1 News reports:

The $180 million central city convention centre opened just over a year ago, with Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau saying after it was complete that the building would be “the first step in the rebirth of Wellington”.

But documents released under the Local Government Official Information Act show the Jurassic World by Brickman exhibition and the Marvel: Earth’s Mightiest Exhibition failed to meet targets.

The Jurassic World by Brickman exhibition ran from June 3 to October 16, 2023 and featured a range of dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park film series made of Lego.

The documents state that the exhibition had an attendee target of 144,000 but attracted only 92,109.

So they fell short by 36% – now even close. And this means ratepayers will again be the losers.

I have actually attended both the Jurassic World and Marvel exhibitions. It is nice to be able to take the kids to them. But you don’t need a 18,000 square metres convention centre just to host exhibitions – there are other venues.

Tauhu David MITAI-NGATAI is a Third Striker.  He repeatedly sexually assaults women.

He has over 100 criminal convictions as an adult and is believed to be a gang associate.

His daughter has a protection order against him according to the Judge who sentenced him on his Third Strike.

He has been assessed by probation at a high risk of re-offending and a high risk of causing harm to others.

Under the Government’s proposed re-introduction of Three Strikes 2.0, he will be on a clean slate.  His prior strike offences count for nothing, and he is a zero striker.

Just as bad, under the Government’s proposed Three Strikes 2.0, Mr Mitai-Ngatai would not qualify as a Third Striker if he did it all again!

This is because it is proposed that a person would only be a striker if they had been sentenced to more than 24 months imprisonment for all strike offences.

For Mr Mitai-Ngatai’s first strike offence – an indecent assault – he was only sentenced to 1 year and 3 months imprisonment.  For his second strike offence – another indecent assault – he was sentenced to 1 year and 1 month imprisonment.

Neither meet the Government’s threshold to be considered a striker AT ALL!

Mental health Minister Matt Doocey announced:

• Faster access to specialist mental health and addiction services:target of 80 percent of people accessing specialist mental health and addiction services are seen within three weeks
• Faster access to primary mental health and addiction services:target of 80 percent of people accessing primary mental health and addiction services through the Access and Choice programme* are seen within one week
• Shorter mental health and addiction-related stays in emergency departments: target of 95 percent of mental health and addiction-related emergency department presentations are admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours
• Increased mental health and addiction workforce development:target of training 500 mental health and addiction professionals each year
• Strengthened focus on prevention and early intervention: target of 25 percent of mental health and addiction investment is allocated towards prevention and early intervention

Annoyingly it is hard to locate what the current data is, so it is hard to assess how much of an improvement achieving these will be. But again good to see a Government commit to improved outcomes and outputs.

On the basis of the report into Darleen Tana, the Green Party have excluded Tana from their caucus and asked her to resign as an MP. So far she has not, so she is now an Independent MP.

I will give credit to Chloe Swarbrick who was very good at the press conference making it clear how unacceptable Tana’s behaviour had been, and how the whole investigation wouldn’t have been needed if Tana had been truthful to then.

If Tana refuses to resign (as is likely), then the Greens will need to decide whether to use the wake jumping law to expel her from Parliament.

The NY Times reports:

President Biden told a gathering of Democratic governors that he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m., according to two people who participated in the meeting and several others briefed on his comments. …

Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said of the president’s comments about more sleep and less late work: “President Bush went to bed at 9, and President Obama made dinner at 6:30. Normal presidents strike a balance, and so does Joe Biden. 

President Bush would get up at 5 am and be working before 7 am. It is because of that he would usually go to bed by 9 pm.

Obama did always do dinner at 6.30, but would often work through until 2 am.

Bill Clinton was known to ring cabinet members after 1 am.

These are not the same as someone whose own staff say he is only good for six hours a day.

This is Ranapera Taumata.

