From the New Zealand Herald focused on the growth of Auckland schools and some that are bursting at the seams (i.e. these are not my numbers).

1. Mt Albert Grammar Principal Patrick Drumm is thankful for the school being allocated $30million to establish 22 new classrooms and accommodate 600 extra students.
   
   So … an establishment cost of $50,000 per student.
   
2. Drumm notes that a new State school establishment for 600 students would cost $250million.
   
   So … an establish cost of $416,666 per student.
   
3. If the new Charitable Company I am involved with is awarded the four wonderful Charter schools we have proposed that establish cost would be well under $9million (at a rough, but experienced, guess) for 1,160 students.
   
   So an establishment cost of $7,758 per student.
   

The ongoing interest (or opportunity) costs, at 5%, for 5 years are:

MAGS: $1.5m per annum (600 students) i.e. $2,500 per student – 5 year total $7.5m

New State School: $12.5m per annum (600 students) i.e. $20,833 per student – 5 year total $62.5m

Education 710+: $450,00 per annum (1160 students) i.e. $387 per student – 5 year $2.25m

Just on establishment and the first 5 years these Charter Schools (for equal numbers) would save the taxpayer:

$32,623,000 against the MAGS situation.

$307,613,000 against the State new school situation (i.e. over twice the cost of the 15 proposed new Charter Schools over four years).

The Charter schools then operate at the same per student cost for similar sized and demographics State Schools – and have actual performance targets to meet.

You will probably not hear this from the teacher unions or the Labour Party.

I knew my Economics degree would be useful at some point.

Alwyn Poole
alwyn.poole@gmail.com
Innovative Education Consultants Ltd
Education 710+ Ltd
(both sites currently being re-done)
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

Stuff reports:

A self-described Nazi on Tuesday became the first person convicted in the Australian state of Victoria of performing an outlawed Nazi salute.

Jacob Hersant, 25, gave the salute and praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in front of news media cameras outside the Victoria County Court on October 27, 2023, after he had appeared on a unrelated charge. It was six days after the Victoria state government had made the salute illegal.

The Federal Parliament passed legislation in December that outlawed nationwide performing the Nazi salute in public or to publicly display, or trade in, Nazi hate symbols.

Anyone who does a Nazi salute should face severe reputational damage. However they should not face criminal sanctions for it.

The only exception to this is arguably countries where the Nazis came to power such as Germany and Austria.

The BBC reports:

A plan to restrict the opening hours of fast food outlets near schools has failed to curb childhood obesity, with rates instead rising.

In 2014 Medway Council put rules in place which limited takeaways if they were located within 400m (1,312ft) of a school.

Public health activists seem to love these bans of anything within x metres of a school. As I have pointed out many times these are as the crow flies, so a 400 metre radius ban zone will cover an area of 50 hectares. In most cities it would ban them basically everywhere.

Public Health England data showed that 21.9% of reception children and 32.8% of year six children measured were either overweight or obese in Medway in 2013/14 – but 10 years on the rates have risen with 22.3% of Medway’s reception children and 37.4% of year six children being overweight or obese.

I am not surprised. The answer to child obesity is almost always parenting.

Councillor Teresa Murray, the authority’s deputy leader and chairwoman of the health and wellbeing board, said the council’s decision had been “the right one” but that “no single policy” could tackle the ever-growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

This means you can claim anything you do is the right decision, on the basis that no single policy works.

The table above shows the polling averages from the six leading forecast sites in the US.

It is as close as you can get. Three have Trump winning, and three have Harris winning. The most common forecast is Harris wins by 276 to 262 which means just one of three states going the other way, would give victory to Trump.

I’ll update this table every couple of days.

Readers will know I am a supporter of the End of Life Choice Act. In fact I was an active campaigner for it. I think it has provided much needed choice to many New Zealanders who were terminally ill.

But this story from the Herald is a concern:

Two members of a committee tasked with ensuring assisted deaths complied with the law say the oversight process was so inadequate they would not have known if someone had died wrongly.

