Phil Twyford claimed the other day in parliament that he and Labour had consulted extensively with business over the cancellation of the East-West link.

Turns that may have been a porkie.

NBR reports:

The Auckland Chamber of Commerce’s chief executive rejects government claims that business received extensive consultation before Labour decided to scrap the East-West Link motorway project in Auckland.

Transport Minister Phil Twyford made the comments yesterday in the House, after being quizzed by National’s transport spokeswoman Judith Collins over how much consultation Labour had had with Auckland businesses on the move.

Ms Collins asked how the minister responded to claims by the chamber’s chief executive, Michael Barnett, that “Ms Ardern’s government did not consult with the Auckland business community before announcing a scaling back of the project.”

Mr Twyford insisted the government did consult “extensively”, including with Mr Barnett himself, before deciding to can the project.

But Mr Barnett disagrees with that description.

Misleading the house is a serious offence. Phil Twyford might find himself in a spot of bother.

He says Mr Twyford did meet a group of Auckland businesses during the election campaign, including the Employers and Manufacturers Association and the chamber but only came to them at the point when he had already made his decision.

“If you came to me and asked ‘did he meet with us, canvas opinions and go through the processes with us’ I would say no, that didn’t happen.”

“He had made [his] mind up at the point in which he spoke to us. I would say the consultation with us was honest – he didn’t hide behind the fact that it wasn’t Labour’s intention to be proceeding with it.”

That isn’t consultation.

Stupid Labour, they’ve cancelled something without having a replacement and any replacement will now find tougher scrutiny because of the stupidity of the minister.

-NBR

I think it is safe to assume that the Australians have had enough virtue signalling and are letting rip with some intelligence.

The Courier Mail reports:

Operation Sovereign Borders has turned back four boats trying to get across the ditch.

In shock new details, it can be revealed crime syndicates have tried to bypass Australia’s tough immigration measures and attempted to send four boats, carrying 164 asylum seekers, to NZ.

It comes as there are genuine fears within intelligence communities that the direction of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who has kept her predecessor’s offer to resettle 150 refugees but has been highly-critical of Australia’s policy may be used by people smugglers to encourage desperate people to risk their lives at sea.  

The Courier-Mail understands that “chatter” has resumed among people smugglers who have pointed to the stand-off between Australia and NZ.

It is not know when the boats were intercepted or what country they started from but it is believed they told OSB they were headed to NZ. They were turned or towed back to near Indonesian waters.

In a recent exclusive interview with The Courier-Mail, the man in charge of OSB, Air Vice-Marshal Stephen Osborn said people smugglers leapt on changes of governments or ministers to get back into business.

“And it will be spun, whether it is (true) or not, because you’ll have people smugglers who will go, ‘Right, here’s something that has a grain of truth, there’s been a change in minister for example, we can spin this that he’s a really nice guy, he’s left-leaning, like the Greens or whatever, and he’ll invite us’,” he said earlier this year.

While it has never before been revealed that four boats were turned back, last week Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said NZ had been a destination for people smugglers.

“New Zealand is seen as we know from our own intelligence, New Zealand is seen as effectively part of Australia by the people smugglers,’’ Mr Turnbull told ABC Radio.

“Do you know, we have intercepted and turned back boats which were heading to New Zealand?

“I mean the people smugglers, the only reason New Zealand does not have thousands of people arriving in an unauthorised way on their shores is because of our border protection policies.

“New Zealand is a prime beneficiary from our strong border protection policies.”

And Jacinda Ardern continues to insult the Aussies. Perhaps she should start breathing through her nose and shut her trap and start listening for once in her sheltered life.

Well done to Jacinda, her virtue signalling and arrogance towards Australia has empowered the people smugglers.

She needs to tell the NZ public how many deaths she is prepared to accept as a result of her globalist ideals. Jacinda seems to be stuck on doing nice things.  Being a leader isn’t about doing nice things.  It’s about doing the right things.   If she was a parent, she may understand that better.

A photo of government ministers grovelling to the Opposition, begging not to be shanked

Labour reckons they weren’t hoodwinked by National…

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is describing confusion over [Tuesday’s] election of a new speaker “a minor irritation”.