His three strikes are:

• 1st: aggravated robbery – he was sentenced to 8 months home detention
• 2nd: robbery (which he committed while on prison release conditions) – he was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment.
• 3rd: murdered his girlfriend in 2019 by beating her to death with his bare hands.

Now what the Government’s new Three Strikes law does is firstly wipe all three of his strikes. Yep he is back to zero strikes. Unbelievable.

But even worse is this new law means he would have even got a first or second strike. As both got sentences of under 24 months, he would not have even got strikes for them. So his murder conviction would be a first strike, not a third strike.

Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau said:

Mayor Tory Whanau says: “Pōneke is going through a huge transformation at the moment – and all the work we are doing now is setting the city up for generations to come.

“This survey will continue to help Wellington City Council make informed decisions about what residents want and need.

“It’s such a great sign that people are increasingly finding it easier to get around the city using public transport and cycleways, and that they are satisfied with our community facilities that serve so many Wellingtonians.

Here’s the actual data, and the changes:

• Wellington’s city centre is lively and attractive 37% (-51% from 2017)
• I feel a sense of pride in the way Wellington looks and feels 50% (-35% from 2017)
• 20% satisfied with the process by which Council makes decisions
• Overall Council satisfaction 29% and dissatisfaction 56%
• Feeling safer in CBD after dark 43% (-33% from 2019)

Only 1 in 3 think the city centre is attractive, and it used to be almost 9 in 10. Most Wellingtonians do not feel safe in the CBD after dark, and it used to be 4 in 3 did feel safe.

Those who want Joe Biden to stay in:

• Donald Trumo
• Donald Trump Jr
• Eric Trump
• Lara Trump
• Hunter Biden

Those who want Joe Biden to drop out:

• NY Times Editorial Board
• Nate Silver
• New Yorker
• The Economist
• Chicago Tribune
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Nicholas Kristof
• Thomas Friedman
• Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.) 
• Rep Seth Moulton (D-Mas)
• Rep Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ)
• Former congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)
• Former housing secretary Julián Castro
• Former DNC vice chair R.T. Rybak
• Former senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)
• Billionaires Christy Walton, Michael Novogratz and Reed Hastings
• Paul Krugman
• David Ignatius
• Joe Scarborough
• James Carville
• Andrew Yang

Erica Stanford released:

The Coalition Government is delivering consistency in student assessment, giving parents certainty on how their child’s doing at school, Education Minister Erica Stanford says.

“Currently, the first glimpse at student achievement is when children sit NCEA. It’s far too late to learn in Year 10 or 11 if they have not been adequately prepared with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

“At the earliest opportunity, parents deserve to know how their kids are progressing at school and have confidence they are moving in the right direction.

“That’s why the Government is introducing consistent assessment tools so no matter where you live in New Zealand, parents and teachers will know more about how our young people are learning.”

From 2025, all children in their first year of schooling will have an opportunity to run through a phonics check, to help teachers understand how well a child can read words by sounding out letters.

“This will be done after 20 weeks of schooling and repeated after 40 weeks. It will help teachers identify and arrange additional support for those who need it right at the start of the child’s education,” Ms Stanford says.

Awesome. At Year 1 there is still time to support and helps the kids who are behind. By Year 11, there is little you can do.

Progression monitoring on reading, writing and maths will also be introduced for children in years 3 through 8.

These will be done twice each year and will inform teachers about the next steps needed for a child’s learning.

Excellent. Erica is making so many great changes, so quickly.

In Part 1 I covered the first three of the seven legal actions or indictments filed against former US President Donald Trump.

UPDATES FROM PART 1:

The 14^th Amendment case brought by the State of Colorado was predictably dismissed on the 4^th of March by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and in the lopsided manner (9-0) that experts had predicted so Trump will be on the ballot in all 50 states in November.

