Andrew Dickens Afternoons

Yesterday I started the programme with an opinion piece where I said the government has offered the teachers as much as they can and they should be congratulated for it and that the teachers continued rejection of the pay offer was reminiscent of truculent children.
When it was published on line that was one of the headlines.  Our teachers are starting to look like truculent children it said.
Later, I got a message and it started like this:  ‘Mr Dickens, I am an ex-teacher’. 
 And I thought ‘uh-oh, here we go’. Ex-teacher outraged that I’m starting to side with the government and losing sympathy for the teachers.  So it went “Mr Dickens, I am an ex-teacher and may I congratulate you on the excellent use of the word truculent.”  Excellent!
So today I thought I’s pay it forward and congratulate my old producer Alex Braae who now writes The Bulletin for the excellent use of the word ‘hyperbolic’  in his column today, which effectively describes much of the discourse that poses as debate these day.
This is how he used hyperbolic. 
Alex wrote: “Environmental groups have reacted with fury to the news Austrian oil giant OMV might drill off the coast of Otago. The ODT reports OMV may end up drilling up to 10 wells, under existing permits. Environmental groups including Oil Free Otago, 350 Aotearoa and Greenpeace say there will be "resistance" to any rigs appearing off the coast. It rather underlines how hyperbolic some of the rhetoric around the oil and gas exploration ban got last year from both sides of the argument, given this situation appears to show that it's basically business as usual."
And this is what I said all along.  Taranaki, as I understand it, still has over 80 consented exploration licences left to explore.  Effectively the ban was on future exploration and not what we’ve already okayed.  But the hype preferred us to say all oil and gas exploration is over. Taranaki is over.  Otago is over.  When they’re not.
Now that’s not to say banning future oil and gas exploration was a good idea, because it’s not.  What we really need is a viable alternative so that oil and gas and fossil fuel goes the way of the very dinosaurs they originally came from. But let's not believe the hype
Hyperbole of course goes both ways.  Politicians are fond of minimising the facts.  Like Simon Bridges and his team over their handling of the so called junior staffer who unilaterally took down an anti-UN migration pact petition from the National Party website on the night of the Christchurch mosque shooting.
Turns out the so called junior staffer is in fact a former senior ministerial press advisor who’s been working for the party for six years and is a crucial part of their team coming up with agriculture and environmental policy. Anything but Junior.  Bridges and his team also told fibs about when the post was pulled down
This poor bugger is now on leave from his job for doing something that many people think was absolutely the right thing to do.  The fact that National, a pro-immigration party, was supporting the hyperbolic protests against the compact was strange in itself and many in the party are uncomfortable with it.  
And what is not hyperbole is that Simon Bridges and his team have once again found to be wanting.

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Over the events of March 15th, I have been very impressed with the concern shown around our mental wellbeing by so many parties. It shows a positive shift in our cultural outlook. Rather than just putting on a stiff upper lip, gritting our teeth, bottling it up and just soldiering on we have accepted that a lot of people can’t just tough it out.
So in that communal spirit, I’d just like to ask the Education Minister Chris Hipkins if he is alright. Does he need to take time out? Because I’ve been worried for a while about the amount of conflict he is in the middle of.
It was something I noted a while back and it was absolutely evident last night on Q and A where he was interviewed and it was spread over two segments.
I mean just look at what he’s trying to do. He was the first Minister to do anything getting the free tertiary policy off the ground. A policy that hasn’t seemed to have markedly changed a thing regarding enrolment and further education.
But not content with that he is also on a mission to reform 30 years of educational thinking and development with fundamental changes to the Tomorrow’s Schools framework. That’s a lifetime’s work right there.
But that’s not all for this Super Minister.  He’s also out to reform the entire Polytechnic and Industry Training Organisation structure at a time when our need for tradies is at an all-time high. Again this is a major project. One that could easily dominate all a Minister’s time.
Meanwhile, there are little fires that need to be put out like Victoria University’s fevered and misguided wast of public money pursuing a name change.
And if all that is not enough then there is the wage and condition standoff between the government and all the teachers in the country.  This is looking increasingly deadlocked and unsolvable and is building momentum until it will become the biggest industrial action of our age.
To their credit, the government has done as much as they feel they can and certainly it far exceeds anything that the previous regime would have offered. And to his credit, Chris Hipkins is standing firm, guided by his Finance Minister’s edict that this government is not going to blow the budget but the pressure must be immense.
Last night I kept wondering about Chris Hipkins days which must be a succession of massive meetings loaded with crises, big ideas, vested interests and enormous egos all plotting to stage a revolution in every sphere of our education system.
And with so many balls in the air, there is no way that anyone could be sure of not dropping one or two.
Chris Hipkins along with Phil Twyford are showing us what a decade in opposition does to a politician. It frustrates, and then you dream of what could be done better, and then, when, suddenly and surprisingly, given the opportunity to realise your dreams the 2 men have leapt in all guns blazing but with little aim. The latest dream for Mr Twyford to go sour is his precious light rail which this week was viciously savaged by Councillor Mike Lee who called it Kiwibuild with wobbly wheels.
Dreams are great but trying to make too many dreams come true all at once is a recipe for nightmares.

