Justifiably, Louise Upston was challenged yesterday before the Social Services and Community Select Committee for changes that could see a significant number of disable workers worse off.

Sometimes highlighting people and organisations that do an incredible job is the best way.

I became are of www.downlightsnz.com/ when they employed a student who had been at Mt Hobson Middle School while I was Principal there. She is an incredible adult now and throughout her life has been supported by brilliant parents.

Downlights founder Jennifer del Bel is a remarkable person and a part of her story is told here.

She sent me this note earlier in the week:

Downlights is a NZ owned luxury artisan candle & fragranced products company that creates meaningful employment opportunities for young New Zealanders with Down syndrome learning disabilities. 

A multi- winning social enterprise, Downlights also pays our staff the  Living Wage and we donate NZD1 from every Downlights candle sold via the Downlights Charitable Trust.

Please check out their site: https://www.downlightsnz.com/

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/
www.wood2water.co.nz
www.russellinfo.co.nz

The latest e-mail newsletter from the Taxpayers Union highlighted how there is still plenty of waste the Government can eliminate to fund priorities like cancer drugs.

Once upon a time the Health Research Council would mainly be funding research into things like cancer treatments etc. But they have been infected by the woke virus and here are some of their current grants:

• $650k for Hapai te hauora: Breathing your ancestors into life, captures the breadth & connections of a generation – rangatahi Māori–a generation moving forward together
• $400k for access of traditional Maori healing for cancer care services
• $380k for Kaupapa Māori music theories and practices as a pathway to accelerating Māori well-being
• $150k for interviews with Pacific men, Pacific heath promoters and Pacific barbers will inform the development of a Pacific health promoting behaviour change framework and intervention programme in a barbershop setting owned by a Pacific health provider
• $150k to redesign hospital waiting rooms away from “a legacy founded in colonialism and are designed to Eurocentric principles of health and well-being“
• $400k to research traditional Māori lunar calendar system guided by the goddess Hine te Iwaiwa, into the context of pregnancy care for wāhine Māori and Maori Midwives.”
• $650k to research a Fijian Health Model
• $650k to fund build on her expertise in kaupapa Māori research and enable her to pursue a development and capacity building plan to grow both her expertise and that of emerging researchers

There is so much unmet health need in NZ, and we are throwing millions of dollars at woke feel goodness.

The Post reports:

The Green Party has admitted that its request to use off-street car parks of Wellington retailers, still sore after a Green-led cycleway took away on-street parking, was not the best look.

At Stacks Furniture, Duncan Domett recently moved further north on Adelaide Rd, partly because the new cycleway took away on-street parking at his original site. His new shop had off-street parking.

Then, on Friday, he had staff from the new electorate office for Green MPs Julie Anne Genter and Tamatha Paul asking if they could use his car parks for an event they were hosting. He, and a manager at the nearby Repco, refused to let the party use their car parks.

It really is hilarious. They take great joy in getting rid of as many car parks as possible, and then when they need some, ask businesses that have lost customers from their policies to lend them some parks for free!

Alexander Wang is in his 20s. He become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at the age of 24, through his company Scale AI. He is the son of Chinese immigrants. He recently announced his key hiring principle:

Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.

Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. 

It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. 

We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic.

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.

Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do. This approach not only results in the strongest possible team, but also ensures we’re treating our colleagues with fairness and respect.

As a result, everyone who joins Scale can be confident that they were chosen for their outstanding talent, not any other reasons.

If only more companies were willing to say and implement this.

From The Telegraph:

Take our quick quiz to discover whether you too are at risk of joining the ever-growing number of dangerous extremists labelled “far-Right”…

1. In 1993, the UK had an annual net immigration figure of about zero. Thirty years later, in 2023, it had an annual net immigration figure of 685,000. How do you feel about this change?

a. It just goes to show how much Rishi Sunak’s racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, Little Englander Tory Government hates migrants. The 2023 figure should have been at least twice as high.

b. I can’t see any problems with it. Certainly not in the charming, peaceful and expensive middle-class suburb where I live.

c. Now you put it like that, the 2023 figure does seem a trifle on the steep side.

2. Do women have penises?

a. Obviously. Come on, this is basic biology. As of about 2015.

b. Oh, must we really keep on stoking these beastly culture wars? What’s wrong with placing convicted rapists in a prison full of women, anyway?

c. Er… no?

