As usual, another of Labour’s policies has been exposed as no more than a bumper sticker slogan.

Rodney Hide exposes the water tax scam even more:

Farmers are right to be worried about Labour’s plan to tax water.

The power to tax is the power to destroy and such a tax has the potential to tip a farm from profitability to bust.

Every farmer’s financial circumstance is different and even a modest tax could prove devastating for farmers just starting out, carrying big debt and not having factored in the prospect.

It’s of further concern that Labour leader Jacinda Ardern announced her water tax not at a farmer’s conference but at an Environmental Defence Society Conference.

She promised her Government would take the money from farmers to clean up the nation’s waterways. She no doubt figures there are more townies wanting clean waterways than farmers having to foot the bill. The vote/loss calculation will be in her favour.

Of even more concern is a complete lack of any detail of how much the tax will be, how it will be applied, and what Labour is expecting to raise.

It’s hard to imagine a party heading into election promising, say, to tax cars without declaring what the tax will be or how much is expected to be taken.

Labour always does this. They say, glibly, that they will form a working group to set the parameters. That isn’t good enough. They’ve had nine years in opposition to develop policy and important things like the mechanism for charging and how much they are going to charge are important.

The bare-bones announcement shows just how little farmers count in an election. They still drive the economy but matter little in politics.

But even a small tax should be worrying. All taxes start out small. The principle is established and then the tax is ramped up. Whenever government is a bit short, up goes the tax.

Taxes under Labour almost never go down. Instead they find new and innovative ways to tax as many people as possible. The water tax is just one of them. Wait until they hit us with a fat tax and a sugar tax as well. All their moaning about cost of living increases under National will pale into insignificance with cost of living increases as a result of their punitive and comprehensive tax regime.

It would be better to convert all existing water rights to perpetual rights and allow them to trade. That would get farmers onside – and it would price a valuable resource. It’d also keep environmentalists happy, if done right.

The only ones missing out would be politicians and bureaucrats who would not have the tax dollars to spend.

And there’s the issue: taxes are good for Wellington and bad for everyone else.

Especially with socialists in command of the tax levers.

Labour’s new strategy:  Get Jacinda to smile while the rest of them rob you poor with taxes.

Of course, Grant wants Jacinda to go down hard.  Then, and only then, will his rise to leader be assured.

The terrifying Mike Hosking

TVNZ is sticking to its guns over its decision to have Mike Hosking host election debates.

More than 40,000 people have signed an online petition asking the state-owned broadcast to remove Hosking as the host for its three election debates.

Hosking’s hosting role was also condemned on Thursday by New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, who called Hosking a ” “wholly unsuitable” choice.

For a moment I considered putting myself up as a replacement for Hosking.  If only to get more than 40,000 people signing a petition and to make Hosking look benign by comparison.

“We’re aware of the petitions. We accept that not everyone will agree with all our presenter choices,” communications manager Georgie Hills said.

“Our position remains unchanged, as communicated by John Gillespie yesterday.”

TVNZ head of current affairs John Gillespie said on Thursday the network was providing a range of perspectives across its election team.

He promised no politician would get an easy run during the debates.

If anything, Hosking is more likely to go harder on the right to assure there are no grounds for complaints that will be upheld.  Also, the left are ignoring the golden gift of having Hosking there.

He can be the rich, white, male bully that “never gave poor Jacinda a fair chance”.

Nobody does victimhood like the left.  And for that, you need a villain!

Labour were the ones who took out Metiria Turei, in a Red on Green hit job.

Now they are gloating about it. Witness Kelvin Davis:

Labour deputy leader Kelvin Davis says the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Greens is still on, despite the party’s descent into chaos.

James Shaw is the party’s sole leader following the departure of Metiria Turei, and one of the two MPs who quit on Monday wants back in now she’s gone.

Potential leadership contender Julie Anne Genter lost her cool when asked on Thursday afternoon if she’d be putting her hand up for Ms Turei’s job.

Appearing on The AM Show alongside Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett, Mr Davis said the turmoil hasn’t affected the MOU.

“That memorandum of understanding, all it means is that when Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister on the 24th of September, she picks up the phone and the first call goes to whoever’s left standing in the Greens – I assume James Shaw.”

Labour smashed the Greens, and now they are gloating about it.

Ms Bennett said it was a “horrible situation” for the party, but she wouldn’t “dance on [Ms Turei’s] grave”.

“She’s made her decision now, and I hope she can regroup with her family. I think enough’s been said, to be quite honest.”

Ms Bennett said it was no one’s fault but Ms Turei’s own for “opening that door” into her past.

“Once you do that, other people are involved and it gets really messy.”

She has repeatedly insisted during her own time spent on the benefit, she never misled Work and Income.

