlikely to do much good any time soon to remedy a crippling shortage of plasterboard.

A Ministerial taskforce has been set up to look at what more can be done to ease the shortage, including the potential for legislative or regulatory change.

In the supermarket business, the muscle-flexing has been announced in robust language – the press statement is headed Commerce Commission empowered to crackdown on covenants.

The Commerce Commission will be enabled to require supermarkets to hand over information regarding contracts, arrangements and land covenants which make it difficult for competing retailers to set up shop.

A much more troubling sign of the state flexing its muscle can be found in a statement jointly released by Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson and Māori Crown Relations Te Arawhiti Minister Kelvin Davis. Their lark is the mobilising of the media for an exercise in mass education – or is it indoctrination?

The Platform chats with Don Brash about co-governance and treaty partnership

Don Brash says New Zealand is undergoing a cultural coup

Garrick Tremain: Optics

Jacinda passing her eye test

Bruce Moon: Why We Should All Celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Day

It so very nearly succeeded!  

Had not a second check of the vaults of the palace of Westminster found Guy Fawkes ready to ignite a colossal quantity of gunpowder, the King, the Lords and the Commons would all have been blown sky high in an instant.  

The subsequent chaos in England can only be imagined and how defenceless it would have been – 1066 all over again a mere 17 years since the destruction of the Spanish Armada!  For the Spaniards, surely still thirsting for revenge, an invasion from their Netherlands possessions (Belgium) would have been easy – if the French had not got there first.  In moments the hard-won liberties of the English people would have been swept away and a savage inquisition imposed.

Point of Order: Poverty and pessimism – slump in consumer confidence brings more unpalatable news to Robertson and the Govt

When the country’s newspapers devote their cover pages to advertisements captioned “The cost living crisis”, it’s not something that makes palatable reading for government ministers.

When the advertisements come from an organisation like Kidscan, appealing for donations “to make sure children in poverty get the food they urgently need this winter”, those ministers may well choke on their morning lattes.

Mike Hosking: Let's make teaching an attractive profession again

Performance pay in education is one of those things governments have given up on, those that thought the idea had merit anyway. They tended to be National governments.

And it is a good idea. The same way it’s a good idea in virtually every other workplace anywhere. The idea that a pay rise or reward only comes as a result of time spent in the classroom suggests that simply turning up makes you better, which of course it does not.

The argument always put forward by unions is that somehow, unlike all other professions, teaching is unique.

Wendy Geus: National Party Faithful Return in Their Droves to the Fold

Newly minted Justice Minister Kiri Allan has been quick out of the blocks with some rhetoric of her own, calling National’s ‘soft on crime’ line “abhorrent” and (the old faithful) decrying their “knee jerk reaction” to the current crime wave, which even Allan does not deny.

Despite low voter turn-out, it was clear the thousands of Tauranga voters who returned to National (from Labour) in the by-election, giving Uffindell over 6000 more votes than Tinetti, didn’t agree that National’s ‘soft on crime’ accusation is just “abhorrent rhetoric”.

Sam Ufindell has his own member’s bill ready to go before parliament, promising a tough-on-crime approach in his city. A couple of the measures include banning gang patches in public and confiscating motorbikes for a month as punishment for associating and causing a public nuisance.

Garrick Tremain: Trevor Mallard, sprinklers and manky music

Trevor Mallard entertains new friends in Dublin

Garrick Tremain is one of New Zealand's best known artists and political cartoonists. With a background in farming and advertising, he has a wonderful ability to capture in images exactly what people are thinking in a way that makes us laugh. You can see his more of his work on his website HERE.

Point of Order: O’Connor chalks up global fishing success – now let’s see if Twyford can persuade Russia (and others) to agree to nuclear-weapon ban

While Health Minister Andrew Little was announcing the launch of a meth addiction service in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, two of his colleagues were dealing with much grander global issues – one related to the international regulation of fishing, the other dealing with efforts to ban nuclear weapons.

Trade Minister Damien O’Connor – reporting back from Europe ahead of his return home – said New Zealand’s leadership had contributed to a number of significant outcomes and progress at the Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which concluded in the early hours of Friday morning after a week of intense negotiations between its 164 members.

A major outcome was a new Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies

Karl du Fresne: The cabinet minister and the RNZ editorial executive

A couple of updates:

Last week I posted complimentary remarks about cabinet minister Kiritapu Allan. Today I read that her partner for the past three years has been RNZ’s Maori News director Mani Dunlop. Presumably this was common knowledge around Parliament and in media circles but it was the first time I’d learned of it.

