Andrew Dickens Afternoons

So Winston’s back for another crack. 
I never doubted it. The man’s constitution and energy are only matched by his ego. And he’s a worker. 
I’ve always liked Winston and New Zealand First and always been surprised at how misunderstood his party is by so many New Zealanders. 
He’s a conservative with a small c from an earlier age in New Zealand where egalitarianism was strong. It’s one for all and all for one and no-one is your master and no-one you’re inferior.  He may be a lawyer but he’s really just working class.  There’s One New Zealand and everyone keeps New Zealand First.  It’s in the name. 
New Zealand First was socialism-lite without the virtue signalling that the new breed of middle class Labour supporters embrace. He’s always had more in common with a Helen Clark or a Michael Cullen than he ever had with John Key or Bill English. 
Somehow I think many National supporters thought that New Zealand First was a National lite because that’s where Winston first made his name.  But there was always a reason Winston parted with National. 
So when he went with Labour in 2017 those National party supporters were truly shocked and branded him untrustworthy.  But I never felt that way.  Throughout the election he campaigned hard to oust the National government and that’s exactly what he did. 
He never pulled the wool over your eyes. You were just too blind to see. 
He brought with him some solid hard working MPs. I had no problem with Ron Mark and Tracey Marting and Jenny Marcroft.  Shane Jones was another thing but he is not working class at all and would be far more at home in Labour 
Now Winston’s back and he knows that the Labour Party of the 2020s is not the Labour Party of old, but a pimply faced crew of social justice warriors, so he’s here keep them honest. 
But once again to get the cut through he’s returned to what I call the Winston whistles. 
Winnie whistles are knee jerk hot takes and reckons that resonate with the grumpy. 
So yesterday he went at like the warhorse of old. First he thrashed Labour, then National, then the media, then the Greens, then the Maori Party, then the cyclists, then te reo in public life – particularly the phrase Aotearoa and then cancel culture. 
It was like he’s spent the last 18 months in limbo listening to talkback radio and taking notes. 
If he had also got stuck into gender politics he would have completely sounded like your Uncle Colin on Christmas Day after five whiskies. 
Irrelevant worry lines. Nothing on housing or post Covid recoveries or mental health and income inequalities that are the real worry for real New Zealanders.

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It’s been two weeks since my last show on Newstalk ZB which means a fortnight listening to howls of outrage over cycle bridges and rail links. 
And I’ve come to the conclusion that New Zealanders do not and have not understood infrastructure and it’s planning. 
The news that a dedicated three quarter of a billion dollar pedestrian and bike bridge will be constructed next to the Auckland Harbour Bridge horrified me. And that’s saying something since I am a dedicated bike commuter and have been all my life. 
It’s just too expensive and the cost benefit does not stack up.  In parliament, the Prime Minister estimated the Bridge would have 3000 crossings a day meaning a cost of $12.50 a crossing.  That was a big underestimation and many calculate it is more like $50 a crossing. 
Well, cyclists are already crossing the harbour on ferries and it’s costing them $5 a crossing on their HOP card so its more expensive than the current regime.
And here’s a point.  Why don’t we charge the cyclists $12.50 a crossing the same way we charged motorists 20 cents a crossing in the early days of the Harbour Bridge in the first place? That would be an interesting test of the market for such a bridge. 
It all begs the question why we just don’t expand the existing bike service.  Three ferries with capacity of 50 bikes each would do it and at a cost of around 100 million.  Make them electric too. 
All of this not taking into account the real problem which is the capacity of the Bridge itself.  Car numbers will not reduce because the government’s intention seems to be to replace carbon fuelled vehicles with electric vehicles. 
This is a problem that has been acknowledged since the Bridge was first proposed in the first place.  Options have been presented for decades. Leading the pack, a new bridge beside the existing bridge providing new lanes and a double train tunnel. 
But somehow those ideas were thrown out at a moment’s consideration for a bike lane.  Why? 
I can only think the problem is that infrastructure decisions are I the hands of politicians who  sway and bend in three year cycles. 
Infrastructure needs more long term planning and it needs to be out of the hands of politicians. 
Ashburton’s Bridge needed to be replaced with a longer spanned bridge decades ago.  But wasn’t. Ideas to increase Auckland Harbour Bridge’s capacity should have been in place in the 80s.
Do I have to remind you again that Sydney started built it’s underground rail system and it’s bridge in the 30s.  Nearly 100 years ago when the population of the town was 1 million. And the bridge they built has road rail cycle and pedestrian lanes and lines. 
Our cheap arse short termism has cost us dearly and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