The former End of Life Review Committee members said they were “extremely concerned” about how little information they received about patients’ deaths and raised it repeatedly with the Ministry of Health and successive Health Ministers.

When they complained about receiving assisted death reports with blank sections they were told by the ministry to assume nothing was wrong – a response which led one of the members to step down from the role. Another member described it as a “tick-box” exercise.

As I said I am a big supporter of the Act, but it is essential that the safeguards are rigorous and not seen as a tick-box exercise.

The two committee members occasionally attempted to raise what they felt were important issues but were told that this was not within the scope of their role.

Wensley became concerned about the unequal distribution of assisted deaths, noting that more of them were occurring in small, rural areas than anticipated. When she sought more data to “check her sense”, it was denied by the Assisted Dying Secretariat, she said in a letter to former Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

A Ministry of Health spokesperson said Wensley had raised an important equity question and officials had taken it seriously. But the relatively new service lacked enough data to draw conclusions about equity and access, and this would be investigated when a more robust dataset was available – likely to be several years.

The spokesperson also said that such an investigation was not within the committee’s responsibilities and that Wensley’s question had been passed to the ministry’s research team.

Maybe the review should look at changing the law so that such issues are within the committee’s responsibilities.

The Herald reports:

A pharmacist and transgender refugee who was convicted last month for pouring tomato juice over the head of anti-transgender rights activist Posie Parker – prompting the controversial British speaker to promptly leave New Zealand over safety fears – returned to a courtroom today as her lawyer asked to have the conviction rescinded. …

He acknowledged there was a degree of premeditation to the confrontation, but he said Rubashkyn now regrets her actions – feeling remorse for both the victims and also for the backlash experienced by the transgender community as a result of her actions.

Oh, what absolute nonsense. She feels zero remorse for her victims. We know this because she boasted on TV about how proud she was. The only remorse is for the consequences of her actions on her. A useful take is here.

If the conviction is rescinded, then it will signal that violence is acceptable to silence speech you disagree with.

Joel McManus writes:

There are three options being considered, but the one that has garnered the most interest is the long tunnel, running all the way underneath the Wellington city centre.

The investigation has cost $1.6 million so far, which is not an unreasonable amount of money to spend during the early stages of a multibillion-dollar city-building project. But this is a transport minister who has been happy to attack other projects as “a gravy train for consultants”, which does make it seem a bit more hypocritical. 

Not really. Auckland Light Rail had $230 million of spending which resulted in nothing. The cycle bridge had $560 million that resulted in nothing. They were planning to spend $100 million just one a business case for Wellington rapid transit. LGWM spent $83 million on consultants that resulted in an unpopular pedestrian crossing.

By contrast $1.6 million to get some idea of how much Wellington’s largest ever transport project would cost, is in a different galaxy for spending.

The city council and regional council both hate the long tunnel. 

That is almost proof it is a good idea.

There is no natural constituency clamouring for it other than Simeon Brown himself and some late-career Marks and Johns at Waka Kotahi NZTA. 

This is, respectfully, nonsense. To claim there is no natural constituency for a tunnel that would knock 15 minutes each way off travel times is a bizarre view.

But the long tunnel isn’t stupid. It’s expensive and high-risk, but if it were viable, it would be a fundamentally good idea.

Here we agree. It is fundamentally a good idea. The two major negatives are:

• Cost. At $5 billion you’d do it without banking. at $10 billion you’d be blinking a lot.
• Time: Perfect can be the enemy of good. A second Mt Vic tunnel has less benefits but can be done quicker than the mega-tunnel. Do you do something that could reduce congestion in less than 10 years or something that might not be completed for say 15 years?

The long tunnel would solve real problems. It would speed up trips through Wellington and, more importantly, free up space in the city centre. Right now, State Highway 1 empties out onto Vivian Street, which would be a much more popular retail area if it wasn’t a car sewer. It cuts straight across Cuba Street, causing a noticeable drop in foot traffic south of the intersection.

