Utopia, you are standing in it!

The new Three Waters amendment bill is intended to increase the number of water services entities to ten and introduce a Funding Agency but only makes a bad policy worse.

• Thomas Cranmer writes –

 The Three Waters legislation was back before Parliament this week in the form of an amendment bill which is intended to implement changes to the reforms announced by Prime Minister Hipkins and Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty in April.

Those changes came about as a result of the new Prime Minister’s “policy refresh” which asked McAnulty to consider options for reform of the Three Waters proposal, including timing and sequencing, the number of entities and boundaries and alternative approaches for Māori representation and involvement.

The relevant Cabinet Paper from February suggested that alternative approaches for Māori representation could include replicating in the Regional Representative Groups the structure proposed for the Regional Planning Committees in the…

Stardate: 41235.25
Original Air Date: October 12, 1987
Writers: Katharyn Powers & Michael Baron
Director: Russ Mayberry

“Yours is a different world.”

The Enterprise has arrived at Ligon II, a planet which is the source of a rare vaccine needed elsewhere on a Federation planet called Styris IV, currently suffering from an outbreak of the plague. Starfleet has instructed Picard to make a friendly visit to Ligon II in the hopes of entering into treaty negotiations in order to acquire the needed “medicinal substance.”

When the Enterprise enters standard orbit, a Ligonian party beams aboard the ship using its own technology. They offer Picard a small sample of the material needed for the vaccine. Here, the episode begins to go off the rails –while the Ligonians reside in a highly structured society similar to an ancient society on earth, they are also extremely proud, almost to the point…

Auckland surgeons have been told to prioritise Māori and Pacific Island patients:

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients – on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand has introduced an Equity Adjustor Score, which aims to reduce inequity in the system by using an algorithm to prioritise patients according to clinical priority, time spent on the waitlist, geographic location (isolated areas)…

Cinephiles congregate around the films of Stanley Kubrick the way history buffs are drawn to Alexander, Hitler and Napoleon. They were all-powerful control freaks who set out to remake the world in an image they saw in their own minds, and gained the power to attempt it.

So it was with Kubrick, a chess fanatic who came along too late to have grown up with the world-building games that connect new generations of Kubrick fans to his films and his career. He is admired by fans at least partly because of his dictatorial powers over the worlds he created in his films.

He was an Orson Welles who won absolute power over his career and his movies, a Spielberg with more grandiose visions and ambitions.

“Paths of Glory” was a brisk and biting World War I anti-war film, a politicized combat movie that reset the standard for trench warfare movies…

The big fiscal debate in the United States is whether the United States should become a European-style welfare state, which is something that automatically will happen over the next few decades in the absence of genuine entitlement reform.

Some people even want to accelerate this process.

My response is usually to ask why the United States should copy Europe when there is a wealth of evidence that living standards are substantially lower on that side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Not only are living standards lower, but there is also lots of evidence that Europe is suffering from anemic growth.

Which means the gap in living standards is getting wider every year.

At the risk of understatement, copying European fiscal policy seems like a big mistake.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s some more evidence. In his column for the U.K.-based Financial Times, Gideon Rachman compares the…

• Thomas Cranmer writes –  

They say a new broom sweeps clean, and that is certainly the case with the premiership of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. However, even he couldn’t have anticipated the rapid exodus of ministers under his premiership. The fallout has left reputations tarnished, with survivors like Kiri Allan grappling after a series of missteps. Meanwhile, Jan Tinetti’s fate hangs in the balance as the Privileges Committee investigates allegations of misleading the House regarding her office’s role in the release of school truancy data.

What has prompted this state of affairs and what does it mean for the next government?

Undoubtedly many of these mini-scandals can be traced back to former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her more relaxed and permissive approach to managing her ministers. During 2022 it was apparent that problems were beginning to mount.

By her own admission, much of the Prime Minister’s time during the…

There’s nothing even vaguely ‘clean’ or ‘green’ about wind power. An industry built on lies and running on subsidies can’t produce power as and when we need it, but is a master at producing environmental havoc at a global scale.