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A couple of weeks ago I was hosting ZB Drive. When it came to the Huddle, one of the panellist welcomed me by saying, “Hello Anaru, how are you”
Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a snippy mood and so I snapped back by saying, “Is Anaru my real name?”
Chill out Andrew, I was just being friendly, said the panellist.
I didn't take it any further but Anaru is not my name. It's Andrew. Not Andy or Drew either, but Andrew. Anaru is a Maori equivalent, but it's not the name given to me by my parents and that I have answered to my whole life.
A lot of people have since praised me for standing up to what they called "wokeness". The liberal obsession with introducing the Māori language into our day to day conversations more and more.
But that's not what I was doing. I was making a point.
It was about mutual respect for the two national languages of our country. If Māori want me to respect their language then they have to respect my language too.
If Māori think they can call me Anaru any time they please, then they can't complain if I decide to call every Hone or Tipene I meet, John and Stephen. And non-Māori can't complain when Māori ask for traditional placenames to be reinstated.
What's sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.
So I believe in mutual respect for our two languages but mutual respect for the languages of this state is at a strange moment and it's reflective of our current state of race relations.
There seems to be an irrational and visceral anger at any broadcaster who chooses to spread a little bit of Te Reo through their broadcast. Now, admittedly a lot of the attempts are excruciatingly tryhard, as anyone who has heard Susie Ferguson try to tell the time in Māori will tell you.
But the reactions of some to any Māori interspersed in our news bulletins is positively blood curdling. They're furious at hearing a smattering of an official language. A language that has been heard on these shores for hundreds of years.  An official language since 1987.
It's a completely out of proportion fury which I think exposes a deeper animosity towards Māori.
It reached its crescendo when at last week’s meeting of the newly formed Tauranga Ratepayers Alliance. An attendee stood and launched into a standard Māori greeting and was met instantly by jeers and shouts of ‘Speak English’. She said six words of welcome for goodness sake.
I suspect this fury has been fired on by a fear that Maori political power is increasing and more and more they're looking to be in charge of their own affairs. But to be frank a hatred of Maori has been bubbling under the surface for a while and it affects many non-Māori in this country
That crowd was unbelievable, childish, quite vile, shameful to many and, yes, racist. Plus overly sensitive and easily offended just like the snowflakes they despise
Just a request. Could all the Māori language haters just shut up and let the adults do the talking? 
You are on the wrong side of history. If you don't like Māori, go somewhere where it's not an official language.

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I'm not one to blow my own trumpet, but sometimes someone has to step up to plate and so I am.
Exactly one week ago, the last time I was on Newstalk ZB, I predicted a boring budget with the only big item, an increase in benefits.
Other than that I said that it would be business as usual.
And that's exactly what transpired. A boring Labour lite budget for beneficiaries sprinkled with a little honey for rail.
As an aside, considering its desire to be perceived as the wellness Government there was a pathetic increase to the Pharmac budget.
After four years on the Treasury benches, the transformative Government has transformed nothing at all. With the exception of a new tax rate for the wealthy that will raise half a billion and a regional road tax that raises a couple of hundred million there has been little or no change to the macro settings that have been in place for over a decade now.
The most galling for me was the 1.9 billion promised to mental health in the first Wellbeing budget which 2 years later remains unspent while all along the nation's mental health statistics worsen exponentially.
Nothing is really going down at all with this lot other than managing day-to-day crises wrought by nature.
So it amazes me when so many seemingly rational opponents of the Government start imagining all sorts of backroom doomsday scenarios where this Government is secretly plotting to completely overhaul this country's constitutional arrangements without any heed to the democratic process.
It seems rich to hear the opposition claiming that this Government is useless and then claiming they are capable of the greatest constitutional revolution since the signing of the Treaty itself. All in secret. Come on.
The hysteria over the He Puapua report is very disappointing and confusing. It is nothing more than the musings of half a dozen people who were asked to look at ways we could comply with the UN's Declaration of Indigenous People's Rights which, by the way, the National-led Government signed us up to in 2010. Maybe Judith forgot that.
When presented to the Government it was promptly ignored. There were other things on. Like a pandemic. And many of the ideas are preposterous and politically impossible to get through like a separate Maori House of Parliament.
Some of the ideas like a Maori Health Authority were canvased and might come to pass. I'm not a fan because medicine is a science and not beholden to culture.
But Judith seems to have forgotten that it was National that instituted Te Wananga O Aotearoa, which now has 80 campuses through New Zealand. A Maori-led tertiary organisation grounded in Maori values. They also promoted charter schools for Maori. Yet no one screamed separatism at Sir John Key.
He Pua pua needs to be debated. That's why we asked some big brains to have a think about it in the first place. But it's nothing more than a think piece and to imagine it might be secretly enacted is to be completely ignorant of the processes of democracy in this country.
Is it constitutional revolution by stealth? Stop reading fantasy novels.
Was Judith wrong to bring it to light? No. But she was wrong to create racially-based panic on such a flimsy pretext.
We have become far too open to conspiracy theories and fake news and imaginary scenarios.
If you don't believe me read Sir John Key's weekend interview about vax deniers. When the great Common Sense politician of our time starts seeing his fellow New Zealanders losing their rag over nothing you might start thinking we're in trouble.