Not having SH1 cut the city in two would be a good thing.

Then, there’s the Basin Reserve, which has been an awkward issue for transport. It sits right in the middle of a complex intersection, with traffic going east/west between SH1 and the airport and traffic going north/south toward the city. 

The NS and EW traffic must be separated. This tunnel is not the only way to do it, but certainly would achieve that.

It’s not a question of whether the long tunnel would be good for Wellington – it would. The question is whether it is the best use of money. Is $4 billion (or whatever the final cost ends up being) worth it for a slightly quicker drive from the Hutt to the airport, a few apartments in Te Aro, and a slightly better service on the Number 1 bus?

Not slightly quicker. Potentially half an hour quicker for a return trip.

But the opportunity cost is very real. The more it costs, the harder the case for it is.

News.com.au reports:

China’s thriving electric vehicle market has taken a brutal hit after the European Union voted to slap huge additional taxes on all EVs made in China.

Ten EU member states including France, Italy and Poland supported imposing the tariffs of up to 35.3 percent, coming on top of existing duties of 10 percent.

Only five including Germany and Hungary voted against while 12 abstained including Spain and Sweden – not enough to block the tariffs.

The cheaper EVs are, the more people who will buy them. The EU (like the US) is showing that they are more concerned about their domestic car industries than about climate change.

Matt Taibii writes:

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: There are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

This is a good insight into the self-appointed censors.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues, and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set—what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “utopia of scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the nosy parker, the snoop. 

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.”

A great column.

Here are the net approval ratings for UK Prime Ministers three months after each election:

• 1992: Major +8%
• 1997: Blair +62%
• 2001: Blair +41%
• 2005: Blair -3%
• 2010: Cameron +24%
• 2015: Cameron -7%
• 2017: May -17%
• 2019: Johnson +14%
• 2024: Starmer -30%

Starmer has become incredibly unpopular so quickly.

Breitbart reports:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel Security Agency (ISA) announced Monday that they had killed Fateh Sherif, who led Hamas in Lebanon. He was also a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) employee. …

Overnight, during a joint IDF and ISA intelligence-based activity, the IAF struck and eliminated the terrorist Fateh Sherif, Head of the Lebanon Branch in the Hamas terrorist organization. 

Sherif was responsible for coordinating Hamas’ terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives. He was also responsible for Hamas’ efforts in Lebanon to recruit operatives and acquire weapons. …

Sherif was killed today in an airstrike on the al-Bass refugee camp in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, along with his wife and children. Reports indicate he had been the principal of the UNRWA-run Deir Yassin Secondary School in al-Bass.

So NZ tax dollars goes to UNRWA so they can employ a Hamas commander as a school principal. Do you think he makes sure they are taught about peace and compromise or about hatred and killing?

1 News reports:

A prominent former political figure found guilty of eight sex crimes dating back to the 1990s has taken his bid for continued name suppression to the High Court. 

In August, the man was found guilty of eight historical sexual offences against two teenage boys. 

At the last hearing, four weeks ago, he applied for interim name suppression until his sentencing on November 22. That was denied by the judge who granted the man 20 working days to consider whether to appeal. 

That period expires today – and the man’s lawyer has now appealed the District Court decision to the High Court. 

The application will be heard on November 25, three days after the man’s sentencing.

The decision to appeal is bizarre. There is close to zero chance of success. If someone has actually been convicted of serious crimes, then they are almost always named. There have been political figures in the past who got name suppression but that was for relatively minor offending such as taxi chit fraud, not sexual offending.

It may take time, but the person convicted will be named. As it happens I suspect a large portion of the population already knows their name, or at least their former role.

You often hear people claim they are not anti-semitic, just anti-zionist. On campuses they demand zionists be banned etc. So in this post I explore what a Zionist is and is not.

I’m first going to start with what a Zionist is not.

