It was easy news, if not exactly news based on fact. It all began on Saturday, when Australia’s Prime Minister went to see the Sydney Swans play, and posted on social media a photo of himself cuddling his baby granddaughter, planting a kiss atop her sweet head.

In his non-baby-cuddling hand, Malcolm Turnbull held a beer in a plastic cup. …

One Facebook commenter, it was reported, asked “When was drinking while holding a child OK?”

Another, displaying contempt not just for the Australian PM but also for the proper use of apostrophes, said it was “disgusting to see people breathing grog all over baby’s but sadly I’m not surprised by Malcolm doing it”.

One Australian tabloid referred to an “online meltdown” over the photograph, and duly sought comment from properly Australian Australians, who could be relied upon to reaffirm Australian values regarding the appropriate co-mingling of beer and babies.

“Social researcher” Mark McCrindle said Australian had become a “nation of judgers”. Dick Smith said people could “go and live somewhere else” if they didn’t like the photo, and Ita Buttrose was very ticked off indeed.

Nothing brings a people together like a public shaming on social media, and in this case it was the original  Australian Prime Minister-shamers who were being shamed, bringing about an awe-inspiring shame-cycle that could well stay alive in the media for weeks, if properly stoked by an Andrew Bolt column or an Alan Jones editorial.

There is only one small problem, and it is a small problem indeed in the era of post-fact news. So small it barely warrants noting, except by pedants.

That is, the number of Facebook commenters who were “outraged” by the Australian PM holding a beer while cuddling a baby, numbered two.

On Monday morning, the post had been “liked” by 17,000 Facebook users, and 1500 people had commented on it. Because I value my mental health I did not read all the comments, however I couldn’t find a single one that wasn’t sticking up for the Australia Prime Minister in the face of the moral outrage he provoked, even though that moral outrage was not in evidence anywhere except in two comments quoted in the tabloid media and now, presumably, buried under an avalanche of nice comments.

So two people out of 1,500 didn’t like it, and the media turn this into a major story and fake controversy. No wonder trust in media keeps plummeting.

Auckland Council is unconcerned about the growing scrutiny over councillors’ eligibility to hold office. …

Government requirements state that in order to be a councillor, one must be both a New Zealand citizen and enrolled as a Parliamentary elector – which also means being 18 or older.

However, despite more than half of its councillors choosing not to respond to the eligibility inquiry, Auckland Council were not ready to hit the panic button.

General manager democracy services Marguerite Delbet said council would not look internally at staff citizenship, electing to instead trust the information they were provided with at the time members were elected. 

“No, we don’t plan on looking into staff citizenship. When a candidate lodges his/her nomination for an election, it is done on an official, prescribed nomination paper,” Delbet said.

“The candidate is required to consent to be nominated and to certify that they are qualified to be a candidate. Certifying they are qualified is done by ticking two check boxes, and then signing the nomination paper.” 

The council’s electoral officer then checked each nomination paper when they were lodged to ensure both criteria (NZ citizen and Parliamentary elector) were ticked and accepted the information contained on the paper as correct, she said. 

I’m sorry but this is appallingly slack. The returning officers have a responsibility to verify that someone is eligible for election and someone ticking a form declaring they are eligible does not count.

If someone ticked a box on a form declaring they are a deity and immune from rates, would they accept that.

It would presumably take around five minutes for a Council to check with Internal Affairs if someone is a citizen. There is no excuse for them not to do so.

A capital gains tax was introduced in Australia over three decades ago and since then house prices have roared out of control.

But does this mean that capital gains taxes can’t help control house prices?

Not necessarily. It depends on why they were introduced and how they were designed.

As New Zealanders contemplate casting their vote in a couple of weeks’ time and voting for a party that may or may not introduce a capital gains tax (perhaps things are clearer on the other side of the Tasman than they are from this distance) there are some lessons from Australia.

 

The capital gains tax was introduced in September 1985 by the Labor government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

In 1985, the median Sydney house price was just A$92,000 ($102,000), compared with A$1.1 million in 2016.

But before we jump to the conclusion that capital gains taxes can’t limit property prices, we should look a few of the reasons that it hasn’t done so in Australia.

