Melissa Lee has got her scalp. Clare Curran, The Minister of uhms and ahhs has…ahhh…uhmm…resign. The NZ Herald reports: Quote:
Under-fire Clare Curran has quit as a minister.
She becomes the first casualty of the coalition government.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a radio interview with Newstalk ZB recorded at 8am this morning that Curran’s job was safe.
But it has now emerged the errant minister told Ardern last night that she would quit – and Ardern accepted her resignation.
“Clare Curran contacted me last night to confirm her wish to resign as a minister and I accepted that resignation,” Ardern said today.
“Clare has come to the view the issues currently surrounding her are causing an unacceptable distraction for the Government and immense pressure on her personally.
“I agree with her assessment that resigning is the best course of action for the Government and for her.”
Ardern is going to have plenty of questions to answer given her stupid comments this morning. She’s now confirmed that Curran offered to resigned last night so what promoted this fool of a prime minister to make that statement this morning.
The PM endorsed her this morning and now she’s gone? What happened?
Jacinda Ardern is showing a distinct and profound lack of judgment.
Who would ever have thought that Melissa Lee would claim the first scalp.
Mike Hosking doesn’t believe a word Phil Twyford or the government says on Kiwbuild: Quote:
The Government has pledged to build 100,000 homes over a decade, which averages out at 10,000 per year.
The KiwiBuild plan includes 1000 homes in the first year.
So far we’re only at 18, quite a few short of that promised 1000.
But what no-one is pointing out here, and it needs to be because this is the Government’s biggest noise and they’ve promised to fix the housing market with this piece of snake oil, is that the 982 that are missing out of year one go into year two.
Which then means into election year they’ll likely be hundreds short – and they’ll be busy promising more smoke and mirrors if only you re-elect them.
It is possible they’ll have another 12 ready by Christmas, but even at 30 in one year it’s a pretty pathetic start to what is supposed to be one of the biggest infrastructure programmes this country has ever seen. End quote.
It is worse than that. Every single one of these so-called Kiwibuild houses, were started or consented under a National government. Furthermore, and this is something media seem rather lax on, Labour promised 100,000 extra houses over and above that which the private sector was already producing. All Kiwibuild homes claimed by Twyford thus far have not been extra houses. It is a fraud, a sham, a lie even that these are extra houses. Quote:
These homes, 12 at $579,000 and six at $649,000, are at the upper end of the so-called affordable range the Government has invented.
We all know, of course, given we have seen the numbers, they’re not affordable and a very small percentage of people who are new to the market have the deposit or the income to actually afford them.
But if the developer is not breaking even you know what happens next. Either he’s not back for more, or the price of the so-called affordable house is going up. And it’s already gone up $50,000 in the time it took to announce the policy and actually produce the first houses.
And if he’s not back that’s a supply issue, in an industry we are already critically short in.
And if he is back but the cost rises, and let’s be honest we all know the cost is rising, because we have seen those numbers too. End quote.
It is a fraud on the electorate…and we are paying for it. Quote:
Labour costs are up because this Government is handing out pay rises left, right, and centre. And building costs rise because the market on product is broken, if not stacked.
So 18 homes in … just 99,982 to go over the next decade.
And already we have signs of what a house of cards this whole thing really is. End quote.
Golriz Ghahraman is the best example of why MMP has been a complete failure for New Zealand as a system. She is the poster girl for list MPs on massive salaries who would not be taken seriously in the real world. In the real world, she would have been fired at least twice already for her lack of honesty. In the real world, she would not have been able to afford a QC to intimidate an Australian Immigration lawyer into removing his article and messages on social media that challenge her ‘refugee’ backstory.
In the real world, she would not be invited by mainstream media to write opinion pieces. In the real world no one would pay the slightest bit of attention to her ridiculous claim on One news that the free speech of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux is a threat to the safety of New Zealanders and Chelsea Manning (who spilled state secrets and put the lives of undercover people’s lives at risk) in contrast is perfectly fine and is a hero whistleblower.
[…] the question when deciding whether to approve Ms Manning’s visa isn’t her criminal history, Ms Ghahraman told TVNZ1’s Breakfast today. It is whether she would pose a threat to New Zealand, she said.
[…]But Ms Ghahraman hasn’t been an advocateto opening our borders to all speakers.