I’m not surprised she won’t dance on her grave, probably because of what is coming her way.

Mr Davis said Ms Turei’s resignation hasn’t damaged Labour. The latest Newshub-Reid Research poll showed Labour surging under new leader Jacinda Ardern, both NZ First and the Greens bleeding support.

“It’s better to be on 33 percent than 23 percent, but we know that we’ve got work to do still,” said Mr Davis.

Labour think they are going to go higher…we shall see.

Meanwhile, they are clearly demonstrating that a Labour government will have the Greens and we’ve now seen how well they play together.

The funny thing is Kelvin Davis has forgotten how he got elected, and let me tell you it wasn’t because of his dynamic personality. He’d have some explaining to do if it ever got out…and who was involved, especially since his party stills bangs on about Dirty Politics.

This look, yes this look, is the look of a smug, self confessed, fraudster

Karl du Fresne finds himself writing about Me Tu against his own will

I think most people are prepared to forgive politicians for things they did when they were a lot younger and prone to bad judgments. But I don’t think it was Turei’s admission of benefit fraud that turned people against her.

What repelled many people was the air of sanctimony that accompanied her confession, as if she had done something noble and virtuous.

People noted that she made this declaration a few weeks out from the election. She said she did it to start a conversation about welfare, but it looked like a calculated play for votes: a dog-whistle. Turei may have been hoping to tap into that same tranche of disenchanted young non-voters that came out behind Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States.

Without the help of Nicky Hager this election, the Greens needed a plan and they needed it quick.  Problem was, this time they couldn’t keep their hands clean in the process.

Sure enough, other facts began to emerge: first a wrong address on the electoral roll and then the rather inconvenient fact that the father of her child was listed as living at the same property – a bad look when she had claimed the DPB. It even turned out her mother had been one of her flatmates while she was defrauding Work and Income by not revealing income from other people in the house.

The cumulative effect was that Turei was soon looking less like a heroic crusader and more like someone who had sneakily gamed the system for her own benefit.

The public was entitled to wonder what else might be in her past. But more crucially, it was entitled to form a judgment about her character.

Then came what seemed a climactic meltdown, when two respected senior Green MPs decided they could no longer, in conscience, share the same party ticket with her.

That exposed a nasty side of the Greens that the public hadn’t previously glimpsed. The recriminations were vicious until co-leader James Shaw pulled back from a vow to expel the two.

Shaw said he changed his mind after getting some sleep. I suspect the truth is that he realised how bad it looked for the Greens – who want everyone to think of them as a kind, gentle party that eschews bitchy politics – to be indulging in vengeful Stalinist bloodletting.

But by then it was too late. The damage was done.

And now Turei herself has gone, amid a nauseating display of self-pity and self-justification. “I wish I hadn’t had to do this,” she whimpered to a sympathetic John Campbell.

Well, she started it, and she should suck it up.

There’s irony on a Shakespearean scale in the fact that just when the Greens had high hopes of finally getting their feet under the cabinet table, the party has been brought crashing down by one woman’s hubris.

The odd thing is that all of us expected the Greens to throw Metiria under the bus.  Whaleoil’s Rules of Politics:  NEVER hug a (political) corpse.

It is this stupendous lack of political judgement that could see the Greens go from being seriously in the running at finally being able to co-govern to now having to fight to survive as a party.

And as Karl points out:  all because of one woman’s hubris.

Idiots.  The lot of them.

Labour’s water tax is just an announcement that they will have one.   But there are no details at all.   Nature abhors a vacuum, so Winston steps in thus

New Zealand First says it has information proving how hard working Kiwi families will be seriously affected by Labour’s proposed tax on ‘commercial water use’.

“Labour has simply not done its homework on the issue of water,” says the Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First and Member of Parliament for Northland.

“This policy is so badly conceived that it is like a speed camera on healthy food. One large vegetable grower has estimated that a one cent tax per litre of water adds up to a 300% increase in supermarket prices.

“Potatoes could go from just under $3 a kilogram to just under $9, meanwhile, the price of a single cabbage could soar from just under $6, to just under $18.

“The grower is questioning who Labour thinks will foot the bill because from his perspective, it will mean a $25m annual tax bill. That’s just one producer of vegetables let alone what it means for the price of milk and bread, showing how this is seriously playing with fire.

“This has got to be a policy mistake.

“Those least able to afford higher food prices like people on the breadline will be badly stung. The working families of New Zealand are already hard up against it without this kind of tax being loaded onto them,” says Mr Peters.

Those of you who are up to date with my podcasts will know about Cunningham’s Law.  It’s a technique where you deliberately make a mistake because other people will jump out and correct you.

