Owen McShane: If I was going there, I wouldn't start from here.

Many people are hoping the creation of the Auckland Super City will launch a new and better
Auckland – more affordable, more liveable, and more efficient.

Unfortunately, such improvements are unlikely while so many are so misinformed about Auckland’s environment today. If we don’t know where we are we cannot properly plan where to go.

Allan Peachey: The race between education and catastrophe

I wrote last time about praising New Zealand’s great schools and fixing or closing its bad ones. That brings to mind that great Ronald Reagan statement ‘if you cannot make them see the light, make them feel the heat”. I think it has been well demonstrated that getting New Zealand schools to “see the light” just has not brought about the changes that are needed if every New Zealand child is to have an outstanding school to go to. I spent over 32 years in schools and now after five years in Parliament all I continue to see is tinkering around the edges so that real problems never get dealt with.

Karl du Fresne: ACT enters the terminal phase of self-destruction

Will ACT survive the next election? I don’t think anyone will be betting the house on it right now. The party seems determined to disembowel itself in full public view.

My own reaction to this is mixed. On one hand I’m disappointed, because I supported most ACT policies and admired many of its MPs, at least up until the point when the party suddenly jumped the rails by aligning itself with the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

Mike Butler: Unrepresentative democracy

Ninety one percent of respondents to a YahooXtra poll this weekend think that iwi should not have any customary title to beaches. The poll attracted 21,050 votes in two days, of which 19,211 were against granting customary title. It is interesting to see such overwhelming opposition when there has been little debate in the mainstream media over the National-led government’s purported solution to the foreshore and seabed issue.

Allan Peachey: The Scandal of School Failure

I did not have a lot of time for Al Gore, the former Vice President of the USA. It was a stroke of good fortune for the world that George Bush finally prevailed over him in 2000. However, Gore did say one thing that continues to resonate with me: “Scandals are front page news, while routine failure is ignored.” He could have been talking about the New Zealand schooling system. The media, particularly but not exclusively the Sunday print media, love the “teacher sleeps with pupil” stuff or for variation “pupil sleeps with teacher”. And whether the Teachers’ Council is stern enough, or severe enough, or quick enough, or public enough in dealing with such cases. I am not arguing that such matters are not important, of course they are. But they attract far more attention than what the routine failure of schooling attracts.

Owen McShane: No Access Ramps between Orewa and Warkworth

The proposed Puhoi to Wellsford Highway should greatly enhance the connectivity of the Auckland and Northland economies. We are learning that networks are now more important in establishing urban primacy than size alone. But the potential benefits of this new element in the roading network are seriously compromised by the decision to have no access or exit ramps between the Orewa roundabout and Warkworth. This is not an engineering decision but is based on the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy which has determined that there shall be no growth between these two access points and hence there is no need for ramps.

Roger Kerr: This Year's 2025 Taskforce Report an Important Stocktake

 Next month the 2025 Taskforce will be delivering its second report to the government. It is the most important taskforce reporting this year.

Achieving the goal of catching up with Australian income levels by 2025 would hugely benefit most New Zealanders and alleviate many social problems – stretched household budgets, the availability of high-paying jobs, housing affordability, resource constraints in health, education and environmental protection, and our ability to cope with an aging population.

Lindsay Mitchell: Sole parents - blighted by poverty and mental illness

The following graphs paint a clear picture of the deprivation associated with sole parenthood.

But first, the extent of sole parenthood, which grew from 10 percent of all families with dependent children in 1975 to 28 percent in 2006:

David Round: Betrayed by National

I was arguing last week, you may recall, that the passage of National’s proposed foreshore and seabed legislation will mark the beginning of the end of our country. Towards the end of that column I made the point that the line we have been fed for the last twenty-five years, that after historic Treaty claims were settled we could all put the past behind us and get on with being New Zealanders, was a lie. Many of those claims, of course, were the repetition of earlier claims which had already been fully and finally settled at some past time, and clearly, also, despite these latest full and final settlements, the claims will be made again in future. But that aside, those claims and settlements were in fact but one stage in the continuing division of our country, a process of division in which National’s proposed foreshore and seabed legislation will mark a decisive and disastrous point. Let me remind you now of some of the other things that are going on, before I return to the foreshore and seabed.

Allan Peachey: Protecting Democracy through Education

Some weeks ago I wrote about the importance of science in the protection of democracy. That drew some nice comments in my direction and the ire of one economics teacher. Today I want to write about the importance of history in the protection of democracy, and no doubt draw praise from history teachers and the ire of a few more economics teachers! I should probably start with a declaration of personal interest. I am an historian by academic training and I have remained one by personal inclination for the nearly 40 years since I graduated. I remain an avid reader of anything historical. I always thought that was one of the great things about history – it can be the interest of a lifetime and stimulate a wide range of book reading. I sometimes say that when I retire from politics (and anyone with an eye on the Tamaki seat will have to wait a while longer!) I intend to spend my days watching the history channel on Sky. Some of the most pleasurable years of my teaching life were those spent teaching history.

