What a remarkable thing to happen:

Parents of bullies in a New York town could face jail time thanks to a new law passed unanimously last week.

It’s the no tolerance crackdown a group of parents in a western New York community lead by Victoria Crago, had been pushing for after Ms Crago’s 13-year-old son was assaulted in front of her earlier this year.

“This young man just sucker-punched him right in the face and hit him as hard as he could,” the mum told ABC News of the attack. “What really alarmed me about the situation was the brazen act of violence in front of a parent

The little scrotes know that bleeding heart liberals have made kids untouchable.   And for them to remain untouchable, now the parents will get punished for rearing a piece of shite kid.

The incident prompted Ms Crago and her husband Will Crago, to create a Facebook page “North Tonawanda Coalition for Safe Schools and Streets” for concerned local parents, who were increasingly alarmed at what they called the “culture of violence” around North Tonawanda Middle School.

Their efforts lead to a new anti-bullying law being passed by the North Tonawanda Common Council on 1 October. Under its terms, parents can be fined $250 and sentenced to 15 days in jail if their child violates the city’s curfew (unaccompanied children under 16 years aren’t allowed on the streets after 11 pm on weeknights or midnight on weekends), or any of the city’s laws – including bullying.

“We hope to never need to use this law but it’s there in extreme cases,” North Tonawanda City School District Superintendent Greg Woytila told ABC News. “But we need to do a better job and we are continually trying to do that.”

Tonawanda City Attorney, Luke Brown, says the law is more about getting parents to engage “in the process” and to find solutions.

If you have parents that don’t care that their kids are running around terrorising the place, then I see no problem with giving them two weeks in jail as a reality check.

But don’t expect it to help.

“When you’ve got 3,000-plus students and two or three are out of control, that’s too many,” he said. “One’s too many. Sometimes the police officers are the only ones trying. The families have given up.”

People who create children that go on to become violent, dishonest and a continuous cost to the general taxpayer need to be locked up until the child is a legal adult.  It will prevent the creation of more children for starters.

I just watched a cringe-inducing video with a patronising narrator so annoying that I wanted to tell ‘her’ er ‘him’ er ‘it’ grrrrr ‘they’ to STFU

Basically being an attractive white girl with the wrong opinion or reaction is a crime and you need to be re-educated by a white transgender who is dumpy, unattractive and frizzy-haired.

I do agree that the misgendering must stop but the people who are doing the misgendering are the people who claim that they identify as something they are not. Those who point out the objective reality are not misgendering they are stating nothing less than the truth.

While homosexuality has been a part of mankind forever Transgenderism is a modern creation. It has even become fashionable to identify as Transgender and the tiny minority of people who actually have the mental illness of gender dysphoria have been swamped by the majority who are either attention seekers or those who do not feel that they fit into society because they are socially awkward and think that transgenderism is a good way to explain that inability to fit in.

If you want to identify as an attack helicopter or as transgender knock yourself out. You are also free to believe in fairies and Santa Claus. What you don’t get to do is to lecture me on how I should react to your fantasy.

Believing in Santa Claus hurts no one and if you want to dress like a man and say you are a man then that doesn’t affect me one little bit. However, you cannot demand that I share your belief in Santa Claus or your belief that you are a man. I will call you Bob even if that is not your name if that is what you want to be called but I will not call you ‘him’ or ‘they.’

The only people misgendering these days are those who claim to be something they biologically are not.

The option it has been road testing solidly for the last two weeks is a deal with the Greens. National’s core leadership have barely mentioned it, but they’ve had cheerleaders and mischief makers, as well as good honest souls, all hard at work promoting the idea. And perhaps to the surprise of the left and right, it resonates with a lot of voters.

It’s not going to happen. Well, it’s extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon. And of course that’s not quite the same thing as saying never. But it’s clear the idea has almost zero support among Green Party members and supporters. There is no chorus of people who voted Green and now say they would like their party of choice to lean on the National Party to do a deal.