The 52nd Parliament got off to a rocky start, with the National Party appearing to have hoodwinked Labour on the coalition’s first day.

After MPs were sworn in, a hasty deal was struck between National and Labour on the floor of the House when Labour did not appear to muster a majority to have its MP Trevor Mallard elected as Speaker.

National had questioned whether Labour had the numbers in the house to get Mr Mallard elected.

After a quick consultation between party whips and senior MPs, Labour agreed to increase the number of select committee positions from 96 to 108.

In fact Labour did have the majority it needed, but fell for National’s bluff.

Five government MPs and one National MP were absent from Parliament as MPs were sworn in this morning. This means 55 National MPs and David Seymour for ACT were present; versus 58 for the coalition.

Two of the absent MPs, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Trade Minister David Parker, are out of the country attending the APEC meeting.

Ms Ardern insisted Labour knew it had the numbers, but did not want to force a vote.

“It tends to be a tradition that you’d prefer to have all parties supporting the speaker and we didn’t want to have to ask the speaker to have to vote for himself.

“Look, that issue could have been issued in [the] Business Committee, it was resolved there [it was] a minor irritation, it’s not going to stop the business of this government.”

Ms Ardern rejected the notion that the government had fallen for National’s bluff.

Oh, so you weren’t hoodwinked? Good to know.

That just means that Labour are stupid and can’t count. Thanks Jacinda for confirming that.

One more question…why did the cat have to die then?

I think we can safely assume Kelvin Davis’ resignation will be on Jacinda’s desk early this week….if he is a man of his word:

Labour’s MP for Te Tai Tokerau says he will resign if the two charter schools in the north are closed down.

The Labour Party is opposed to charter schools but would continue to support kura kaupapa and special character schools.

Te Kura Hourua O Whangārei and Te Kāpehu Whetū are both charter schools in Northland.

The MP Kelvin Davis said Māori wanted a measure of autonomy over the education of their children.

“So if they were to close they would no longer exist, that would be a bottom line for me, so the fact is they can exist as special character schools, that’s the bottom line to me.“

There are actually 4 Charter Schools in his electorate – two in Whangarei as well as Vanguard and MSWA.

Tracy Martin on Q+A yesterday was unequivocal…those charter schools are going to be closed down. 

Climate Conversation writes 

For 20 years there’s been no local warming — NIWA’s own figures prove it, contradicting their endless public statements. Why don’t they admit this in public? Why do they tell us a different story? Why do the PM’s Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, and the previous Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, BOTH talk about warming when it hasn’t been happening? Could they have been deceived by NIWA and the Royal Society? I lump them in together because most of the climate panel on the RS are NIWA scientists. They’ve been in bed together on climate, with the IPCC, for decades.

How did I discover this? A few days ago I picked up the Royal Society report, Human Health Impacts of Climate Change for New Zealand, and the very first sentence (highlighted above) rang alarm bells:

In the Australasian region our climate is changing.

Now, most readers know there has been no significant global warming for about 20 years. They also know that the climate has been changing for millions of years, so on the face of it this is a true statement. However, with climate language twisted completely out of shape by environmental propaganda over the last 30 years, “climate change” now means man-made warming. Beware denials, for they are coming, but when they say ‘changing’ they actually mean ‘warming’.

Christopher Monckton was tracking the lack of warming evident in the RSS dataset, which grew to 18 years and 9 months before the El Nino of 2016 set in with higher temperatures. Since the El Nino ended a few months ago, temperatures have been subsiding, and last month returned to previous levels.

But the RS was talking about Australia and New Zealand, not the globe, so I wondered how local temperatures were tracking. NIWA’s website displays the 7SS and on looking closely it was hard to see a trend one way or the other over about the last 20 years.

So I downloaded the 7SS data and, taking it from 1998 to the present because that’s what the IPCC used in discussing the global “pause” in AR5, tried graphing the last 19 years. Here’s the result:

You can see there’s an insignificant cooling trend of 0.0012°C/year (0.12°C/100 yrs). In other words, no warming and no cooling. It reflects quite accurately the widely acknowledged hiatus in the global mean surface temperature.