3. Last Saturday the IDF rescued four Israeli hostages from Gaza. What was your reaction?

a. Like every other decent, compassionate human being, I was utterly appalled by the premeditated slaughter of innocent Hamas operatives.

b. Both sides should just set aside their differences and live in peace. Why does no one seem to have thought of this?

c. If Hamas didn’t want the IDF to launch an armed operation to rescue the hostages, perhaps they shouldn’t have taken the hostages in the first place.

4. Last month, a councillor in Leeds ended his local elections acceptance speech by screaming, “Allahu Akbar!” How did you feel about this?

a. There was nothing remotely sinister or threatening about it at all. As anyone who knows the first thing about Islamic culture can tell you, it actually translates as “happy birthday”.

b. Do we really have to dwell on this sort of thing? It’s all terribly awkward and uncomfortable. Look, let’s just keep our heads down, and I’m sure it’ll all blow over.

c. He may well be a very nice man once you get to know him, but I can’t say I’ve got any immediate plans to invite him over for wine and nibbles.

YOUR ANSWERS

Mostly a: Congratulations! You’re a progressive. You therefore hold all the approved opinions about today’s key issues.

Mostly b: You’re a centrist. As a result, you believe in moderation, nuance, and never expressing any opinion that might damage your standing in fashionable circles. If Person X argues that 2+2=4 and Person Y argues that 2+2=5, you propose a sensible compromise of 4½.

Mostly c: You far-Right, bigoted, hate-filled, genocidal, transphobic Zionist. You are literally Hitler.

A month ago I blogged:

There is no way the investigation will have taken nine weeks. The Uffindell investigation took only five weeks to complete, and that was dealing with events from 20 years ago where witnesses had to be tracked down.

Almost certainly the Green leadership have the report, and have had it for some time. They don’t need to release the report, but they do need to tell us whether it substantiated the claims against Tana, and what the outcome will be.

It has now been 95 days with Tana on full pay. I’ve been a board chair where we have had to have a barrister investigate issues around employment allegations. We got the report within a fortnight or so.

How long is 95 days. Well some comparisons:

• The duration of 1.3 Falkland Wars (74 days)
• The duration of 2.3 Gulf Wars to liberate Kuwait (42 days)
• 8.6 Scaramuccis (11 days)
• Light from the sun will have travelled 1/16th of the way to Proxima Centauri
• 1.3 times the duration of the independent inquiry into the appointment of the NZ Deputy Police Commissioner (74 days)
• 1.1 times the duration of the independent inquiry into Judith Collins and the SFO Director (85 days)
• 0.7 times the duration of the Rogers Commission inquiry into why the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded
• 4.3 times the duration of the US Senate investigation into the sinking of the Titanic (18 days)
• 1.1 times the duration of the Tower Commission into the Iran-Contra Affair (85 days)
• 1.8 times the duration of the Roberts Commission into the Pearl Harbour attack (54 days)

Amazing how an inquiry into alleged employment infringements can take this long.

The Herald reports on how Kayla Pawa was kidnapped and tortured by gang members who wanted to access her partner’s cryptocurrency stash. The details include:

• held hostage for a month
• tortured with a blowtorch, threatening to burn her eyeballs out
• had the barrel of a gun put in her mouth
• forced to sleep on an extremely cold bathroom floor
• kept bound in the boot of a car
• instructed to dig her own grave
• threatened to cut her fingers off
• hit her in the ribs with a baseball bat
• multiple men used a hammer on her hands
• refused to feed her for five days
• held a meat cleaver to her shoulder
• beating her unconscious
• threats of amputating an entire limb

The maximum charge for kidnapping is 14 years but to be honest even that seems insufficient for what they did. The repeated tortures should result in a cumulative, not concurrent, sentence.

Sadly I suspect Harris will get less than ten years.

Readers will recall that the media reported breathlessly the statement by former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr that he was intending to sue Winston Peters for defamation after Peters said Carr was a pawn of China, or similar.

The media even got the letter from Carr’s lawyers 90 minutes before it was actually sent to Peters. For days this was reported as a major scandal, and the Labour Party even declared that Peters must be sacked as Foreign Minister for his comments. I noted here that what Peters said was hardly novel, and was something that even Carr’s former colleagues had said. But the media portrayed Peters as being under huge pressure because of this.

Well it is now over 45 days since Carr said he intended to sue, and he hasn’t yet (as I predicted). Perhaps the media who got leaked early a copy of his lawyer’s letter to Peters, could ask Mr Carr what is happening?

Nicola Willis announced:

Workforce data for the quarter from 31 December 23 to 31 March 24 shows a decrease of 0.6 per cent (or 416 FTEs) indicating workforce size peaked in December.