The first reason is that it was never intended to limit house price growth. In Australia, the CGT was intended to raise money for the Government and to ensure that those people who were lucky enough to have investable assets paid tax on those gains, in the same way others pay tax on their wages.

There is a case for a CGT in NZ, which is to broaden the tax base. But Labour are selling it as something that will lower house prices. It’s a fallacy.

To maximise the amount of money raised, the tax was applied to any investments, be they houses, other property, shares, bonds, works of art, or whatever. Thus it did nothing to divert investments away from property.

And Labour are saying they will exempt the so called family home, which means again it will have almost zero impact on house prices.

1. Bill English 4.13
2. Jacinda Ardern 3.81
3. Steven Joyce 3.71
4. Nikki Kaye 3.62
5. Amy Adams 3.58
6. Paula Bennett 3.56
7. Chris Finlayson 3.49
8. Simon Bridges 3.18
9. Anne Tolley 3.11
10. Todd McClay 3.05
11. Kelvin Davis 2.97
12. Grant Robertson 2.96
13. David Seymour 2.85
14. Stuart Nash 2.82
15. Phil Twyford 2.82
16. Winston Peters 2.64
17. David Parker 2.54
18. Julie-Anne Genter 2.49
19. James Shaw 2.43
20. David Clark 2.35
21. Megan Woods 2.25
22. Andrew Little 2.06
23. Chris Hipkins 2.04
24. Carmel Sepuloni 1.98
25. Gareth Hughes 1.86
26. Tracey Martin 1.57

Interesting that Jacinda is the only opposition MP ranked higher than 3/5. Everyone else is below a 3.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show putting agriculture into the ETS isn’t straightforward. Supposing the price of carbon is say, $16 per tonne, and 1 kg of beef protein takes the FAO average (see below) of 342kg of CO2 emissions.  If a beef cattle yields 200-250 kg of meat (about 1/6th of which is protein), then that’s about 40kg of protein. That’s associated with about 13-14 tonnes of CO2. So that’s an additional cost of about $200 per beef steer. Any way you play with these numbers, the cost of sheep, beef and dairy farming in NZ is going to rise dramatically.

So there are 3.5 million beef cattle in NZ. That’s a $700 million extra cost just on those farms.

The average export price for beef per head is almost $1,200 so that $200 extra charge is one sixth of the income. So if the current profit margin was less than one sixth, those farms are now making a loss. This is not a minor policy impact – it is huge.

National will rename the Sustainable Farming Fund, to the Future of Farming Fund, and boost its funding from $7 million to $20 million per year for investment in agricultural science and innovation.

Labour will fund an additional 100 Plunket and Tamariki Ora nurses to increase the help available for vulnerable parents and babies.

We won’t work with Labour until they come clean on their tax policies.

The Green Party will fund free counselling for all New Zealanders aged 25 and under as part of a $260 million youth mental health package.

We didn’t want a deal with National and Labour anyway (so they claim).

Simon O’Connor’s Facebook post that Jacinda Ardern’s euthanasia stance encourages suicide. Struck down by PM.

No polls out today.  The poll of polls is here.

Next update now out tomorrow (it’s a lot of work keeping up with the promises!).

1. Hauraki-Waikato poll – Mahuta (L) leads by 56%
2. Te Tai Tonga – Tirikatene (L) leads by 35%
3. Waiariki poll – Flavell (M) leads by 20%
4. Ikaroa-Rawhiti – Whaitiri (L) leads by 16%
5. Te Tai Haururu – Tamati (M) leads by 13%

So at this stage the only seat looking to change hands to Te Tai Haururu from Labour to the Maori Party.

Ardern said a Labour Government would focus on students by putting mental health teams in every state secondary school.

She said Labour’s target for New Zealand’s suicide rates would be zero: “Because anything else suggests we have a tolerance for loss to suicide in New Zealand.”

I prefer the Government to have achievable targets rather than nonsencial ones that just make people feel good. A target such as “reduce the suicide rate by 10%” doesn’t mean we want anyone to kill themselves any more than a target such as “reduce the road toll by 10%” doesn’t mean we want people to die in road accidents.

Using this logic, we should have a target of a zero road toll, zero unemployment and zero accidents in the workplace.

This is unfair on Jacinda, and unfair on the 75% of New Zealanders who do support euthanasia.