But it seems a remarkably large number of National Party members and supporters are keen on the idea. Some would rather the Greens than Winston. Others would rather the Greens anyway: many right-leaning voters clearly believe a good dose of environmental passion would do the National Party a world of good.

Such short memories they have.  They’d prefer to work with people that would die in a ditch for someone who defrauded the government for years!

If you think New Zealand should be saved from a government with Winston Peters, don’t ask the Greens to make it happen. It’s unreasonable to expect the Greens to risk destroying themselves just to help National out of a spot.

Instead, ask National why they haven’t tried to make it happen.

Is it a core philosophy for the National Party to be a slow follower of the worldwide movement to fight climate change? Of course not. They’ve done that merely because it’s been politically convenient in the here and now.

Is it a core philosophy for National not to care whether all citizens have a reasonable chance in life? No, it’s not. They’ve already moved past that.

Is it a core purpose for National to ramp up fears among rural voters of an urban/rural divide? I’d say no to that as well.

On the contrary, National could be a party that seeks to build a grand coalition of town and country to fight climate change. Couldn’t it? This, after all, is probably the biggest task facing the government, not only now, but into the foreseeable future.

So what’s the offer National might make to the Greens that they just could not refuse?

Because while the sympathies of Labour and the Greens are obviously closer right now, the potential does exist for National to govern with the Greens. One day. It’s so unlikely this election, but what of the next, or the one after that? To make it happen, National has a question to answer, and it is this: how is it going to change?

Unless, of course, I’m wrong and we wake up tomorrow or the day after and discover they’ve both gone and quietly done an astonishing deal already. It would have to be truly astonishing and I have to say I’m not expecting it.

Nobody wants to work with the toxic Green party.  Even Labour and Winston are talking about a structure that keeps the Greens from any kind of portfolio.

You can’t just be a bunch of political activists one day, and then be considered fit to be in government the next.  Russel Norman and Kevin Hague figured it out and went to do the job they wanted to do for Greenpeace and Forest & Bird.  In the mean time, the rest of the Green misfits are more interested in breaking things, banning things, obtaining things by force and “fixing” the unfixable while ruining the economy that lays the Greens’ golden eggs – the money they need to pay for it all.

The NZ Green party are so far up their own backsides, they don’t even realise they are the political equivalent of the plague.

– Simon Wilson, NZ Herald

We have all heard the saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, well  Dame Susan Devoy sees racism where I and others see only a harmless metaphor. Duncan Garner bent over backwards to make it clear what the intention of his opinion piece was yet Dame Susan feels that she knows more about what he said and why he said it than he does.

She reminds me of the people who wrote the English exam that I did for school certificate. In it, they had a reading comprehension question about a paragraph from a book by Witi Ihimaera. Just for fun after the exam had been marked a journalist sent the question to Witi Ihimaera and asked him if he would have chosen a,b,c or d as his answer. The question was about the meaning of a metaphor he had used. Witi got the answer wrong!

As an ex-high school English and History teacher I do not think that Dame Susan Devoy is more qualified than I am to interpret another person’s metaphor. A metaphor cannot be looked at in isolation. You have to see it in the context of the whole article. In my expert opinion as someone who has BA in English Dame Susan has totally missed the mark with her outrageous interpretation of Duncan Garner’s simple metaphor. Just like the School Certificate English exam writers who failed to understand Witi Ihimaera’s metaphor, Dame Susan has added meaning that isn’t there to Duncan Garners.

[…] While on a recent undie-buying mission, instead of a queue of strangers at Kmart he told readers he saw a “massive human snake” of “Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Syrians and many others”, a “nightmarish glimpse of our future” that snaked and snaked and snaked through the store.

He was describing the long curving queue that anyone who has ever been to K-Mart is well familiar with. Writers use a snake as a metaphor for many long curving things. For example, they may say that the river snakes through the woodland.

K-Mart has a unique system that forces all customers to line up in a single queue that can stretch a very long way. His metaphor of a snake in this instance was to describe the unusual length of the queue throughout the store. A queue that he himself was a part of. He was attempting to compare the long queue to the side effects of poorly planned immigration as too many many people slows everything down and it becomes a nightmare.