“We knew that the recent increase in the number of back-office public service roles was unaffordable and needed to be reined in,” Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. 

The full impact of Budget 2024 decisions is yet to be realised which is why the nine months to 31 March 2024 still shows a small net increase of 3.4 per cent in FTE since June 2023 to 65,283 FTEs.

Now this is only to 31 March, but the fact that FTEs are 3.4% higher than just before the election shows how fast it grew in the second half of last year.

The Herald reports:

National MP Maureen Pugh was allegedly assaulted after a Tākaka community board meeting.

Golden Bay Community Board chair Abbie Langford said the incident yesterday afternoon, which allegedly involved a man pushing a placard into Pugh’s chest and others shouting at her, was “a bit scary”.

“We weren’t prepared for the aggression shown towards Maureen.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told reporters today Pugh had been a victim of an “attack” and the matter had been lodged with police.

The person responsible should be charged. The right to protest is not a right to assault.

NewstalkZB reports:

New and existing “roads of national significance” would have a 110km/h speed limit if they had been built to a high safety standard. 

Brown said the Government was seeking feedback from the public on potential 120km/h speed limits on “roads of national significance” able to safely accommodate that speed. 

If the engineering is done well, then I see no problem with 120 km/hr limit on very safe roads. It is a limit, not a target.

In just one month both the former President of the United States and the son of the current President have become convicted felons. Both are unprecedented

Both men are yet to be sentenced. I have an idea, albeit impossible. They should both be given the same sentence. Both their crimes are relatively low level and first time offenders. So if one gets a year in prison, the other should. If one gets 400 hours community service, then the other should etc.

Then the whingers couldn’t complain that the justice system is biased against their “side”.

The Herald reports:

It has been revealed Costley is claiming $36,400 (taxpayer-funded) a year in housing allowance for an apartment he owns in Wellington despite living about 58km from Parliament in a family house in Waikanae.

MPs are entitled to claim $36,400 a year if their main residence is “outside the Wellington commuting area”, but the rules do not specify a minimum distance.

Inland Revenue defined reasonable commuting distance as “between 50km and 80km for each leg of the journey or between 100km and 160km, taking both legs into account”.

The part in bold is wrong. The rules state:

Wellington commuting area means the cities of Wellington, Hutt, Upper Hutt, and Porirua

They’re in black and white. There is no grey area.

It’s fine to debate the wisdom of claiming the allowance, but it isn’t find to imply the rules are unclear when they are not.

Personally I’m not a big fan of requiring MPs who have just worked 14 hour days, to also be expected to drive home for 45 to 60 minutes.

The Post reports:

Green councillor Nīkau Wi Neera and Labour councillors Nureddin Abdurahman and Ben McNulty will no longer commit to voting with the mayor’s policies.

The vote to sell the airport shares, spearheaded by Whanau in the Wellington City Council’s long-term plan meeting two weeks ago, was the final straw.

“We’re not going to be co-operating unconditionally in the same way that we were, until we receive some guarantees that the progressive agenda that the mayor’s office is supposed to be pursuing is the agenda that is actually going to be pursued,” Wi Neera said.

Doesn’t this speak volumes. An admission that the Councillors on the left have been co-operatunbg unconditionally with the Mayor, rather than actually forming their own views. They are not there to represent ratepayers, but their parties.

For the first half of the term, the progressive transport and housing decisions made with the council have been made possible by the eight votes of the Labour and Green councillors, including Whanau’s casting vote as mayor.

No longer. Without the votes of Wi Neera, Abdurahman and McNulty, Whanau will have to make compromises with independent councillors to maintain the eight votes needed to pass her core policies.

This is not a bad thing.

The three councillors will instead vote issue-by-issue. They will not re-enter the voting bloc unless the mayor agrees to set some boundaries or “red lines” around what might be on the table for the rest of the council term.

There we have it – they do not vote issue-by-issue. They simply vote as a bloc. This is why political party Councillors should not be on Councils.

“The mayor is not leading, the bureaucracy is governing us

The Mayor hasn’t spoken to some Cos for over a year.

“Council’s officers say: ‘Jump,’ and the response of the mayor’s office is to say ‘How high?’” McNulty said.

And the response of the Labour/Green Crs has been to say “Can we go higher”

McNulty said the three were standing up for what they believed in. He had stopped attending the Labour-Green caucus meetings because it was “not a healthy environment to have an opinion different from the majority”.

This is how our Council is governed.

“It’s not up to individual councillors what we can and can’t make decisions on,” said Labour councillor Teri O’Neill.

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile!