• You can be a Zionist and think Bibi Netanyahu is a bad person
• You can be a Zionist and think there should be an independent State of Palestine
• You can be a Zionist and oppose the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories
• You can be a Zionist and think the boundaries of Israel should be as per the Balfour Declaration in 1917, or the UN resolution in 1947, or the 1949 armistice agreement, or the aftermath of the 1967 war, or the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, or the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty etc
• You can be a Zionist and think the Israeli counterattacks in Gaze and Rafah are disproportionate and should stop.
• You can be a Zionist and think Israel should provide more aid and employment etc to Palestinians
• You can be a Zionist and think Likud is a terrible political party
• You can be a Zionist and think the current Israeli Government is horrific
• You can be a Zionist and support parts of Jerusalem being under Palestinian control
• You can be a Zionist and agree that the most holy site in Judaism (The Temple Mount) by under the custody or Jordan

None of the above are features of Zionism. Anti-semites use the term Zionist instead of using more specific terms.

So what is Zionism? Well the UK Chief Rabbi states:

For religious Jews, the Biblical Covenant established between God and the Jewish People is the central tenet of our faith. A critical component of this is the promise made to the Jewish People of a homeland, the journey to it and the experience of living within it. The Torah (Five Books of Moses) is, in effect, a 3,000-year-old constitutional document for the establishment of a nation state in the territory known previously as Canaan and later as the Kingdom of Judah or Judea. Jews know it simply as the Land of Israel.

The Kingdom of Judea is as central to Judaism as the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection is to Catholics.

For nearly 2,000 years, the Jewish People, scattered amongst the nations of the world, continued to live according to the values and principles prescribed by their constitution, the Torah, but without their ancestral homeland. They embraced numerous societies. “Through you all the nations of the world will be blessed,” God promised Abraham. And so, Jews laid down roots and committed themselves to contribute to the success of their newly found homes.

However, the Land of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular, always remained at the heart of their everyday worship. The eventual return to their homeland was central to their Jewish psyche. In multiple prayers every day for thousands of years, we have faced towards Jerusalem, known as “Zion”, which appears no less than 152 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is the very heart of our Jewish faith and identity.

So Zionism is simply support for a Jewish homeland centred on Jerusalem (Zion).

Anyone who supports a two state solution, is effectively a Zionist.

It is essential to understand that Zionism does not entail an endorsement of the policies of a particular Israeli government, nor is it mutually exclusive with advocating for the welfare or rights of Palestinians. 

Absolutely not.

So a Zionist is simply someone who supports the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. So someone who says they are against Zionism, is actually saying they want Israel destroyed.

Now it is true not every Jew is a Zionist (but the vast vast majority are, as it is central to the religion), but opponents use it exclusively against Jews.

While technically you don’t need to be Jewish to be a Zionist, it is almost exclusively used as shorthand for Jews who support Israel’s right to exist. You don’t hear Buddhists who support the right of Israel to exist described as Zionists. You don’t hear Arabs who are citizens of Israel described as Zionists.

So anti-semites use Zionist as short-hand for Jews. Not all Jews are Zionists, but all Zionists are Jews in their rhetoric.

So a Zionist is simply someone who thinks Jews should have a country in which they are the majority. Considering 2,500 years of exile, persecution, hundreds of discriminatory laws, the Holocaust etc this is not a surprising view to hold.

Now you may consider there should be no countries which are religious countries. The Chief Rabbi notes:

I am a Zionist because I believe that alongside the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries and 49 Muslim-majority countries, there is a vital need for a single Jewish country. 

49 Muslim-majority countries, but one Jewish-majority country is too much?

There are also three Hindu-majority countries and seven Buddhist-majority countries.

Now one can have an academic argument about whether the UN should have agreed to a Muslin and Jewish partition in 1947, just as you can have a view on whether the UK should have divided its then territory into Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan in 1947.

But Israel has been a sovereign state for over 70 years with the vast majority who live there having been born there, and without citizenship elsewhere.