The wind and sun cult happily ignores the thousands of wind turbine blades and millions solar panels already being dumped in landfills. Apparently, their mountainous toxic waste legacy will be something for future generations to deal with.

Likewise, little notice is given to the millions of bird and bat carcasses diced and shredded by 40-70m blades with their outer tips travelling at over 350 km/h.

And the hundreds of dolphins and porpoises, and dozens of whales washing up along the Atlantic coast – victims of America’s offshore wind industry – don’t signify, either. Of course, the US government has given the wind industry a license to kill as many marine…

• Bryce Edwards writes –

Michael Wood has become a victim of his own complacency about conflicts of interest. He simply didn’t take integrity rules meant to protect the New Zealand political system from corruption seriously. And that’s rightly led to his downfall.

Wood’s complacency about corruption-prevention is hardly unique. The whole country has generally been far too relaxed about conflicts of interest in politics and public life.

And why wouldn’t we be? After all, we are told consistently that New Zealand is the least corrupt country on earth. Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index always ranks us at or near #1.

Complacency about corruption

The problem is we’ve become conditioned to believe the hype, and not to trouble ourselves with the idea that conflicts of interest occur in our politics. The upshot is that New Zealand simply doesn’t have much in the way of significant safeguards against political corruption.

Edward III (November 13, 1312 – June 21, 1377), also known as Edward of Windsor before his accession, and was King of England and Lord of Ireland from January 1327 until his death in 1377.

Family

Edward III was the son of King Edward II of England, Lord of Ireland and his wife Princess Isabella of France. Her parents were King Philippe IV of France and Queen Joan I of Navarre,daughter of King Henri I of Navarre and Blanche of Artois.

Princess Blanche of Artois was the elder child and only daughter of Robert I, Count of Artois, and Matilda of Brabant. A fraternal niece of King Louis IX of France, Blanche was probably born in 1248. Blanche’s father,

Robert I (25 September 1216 – 8 February 1250), called the Good, was the first Count of Artois. He was the fifth (and second surviving) son of King Louis VIII of…

On Monday the Reserve Bank Board put out a release indicating that it was opening applications to fill two external MPC vacancies (which will arise next year when the second and final terms of Peter Harris and Caroline Saunders expire). By law, the Minister of Finance can appoint to the MPC only people the Board has recommended (the Minister can reject nominees, but cannot simply impose his/her own people). There are all sorts of problems with this process and with the people involved in it, but that is for another day and another post.

When I opened Monday’s emailed release, my eye lit immediately on this

This appeared to be quite a change from the stance adopted by the Board (which includes the Governor) and the Minister of Finance since the MPC was set up under which (to quote from a January 2019 Treasury report to the Minister released to…

Point of Order was alerted by Kiwiblog’s David Farrar to the shape of local government which is being recommended in its final report by Labour’s hand-picked panel.

Farrar particularly noted the proposal from this government-appointed body to dismiss the principle of equality of suffrage.

His article drew attention to these proposals:

• Taxpayers to hand over $1 billion a year to fund local councils, on top of rates
• Lower voting age to 16
• Make STV compulsory for all Councils
• Allow Councils to charge congestion charges, bed taxes, visitor levies and value-added taxes
• Rejects equality of suffrage as a western-style ideal (in fact it is a universal human right)
• Allow every Council to have direct Iwi/Hapu appointed members with equal voting rights to elected councillors
• Go from three to four year term

Farrar commented:

The Western Schism

While, by now, the papacy had officially relocated from the banks of the Rhone to the banks of the Tiber, St. Peter’s vast riches, library, and archives still mostly remained in Avignon. Throughout the latter months of Pope Gregory XI’s rule, the papacy spent large sums of money transporting its own treasures to Rome –a task which required scores of dutiful scribes and accountants. Despite being only forty-eight, and having been appointed pope in 1370, Pope Gregory was not long for this life and he realized that a house divided could not stand. With what little time he had left, he sought to re-orient the Sacred College away from its French branch and toward a decidedly more Italian pontiff. When Gregory died on March 27, 1378, the people of Rome could be heard shouting, “Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!” (or “we demand a Roman or at…