New Zealand needs to know this.

He later added

For the national temperature record, the 7SS, NIWA have collected the data, checked it, adjusted it, approved it and published it on their website, so they can scarcely now argue with it. But, on the other hand, it’s totally at odds with what they say in public. Note to MSM: this ought to be front-page news.

And in the meantime, we have our politicians running around like the sky will fall within our lifetime.  Implementing all kinds of taxes and social costs to ‘save’ us all.

It doesn’t help that our own “scientific” watchdogs such as NIWA have become so indoctrinated that they’ll even ignore their own data.  I guess they feel there is safety in numbers as much as there is safety in not upsetting a government with the inconvenient truth:  that this Climate Thing was an embarrassing mistake and we need to back out of that now.

via Yahoo!

Only one week into the job new Police Minister Stuart Nash is already feeling the heat and walking back his own half-baked ideas, National’s Police Spokesperson Chris Bishop says.

“Having just floated the idea of recruiting new police staff from overseas to meet the Labour/NZ First promise of 1800 new officers, Nash has now backtracked completely, ruling out the idea after pressure from the Police Association and his own Cabinet colleague.”

“This is amateur hour stuff. Almost immediately after having been signed-up to the 1800 new Police staff by the Labour/NZ First Agreement, Mr Nash was preparing New Zealanders for failure, saying the target was “aspirational” only, there would in fact be fewer, and not all would be sworn officers.

“Then came the floating of the migrant cop idea, before the immediate slap down from Nanaia Mahuta – and the Police – who rightly pointed out it should be New Zealanders doing the job and they should be properly trained.”

“Like his colleagues, Mr Nash is quite clearly making it up as he goes along. New Zealanders deserves better.”

“I suspect another reason the policy’s been ditched is that it was obviously embarrassing for Labour to admit yet another sector of the economy would require “special visas” – meaning the government allowing people in only where it suits them – in defiance of their own policy of slashing migration.

“Poor Mr Nash has had to take one for the team so Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway can desperately try and make his own target.”

“It hasn’t taken long for divisions to become apparent even with Cabinet Ministers from the same party, let alone within the Coalition.

“Furthermore, Labour need to be upfront about the cost of their commitment to 1800 new police. As Nash even admits, with natural attrition in the sector, 3000 extra police will actually have to be recruited to meet the government’s target. Like with the rest of their costings, the Labour/NZ First/Greens government is fudging the numbers and hoping the problem will just go away. It won’t.”

3,000 new police. Of which 1,600 are just to replace those who are not good at it or are burnt out.

The remaining 1,400 will have a number of people from overseas.  Together with their families, they will need a place to live.  Space to drive.  Hospitals and schools to use.

There is a dark poetic beauty to Labour’s solutions in as much that one policy does not lock in with their others.

And we might as well laugh because you and I will be paying for it.  Well into the next National government.

via RNZ

One of the more stupid new ministers, Julie Anne Genter has blamed the previous government for the high road toll this year…seriously.

The new Government minister in charge of road safety is appalled at the rising road toll in recent years.

“It’s absolutely tragic and it’s unacceptable that the previous National Government chose not to make safety a top priority in transport funding and policy. This new Government will,” Julie Anne Genter said.

Given her logic, Labour and the Greens and in particular Julie Anne Genter are responsible for the seven road deaths in the past 5 days.

The Police though realise what the real problem is:

Police say drivers need to take greater responsibility for their actions and they’re urged to reflect back on when they first passed their driver’s licence.

“The reason you got your licence was because you weren’t drunk when you did the test. You did wear your seatbelt. You weren’t driving too fast and you weren’t on your cellphone,” Superintendent Greally said.

Only the most truly nasty politician would blame the road toll on a government. According to Julie Anne Genter the individual who was drunk, distracted or speeding isn’t responsible at all for their own death or that of others, it is the evil previous government.

With true stupidity like this she will regret those words. She has stated she will stop the road toll, essentially. She will be held to account for those comments…this year, next year and for the next three years while she is charge.

To the minister, does she stand by all her statements? If not, why not?

Judith Collins will make mince-meat of this muppet.