The New York Attorney General fraud case took a turn decidedly in Donald Trump’s favour. The massive and unrealistic fine levied by Judge Engoron was designed to be so steep as to make it virtually impossible for Trump to raise a bond necessary to file an appeal. He had to lodge a bond to cover the entire $368 million fine plus a year’s interest making a total of $450 million. Despite Trump’s considerable assets, it proved impossible for him to find even a consortium of bond agents to raise the necessary bond for his appeal and so the NY AG James filed an application in Westchester County Court to seize Trump’s golf resort at Bedminster as a precursor to a forced sale to cover the fine. Trump appealed the size of the surety to the Manhattan Court of Appeal under his 8^th Amendment right against excessive fines and the Court ruled that the bond amount necessary to be filed before an appeal could be lodged was reduced to $175 million and a one-week extension was granted to enable Trump to find either the cash or raise a bond. As reported in Part 1, Trump’s media company that owns Truth Social (his social media platform) had been cleared to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp and with that merger came a listing of the combined entity (Trump Media and Technology Group Corp) on the NASDAQ and a few days before the bond filing deadline, TMTCC was floated with the ticker symbol $DJT and the listing price (despite a 40% retreat since the float) initially almost doubled Trump’s net worth by $3.3 billion to over $6 billion. Trump was able to deposit cash to cover the bond that was easily issued, and he formally posted the appeal bond on Monday March 25^th. The Manhattan Appeal Court granted Trump an even more significant favour in that he has until the September court season to “perfect” his appeal which is a legal term to allow the appellant time to get together all the necessary paperwork. The autumn court season begins on 3 September and even if granted an expedited hearing at the New York State Court of Appeal and they uphold the Ergoron finding, Trump’s Federal Appeal Court appeal avenues would take this case well past the election. The Manhattan Appellate Judge finally stayed Engoron from any further action on the case until appeal.

The final four are all criminal indictments in that a specific criminal statute is alleged to have been breached. In the US these fall into two broad categories: misdemeanors or minor offences and felonies or more serious offences. I will again go over each case discussing the backgrounds of the prosecutors and judges and examine the likelihood of any convictions and that if so found, the likelihood any guilty verdict would withstand appeal. Each of these four cases cover so many issues and the status of each case have been changing dramatically (each in Trump’s favour) each week so I will cover each indictment in a single episode.

3 – Criminal Cases

(i) District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Manhattan Municipal Court – Campaign finance violations

Alvin Bragg is one of a wave of radical Democrat District Attorneys catapulted to power behind boatloads of George Soros’ cash. Soros is the Hungarian billionaire who made his fortune shorting against the UK Pound during the Asian financial crisis and he has spent billions over the decades funding a large variety of left-wing causes, Foundations and left leaning candidates for political office globally but especially in the US. A common feature of Soros backed District Attorneys are radical left law enforcement policies such as:

• Decriminalising shoplifting and petty theft of amounts usually below $1,000 – jurisdictions that have such DAs and left leaning city councils that allow this have seen shoplifting rates and ram raids soar.
• No cash bail – this has been a huge reason for the rise in crime in violent crime in cities where Soros backed DAs handle the flow of prosecutions. New York City, even before the influx of illegal immigrants, was notorious for releasing violent felons back onto the street where they go on to commit more crime. NYC courts have become revolving doors for criminals.
• Early release of criminals with extremely generous parole administration which has led to serious offenders serving lengthy custodial sentences being released back on the streets.
• Severe constraints on the activities of the police. NY Mayor Rudi Giuliani famously drastically reduced the crime and murder rate in NYC in the 1980’s from the so-called broken windows policing where even petty crimes like subway turnstile jumping and public urination were prosecuted which led to the NYPD ending up catching major criminals. Now there can be no targeted policing of any type and police cannot search and frisk known criminals for fear of being tagged as racist. This means that violent criminals operate almost with impunity.