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Well, I have little to say about Judith Collins and the Nats low polling in the Newshub poll, other than to say Judith Collins is once again wearing too much of the blame.
The National Party is "Absent Without Leave" with a few exceptions like Nicola Willis and Shane Reti.
For example today we had a piece in the paper from National's Finance spokesperson. Can you name him? Andrew Bayly. Surprise
National's schtick is to have a finance monster. Read Richardson, Birch, English, Joyce. True number 2s. Andrew Bayly is very good but he's no English.
So welcome to Budget week and the question on everyone's lips is what will happen on Thursday.
After the Australian budget last week, the Labour Party were quick to jump on the Aussies slogan.
Treasurer Frydenberg called it the Recovery Budget and now our Government has said that's what they want to do as well.
But can we afford to do what the Aussies have done?
In a word No. The Australian economy is a strange and unique beast. It's built on iron ore and mineral prices to an extreme extent. It makes our reliance on the white gold of dairy seem like play money.
Currently, Australia is raking it in as China buys as much iron ore as it can at record-breaking prices. It's up 400 per cent on pre-Covid prices which were already high.
So Frydenberg has loads of cash, that we'd never see, and no hesitation in borrowing like billy-o to create jobs. Our Government will seem spend-thrift compared to the Aussies because they just have more money than us. And our government doesn't want to lose the former National voters who voted for them last election
So, what do I reckon? I expect the Government will raise benefits.
This is classic consumer-led recovery economics. Give the lowest paid a bit more cash and they'll buy a few more New Zealand goods like food and services giving retail and the general economy a bit of a boost.
And this dovetails into why they pretended to come down hard on the public service last week with the infamous pay freeze.
It's a classic Clinton trick from the 80s called triangulation. Jon Johansson the former New Zealand First Chief of Staff wrote about this at the weekend.
It's the “look over there” tactic. Knowing they want to introduce their Fair pay and benefit rises this week, they appear to come down hard on the hated bureaucrat class.
The centre-left praise the caring benefits. The centre-right praise the crackdown on the rampant public service and the Labour Party floats along as appealing to the everyman in the middle. The 3 points of a triangle.
John Key used to do this impeccably. It's focus group politics. New Zealanders are essentially reasonable moderate people so the trick is to be more reasonable than the other guy.
There's no political philosophy there just a desire to be popular.
When you realise that all politicians do this the whole game becomes less threatening.
It's also sobering to realise that no government has been transformative since Douglas and Lange in the 80s.
So I'm predicting business as usual but beneficiaries will be able to afford another loaf of bread a week.
Shock horror. Welcome to New Zealand - the little country that coasts along under its own people's steam.