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I am the son of a teacher. One of the old fashioned kind. The teacher who left school at 17, went to Ardmore Teacher’s Training College and was back in front of a classroom of kids by the age of 18.
A teacher who taught in Canada and the UK and came home destined to never climb up the rankings of teachers because she never went to university and got a degree.
The sort of teacher who was still teaching kids late into her seventies. A 60 year career. A person who had a calling to be a teacher.
These are the teachers that many principals say save the day. The ones they can call when there’s illness and staffing crises and this older generation would wade in and just get down and teach.
And Mum was a teacher who lived in the nice part of town but taught in the poorest. My school was decile 10 while Mum drove miles teaching all through South Auckland and Flatbush until finally ending out at Panmure Bridge School - Decile Rating 1.
There’s quite a few of these teachers around. and they’re the ones who have seen every fashion, every crackpot idea and every genius innovation in our education system and they know what they think.
Mum was very forthright, and as I was in the media, I used to get the sermons on the state of education.
And one thing she always said is that Wellington knew nothing. She saw enough inspectors come in and make instant judgements on difficult situations and destroy good teachers and good schemes.
She would rail against the teacher experts who spoke only to other teachers until they led each other down a rabbit hole of ideology that was never based on fact.
I remember asking her about the decile system back in Hekia Parata’s day. Nothing wrong with it, she’d bark.  Poor communities get a bit more funding.  But what about the stigma and the exodus of students from low deciles to high deciles Mum? Her response: Ridiculous, ignorant, middle class, misplaced elitism.
Mum always said that the best teachers she had ever worked with were in the poorer schools. They were the ones who relished the challenge and could see the difference they made.
So the New Zealand Initiative Report released today that looked at the results of 400,000 students and concluded that whatever school you went to makes little difference to educational outcomes would have been right up her alley. It shows that the inequality of education that we have been accused of is not because of the education system.
But that’s nothing to be proud of because it highlights that our iniquitous education outcomes is because of wide social inequality throughout the wider society.  The blunt truth is if you’re born poor, you’ll stay poor and you’ll get a poor education unless your family decides to take advantage of what is on offer.
But despite the empirical proof, comfy theoreticians like the Education Taskforce are talking about fixing problems in the education system that don’t actually exist. Let’s all play the fiddle while Rome burns.