Simon has strong and sincere views on euthanasia, but people have sincere views the other way also.

Most people do not see euthanasia as comparable to suicide, especially suicide. The former is something generally reserved for those who are dying already or in unbearable pain and there would be a strict legal process to go through.

That is very different to people struggling with depression who kill themselves.

The reality is most people do understand the difference. That’s why there is 0% support for more youth suicide but 75% support for legalised euthanasia.

US President Donald Trump prepared for a pivotal meeting with congressional leaders by huddling with his senior team – his chief of staff, his legislative director and the heads of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget – to game out how to fund the government, raise the debt ceiling and provide Hurricane Harvey relief.

But one option they never considered was the one the president ultimately chose: cutting a deal with Democratic lawmakers, to the shock and ire of his own Republican Party.

I think there is a decent chance Trump will stand at the next election as an Independent or on his own ticket – the MAGA Party. He’ll try and do a Macron and get his supporters elected to the House and Senate.

The downside for him is that when he leaves the GOP, they won’t feel the need to rein in the investigations of him.

1. Gareth Morgan to TOP $1,400,000
2. Inner Mongolia Rider Horse Industry (NZ) Ltd to National $150,000
3. E Tu Union to Labour $120,000
4. Hon Robert Smellie to Labour $115,000
5. Alpha Laboratories to National $112,000
6. Dame Jenny Gibbs to ACT $106,200
7. Alan Gibbs to ACT $100,000
8. Bruce Plested to Maori Party $100,000
9. NZ Dairy Workers Union to Labour $100,000
10. Karl Maughan to Labour $60,000
11. Lianna Hagaman to National $57,616
12. Heartland Bank to National $57,400
13. Barry Colman to National $56,000
14. HWM (NZ) Holdings to National 55,000
15. Phillip Mills to Labour $50,000
16. De Yi Shi to National $50,000
17. Carrus Ltd to National $50,000
18. Rorohara Farms Ltd (Bruce Plested) to Maori Party $50,000
19. Lane Capital Group to National $50,000
20. Christopher Reeve to ACT $45,000
21. Maritime Union to Labour $40,500
22. Stanley Palner to Labour $39,100
23. Murray Chandler to ACT $35,000
24. MF Management Ltd to National $32,000

So by party:

1. TOP $1,400,000
2. National $670,016
3. Labour $524,600
4. ACT $286,200
5. Maori Party $150,000

No surprise with the large union donations for Labour. Labour’s industrial relations policy is a wet dream for them giving them more power and money than they have had since the 1970s. It is a sweet deal for them.

A big month in the polls, as you can see above. The monthly newsletter is out, and the executive summary is:

Curia’s Polling Newsletter – Issue 112, August 2017

There were five political voting polls in August – a Roy Morgan, two Newshub Reid Research and two One News Colmar Bruntons.  

The average of the public polls saw National 6% ahead of Labour in August, down 13% from July. Note that this includes all polls in August including those that taken before or during the leadership changes in Labour and the Greens.

 The seat projection for August was centre-right 54 seats, centre-left 54 which would see the NZ First hold the balance of power.

We show the current New Zealand poll averages for party vote, country direction and preferred PM compared to three months ago, a year ago, three years ago and nine years ago. This allows easy comparisons between terms and Governments.

National’s party vote is 3% below a year ago and 6% below three years ago.

Labour’s party vote was 8% higher than a year ago and 11% higher than three years ago.

In the United States as the rhetoric around North Korea escalates Trump’s approval for foreign policy falls.

In the UK, the Conservatives and Labour are almost neck and neck in the polls.

In Australia, Labour have extended their lead over the Coalition to 8% on a two party preferred basis.

In Canada, The Liberals maintain an 8% lead over the Conservatives.

We also carry details of polls on Whangarei, Israel, Maori seats, Ohariu, water tax and the top tax rate as well as business and consumer confidence.

This newsletter is normally only available by e-mail.  If you would like to receive future issues, please go to http://curia.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=e9168e04adbaaaf75e062779e&id=8507431512 to subscribe yourself.