Mike Butler: Booze culture

At the risk of being forever labeled a wowser I would like to make some observations on our booze culture. This blog was sparked by a TV One Closeup feature on the death of Kings College pupil James Webster, who sculled a bottle of vodka and was left to die by his friends and so-called responsible adults at the Grey Lynn Returned Services Club. While the item was very worthy and gut-gripping as all good television should be, the underlying assumption is that James’s death was a consequence of a teenage drinking problem. Is that so?

And why do teenagers drink? My mind drifted back to a Mission Concert about three years ago, the one where headline performer Eric Clapton spat the dummy when he saw a bottle of wine with his name on the label. Clapton is a recovering alcoholic and has spent tens of thousands of dollars towards the rehab of other recovering alcoholics, so I can understand why he was furious to see his name endorsing some fine Mission Estate wine.

Ron Smith: Bushehr and the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Programme

The international community continues to condemn Iran for nuclear activities that, in their context, can have no other purpose than the production of fissile material for the fabrication of nuclear weapons. However, there is an important distinction to be made between the proliferation significance of the Bushehr power reactor, that is about to come into operation, and virtually all the other nuclear activities that Iran has been engaged in for a number of years (see my columns on this site on September 6th and 19th of last year). To be sure, the processing of uranium ore, its conversion into uranium hexachloride, and subsequent enrichment could be claimed to be relevant to the manufacture of fuel rods for civilian purposes. The trouble with this justification is that Iran really only has one plant that could use these rods (Bushehr) and the fuel for this has already been provided by Russia, who also completed the building of the reactor. Indeed, the Russian contract under which this was done specifies that in addition to supplying fresh fuel, they will also take away the spent fuel, for storage, or reprocessing. Iran, therefore, needs to do nothing in the way of preparing fresh fuel itself and nothing in the way of ‘completing’ the nuclear fuel cycle by reprocessing.

Owen McShane: The Disappearance of the Next Middle Class

Every week we read that yet another major housing project has been turned down by the Courts here in New Zealand because of the need to protect "rural character" or "natural landscapes". This may well have profound short and long-term consequences for the future of our middle class, as it does for the same class in countries around the advanced world.

Every week a multitude of smaller developers abandon their projects because Councils’ compliance costs and development contributions make the projects unviable – even if the land were free. And it’s not.

Michael Coote: Whale vetoes point the way on foreshore and seabed legislation

While the public awaits the National-led government to release its foreshore and seabed bill on September 7, it is worth looking at some signs of things to come. Practices in place at present concerning unwonted coastal Maori tribal influence over the foreshore and seabed are likely to multiply exponentially under the impending legislation. This increase can only result in the further undermining and overruling of New Zealand’s open, secular, democratic Western society, and in particular its scientific culture.

Destruction of the supremacy of Western civilisation in New Zealand is of course a key objective in the Maorification agenda being pandered to by the government’s foreshore and seabed legislation proposals.

Allan Peachey: Improving Teacher Training

I write this week’s commentary in partial defence of my last article in which I argued that teacher recruitment and training should become the responsibility of schools. Schools should be able to recruit their new teachers direct from university graduates without a course of teacher training having to intervene first.

Ron Smith: What to do with the prisoners?

We seem to be agonising once again over captives in the ‘war on terror’ and, particularly, over prisoners taken as part of the Afghan counter-insurgency. Of course, it goes without saying that we have an obligation to treat captives humanely. This derives from general principles which require us to treat all human beings as part of a single moral community, even if they do not appear to reciprocate. More directly, the obligation comes from our membership of the United Nations (and the associated Declaration of Human Rights) and, more specifically, to our commitment to the various Geneva Conventions.

Roger Kerr: The Dubious Benefits of Fiscal Stimulus

John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.” Unfortunately for the world, the problems with Keynes’ ideas were not discovered promptly, and the lessons were too soon forgotten as Keynesian thinking enjoyed a revival with the recent global financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Mike Butler: Reheating climate debate

Glad to read that the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition has lodged papers with the High Court asking it to invalidate NIWA's official temperature records. Coalition spokesman Bryan Leyland said the New Zealand Meteorological Service had shown no warming during the past century but NIWA had adjusted its records to show a warming trend of 1degC. (1)

Ron Smith: Hiroshima 2010

For the first time, an American diplomatic representative was present in Hiroshima at this year’s remembrance of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on that city. It was said that this was intended to reflect a common United States / Japanese commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The American representative did not apologise for the event, although the United States is regularly urged to do so and the question is still live in the context of a projected visit by President Obama to Japan next year and the possibility that he may visit Hiroshima.

Frank Newman: Straight talking

Paul Holmes wrote a good column in last week’s Herald on Sunday. He was writing about the economy. I liked it because he told it like it is – so few people seem to nowadays. Here are extracts from his column,

“Let me tell you about economists, in particular those we hear on the radio and on television and read in the newspapers. They are fundamentally, intellectually dishonest. They are not to be trusted because they are deeply compromised.