Recently, she was among the prominent voices calling for far-right Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to be denied entry. Those two didn’t have felony convictions, Breakfast host Jack Tame pointed out.
“I suppose some people would look at it and say you’re happy for the rules to be relaxed for a message that you want to hear, but you want different rules to apply in another circumstance for a message you don’t want to hear,” Mr Tame said.
But the situations are starkly different when weighing the risk to New Zealand, Ms Ghahraman responded.
“We have a right to protect ourselves against hate speech, which is defined in New Zealand law,” she said.[…] end quote.
Hate speech is NOT defined in New Zealand law at all. Does this woman never get tired of making stuff up? We have legal speech and illegal speech and that is all. There is no legal definition of hate speech anywhere in New Zealand law.
Out of all the politicians in the Beehive Golriz is the one that pushes all of my buttons. She simply should not be there. Having someone of such a low calibre sucking on the public tit offends me on every level. To paraphrase Blackadder…
Her brain is so minute that if a hungry cannibal cracked her head open, there wouldn’t be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
She is wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume.
Most of New Zealand thinks she’s a prat. Ask them who they’d rather meet, Green party list MP Golriz Ghahraman or the man who cleans out the public toilets in Aberdeen, and they’d go for Wee Jock Poo-Pong McPlop every time.
There hasn’t been a person doing this badly since Olaf the hairy, King of all the Vikings, ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside.
Golriz wouldn’t recognise a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on a harpsicord singing “subtle plans are here again”
In the Amazonian rain forests there are tribes of Indians as yet untouched by civilisation who have developed more convincing MP impressions than Golly G’s
The Government allowed Housing New Zealand to borrow billions of dollars to build new state houses despite advice from Treasury that such debt would be expensive and risky.
In May, the Government announced it would be building 6400 new state homes over four years.
The funding for this came principally from $2.9b Housing New Zealand was allowed to borrow independently, instead of through regular Government borrowing.Just $234m of new money was allocated to the crown agency.
Documents released by Treasury on Thursday reveal the agency repeatedly warned the Government against allowing HNZ to borrow money this way in the lead-up to the Budget, suggesting instead that the money should come out of normal Crown debt.
This money would have likely come with cheaper interest rates but would vastly increase the amount of core crown debt. That would likely stop the Government achieve its key Budget Responsibility Rules target of getting core crown debt below 20 per cent of G.D.P. in five years.
The advice echoed similar words given by Treasury when the National-led Government decided to allow Housing New Zealand to borrow over $1b in the last Budget.
In a February briefing, Treasury analysts wrote that borrowing directly through the crown would save $11 million per year. This was based on a plan to borrow $1.75b instead of $2.9b. A later analysis estimated an additional $3m-$6m in annual interest costs for every $1b borrowed by Housing New Zealand.
Treasury analysts said letting independent agencies borrow money of their own accord made sense with properly independent state-owned enterprises like Solid Energy, but not bodies that delivered “essential services” and would obviously be bailed out by the Government if something went wrong like Housing New Zealand.
“This is because failure to deliver these services will be unacceptable to the public and Ministers (and rightly so), meaning that further public funding will be made available to continue service provision should it become necessary,” the analysts wrote in a February paper.
In essence, overseas credit rating agencies would not see this debt as separate from Crown debt given the agency delivered such a core service, and thus would just factor it into their decisions about New Zealand anyway.
Because of this it risked the credibility of the Government’s Budget Responsibility Rules – as it was essentially a loophole through them.
“Decentralised borrowing could undermine the fiscal management approach, weakening fiscal control, the ability to manage total levels of debt to prudent levels, the prioritisation process that the Budget applies to spending proposals and the credibility of the fiscal strategy,” the analysts wrote. […] End of quote.
There’s nothing like a good bit of creative accounting when those pesky pre-election slogans come home to roost. Watch carefully now, which thimble is the pea under …?
Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says his Ngāpuhi iwi is probably the most incarcerated tribe in the world and he has a goal to change that.
Tonight, the government’s criminal justice summit kicks off at Parliament, before running for two days in Porirua, north of Wellington.
It will bring together all interested parties across justice, Corrections and police to talk about the government’s plan for reform in the system, and how best to achieve it.
“Of that 50 percent, half again, are from Ngāpuhi, my own tribe, so this is personal.