There were a lot of Labour-Green councillors who didn’t want to be in the same room as each other at the moment, Wi Neera said. “It is a really difficult time, and a lot of people have got hurt, and there’s healing that needs to happen.”

Oh because they voted differently on an issue, they now need time out, and it sounds like an abusive relationship where people have got hurt and need healing!

Whanau said she remained committed to leading Pōneke “with a progressive vision”.

The Reading Cinemas deal and the Town Hall had both been voted through with a progressive majority, she pointed out.

Good to know a progressive vision is to blow out a renovation from $43 million to almost $350 million and to hand out corporate welfare to a US multinational cinema company. I’d call that regressive.

The Telegraph reports:

In three years, Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), has turned a failing force that was on its knees into the one rated most improved by the official police watchdog.

How bad was it?

When he arrived in the summer of 2021, GMP had been placed in “special measures” after failing to record 80,000 crimes – a fifth of that year’s total. Emergency 999 response times were the worst in the country, with serial warnings that it was failing domestic abuse and sexual assault victims.

So rock bottom.

Now, says Watson, every crime is investigated, emergency response times are among the best in England and Wales, arrests of domestic abuse perpetrators have doubled in a year and overall crime is down by 7.7 per cent. Since he took over, stop and searches have quadrupled to 46,029 in a year – a key reason, he believes, behind sharp falls in robberies, firearms offences and people presenting at hospitals with knife injuries. “It is about leadership and having an effective plan,” he says.

Stunning. And what did he do?

Instead, he believes it is about investigating every crime no matter how minor and thinking about crime “through the prism of the victim’s experience rather than the prism of some sort of Home Office classification”.

It echoes the US-inspired “broken windows” philosophy on tackling crime. “I expect my officers to enforce moving traffic offences, litter and graffiti, right the way up through the spectrum. It’s as much about the small stuff as it is about the big stuff,” says Watson.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that if you don’t tend to anti-social behaviour, which is symptomatic of crime, eventually things will deteriorate to the point where you get embedded endemic, deep-rooted crime and anti-social behaviour.”

We now have this in NZ. In Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington there is so much anti-social behaviour employers are moving out of the city.

There is no link between UNRWA and Hamas, no none at all. We know this because UNRWA commissioned a report that said so.

Gavin Ellis writes:

The Fair Digital New Bargaining Bill should be placed on a figurative Viking funeral ship, pushed out into the water, and set on fire. …

There are several reasons why the House should simply let the poor thing die in peace.

The first, and most obvious, is that similar legislation in Australia and Canada is not working. After a Married At First Sight honeymoon, the Australian system fell victim to Meta’s arrogant capriciousness. It simply refused to renew its commercial agreements with Australian news media. In Canada, it stopped carrying the country’s news altogether. What makes anyone think New Zealand would be treated more favourably?

Of course the same would happen here.

Overall, the bill’s many wounds and contusions are not survivable. It would be best to torch the remains and board another longship.

Hopefully the Government agrees.

A guest post by Alex Murphy from the Taxpayers Union:

Kiwis made it clear at the election what they wanted to see from this year’s Budget: real income tax relief, a much smaller state, and most importantly, public debt coming down.

Unfortunately, last week’s Budget fell well short of those expectations.
 
Not only has Treasury said we’ll be stuck in the red for at least another four years, but Kiwis won’t be getting the tax relief they asked for, and the state will remain just as big and greedy as it was when the Coalition took over.

Worse still, the Government is planning on spending more this year than Grant Robertson did last – $6,930 per household more to be exact. So much for ‘brutal cuts’, Nicola Willis’ Budget was practically a whole buffet!

Kiwis voted for fiscal restraint, though, not another budget buffet. So, what could the Government have done differently?
 
Well, for starters, it could have actually delivered Kiwis with the tax relief they deserved. 

As the Finance Minister said time and again before the budget, Kiwis haven’t a tax break in 14 years thanks to inflation stealing more and more of their real incomes by artificially forcing them into higher and higher tax brackets. 

The magic number we were looking for was a $49 per week reduction in tax for the average Kiwi worker. Anything less is only a partial catch up to the last 14 years of rampant inflation. Nicola Willis managed just $25 a week, taking us back to 2021. That isn’t tax relief, that is just shortchanging New Zealanders.

Had the Government actually taken the knife to public spending like it said it would, Nicola Willis could have simultaneously given Kiwis their $49 a week in tax relief and put the books back in the black.

Dare I say a chap from Argentina managed it a few months ago, and the Government certainly wouldn’t need to go as far as him.