I don’t know if Duncan is anything like Cam but he HATES long queues with a passion and will leave a store rather than wait to be served if it is too long. We have been very privileged in New Zealand as long queues are not the Kiwi way. Our low population has protected us from the stress found in highly populated countries where queues are commonplace. A long queue of people snaking around corners is a good symbol to use to illustrate how our paradise is changing.

[…] Garner’s decision to frame immigration and planning as a uniquely nightmarish Asian problem is in fact, the problem. And if he’s surprised that people are angry he shouldn’t be, because his words are hurtful, they’re inflammatory and they matter.

Likening foreigners to a snake isn’t a compliment; earlier this year US President Donald Trump recited the lyrics of a song The Snake and likened poisonous, treacherous snakes to immigrants.

The snake metaphor was used to illustrate the extreme length and curves of the queue, not danger or menace and it was an observable fact that the people in the long queue were Asian.

[…] Right now, yes, we need to be able to tell decision makers to plan strategically for population growth. But no, we don’t need to do it with inflammatory racist language. We’re better than that.

* Susan Devoy is New Zealand’s Race Relations Commissioner

The below boat race is called the ” Snake Boat race” not for any sinister reason but because the boat is very, very long like a snake. Devoy reveals her ignorance of how metaphors are used with her outrageous smear of Garner. Not all snake metaphors have sinister meanings.

– The Dominion Post

I have 18 questions for Susan Devoy – the taxpayer funded Race Relations Commissioner.

She has criticised me for my weekend column on immigration saying I used racist language that only inflamed the debate.

So, this tweet below is from the NZ Human Rights Commission – that’s Devoy.

‘Yes, debate immigration & planning
But saying people who don’t look like us are a “nightmare” or a “human snake”?   Posted in General

Matthew Hooton thinks it is Winston’s turn to shine:

As detailed on the opposite page, Mr Peters has the Greens to thank for once again gifting him ultimate power to decide the next prime minister. If, to use Rob Hosking’s word, the Greens been less kindergartenish earlier this week, it could have been them not Mr Peters currently playing Jacinda Ardern and Bill English off against one another for policy wins.   

The Greens’ decision not to step forward has real consequences, ecologically and socially. Money which Ms Ardern or Mr English might otherwise have been forced to spend on cleaning rivers, battling climate change or feeding hungry children is now more likely to be invested in new indulgences for Baby Boomers.

Leader James Shaw is almost certainly right that he could never have won support for a National-Green coalition from 75% of his party’s mainly swivel-eyed activists. But what does it say about their integrity that they prefer to grant total power to Mr Peters rather than have Ms Shaw so much as send a text message to Mr English asking what might be on offer?

If, from a Green perspective, New Zealand becomes a more xenophobic, more racist and less tolerant place over the next three years, it will be the Greens’ own decisions this week to hand total power to Mr Peters that will be responsible.

Moreover, if Mr Peters’ experience is anything to go by, it could be 21 years before the Greens again have the opportunity to exercise the balance of power themselves.

The Green party is separated into three factions. MPs, activists/Members and voters. There is minimal overlap between those three groups.

Still, Mr Peters may surprise his critics and it is in his interests to do so.

When he reveals his choice for prime minister, the whole fury and might of the party spurned shall be turned on him. If he is to stand up to it, the deal he reaches with Mr English or Ms Ardern – even if it is to sit on the crossbenches – must be comprehensive, robust and based on a genuine commitment by both sides to make it work.

If, instead, the deal is loose, it will presage game playing by less loyal MPs across the parties, drift and decay, and ultimately the premature collapse of the government.

Assuming Mr Peters is serious about all he has said since first rising to prominence in the mid-1980s as a critic of the Lange-Douglas and then Bolger-Richardson reforms, his demand for more activist economic management must involve much more than a further extension of Steven Joyce and Simon Bridges’ MBIE circus and corrupt corporate welfare machine.