“My tribe of Ngāpuhi is probably the most incarcerated tribe in the world, per head of population, so we really have to look at what we’re going to do differently as a country, to turn these figures around.”
Mr Davis said Māori must be included in the conversation, and is pleased half of the justice advisory group, set up by the Justice Minister Andrew Little and headed by the former National MP Chester Burrows, are Māori.
“If Māori make up more than 50 percent of the prison population, we should actually be talking to Māori about what the solutions are too.”
One of the big issues is institutional racism, and Mr Davis said he had been impressed with Police Commissioner Mike Bush’s actions, in particular, in acknowledging unconscious bias in the police force.
“The question then becomes, ‘so, what do we do about it?’
“Because if it’s not unconscious bias, well then it’s conscious bias and we’ve got to make changes to make sure that Māori aren’t particularly picked on, or seen as the ones that are committing all the crime.” End quote.
How do we do it? If Ngapuhi don’t want to keep getting locked up them perhaps they should stop committing crimes. It is quite simply really, but obviously beyond the feeble mind of Kelvin Davis.
At June 2015 only half of Maori inmates expressed an affiliation.
Of these 24% are Ngapuhi.
At the 1999 prison census Ngapuhi made up 17% of sentenced prisoners and 20% of rendered prisoners. So the percentage is rising.But not fast enough to be at half in 2018.
There may be many more prisoners who express an affiliation with Ngapuhi but not as their primary. Also many who have an affiliation but clearly aren’t expressing it.
But what does Mr Davis know that the rest of us don’t? End quote.
Maybe Davis means 50% of 50%, or he’s just dumb?
In any case the government is looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope. The answer isn’t to stop sending Maori to prison, the answer is to get Maori to stop committing crime. Same as the solution to bashed children. Good luck trying to stop Maori bashing kids and stop committing crime with this soft on crime government.
At some point responsibility has to be sheeted home to iwi.
Let’s count up the benefits of the coalition shall we?
It is now nearly 12 months since the election and we are seeing the benefits of the Coalition of Losers starting to come through.
What you say! What benefits?
Well… I believe that what we are seeing is of benefit to us. Yes it is going to involve some pain, and yes it may cost some of us our livelihoods – however in the longer term, the prospective for democracy in New Zealand has a rosy tint to it that I haven’t seen in a very long time.
I admit it. After the election, I was very grumpy with Cam and believe his tacit endorsement of Winston (he will NEVER go with the Greens!) may well have swung the election to the CoL. I saw that as a bad thing.
With the dint of hindsight, I can now look at the last election as the necessary pain that an adolescent (our green tinged millennial electorate) must go through in those awkward learning years. If the Nats had won, the pain from 2020 onwards would be deep and the patient (our system of democracy) may not have survived.
Now at least we have a chance. Our economy will crash and it will happen sooner rather than later. The signs are there for all to see and the seeds of the crash were planted well before the CoL took office. Unsustainable immigration, unaffordable welfare and a decreasing tax take are but some of the issues that we face. Perception in markets is everything and once confidence is dented (as it is now) a recession is all but inevitable. On top of our own fragile condition, any sneeze in the World’s economy will send us into free-fall.
Why is this a good thing? Well to quote a famous meme “Socialism is a great ideal – until you run out of other peoples money” (and another) “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” The CoL (and lets be honest, the last Nat government!) are driving the country towards socialism – ignoring all the history behind that utterly failed experiment. A nephew living in London who lived through the 87 crash and the 90’s pain commented that his younger sister (now in her early 40’s) had never experienced “going without” and had not lived through a recession. Unfortunately for her and her fellow travellers, that is about to change! They won’t like the medicine but it may cure the disease!
I am awed by Cam’s prescience in understanding the need for the CoL to win to ensure that the coming bloodbath would happen. As a famous man once wrote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” Blood must be spilled for New Zealand to become “well” again, with a purge of both major parties and the utter decimation of the Green blob and Winstonfirst.
Unfortunately, we must all suffer some pain before this can happen which reflects another truism: there is no gain without the pain!
Steven Joyce is going to be proved right. There is a fiscal hole and a softening economy is making it wider.
I don’t like the term fiscal hole. Good policy should dominate over strict debt targets and economic cycles come and go which are often beyond government control.