When it comes to finding a jurisdiction to attempt to stretch any law to the absolute maximum, a DA like Alvin Bragg with a Manhattan judge being as anti-Trump as Judge Engoron in the civil fraud case and a heavily Democrat voting jury pool in deeply liberal Manhattan, it was a perfect location to bring charges against Trump that even the Biden Administration appointees at the Federal Elections Commission and the deeply politicised Federal Department of Justice wouldn’t bring.

Most readers will recall Trump’s tangle with porn actress ‘Stormy Daniels’ or her real name Stephanie Clifford. She accused Trump of being her client and paying her for sex, an accusation Trump denied but during the 2016 Presidential Election campaign, Trump instructed his then lawyer Michael Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 in hush money for her to stay silent about the accusation during his campaign. Trump’s opponents alleged that the payment was an ‘in kind’ contribution to his election campaign even though the cheque to Clifford was paid by his lawyer Cohen and alleged he falsified business records to cover an unspecified underlying Federal Crime. Even assuming Trump DID violate New York campaign finance law, the failure to make a routine Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing is the campaign version of leaving your car parked by a fire hydrant and not paying the parking ticket. Routine minor campaign filing errors, if investigated by the FEC, are normally dealt with by either a retrospective filing and paying a fine and if prosecuted, being nothing more than a minor misdemeanor offence. For that reason and for the case being past the 7-year statute of limitations and the weak tea nature of the charges, all are part of the reasons why even Trump hating senior Biden appointees at the FEC and DOJ never brought charges. Bragg circumvented these normal objections by convening a Grand Jury deep in the heart of perhaps the most Trump hating city in America and, as the old aphorism goes, “you could get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich”. In other words, obtaining an indictment in this jurisdiction is easy no matter how flimsy and trumped up the charges may be. The alleging of a Federal crime and yet never actually charging Trump (or even revealing in court what this felony might be) was the thin gruel Bragg used to turn a NY State and FEC filing misdemeanor into Federal felony business fraud, an attempt that no neutral judge would allow a prosecutor to get away with in any normal courtroom but Bragg’s courtroom under Judge Juan Merchan, another partisan Democrat appointee, in Manhattan was anything but normal.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Bragg’s case was the fact that the only prosecution witnesses were Clifford herself who has flip flopped and changed her story multiple times and swore under oath in court that she never slept with Trump and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, who has been caught lying under oath in several court rooms AND to Congress. Challenging the truthfulness of both their testimonies became an easy defense for Trump’s lawyers to make.

The reaction has been a wall of skepticism even from legal analysts known to be unfavourably disposed to Trump. A sample:

• Two of the DA office’s prosecutors resigned after the indictment
• “It is said that if you go after the king, you should not miss,” wrote Richard Hasen, a campaign finance law expert at UCLA. “In this vein, it is very easy to see this case tossed for legal insufficiency or tied up in the courts well past the 2024 election before it might ever go to trial. It will be a circus that will embolden Trump, especially if he walks.”
• Even Ian Millhiser, the liberal legal commentator for Vox, called the legal theory on which Bragg’s case is built “dubious.”
• Constitutional legal analyst Jonathon Turley in his New York Post article on the subject noted Bragg’s frequent propensity to plea down violent and serious felony charges and yet being happy to turn an expected at most misdemeanor into a tortuous charge of business document fraud.

The verdict and what happens next

The trial went pretty much as most commentators expected. Clifford’s testimony was salacious but ultimately weak and contradictory, Cohen admitted to his prior lying under oath and further admitted to stealing $64,000 from Trump and yet still Trump was convicted by a jury pool said to be 94% Democrat on all 34 counts.