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The news of a boost to cervical cancer testing budget and a move to less invasive techniques is a brilliant piece of news. 
The disease as we know is a killer but also very preventable using techniques such as immunisation against the HPV virus and regular monitoring and testing. 
The testing has always been invasive and that has been a barrier to greater numbers of women being safe, so the news of a less invasive swab is fantastic. 
The only downside is that the introduction of the new testing regime is still years away.  I know there are a lot of t’s to be crossed and I’s to be dotted but these things in the Ministry of Health seem to take an inordinate amount of time.  Just like the Covid vaccination campaign. 
By the way, my company’s flu vaccination campaign is underway.  I got an email, booked a time and filled out a form all in five minutes. I’m being jabbed at 8.39am on May 26th.  Simple really when you put your mind to it. 
Now the cervical cancer testing regime will definitely help Māori.  At the moment 61 per cent of Māori wahine get their smear versus 75 per cent of non-Māori. 
Why is that number so low?  After all Māori and non-Māori all have the same systems.  Peeni Henare explained this a few weeks ago when Kiri Allen announced her cervical cancer. 
For Māori women, much of the mana is tied up with the sanctity of the reproductive system so any fooling with it is a direct attack on their mana. They won’t get the test because it hurts their pride. 
This is the sort of apologetic poppy cock that drives me crazy. 
Because the mana on non-Māori women is also tied up heavily in their bibs and bobs.  The cervical cancer testing regime is deeply invasive, and demeaning, and uncomfortable and degrading.  It affects your pride, or your mana.  It is not nice. 
But the difference is that more non-Māori suck it up and take the test because to die before your time and unnecessarily is also deeply hurtful to your mana.  To your ability to pass on your knowledge and guidance to your  tamariki and mokopuna. 
Māori leaders would do better by their people to guide them towards the future rather than validating some outdated cultural values that, at the end of the day, kill them.

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Listening to the blamestorm over MIQ last week I thought the universe had tipped on its axis. 
There was our poverty defeating socialist Prime Minister, punching down on a minimum wage frontline worker and bemoaning his lack of accountability and accusing him of lying..
Meanwhile, a cohort of neo-liberal, conservative right wingers were busy defending the honour of the man because he was among our most vulnerable who was being attacked by our most powerful. 
Are the lefty’s now the advocates for personal responsibility now? Because that was the PM's angle.  And are the right wingers the advocates for ultimate governmental supremacy in all?  They seemed to be exonerating the worker and First Security for not keeping to the rules.
In my opinion both sides were kind of right. The man misled his employer, who then misled the Government. He told fibs presumably because he doesn’t like a bottle brush up the nose. Some would call that lying.
Meanwhile, the Government should have known that something like this could happen and have ways of picking it up earlier.  It appears nearly 500 others lack the personal responsibility to get a fortnightly test. 
But what is the PM always says. We're all in this together. So one party got left off the blamestorm. 
Governments decide policy then pass it on to the public service to make it happen. 
So in this case the responsibility to make sure the governmental policy of fortnightly tests for frontline workers was enacted surely belongs to the Ministry of Health. 
The behemoth that is the Ministry of Health.  1000 highly paid head office experts who you would presume know more about health issues than any politician. A yearly budget of $20 billion. Overseeing. 6000 DHB workers. 20,000 nurses.  
And yet handed a policy of fortnightly tests, no-one in the Ministry had the wit to make sure that it was monitored and was in place. 
Do politicians have to tell us how to do everything these days?
It doesn’t surprise me. The Health sector is a mess. The DHBs have a multitude of systems and services that don’t talk to each other and a culture of secrecy that prevents the truth. That was highlighted by the Roche Simpson report.
It doesn’t matter who’s at the top. You won’t know what’s happening at the bottom. I don’t know if the bottom knows what’s happening there. 
The Government gifts the Ministry $1.9 billion for Mental Health improvements and the Ministry doesn’t know what to do with it. 
Most worryingly, we closed the country to prevent our emergency services being swamped by Covid 19 patients. Well, we find out this month that our services and facilities are swamped anyway, without a single case of Covid. 
Covid has exposed the Ministry of Health as dysfunctional. Andrew Little is launching a campaign to fix it.  He has a very big job to do.

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A huge statue of Jesus Christ is under construction in southern Brazil, and it will be even taller than its famous counterpart in Rio de Janeiro.
The "Christ the Protector" statue is being built in Encantado, a small town in Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, by a local organization named Friends of Christ Association (AACristo).
Made of steel and concrete, it will stand 43 metres tall -- 16 feet taller than Rio's Christ the Redeemer, according to AACristo.
The organisation said the statue will be the third-tallest statue of Jesus in the world, after a 249-foot statue currently under construction in Mexico and a 172-foot monument in Poland.
The statue is the work of sculptor Genésio Gomes Moura and his son, Markus Moura. Its head and arms were installed on April 6 and the construction, which began in July 2019, should be finished by the end of this year, according to AACristo.
It will cost around $353,000 in total, and AACristo is asking for donations to finish the project.
An elevator installed inside the statue will take tourists to a lookout at the height of Christ's heart.
"It will be a glass opening from where people will be able to film and photograph the valley," head project supervisor Artur Lopes de Souza said on the AACristo website.
The aim is to boost tourism in the area, which is close to Brazil's borders with Uruguay and Argentina.
The Christ the Redeemer statue has looked down upon the city of Rio de Janeiro for almost 90 years and is one of Brazil's most famous tourist attractions.
text by Jack Guy, Vasco Cotovio and Rodrigo Pedroso, CNN