Since my 40th birthday I have:

• Run two marathons and four half marathons (No 5 is in November)
• Trekked 17 days to Everest Base Camp and summited Mt Kilimanjaro
• Done seven of the nine Great Walks
• Have travelled to 52 countries in all seven continents
• Become a father

So has been a great 10 years and am looking forward to the next decade.

National will make it easier for first home buyers to get a deposit by doubling the financial support available when buying an existing house, and increasing it for new builds.

A Labour-led government would ban foreign purchases of New Zealand property by Christmas.

We have a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change including replacing the Emissions Trading Scheme with a Kiwi Climate Fund.

Labour’s 100-day priorities.

As at 9am 5 September (next update due tomorrow): Nats: $7.62b Lab: $22.82b NZFirst:  $25.97b  Greens: $9.94b  Maori: $12.17b  ACT: $-2.43b  TOP: $10.69b  (all figures limited to costs within next Parliamentary term). Full details here.

Biggest secondary girls school in country considering ban on UberEats

One of the country’s largest state schools is considering a ban on fastfood being delivered to the school grounds for safety reasons.

In a recent newsletter Westlake Girls High School principal Jane Stanley told parents and pupils the number of delivery drivers frequenting the Takapuna, North Shore school’s grounds was becoming a concern, and asked pupils to “refrain” from making orders.

That included UberEats and pizza deliveries.

Speaking to the Herald on Sunday, Stanley said a ban on foods being delivered hadn’t been formalised, but was being considered in consultation with the school community.

 

“Look, we haven’t implemented a ban. We are certainly concerned at the safety situation with people coming into the school of course,” she said.

She couldn’t say how regularly students were having food delivered, but said it was a noticeable number.

The main issue with the deliveries was security, rather than health concerns. The school, with 2214 pupils, has an on-site canteen.

This is quite funny. The wowsers insist that only food on the approved list can be sold in school tuckshops, so what do the pupils do. They get Uber to deliver the food they actually want to eat, to their school.

Damian Light is believed to be the first openly gay leader of a political party in New Zealand.

By “turning the worm” in a television debate, Peter Dunne lifted the fortunes of United Future.

By turning heads as “New Zealand’s Ryan Gosling” in a television debate, Damian Light hopes to do the same.

The 33-year-old Light was announced as new leader of United Future after Dunne’s unexpected retirement from politics less than three weeks’ ago.

 

In all honesty, not many people outside the party faithful took notice; even though Light is believed to be the first openly gay leader of a political party in New Zealand history.

That changed when Light was thrust into the limelight of the TVNZ election debate for the leaders of minor parties on Friday night.

His good looks – compared with Hollywood star Gosling – caught the attention of social media with “Damian Light” trending on Twitter and the United Future website crashing from the surge in internet traffic.

Heh I suspect their website doesn’t normally get a lot of hits.

Initially though, there are some aspects about freshwater management in New Zealand that need to be understood.  The first is that the statutory responsibility for managing freshwater in NZ lies with regional authorities.  Central government doesn’t give say, sawmills discharge rights into rivers or farmers’ irrigation rights to water.  That’s what councils/regional authorities do.  The second is we do have a framework for national water standards.  This process was started by the previous Labour government and developed and made operational by the current National (in 2014).  These require certain standards to be reached nationally, and (with some exceptions), be met by 2025.

He comments on National’s policy:

The swimmable goal described above address the E. coli issue (but not others).  E. coli is a common bacterium found in the guts of humans, livestock and birds.  High E. coli counts make water unswimmable by causing illness in some swimmers. What is not made clear is that these swimmable standards don’t apply to freshwater that is too small or shallow to swim in, in the first place. These will still have to meet the recreational standard however.  The current and planned expenditures on clean-ups at least, addresses some of the other non-specified pollutants. …

Again, most of this is about controlling E. coli levels.  The new proposed rules on sewage discharge recognises that urban areas are a major source of E. coli pollution, and have been somewhat neglected with the focus on rural sources.  There are no new initiatives to control other pollutants, such as nitrates.  This is still up to councils and regional authorities to manage.

Then he looks at Labour:

Since a tax on water-use was first mooted by Labour, there has been high interest in their freshwater management policy. Details have been sparse. It appears at least, Labour intends continuing with the NPS-FM framework for water improvement. The response above however, is woefully short of detail and costings. Many associated issues in this brief response are poorly explained.