But the Labour-led Government’s fiscal hole is looking deeper by the day – and bigger than the $11.7 billion of additional borrowing that Joyce identified.
Growth is weaker, the Government is already borrowing creatively to the tune of $6.4 billion via Crown entities (keeping it out of core government net debt metrics) and spending demands are headed one way.
That combination will pressure its fiscal position.
The good news is that the 2018 Budget showed the books are in great shape to absorb such challenges.
Fiscal surpluses are projected for the next five years. Net debt is around 20 per cent of GDP and low by world standards. We’re in good shape.
Now is the time to just let the so-called fiscal stabilisers (the cyclical economic component of the budget projections) run their course.
If that means missing debt targets, then so be it.
The Reserve Bank is not rigid on a 2 per cent inflation target and neither should the Government be straightjacketed by an arbitrary level of debt. Some are calling for more spending on infrastructure to stimulate the economy, and abandoning debt targets altogether.
That, however, is a step to far.
Turning the dial on fiscal policy also takes time.
Borrowing to try and build more stuff against a backdrop of capacity, credit and cost issues in the construction sector won’t do much anyway.
I’d favour more attention to detail when it comes to this country’s economic plan. The 2018 Budget stretched the definition of an “economic development initiative”. Those initiatives, or the lack of them, was a glaring hole.
Conversely, the combination of a weaker economy and rigid adherence to the 20 per cent debt target and budget rules will require a revising of the Government’s social spending agenda.
The composition of spending should always be looked at but cutting spending to hit arbitrary debt metrics in response to weakening growth would be a policy mistake.
This is not the time to over-react.
I’m not saying that fiscal responsibility goes out the door. Far from it. It’s about getting the right mix and balance between fiscal responsibility and delivering on social and economic imperatives.
Before the election there was broad agreement from economists, myself included, that there was no fiscal hole in the Labour’s fiscal plan.
The lack of money left in the kitty post the 2018-Budget raised issues of credibility, but the fiscal parameters were technically achievable.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was possible, so the Government was given the benefit of the doubt.
But the picture is changing and the Government’s ambitions are looking more and more like pipe dreams.
So, what has changed?
Budget spending and investment demands needed funding, whilst at the same time sticking to the narrative of hitting debt objectives and being fiscally responsible.
The result was crown entities borrowing an additional $6.4 billion between 2017 and 2022.
That is an accounting fudge to get it out of the core Government debt figures.
Public sector pay and spending demands are only heading one way.
Few bemoan the need to pay teachers and nurses more but that money needs to come from somewhere.
The realities of a coalition Government meant more needed to be spent. Spending allocations in the 2019 and subsequent Budgets were increased by $525 million to $2.4b per year.
That looked fine against a backdrop of solid projections for growth. But it was a risky strategy with the economy late cycle as opposed to early cycle.
The economy is not tracking as expected. The Treasury is projecting 3 per cent plus growth. Something closer to half of that is on offer.
We won’t get that growth back. Each 1 per cent change in growth is worth around $800m in revenue.
And with it goes more than $1b per year in tax.
Over four years you lose more than $4b. A second year of the same sort of growth would really hurt.
The Treasury and Government are under-estimating the transitional cost of changing New Zealand’s economic model. As some sectors contribute less to growth than we’ve seen in the past, other sectors will need to step up. That will take time.
We’ve been too reliant on debt fuelled growth for too long.
The economic theory and Government projections say there is growth on the horizon from expansionary fiscal policy, strong commodity prices, increases in wages, a lower New Zealand dollar and continued, albeit, moderating strength in migration.
Few bemoan the need to pay teachers and nurses more but that money needs to come from somewhere, writes Cameron Bagrie. Photo / NZME
You can throw economic theory out the door when you have uncertainty and are changing the structure of your economy, which is what we have now.
Businesses are in a holding pattern. A danger at present though is that businesses talk the economy into a funk and weak confidence becomes self-fulfilling.
The Government is correctly pointing out that the New Zealand economy is in reasonable shape.
Inflation is low, housing excesses are being curbed and credit bingeing has been reined in. That lessens the risk of a major correction.
Odds are rising something untoward will hit from offshore though. Trade war fears are real.
We shouldn’t be perturbed with some fiscal slippage. The debt targets will be missed. We can handle it.