So anti-zionists are calling for either one of three things:

1. Israel is destroyed, and everyone living there is killed
2. Israel is destroyed, and most people living there are made stateless
3. Israel is turned into Palestine with a majority Muslim population, and Jews as the minority

So again a Zionist is simply someone who doesn’t want one of those three scenarios occurring.

In terms of the last scenario, where Jews are the only major religion in the world where they have no country which is a homeland, consider the 2,500 years of history of persecution and discrimination that is still very much alive today. That is why so many Jews are still immigrating to Israel.

But also consider specifically the notion that they could live peacefully in a Palestinian state ruled by Hamas or Fatah. That they very same people who phoned home to proudly tell their parents they had managed to kill ten Jews in one morning, would just settle down as good neighbours.

And also consider the history of Jews in the last century, managing to live peacefully in Muslim majority countries. These are the population changes from 1900 to 2020:

• Algeria 51,000 to 0
• Egypt 31,000 to 9
• Libya 19,000 to 0
• Morocco 110,000 to 2,100
• Tunisia 63,000 to 1,000
• Yemen 30,000 to 6

So a Zionist is basically someone who want Jews to be able to live in a majority Jewish state, centred on Jerusalem, and doesn’t want seven million Jews living in Israel to be killed, made stateless or to be a persecuted minority in a Muslim majority state.

Yet anti-semites use it as a term to generate hatred, knowing that many see it as simply meaning a Jew.

If people want to criticise actions taken in the Middle East that they consider terrible, here are some ways you can do so, without being racist.

• I condemn the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu
• I condemn the current Israeli Government
• I condemn the policy to expand settlements
• I condemn the response to October 7
• I condemn the refusal to surrender more territory in exchange for peace
• I condemn the Likud Party
• I condemn the actions of the IDF

But if you start condemning Zionism, then you are saying that you support seven million Jews having no homeland where they are the majority and potentially being killed or made stateless.

If you condemn Zionism, it means you do not support a two-state solution. It means you support a one-state solution where Israel does not exist.

So yes almost everyone who say they are an anti-zionist is in reality an anti-semite.

Don Brash was Governor to 2002 when numbers were dropping.

Allan Bollard was 2002 – 2012 with numbers up around 5 FTEs a year.

Graham Wheeler 2012- 2017 with numbers flat.

Adrian Orr from 2018 with FTEs rising around 60 a year.

And ironically the number of staff have been inversely proportional to their core KPI of keeping inflation to under 3%.

The details of the Mossad operation against Hezbollah is so incredible, you would think it would be implausible as a film plot. They include.

• Built 5,000 pagers and sold them to Hezbollah
• Each pager weighed less than 80 grams
• Had a special two-step de-encryption procedure that ensured most users would be holding the pager with both hands when it detonated, as it was an encrypted message that was the trigger. This meant it was likely the Hezbollah members would have such severe damage to their hands they couldn’t hold a gun in future.
• The bomb component was so carefully hidden as to be virtually undetectable and it is understood Hezbollah did disassemble some of the pagers and may have even X-rayed them yet didn’t detect anything.
• The booby-trapped walkie-talkies were sold to Hezbollah in 2015, and were undeterred for nine years
• The walkie-talkies gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications

All forms of warfare result in some casualties of people who are not military targets. For example 500,000 German civilians died in WWII. But this operation probably saw one of the smallest level of non-targeted deaths in recent times.

Chris Bishop and Shane Jones announced:

The 149 projects released today for inclusion in the Government’s one-stop-shop Fast Track Approvals Bill will help rebuild the economy and fix our housing crisis, improve energy security, and address our infrastructure deficit, Minister for Infrastructure Chris Bishop says. …

“While the independent Advisory Group recommended to Ministers a total of 342 projects for inclusion in the Bill, Cabinet chose to include only 149 of them to better reflect the capacity from expert panels to assess and consent these projects,” Mr Bishop says.