Grounds for appeal were described by esteemed Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley as so vast that he called it a “target rich environment”:

• The selection of Merchan was unorthodox. Judges in trials like this are normally selected randomly from the pool of Manhattan Municipal Court judges. Merchan was hand selected from the New York Supreme Court where he had a long track record of politically biased decisions.
• Merchan’s conflicts of interest in his donations to anti GOP and specifically Stop Trump causes along with donations to Biden and in particular, his daughter high profile use of the trail to fundraise for Democrats, would normally lead to a recusal.
• Merchan disallowed Trump’s lawyers from bringing to the stand, as significant witness for the defense, Brad Smith, a former Chairman of the FEC, who would later testify to Congress of the spuriousness and lack of legal robustness of the charges laid.
• Merchan’s multiple 1^st Amendment right of free speech busting gag orders that saw Trump fined $10,000’s and threated with jail for contempt for public comments made about the trial, the judge and his daughter whilst Clifford and Cohen made frequent unrestrained references to the trial across multiple media outlets reinforcing the two tiered justice system that sees one set of law interpretations for Republicans and another more lenient set for Democrats.
• Merchan’s requirement that Trump stay in court for the duration of the trial, a break from normal precedent in cases of this nature where normally the defendant is not required to be in court. Democrats thought tying Trump up in New York for 6 weeks would cramp his campaign.
• Merchan arbitrarily changed the burden of jury proof from unanimous to majority as a way to circumvent any pro-Trump holdouts. The unanimous verdict right was recently affirmed by SCOTUS.
• Merchan allowed disgraceful and normally legally inadmissible testimony by Clifford of her alleged sex with Trump, salacious material unrelated to the charges and yet designed to be as damaging as possible to Trump. Any normal judged would’ve stopped Clifford dead in her tracks.
• Merchan’s directions to the jury were biased and distorted and he compounded the error by refusing to give the jurors the normal detailed information packet summarising testimony (in this case over 50 pages) merely allowing them to read it once and not have a copy forcing jurors to return to the judge with multiple clarifying questions.
• The distortion of the misdemeanor charges of campaign violations to federal business fraud felonies alone is so tortuous as to not survive appeal in the eyes of many legal experts in part because right to the end of the trial, the underlying felony Trump was alleged to be trying to hide was never revealed and even MSM network legal commentators (not known for being pro-Trump) were baffled by the pretzel-like efforts Bragg resorted to to conflate the charges.
• In the aftermath of the SCOTUS ruling on Presidential immunity, whole new lines of significant and deal changing appeal open as Trump’s lawyers can attack at various aspects of Trump’s conduct with respect to campaign finances as which of his actions might be within the scope of the immunity. This would require the trial judge to instruct the prosecutors to determine which if any aspects of the indictments (and the complex and questionable layering that Bragg’s team had undertaken to circumvent the statute of limitation and turn minor state misdemeanors into more serious Federal felonies) were not laid in contravention of the Presidential immunity ruling.

Electoral impact of the conviction

Did a flawed, convoluted and concocted prosecution by a jury in such a deep blue city laid by such a controversial, blatant anti Trump and tainted DA presided over by a biased, conflicted and incompetent judge have any effect on Trump’s popularity? For a few days he took a small hit but soon bounced back to stronger than ever leads over Biden in the battleground states and slight leads in national polls. And tying Trump down in NYC so he couldn’t hold rallies? Trump held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey adjacent to NYC and 100,000 in total showed up, the largest outdoor rally in modern NJ history. And then over 30,000 packed into a park in the South Bronx in the heart of New York’s minority majority ghetto and over 70% of attendees were blacks and Hispanics. Whilst it is highly unlikely that Trump will win NJ and NY, his poll numbers amongst black and Hispanic voters are in some polls double or more what he got in 2016 and 2020 and exceed any polling in these communities of any Republican President since the Nixon and Reagan 49 state routs in 1972 and 1984. Finally, did Trump look affected in any way by the conviction during the debate with Biden? To the contrary he looked calm, measured and in control compared to the faltering and doddery Biden. The Democrats major attack line now is that Trump is a convicted felon. How’s that working out? Trump’s rise and Biden’s decline is such that left leaning and mainstream media are in freak out mode about how to replace their cognitively impaired President and party flag carrier.