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Yesterday I was doing talkback on the Immigration Ministers proposed changes to the employer-led temporary work visa system for skilled migrants.
In an attempt to stop the exploitation of migrant workers by paying low wages the Minister is thinking of setting a minimum wage for the migrants that’s in line with New Zealand’s median wage which is around $49,000. And for more highly skilled migrants a pay rate of 150 per cent of the median wage or $76,000.
While this is well meaning it raises a number of consequences. Employers are worried it prices the necessary labour out of their reach particularly in the hospitality and aged care sectors. And if it does come to pass there is the fear of price rises that will be passed on to the consumer. $30 takeaway curries anyone? A number of people have since emailed and said where is the corresponding pay rise for Kiwis to match the migrants.
But I was fascinated by one email which claims workplaces like minimum wage temporary visa migrants because they also don’t have to pay them Kiwisaver contributions saving the employer thousands and thousands of dollars.
We have created a rod for our back due to our addiction to cheap immigrant labour and my fear is that reducing it will cause withdrawal pains to rival any braking of an addiction.
It’s interesting that a proposed law to protect victims of insane offenders has been drawn and is set to go to Parliament.  The Bill, from National's Louise Upston, aims to ensure the victims of legally insane offenders "are treated the same as other victims of crime". If passed, it would rename the verdict of 'not guilty on account of insanity' to something that acknowledges that the offender committed a criminal act. Victims have whooped with joy that this change is coming and I support it too.
But I’m not sure if the Mental Health Foundation will be as welcoming because the argument is that poor Mental Health can not be used as an excuse for extreme behaviour. I look forward to hearing the debate.

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Well it’s obvious that virtue signalling and political correctness is alive and well in this country, and it’s not where you expect it.
As we rampage our way at great haste towards a new gun regime where military style and modified weapons are illegal, National’s police spokesperson Chris Bishop has rumbled into life.
He’s brought up a private members bill that he drafted and presented to Parliament back in the old days when National was the government.
It would bring in Firearm Protection Orders and warrantless searches and he thinks that’s necessary at this time.  With the gangs already saying you’ll be lucky to see us handing in our illegal weapons, Chris Bishop thinks that the police need more powers to target the gangs.
The Firearm Protection Orders would allow Police Commissioners to designate certain gang members with violent offending histories to be subject to orders and allow the Police greater powers to search their cars and search their houses for illegal firearms, without having to seek a warrant.
Now this was defeated last time it was presented to parliament and I can see why.  It makes the Police  judge, jury and executioner without legal oversight. 
Police already have the powers to search gang member houses and cars for illegal weapons, but they do have to get a warrant to establish they have a valid concern.  If Police Commissioners were given the power to search anyone they designate then we’re veering dangerously close to a police state.  We might be happy enough about that but civil rights campaigners and lawyers would have a field day.
Chris Bishop was asked whether he was grandstanding which he denied.  But it did seem to me like a bit of empty virtue signalling to show that National is tougher on crime than the government who are currently running a type of crackdown that National never did.
Meanwhile, the Crusaders and Steve Tew from the Rugby Union are now being accused of being politically correct. Who ever thought that rugby heads could be PC?
It is difficult to see who is advocating a name change for the Crusaders other than the Crusaders themselves, but that’s their business.
As I’ve always said, everyone is politically correct and everyone virtue signals, it’s just that the actual politics and virtues that differ.
On a relared note, yesterday when we had some talkback on the Crusaders decision, we had some vehement and horrific texts and calls from people that could be described as Islamophobic, despite the fact that the Muslim community had never asked for a name change or been involved in the decision.
As another emailer said; it didn’t take long for a veneer of unity to fall off and expose the dark heart of religious intolerance that runs in a sizable number of people in our country.