Can you imagine the difference it will take if we get 149 projects consented within 12 months rather than eight years?

The 149 projects include:

• Housing: 58 projects creating 55,000 new homes
• Transport: 29 projects including 16 roads, 5 rail projects, 5 port projects and 3 public transport projects totally 180 kms of new transport routes
• Renewable Electricity: 22 projects with combined capacity of 3 Gigawatts. We currently have 9.5 GW so that will increase our capacity by 30% – all renewable with a mixture of solar wind and hydro.
• Mining 11
• Quarrying 8
• Aquaculture/Farming: 7 projects producing 143,000 tonnes per annum

The Government is going to need a lot of qualified lawyers and planners etc for the expert panels!

A big upset in voting for the UK Conservative leadership. James Cleverly who won the second to last round of MP voting, got knocked out in the final round, and won’t proceed to the members vote.

Here’s how each round has gone:

Round 1

1. Robert Jenrick 28
2. Kemi Badenoch 22
3. James Cleverly 21
4. Tom Tugendhat 17
5. Mel Stride 16
6. Priti Patel 14

Round 2

1. Robert Jenrick 33 (+5)
2. Kemi Badenoch 28 (+6)
3. James Cleverly 21
4. Tom Tugendhat 21 (+4)
5. Mel Stride 16

This is as expected. Patel’s votes go to three different candidates.

Round 3

1. James Cleverly 39 (+18)
2. Robert Jenrick 31 (-2)
3. Kemi Badenoch 30 (+2)
4. Tom Tugendhat 20 (-1)

Here we probably see some tactical voting. Cleverly went up a massive 18 and Jenrick dropped. That suggests Jenrick voters tactically backed Cleverly to keep him in the race, hoping that they could push Badenoch to third place and eliminate her next round. She is favourite with the members and likely to win if she makes final two.

Round 4

1. Kemi Badenoch 42 (+12)
2. Robert Jenrick 41 (+10)
3. James Cleverly 37 (-2)

Where this is so surprising is Tugendhat is a centrist candidate like Cleverly. Everyone expected most of his votes to go to Cleverly, not the more right candidates of Badenoch and Jenrick. So one theory is Cleverly supporters thought they would tactically vote for Jenrick to knock Badenoch out, but too many of them did so, and they knocked themselves out.

The latest poll of Conservative members has Badenoch beating Jenrick 53%to 33%, so she is the frontrunner. Voting starts tomorrow and closes on 31 October with a result on 3 November (NZDT).

Exclusive poll results (paywalled) on the proposed Treaty principles in the ACT bill, with comparisons to sentiment 12 months ago.

The Herald reports:

Wellington City Council says it’s sensitively managing the removal of pro-Palestine graffiti, with official documents showing several left-wing councillors recently requested that council staff not paint over Palestinian flags and messages for a ceasefire, despite council policy.

How can residents have faith in their elected officials, when so many of them seem to think their role is not to have local laws apply to everyone, but only to those they don’t personally agree with.

The Government has announced key changes to school property:

• Establish a new entity separate from the Ministry of Education, to assume ownership and asset management responsibility for the school property portfolio.
• Clarify roles and responsibilities for the funding, planning and delivery of school property.
• Review and simplify the current funding model for state schools.
• Implement clear processes for regular reporting and priority-setting to promote accountability, transparency, clarity of expectations, and value for money.
• Establish a Transition Board and Transition Unit to oversee and coordinate the establishment of the new school property entity.
• Undertake a range of immediate actions during the transition period to simplify the operating model and ensure value for money.

The first one is to me the most critical. A standalone entity with commercial governance and expertise to manage $30 billion of school property is the way to go.

In Q1 2024, over 60% of new classrooms were initiated as offsite manufacturing, up from under 20% in Q4 2023.

This indicates more affordable standard classrooms rather than each school getting bespoke designs.

UPDATE: The Government hasn’t decided to establish a new entity. It is a recommendation from the reviewers.