There are very good arguments, for example, for the Reserve Bank to focus solely on price stability and even better ones for it to operate completely independently of politicians. Mr Peters must prevail that it is also not unheard of internationally for central banks to have wider goals or to work in closer partnership with their political masters.

Similarly, much greater hurdles for immigrants and investors – even near insurmountable ones in the case of land – are hardly unusual internationally.

Mr Peters’ plan to reinstate a Forestry Service will be mocked as left wing but it is not radically different from a comprehensive proposal put by Graeme Hart to Sir John Key in 2009, facilitated by my firm, to plant one million hectares of marginal land with a mix of native and exotic forest. Both New Zealand’s net carbon emissions and unemployment rate would be lower had Sir John kept his word to Mr Hart to have his government seriously consider it rather than defer to Nick Smith’s hallucinations that emissions trading schemes were set to be adopted globally at that year’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Mr Peters’ Northport and Marsden Point rail plan, dubbed “Stalinist nonsense” by Road Transport Forum chief executive and former Act MP Ken Shirley, would delight many Aucklanders. But, more importantly for Mr Peters, it is key to unlocking the economic potential of the north.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions can be seen as overreach by globalisation advocates and, unlike the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures, an affront to sovereign governments, while Mr Peters is surely right to target the UK and other Commonwealth countries for trade deals in the context of Brexit.

A case can be made that after the divisive child discipline and marriage equality debates, a cup of tea on further social reform is in order. While Mr Peters would surely not want to unravel the settlement of historic Treaty of Waitangi claims, he is not wrong that the iwi elite is out of touch with the people it claims to represent and that so-called contemporary Treaty claims could do with a check.

If Mr Peters can finally bear himself to his duties and deliver, then – perhaps not in 1000 years but certainly 100 – historians will still say this was his finest hour.

Winston Peters has everything to gain and everything to lose right now.

If he takes down another third (fourth) term government his brand and legacy will become toxic.

However if he goes with National and offers up bold policy where the National party has none he could do very well.

Winston Peters leading Jacinda Ardern by the nose may be fun for the left wing for a couple of months, but runs the risk of Jacinda Ardern being PM in name only. While she will be having conversations Winston Peters will be a man of action.

Winston needs a legacy…he has to play sensibly.

I feel sorry for Clare Robinson today, she has gone against the left-wing shibboleths that the election was a vote for change and has said otherwise, that the election was for a vote for the status-quo:

Two extra seats felt like a win to many on the left. But Massey University’s Claire Robinson says that historical analysis of prior MMP results suggests this was far from a change election.

Saturday’s final election results were, contrary to how they were received by some, a real blow for Labour. They didn’t pick up the number of special votes they hoped for. They can’t govern alone with the Greens. More importantly, they can’t govern alone with New Zealand First, which Labour would have been holding out hope for. Labour and New Zealand First together have 55 seats. National and ACT have 57 seats.

No wonder Bill English was beaming in the images at his stand up after the announcement of the final result, and Jacinda Ardern was looking grim, flanked by her equally grim looking ‘henchmen’ (her description) Grant Robertson and Kelvin Davis.

National has to only negotiate with NZ First to form the next government. The process is uncomplicated.

Labour has to hold multiple negotiations. Although commentators are treating them as if they are one entity already, Labour and the Greens are not yet a coalition. Labour says it will first negotiate with the Green Party, then with NZ First, and then, presumably, at some stage all three parties will need to come together either physically or virtually to agree on a way forward. This is a complicated process.

Massive error there from Jacinda Ardern, by negotiations with the Green first she is telling Winston he is third cab off the rank.

Jacinda knows this. She must also know that her argument for still being at the negotiating table is baseless. She’s claiming she has the mandate for change on the grounds that “the majority of New Zealanders voted against the status quo”, and ‘the majority of New Zealanders voted for change”.