Why mention it? After all, Allan’s private life should be her own affair. Who can begrudge her the freedom to enter relationships with whomever she chooses?

Mike Hosking: Plenty of warning signs for the Govt from Tauranga

I think we have broad agreement that by-elections are a story unto themselves. They are never good for the government of the day. And what happens in a one-off vote is not automatically to be repeated on a national stage.

But a couple of notable things happened in Tauranga that tell a story. The National and ACT votes went up significantly. Both parties gained.

And Labour not only lost, but lost badly. They lost badly because the tide generally has gone out on the Government and this merely confirmed it. They also gave up from the start, they never even tried. Not even trying is defeatist.

Peter Williams: "Stop Three Waters" Speech

Full speech given by former radio and TV broadcaster Peter Williams around the proposed 3 waters reform. What it will mean to everyday Kiwi's and why he feels it needs to be stopped.

Geoffrey Miller: Tale of two summits – why Jacinda Ardern said no to the Commonwealth, but yes to NATO

Jacinda Ardern’s decision to attend the upcoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Spain – but to skip the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Rwanda – symbolises the changes she is making to New Zealand foreign policy.

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) starts today in Kigali, while the NATO summit will be held in Madrid next week.

However, Jacinda Ardern is only attending the NATO summit. She is sending her foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, to attend the Commonwealth meeting in her place.

Ian Powell: Is the health system an electoral Sword of Damocles for Labour?

The legend of the Sword of Damocles – about the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power – is relevant to voters in the 2023 general election, when they contemplate the Labour government’s stewardship of the health system.

In 2017 the Labour-led Government inherited a health system in crisis, with severe workforce shortages.

While this was an inherited, the Government has largely ignored it. Workforce shortages now range between ⅕th to ¼ depending on the occupational group. Even before the pandemic these shortages were impacting severely on access to planned surgery and other treatments, overcrowded emergency departments, availability of hospital beds, and compromised capacity to diagnose patients in a clinically timely manner.

Covid-19 accelerated this, but did not cause it.

The Government’s response was transparently pathetic. In 2018 it trumpeted the formation of a committee; in fact, it was a reconstituted committee with less authority than its predecessor.

Bruce Moon: Faking Our Name

Of all the fake history with which New Zealand is swamped today, nothing is more blatant than the claim that ‘Aotearoa” is, or was, the Maori name for our country.

If that were true,  the Williams, father and son, would certainly have used it in their translation of Hobson’s final draft of 4^th February 1840 into that much-scrutinized document, the “Treaty of Waitangi”.  After all, they had been in New Zealand for seventeen years, son Edward Marsh Williams since the age of four and speaking the Ngapuhi dialect as fluently as anybody.  But no! The Williams chose “Nu Tirani”, a reasonable, if not perfect, transliteration using the limited sounds of that speech.

And when their text was presented to the great assembly of chiefs and others the following day, not one word was spoken to challenge the Williams’ choice.  Not once does “Aotearoa” appear in Colenso's recording of the speeches of the day, carefully checked by Busby at the time.

Oliver Hartwich: Māori deserve better than the RBNZ’s cultural appropriation

Pick your favourite bit of bad economic news. How about a 10 percent hike in food prices? 8.6 percent US inflation? Or the stock market crash?

The Reserve Bank Governor should be all over the fragile state of the world economy. Surely, he will figure out how to reduce the RBNZ's settlement balance of more than $40 billion. You would think now is the time to talk to other central banks about avoiding monetary Armageddon.

But you would be wrong to assume any of this. Because at the Central Banking Global Summer Meetings, Governor Adrian Orr delivered an entirely different speech: “Why we embraced Te Ao Māori”.

Guy Hatchard: Shining a Light in Dark Places—Ten Ways the Government Controls the Pandemic Narrative

Ten ways the government and its allies control the pandemic narrative to ensure most of us are none the wiser!

This week Dr. Ian Town, chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Health, announced that the unvaccinated are six times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than the vaccinated.

Dr. Town prefaced his remarks with the caveat “the data is reasonably preliminary”.

Two weeks ago epidemiologist Dr. Michael Baker told us that the unvaccinated are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized.

So who is right, or do you, like me, smell a rat?