For instance, what does truly swimmable mean?  Does this mean using other metrics than the E. coli count?  David Parker was suggesting Periphyton earlier this year. Is this going to be included?

A generation is roughly 25 years. Is that stricter than the current goal of 90% by 2040? If say shallow urban streams and ponds have high E. coli counts because of the bird life inhabiting them, is it really Labour’s goal to get the E. coli count down to a swimmable level of a median of 130? What exactly is the point of getting water bodies that can’t be swum in, down to a swimmable standard?

What is this water royalty? We don’t know what level it is going to be set at (reported numbers are between 1c and 2c per 1000l). We don’t know how it is going to be collected. And it has little relationship to freshwater degradation. Dairy farming is associated with rises in nitrate levels in fresh water. Other forms of farming, such as viticulture aren’t linked to such rises.  Viticulture also uses a lot of water. A royalty based on water use, isn’t a polluter-pays tax.  If your concern is nitrate pollution, you would tax nitrate fertilisers. Or you’d tax cows.  From a policy perspective, taxing water use makes little sense. It isn’t targeting polluters or (directly) the problem of water degradation.

In short, based on the above response, we don’t know what Labour is going to do, how much they’re budgeting to spend, and how much they’re planning to collect by way of water royalties.

No doubt they will form a working group. As always, Labour’s policies are light on details and don’t give you any idea what they will actually do.

He summarises:

Essentially, most of the parties either explicitly or tacitly accept that the NPS-FM 2014 is the vehicle for reaching improved water quality. Given the intensity of the water debate I’m surprised the party policies outlined above showed so few points of difference.  There’s a strong emphasis on E. coli and swimmable standards, but little on other pollutants. None of the parties identified aquatic life (say, fish and invertebrates) as a target or metric for their policies.

Some of the differences are difficult to pin down. A National policy of 90% swimmable by 2040, versus a Labour policy of an unspecified (all?) swimmable over approximately 25 years, versus a Green of all water bodies safe to swim in (no date given) does not generate many degrees of separation.  

So National is the only party with a specific timeframe and standard.

One major point of difference is water royalties or levies.  The case for charging water royalties, or fees, or taxes, isn’t convincing. It’s not a “Polluter’s Pay” tax. The impact of it on water degradation is thus very fuzzy.  If it was about pollution you’d be charging a levy on nitrate fertiliser or the like.  It’s just the wrong thing to be taxing. And we return to that pesky problem that our water pollution has a big contribution from non-point sources. It’s really hard to implement “polluter-pays” when we don’t know who the polluters are, how much pollution they generate, and when they generated it.

That’s never stopped Labour taxing something though!

One of the major sources of freshwater pollution is emissions from urban households.  Rather than such households responsible for, or funding water improvements, we see proposals to fund these from rural sources (e.g. the water royalty).  This subsidies some polluting households (i.e. urban) to stop degrading water, by taxing other households (i.e. rural). It’s a mess.

Yep Labour is going to tax generally lower income rural households to subsidise urban polluters!

Gareth Morgan thinks he can make it into Parliament without reaching the 5 percent threshold needed – as he is set to launch an all-out bid for Ōhāriu.

Newshub understands The Opportunities Party (TOP) will be asking voters in the electorate to ditch the two main parties’ candidates in favour of their candidate, Jessica Hammond-Doube, in order for Ōhāriu to get a three-for-one deal.

On current polling Labour’s Greg O’Connor and National’s Brett Hudson both make it into Parliament as list MPs, so TOP will be asking them to vote for Ms Hammond-Doube in order to get maximum representation for the electorate in Parliament.

The move would allow Dr Morgan to potentially coattail his way into Parliament.

If TOP was to gain an electorate seat, and managed to get 2 percent of the vote as current polling suggests, Dr Morgan and deputy leader Geoff Simmons would be brought into Parliament as list MPs.

It is a strategic move to dethrone NZ First leader Winston Peters as king-maker, and it’s understood TOP will even go as far as asking National and Labour to stand their candidates aside in Ōhāriu to make the move more likely to pay off.

It’s too late to stand candidates aside, even if a party wanted to.

But this will make Ohariu an interesting seat to watch.