Sentencing thoughts

Will Merchan send Trump to jail even for the period of days or weeks before his appeal can be lodged? Highly likely given the Democrats full throated lemming like rush into every aspect of the lawfare against Trump. Maybe Trump’s ability to weather the media storm of negativity over the conviction will finally mean saner heads will prevail. If Trump is incarcerated, that can do nothing but improve his electoral chances as he can claim an almost Nelson Mandela like status and reinforce his relentless attack line that the charges and prosecution are politically motivated (they are) and that, in the Land of the Free, the most popular candidate for President is effectively a political prisoner and that the Biden administration (and its allies in federal and state law enforcement) are conducting themselves like a 3^rd world dictatorship by imprisoning their political opponent on spurious, tissue-thin charges. We can see the big bump Trump got in his polling in the black community after Fulton County DA Fani Willis forced Trump to be arraigned in person at the Fulton County Jail. That infamous mugshot became the catalyst for dozens of prominent black influencers and rappers to endorse Trump. We can read the tea leaves a little from Merchan deferring the sentencing hearing until mid-September from July 11 which enables Trump to be crowned as the formal GOP nominee at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee nearer the end of July. Most commentators say that the deferral arises from the SCOTUS Presidential immunity ruling that, as said earlier, could unravel whole parts of the prosecution’s case. Either way, Trump wins. If he goes to jail, he becomes a martyr and if he doesn’t, he’s free to crisscross the country holding his signature huge rallies. But more significantly, the Bragg prosecution as a tool to remove, defang or pillory Trump into electoral oblivion has failed.

There’s a lot of hysteria over the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity. This chart sums up what they actually decided quite well.

So basically:

• Constitutional acts: Absolute immunity
• Official but non-constitutional acts: Presumptive immunity
• Unofficial acts: No immunity

Seems fairly reasonable.

I have contempt for many in the US Republican Party who have spent over three years gaslighting voters by claiming Biden didn’t actually win the election. There were 61 court cases and Trump lost 60 of them. The alleged voter fraud was mythical or insignificant. There are few things more important in a democracy than the loser conceding defeat peacefully.

Now we have the Democrats doing their own gaslighting, by claiming Biden is capable of being President until; January 2029. They ask us to disbelieve our own eyes and ears from the debate. The excuses ranging from a cold to too much time rehearsing to the impact of a trip to Europe two weeks before the debate are insulting to people’s intelligence. It is clear that Biden has deteriorated significantly since 2020. The debate performance wasn’t due to one off factors, but due to his ageing and mental cognitive skills. These are only going to worsen.

So the US has both major parties who treat the voters with a degree of contempt, and try to gaslight them that white is black or vice-versa. Americans deserve better.

The Government’s 40 point plan for the third quarter of 2024 is here.

I like these plans. They do several things:

1. Force Ministers to be focused on delivery.
2. Allows the PMs Office to monitor which Ministers are pursuing goals for the Government (as opposed to goals for their ministry)
3. Gives transparency to what the Government sees as priority areas

They’re not rocket science, but something that we saw with the previous Government what the absence of them meant.

Back in the day I worked for a bank for a year to pay for my university study. The staff were valued, all customers were valued, service was very good and the branch often supported the community. Oh how things have changed.

I recently separated two business areas by forming a new company (an easy thing to do in NZ!) called BoI Adventures and Art to cover www.russellinfo.co.nz & www.wood2water.co.nz.

I then contacted Westpac as my business and personal bank (as in a wopping great mortgage). The reason was simply to open a new business account around two retail outlets and that had been a part of a company that I have always used Westpac for – i.e. simply separating one account into two with no changes to operations. A five minute job one would think.

You can’t do it online with Westpac, or over the phone, so I dropped into my local branch and got told I needed an appointment and one was available about a week later. I duly turned up and spent an hour giving details they already had. At the end of the meeting the manager then told me he would now refer it to something called the business team (elsewhere) and they would get back to me within 10 days.