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This weekend saw the one year anniversary of the quarantine system that has now entered all our lives - MIQ. 
You’ll remember it started in February 2020 with a fleet of campervans on a Whangaparaoa Peninsula Naval base housing a couple of hundred Kiwi refuges from Wuhan. 
Then New Zealanders were asked to self-isolate, which we proved to be spectacularly unreliable at, so a government mandates and monitored quarantine system was initiated in mid-April 2020 
It has been a huge undertaking.  MIQ involves 4500 rooms around the country in 32 hotels. 130,000 New Zealanders have passed through.  There have been 850 cases of Covid 19 in the facilities including 95 active cases right now. 
There are 4000 staff.  They have delivered 9.1 million meals and snacks, and conducted more than 900 swabs each day. 
Brigadier Jim Bliss says MIQ had grown into a "massive logistical exercise which runs incredibly smoothly and has served our country very well". He also says what MIQ has achieved is beyond belief 
And that on the whole is true, but that has not stopped many saying that the process is bad and the government is useless.  Criticisms have included that the government’s lack of business experience has contributed to MIQ’s weaknesses. 
This despite the system’s oversight coming from the Defence Department which has some of the highest skill levels of logisitic planning in our economy. 
All this is in the pursuit of accountability which is very important.  But sometimes the people holding the government to account need to be held account themselves. 
National’s MIQ spokesperson Chris Bishop said that National’s policy would be a purpose built facility and not the 32 hotels currently co-opted. So easy to say and so easily parroted on talkback radio but why does no-one ask him what that means. 
Is it one facility to cope with the 6000 residents we house every week? Because that is a very large facility.  Very large indeed.  And with a very large price tag. In the billions. 
Is it only for the active cases which are currently housed at jet Park and which is our most dedicated facility?  In which case we have it already, in essence. 
It’s a call that I would take so much more seriously if I could see that some serious thought had gone into it. 
It’s happened all through this year.  David Seymour last week congratulated the government on instituting a trans-Tasman bubble but claimed it was six months too late.  Which is a nonsensical statement as Australia didn’t even have an internal travel bubble six months ago. 
It’s the same as the National Party election policy that travellers must be tested 72 hours before departure.  A policy adopted by the government eventually. 
From the moment it was announced I was asking the question on how you police that in another country you have no sovereignty over and how do you ensure there isn’t a black market in dodgy tests. Which has proven to be devastatingly accurate. 
When we look back on this year of Covid fighting we will see a long string of reckons and crackpot ideas that were not held to account.  Not just from the government but from the opposition and media critics as well

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The plight of the unfortunate container ship that has blocked the Suez Canal has provided amusement for millions online, as the global chaos sparked by the incident continues to have massive financial impact around the globe.
While progress has been made on moving the ship, with the Ever Given being shifted 30m overnight, it remains fixed in place.
The bizarre blockage has been celebrated across the internet.
Several websites have popped up offering their own stance on the issue - with one giving users the chance to try and move the ship with Suez Canal Bulldozer (spoiler alert - you won't have much luck). 
You can also find out if the ship is still stuck at the helpful website istheshipstillstuck.com
And if you want to see how the massive ship would look if it was stuck at other places around the world.  

Helen's not going to be very happy about this... pic.twitter.com/0q75DIVQ78— Josh Couch (@JoshCouchNZ) March 28, 2021


Hard to know how the ship even got into Lake Taupo in the first place... pic.twitter.com/W8Quc1bkUY— Dylan Reeve (@DylanReeve) March 28, 2021

The incident is also being celebrated in meme-form, with many seeing themselves in a photo of the plucky digger working away at the base of the massive vessel.

me just trying my best pic.twitter.com/s1ESpPs0KY— Kim Bhasin (@KimBhasin) March 25, 2021


Today’s Comic: We are all, in our own little way, that ship. pic.twitter.com/GVDjLxzErX— Chaz Hutton (@chazhutton) March 24, 2021


This is my favourite meme format in a long time pic.twitter.com/p7XOuC43PU— Ben Harris-Roxas (@ben_hr) March 24, 2021


My ambitious plan to free the boat is to push a huge cotton swab up the canal pic.twitter.com/ZnY4ehu8fx— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) March 25, 2021

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