A lot depends on the New Zealand economy’s transition getting traction and growth rebounding though. If it doesn’t, the slippage will become a deep hole.
When a government attacks a personal belief that we consider to be a fundamental part of our existence, and removes our freedom of choice or worse, we can feel that they are personally attacking us. They are not. They are simply pursuing their own social agenda and we happened to get in the way. Credit for this thought belongs to Dinesh D’Souza in his book Death of a Nation.
D’Souza points out that Abraham Lincoln predicted the future in his Lyceum address of the great American nation when he said quote
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” End of quote.
Lincoln said the threat to American freedom would come from their very own people. Likewise in New Zealand, we might identify the threat of a culture alien to our own, such as Islam, but fail to recognize the more familiar but equally dangerous threat springing up amongst us.
Donald Trump was voted in to step into the breach precisely to arrest the loss of individual freedom and rights encapsulated in the American constitution.
Americans didn’t need to be told they had lost their freedom, they knew it from Obama’s tanking economy and the businesses that had closed effecting loss of income and homes, unemployment, rising debt and lowering social values. The country’s defence force was severely weakened and the United States international profile suffered in the wake of the Iran agreement and other very poor international decisions including ignoring illegal migration which contributed to a rising crime rate.
Americans gathered around the one person promising to restore individual rights. “America first” was the battle cry that drew the grassroots vote, while the movement threatening to destroy America used the media, Hollywood and large chunks of academia in their attempts to bring Trump down.
They failed in America and they will fail here, provided sufficient numbers of us wake up in time to stop them and we can elect leaders who recognise and will address the issues around loss of freedom.
We were shaken awake when we realised our freedom of speech had just gone up in a puff of smoke when Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneaux were prevented from speaking in Auckland. Quote.
When you are told to close your mouth because you are spouting “hate speech”, you certainly recognise that you have indeed lost your freedom to speak. The nebulous term “hate speech” was used by the media and the ignorant to shut down Southern and Molyneaux and is preventing intelligent discussion particularly on biculturalism, multiculturalism, indigenous rights and immigration.
Surely if hate was on Southern and Molyneaux’s agendas it would be evidenced by violence in their previous public appearances? There is none that I can find. The only violence that might have occurred in Auckland, had these two spoken, could possibly come from agitated protestors. But Southern explained that she welcomed the opportunity to peacefully speak with protestors, as she has done many times in the past. Quote.
If any of us want to discuss sensitive subjects with those who are affected, surely we are free to do so?
Hateful actions are not tolerated and all of us are subject to laws that protect and prevent us from using physical violence.
“Hate speech” as it is currently used often includes the word racism even where there is no mention of race at all. So let me define hate speech as I see it: “hate speech” is used by the real haters to prevent a discussion they don’t want to have, it is simply a ploy to avoid a conversation.
So now that we know they have stolen our freedom of speech by using the term “hate speech” what else are they doing?
They have taken, and are continuing to take away our individual choices and replacing them with “collective choice”. In other words, they make decisions that we are told are for the collective good, sometimes despite evidence to the contrary. An example of this is the closure of Charter schools where the authorities argue that children attending charter schools are disadvantaged. This argument flies in the face of parental and educational evidence. No matter, the Minister of Education is in charge and the collective, or communist, argument applies.
The battlefield of education is a vital one to win because the indoctrinating of our children’s minds will heavily influence their future. We are particularly vulnerable through our children which is why it is so important that parents notice what their children are learning outside the home.
Our kids have already been trained to enforce political correctness.
If this notion had been planted in the child’s head by that child’s teacher, the teacher would be on thin ice with parents who don’t want their girls aspiring to be road workers. And what about the children from families who believe a woman’s place is solely in the home, not working outside of it at all? In the interest of fairness, is the teacher also going to espouse that limited point of view?
The real question though, is why do this government and its teachers have the right to decide on the values our children are taught? Surely that is up to the parents, even when we disagree with them. This is called freedom and we have already lost far too much of it.
In the words of Ronald Regan “It is not that they are ignorant, it is just that they know so much about what isn’t so”.
/arc-anglerfish-syd-prod-nzme.s3.amazonaws.com/public/BMBKD64CURBQHKX7MCCNXYMT6E.jpg)
Few bemoan the need to pay teachers and nurses more but that money needs to come from somewhere, writes Cameron Bagrie. Photo / NZME