Instead, by palming these savings decisions over to the department heads who presided over the last six years of expansion, it’s no wonder why the Government is now finding itself empty handed.

As far as staffing cuts go, the Government should have chopped public service numbers down by at least the extra 18,000 bureaucrats hired under Labour. The measly 4,000 reductions it plans to make simply won’t be anywhere near enough to carve out the enormous layer of fat brought in from the last six years of indulgence.

The Government has already taken a hammering in the media for barely plucking a few stray hairs. It may as well have ensured that its cuts were at least as drastic as they have been characterized to be.

And tackling the back-office bloat is just the start of what the Government should have done to find savings.

Take the billions of dollars’ worth of corporate welfare schemes, for instance, that continue to line the pockets of multinationals and other special industry groups.
 
Willis’ Budget not only keeps the corporate gravy train running, but dishes out even more favours, including nearly $200 million to the bigwigs of Hollywood , and a brand new climate-based ‘heavy vehicle’ fund that will see the biggest companies continue to milk the taxpayer,  for no environmental gain.

Again, this is not what New Zealanders asked for.
 
And further to ensuring there was no new corporate welfare, the Government should have also canned its existing corporate welfare teats such as Callaghan Innovation, NZTE, or the hundreds of other tax credits, grants and funds dished out by ministries every year.

But wait there’s more.

The Government could have also decided to pull the plug on its state media arm and sell it off. Seeing as polling continues to show that New Zealanders trust neither RNZ or TVNZ’s ability to provide balanced and impartial news coverage, the Government may as well have pushed them off its books now while they still might be worth something.
 
Not only would this have brought in some quick cash when the Government needs it most, but passing these organizations over to the private sector would have ensured that all news content from TVNZ and RNZ would be directly accountable to the consumers that fund them – not set by agenda-driven bureaucrats.
 
In short, had the Government listened to Kiwis, gone line-by-line through the finances, and actually cut out the waste, Nicola Willis could have quite easily delivered Kiwis with the tax relief they deserved, all while getting the books back into order.
 
Instead, we’ve been given a budget that shortchanges New Zealanders, keeps the state as fat as ever, and sees our debt continue to spiral out of control.

This really could have been the next mother of all budgets. Instead, it was the mother of all disappointments.

Alex Murphy is a Senior Researcher at the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union

I’m in Ukraine for a few days, attending the Black Sea Security Forum. For reasons of operational security I can’t blog any details of the Forum until it has concluded, but I can blog about why I am here, and my impressions to date.

I’m here because I think what happens in Ukraine matters. It is not a complicated conflict. Ukraine wants to remain a democratic country where its 40 million people determine their own future. Russia wishes to conquer it and turn it into a puppet state, or even use it as the start of reforming the former Soviet Union. It’s probably the most morally unambiguous conflict since World War II.

So what happens is vitally important to 40 million Ukrainians who are fighting for their nation’s survival as an independent democratic country, but it is also important to the world and New Zealand. As one of the smallest and least powerful countries in the world, we benefit the most from a rules based international order, as opposed to a might based international order. A defeat in Ukraine will not just encourage further Russian expansion in Europe, but will embolden other autocratic regimes.

So when I was given the opportunity to attend the Forum, I thought about it for many weeks, only making a final decision to attend a few weeks ago. I feel very strongly my responsibility to my seven and four year old to remain alive many more years for them, and to be more risk adverse than in my youth. But weighing up against that, the actual risk is very low for me – not zero, but very low. Odessa is a fair way from the frontlines. There are missile attacks from Russia, but a very useful phone app warns you of them, and tells you where the closest shelter is. So far the biggest risk was probably the three hour drive from Moldova, where my driver weaved in and out of traffic constantly as he overtook anyone slower than us.

Ukraine being at war is noticeable. There are military vehicles everywhere along the main road.

Ukraine is not a wealthy country, like many former Soviet countries. The GDP per capita is less than 10% of NZ or around 25% on the PPP basis. Around the same as Vietnam and Ecuador. The outskirts of Odessa look very typical Eastern European, but once you get to the city centre, you have remarkable beauty.

The Odessa Opera House which happened to have on a stunning performance of the Don Quixote ballet the evening I arrived.

Every building (and I mean every) in Odessa flies the Ukrainian flag. It is a reminder of how powerful national symbols can be as a unifying force.

The City Gardens, which is surrounded by cafes with outdoor dining, so was my dinner venue last night.

Deribasovskaya Street.

As I said at the beginning, I can’t yet blog details of the speakers and discussion (or venue) of the Forum, but will do so when I can.