I received an email from a Westpac employee claiming to be an:

Onboarding Specialist  – CDD Centre of Excellence 

• he did not know what an information centre or retail art/homewares shop did.
• he asked for – a business plan for two shops that had banked with them under my ownership for four years that addressed “business goals, start-up capital and cashflow forecast.”
• and – “Will there be any one-off lump sums credited from your other business accounts once BOI Adventures and Art Limited Account is opened?”

This is on top of a conversation that was about the possibility of a seasonal overdraft – as is often needed in tourism businesses. In that case the man at the end of the phone opened and started scrolling through my personal account commenting on how much I spend on groceries and how often I go to restaurants for dinner.

I did not proceed with Westpac and had first hand experience to yet another barrier for SMEs. This is an institution that made $477million profit in the first 6 months of 2024 while the country is in a recession.

However – none of them appear much better. When I was involved with South Auckland Middle School I calculated that providing uniform, stationery and IT was saving decile 1 families approx. $1,300 per student per year. I devised a plan where families could put that into a new bank account for their child at $25 per week. At the end of their 4 years they would then have $5,200 plus interest to either keep saved (and maybe add to) or spend on needed items through the Y11 – 13 years. I also looked in detail at a Trust set-up that would allow these accounts to be conglomerated and to invest through a Milford type entity as the sums are significant. The families and students would participate in the decision-making and it would not only be a savings platform but a teaching platform for financial literacy. A brilliant leg-up for the students.

I thought the first step would be easy … getting a bank to come out and open 180 accounts for the wonderful SAMS students.

Not a single bank was interested in the least – a range of reasons were given – including that they did not have staff resources to do that. Their socials consciences have recently been seen forlornly wandering in the dark corners of the city at night. I know full well that if Kings College or St Cuthbert’s had made the same request they would have been there before the phone call ended.

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants Ltd
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

Chris Bishop has announced changes to housing laws which will make a huge difference to housing affordability. Almost every expert has said that to reduce pressure on house prices you need to both build up and build out. The NIMBYs oppose building up and the Greenies opposes building out. Phil Rayford in 2017 had some great policies, but backed away from many of them in Government. Chris Bishop in six months is setting a cracking reform pace. Key details are:

• New Housing Growth Targets introduced for Tier 1 and 2 councils, requiring them to enable 30 years of feasible housing capacity in their district plans, using ‘high’ population growth projections.
• New requirement that ‘price indicators’ (such as the difference in the price between land zoned for rural and urban use) do not deteriorate over time.
• Councils prohibited from imposing rural-urban boundary lines in planning documents (but can still have rurally zoned land).
• Tier 1 councils must deliver housing intensification along ‘strategic transport corridors’ (e.g. key bus routes).
• Tier 1 councils must directly offset any housing capacity lost due to reasons such as ‘special character’ elsewhere.
• Councils cannot set minimum floor area requirements for apartments and other houses, or require balconies.

Currently Councils just have to zone for immediate use three years of growth, and can choose low growth scenarios. By requiring them to zone for 30 years of high growth will mean a significant amount of new land made available.

The removing of the ability to set minimum sizes and balcony requirements will also make a real difference – some have said reduce apartment costs by $70,000 or so just for the balcony. Of course many developers will choose to still have balconies, but they can follow where the market demand is.

The 60 paragraph decision by Judge Jelas is an interesting read. Some extracts:

• The associate returned to Scotties the two dresses and bag that had been taken. The top however was not returned (so a deliberate decision not to return everything)
• Ms Ghahraman in her affidavit in support stated she is unable to fully comprehend or explain why she stole the items. She states she did not want to keep or wear the items stating some would never fit her and she would never wear or use them. (So she stole things she didn’t want, that just happened to be massively expensive!)
• Ms Ghahraman was effectively caught red-handed on the 23rd of December; it was that event that prompted her to return most of the stolen items through her associate. I accept the process of Ms Ghahraman accepting responsibility was most likely triggered by a realisation that she was under suspicion for theft. (yet she didn’t inform the Greens of what had happened)
• Ms Ghahraman describes the most upsetting aspect of the media attention was the large contingent of media who camped outside her private home for weeks (I agree this is very upsetting, as Jason Ede had to endure)
• [The clinical psychologist] is well placed to have provided an unequivocal statement of any causative links that may exist between the thefts and Ms Ghahraman’s mental health. He has not. It is not the role of the Court to make the inferences submitted by Ms Cresswell when [the clinical psychologist] himself has stopped short of doing so. (So it was the lawyer, not the psychologist who said the shoplifting was due to mental health)
• I consider a start point sentence of imprisonment of 20 to 22 months would be warranted. (So a small fine was actually quite generous to Ghahraman)

The UK exit poll (which has been accurate within 1 to 8 seats for the last five elections) is out, and it is slightly better news for the Conservatives than pre-election polling but still on track for their worst outcome in 190 years.

The real interest now is how many Conservative Big Beasts lose their seats, and who survives to stand for the leadership.

The Herald reports:

The Government’s $1.2 billion Regional Infrastructure Fund (RIF) opens to applicants today, though officials are still finalising the assessment process.

The pot will be divided into two parts. There’s $720 million for “resilience infrastructure” – helping to provide for regional resilience in the face of flooding and extraordinary storms, for example, and for the likes of energy security.

The second part is $420m for “enabling infrastructure”: projects that can underpin stronger regional economies and increase lagging productivity.

$60m is set aside for the Government’s “emerging priorities”, a designation that, in the case of the Provincial Growth Fund, proved to be distinctly slushy.

The $720 million for resilience infrastructure looks potentially useful.

I am sceptical of the $420 million for enabling infrastructure as that may just go to projects with inflated business cases as we have seen too often.

Eligible projects must be outside the metropolitan areas of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, and there are no regions with priority.

That’s an improvement.

Some grants will be made, but equity and debt, which may be on concessionary terms, will be the focus. And the fund’s investments will range, in the main, from $1m to $50m.

My preference is debt followed by equity followed by grants.

An excellent speech by Parliamentary Commissioner Simon Upton for the Environment to Environment Defence Society conference. He focuses on the real substance and challenge of improving the environment, as opposed to just making noise. His key points:

• Inconvenient truth 1: Stopping polluting industries here means shifting pollution elsewhere. We can close polluting industries, but in most cases we will simply import the goods that rely on them from other countries. It is relatively easy to suggest that we shun or close polluting industries. But the reality is that unless we are willing to put an equal focus on working out how to get consumers to stop consuming, demand for the output of those industries will continue to exist.
• Inconvenient truth 2: The dog that barks at every passing car gets dismissed. If we are not prepared to examine trade-offs critically, we will be dismissed as the dog that barks at every passing car. If a government wants to bolster the benefits side of the ledger, I would suggest we need to look at increasing the royalties that the Government charges mining companies on the public’s behalf.
• Inconvenient truth 3: Green growth is not an easy win. Calling for green growth – something I spent seven years working on at the OECD – isn’t the easy economic and environmental win some people imagine. While renewable electricity is usually far more efficient and therefore less damaging than fossil fuels, some ecosystems will be damaged by renewable energy and transmission infrastructure. The green growth vision of the future will continually trade one environmental issue for the next. We can’t escape that.
• Inconvenient truth 4: Change is costly. All politics is distributional and green politics more distributional than most. Talk about just transitions tends to be cheap. Meeting environmental standards cannot be optional. But neither do the means of achieving them need to be monolithic, if only because no two catchments are the same physically or socially.
• Inconvenient truth 5: Degrowth won’t be an easy sell. As a student of human nature my hunch is that if we tell people that they can’t have the stuff they’ve grown to expect, they will turn to thinking about how they can take it from others. That’s potentially a recipe for conflict.