Labour fell into the trap when David Parker responded with

Clean rivers don’t cost ‘$18 a cabbage’ – Parker

Absolutely awesome.  The $18 cabbage now gets another round.   And of course it’s not about $18 cabbages, but the fact that Labour want you to vote for them because they will make some kind of “fair” tax.  If you trust them.

“We will work with water bottlers, farmers, NGOs, Maori and the Treasury to establish a fair clean water royalty. It will be fair and proportionate, allowing for differences between regions, quality, and uses.

Something falls from the sky and the grass grows.  The cows eat it, but the Labour party want to charge a tax on the water falling from the sky.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.   The safest way to stop Labour adding another stone is to stop Labour from introducing a brand new tax.

Labour always seems to do this. They launch a policy with no substance, no detail and finances wrapped around it.

People then set about filling in the substantial gaps. Typically their plan is destroyed within days and this is what is happening with their anti-rural water tax proposal.

After their biggest mistake, of gifting large wads of cash to Maori, the next is the lack of substance.

Neville Gibson at NBR explains:

The introduction of commercial charges for water offers a solution to a problem that largely doesn’t exist.

Labour is making it an election promise in response to lobbying that has identified “foreigners” making “profits” for a national resource that is sent overseas in plastic bottles.

The problem is that this resource – unlike, say, natural gas or fossil fuels – is continually produced at no cost to anyone. Like sunlight, it is also abundant and unlikely to disappear.

Both are essential to life and, in some circumstances, can be converted into electricity.

While these resources are free to everyone, there is a cost to how they are used.

The other day about $3000 of water dumped onto my house, and straight into the stormwater system, where I had to pay the council to take it away, in pipes I’ve already paid for. Labour launched their tax on water policy the very same day.

Labour’s policy will complicate the existing management of water, and certainly add new layers of costs. The arrogance is that the policy is mainly about fulfilling an emotional need.

The lack of detail is telling and so is the policy’s discriminatory nature – Labour is targeting only certain users, such as bottlers and farmers who depend on irrigation. But this logically includes virtually all food and drink producers.

It also raises the question of ownership where none exists at the moment.

Raising costs on food production, like their fuel tax idea, will simply be passed on to consumers and will hit the poor more than anyone else. At the same time Labour are campaigning on lowering cost of living expenses. The disconnect is incredible.

Jacinda Ardern has never had a real job, never employed anyone, never made wages and paid PAYE while going without and she mostly certainly hasn’t had to scrabble for the last cent to meet the power bill. She has no idea about business, costs and the costs of production, and neither do any of her other fellow travellers.

They simply see a bunch of rich pricks and line them up like Labour always does. This time however they are using townies to do the pitchforks and cross-burnings. This is yet another envy tax.

They might save the rivers..but since when has a tax ever saved anything…but they will simply lumber even more costs onto the poor.

Sure there are some water shortages in some geographic areas, but by and large water is everywhere in this country. A farmer with a crop or stock needing water will pay anything, sure, but they will pass on those costs. The alternative is to let the crop or stock die…then we enter Venezuela type food supply issues.

Labour never think these things through, then again why would they, their leader loves Venezuela and has made plenty of speeches waxing lyrical about the fantastic socialist paradise it supposedly is.

Photo Ross Giblin via Dominion Post

Like every other hack in the country Soper has taken the cudgels to Metiria Turei. In an online Herald editorial entitled ‘Now you can understand why Helen Clark never embraced the Greens’, he clinically dissects the former Green Co-Leader’s revelation of her criminal past and her subsequent behaviour.

Like most of the recent comment from the Fourth Estate on this topic it’s self-righteous and unkind.

Two photographs of Turei accompany the text. In one she looks relatively cheerful; in the other utterly despairing. I can’t say who chose the two pics, but they seem designed to illustrate the story of Turei’s downfall.

In a broadcasting career spanning more than half a century I have never called myself a journalist. In the first place I have no journalistic qualifications. In the second I’m a bit too sentimental, too easily moved.

So my reaction to Soper’s piece, no tougher than many of the editorials and comments about Turei written by his colleagues, is to ask: isn’t enough enough? We’ve got the message: Metiria Turei did a bad thing. Move on for god’s sake!

Had she quit politics, that would be a reasonable request.  But we all know she’s stepped down as co-leader.  She will still run for the Greens in the election, and you can bet dollars to a knob of goat poo that she expects to be back in parliament after the election as a co-leader with a “new mandate”.

MMP being what it is, there is nothing we can do about it.

Unless the Greens fail to get to the 5% mark.

And that would be mercy heaven-sent for all involved.  Even for Brian, as he will no longer need to contemplate grumpy old white men beating up on little brown girls whose only crime was to have the brilliant forward planning to rip off the taxpayer and her family twenty years in advance so she could use it as an object lesson for the betterment of all starving babies in New Zealand.  Perhaps we just need twenty years to realise it.