In reality there has not been one election since MMP was introduced in 1996 where the ‘winning’ major party got over 50% of the party vote (see table below), and with only 36.9% of the party vote, it’s difficult for Labour to argue that they have more of a ‘mandate’ to form the next government than National on 44.4% in 2017. Moreover, at 44.4%, National’s party vote is greater than Labour’s Party Vote in 1999, 2002 and 2005 — three elections where Labour was more than happy to overlook the fact they didn’t have a majority yet still claim they had the ‘mandate’ to lead the next government.

Pesky things called facts always unhinge lefties.

The final 2017 results show Labour attracted 351,649 more voters than in 2014, which is without question an amazing improvement. But this should not be read as a vote for change so much as a return to home base — the precursor to a genuine vote for change, which is expected to come at the next election.

Labour will have picked up votes from the Greens (who dropped by 94,916 votes), NZ First (who dropped by 21,594 votes), the Internet Mana party (who dropped 30,452). Until we see how votes moved in the NZ Election Study, we’d also have to add some Conservative votes. And Labour got a good proportion of the 175,417 new voters who didn’t vote in 2014.

But to be a vote for change Labour would have had to get more votes than National. In fact National got 20,574 more votes in 2017 than it did in 2014. This is not evidence of a widespread vote to change the major party leading the government. This was a vote for the status quo.

This is devastating for Labour. They don’t want to be in opposition another three years. And to be fair we have to see what transpires this week, before writing them out of being able to form a government. But my research over the past 21 years has shown that where there is a genuine mood for change it shows up in the public opinion polls 12-18 months out from the next election, when more respondents start preferring the major opposition party over the government. If Labour does find itself leading the opposition again after this week it needs to focus on getting to this point, and fast.

Poor Clare, she will excommunicated and howled at via Twitter….oh look mad old Darien Fenton is first out the gate.

A group of Māori and Pacific community leaders and service providers met in Panmure on Wednesday, 13th September, 2017. At this fono they agreed that something radical had to be done to overhaul our Justice system in Aotearoa. A system that incarcerates Māori at alarmingly higher rates compared to others. Over 60% of the prison population are Polynesians. Yet Māori only make up around 15% and Pacific 7% of the general population. He believes that the Justice system is broken and unfairly targets Māori and Pacific.

Manase believes he has a proven model that aligns with the social investment approach that could change the system. Manase says, “It’s very clear that neither National nor Labour know what they are doing in this area. They have no new ideas on how to solve it. Both think building more prisons and running more programmes in the prisons is the answer. This is not the answer.

The answer lies in tackling the issue along the entire continuum. That is from prevention through to rehabilitation, with a focus on restorative justice and via full community wrap-around services that are fully funded. This is the key to solving the issue. The Government spends around $120,000 on each of its more than 10,000 prisoners. That’s around $1.2 billion or more a year. Money that could be better spent to prevent criminal activity, address the drivers of crime (i.e. poverty) and overhaul an unjust and unfair Justice system.

During his time at the Ministry of Health leading the Pacific disability programme from 2002 to 2007, Manase was the architect of the Lu’i Ola interagency plan. A programme involving 12 different Government Agencies, DHBs and local government. The mechanics behind Lu’i Ola and particularly the Access Project in Mangere, helped to influence the development of the Whānau Ora programme. Manase believes a similar approach could be used together with One Pacific’s TaTupu approach and Whānau Ora to tackle this complex issue across the whole community.

I find the logic rather simple to follow. You tell people that if they do this, then they will end up in prison.  When they do this, you send them to prison.  That solves everything.

I’m OK with the idea of other people wanting to analyse how to stop people from doing this in the first place.  I’m also happy with people wanting to work on making sure they don’t do this again once out.

But what I can not abide is this idea that we don’t lock people up because “it’s not working”.  it’s working very well!  The more people that do this that are locked up, the better.

It’s not rocket surgery:  Just don’t do this.

End of discussion.    The rest of it are just troughers looking for money to snort out of the taxpayers’ pockets.  Not saying their intent is wrong, or their hearts are black and cynical, but allowing people to do this and not locking them up simply isn’t an answer.