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So now we have a new measure of child hardship and poverty in New Zealand.
Stats NZ has come up with a survey that asked between 3000 and 5500 households how they are faring. Now already I’m confused because of how many households was it. 3000 or 5500?
Anyway. They asked quite a few households how they’re faring and they found that about 183,000, or 16 percent of children currently live in poverty before housing costs are deducted. The figure jumps up to 23 percent, about 254,000 children after housing costs are deducted.
Hell of a phrase that, child poverty. In this report, it’s defined as children living in households who earn less than 50 percent of the median national income. In 2018 the median wage was $49,000 so we’re talking about kids in households with about $25,000 coming in.
That’s not a lot of money in modern New Zealand. In 2018 Trade Me told us that the median rent in New Zealand for a two to four bedroom house was $525 or $27,000 a year. Or $2000 more than the families of quarter of a million kids earn a year. No food, no shoes, no transport for that family.
For a one to two bedroom place, it’s $390 or $20,000 a year, so if you can squeeze a family of three to four into one of those you may have $5,000 spare to eat with.
It’s beyond the understanding of most New Zealanders. They can’t comprehend coping with that sort of situation and how people with children can end out in this situation. They believe that it must be all the parents choice. There’s anger at those parents that they let themselves get into that situation. The reality is that some poverty or hardship is because of stupid choices but a lot is wrong place, wrong time, wrong person stuff.
There’s one comment that you hear all the time from the people who can't understand poverty or hardship. They say "Throwing money at the problem has never worked". Which I’ve always found to be the lamest argument ever because throwing money at problems is exactly what humans do.  
Got a traffic congestion problem. Throw money at it and build a new road or a train track. Got a health problem? Throw money at it and pay for a doctor and treatment. Got a broken tap. Throw some money at it. 
The trick is not just throwing money at a problem but how you throw money at a problem.
Take your tap problem. You could throw money at buying a new tap then fixing it your self. Or you could throw more money at hiring a plumber. Or you could take advantage of the situation and throw money at a whole new vanity unit.
To have Stats NZ find a quarter of a million kids whose household income can’t even pay the rent is definitely a problem. And money definitely needs to be thrown at it, cleverly.
But there are also questions that need answers that need to come from within society. Why do we continue to be a low wage, high housing cost nation? Why do we have parents who have children when they cannot afford them? And why do we have comfortable people who seem to have no empathy at all?

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Families who have experienced Oranga Tamariki first-hand say the organisation is not doing enough to help families or the children in their care.
It comes after a report last month, the first from Oranga Tamariki's new reporting system on child harm, found that more than 220 children who were removed from their families to keep them safe went on to be harmed in state care over a six-month period.
In the worst cases, children had been raped or beaten. Several incidents led to criminal charges.
Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry for Children, set up the new reporting system last year, to replace the patchy, narrowly-focused one used by its predecessor Child, Youth and Family.
The new system is one of broadest and most detailed in any jurisdiction. It records abuse committed against a child by anyone, not just the caregiver, and in any location, not just within the child's placement. It records all incidents of harm, accidental and intentional, and ranging from over-zealous discipline of a child through to severe physical or sexual assaults.
As of June last year, there were 6350 children and young people in state care in New Zealand. Between July and September, 130 of them were found to have been harmed. Between October and December, 97 were found to be been harmed.
Some of the incidents were historical but were first reported during this period. A few children were harmed more than once. They were mostly likely to have been abused by caregivers, though many of the sexual assaults were committed by other young people or unrelated adults.
Callers to Andrew Dickens Afternoon echoed the reports findings. 
Mohini told Andrew that she knows from personal experience Oranga Tamariki that they "are not getting any better", and are breaching their own policies.  
"Once they take a kid off the parents, they do not allow any other family members who ever showed interest, who they should have contacted in the first place, to be able to assist the little kid anymore." 
She says that one of her nieces was taken off her sister, and that Mohini and her husband asked to get in touch with who was looking after her, but she was not allowed to make contact. 
"How come, in the time it took to give the kid away, no one contacted us to ask if we wanted to keep the child?" 
Bob, who has family that work for Oranga Tamariki, doubts Mohini's story.
"The most important part she left out is why the child was taken away from the family in the first place?"
He says that his family members have seen horrific things through their line of work, and there are two sides to every story. 
Another caller, Sarah, says that her experience with the agency has been "amazing" and they have helped with her situation.
She admits that some social workers don't give you as much information as you would like, and that you can sometimes not get along with them which can cause difficulty, but Sarah believes they have got better. 
"People who have had bad experiences with them aren't going to like anyone from Oranga Tamariki." 
Sarah says that few people will speak positively about the organisation as they have had their children taken away from them. 
"Back in the day, they were taken away for just any reason, but now they can't just take them away for a silly reason. They are actually getting more and more reports about a particular case."

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So I’ve had a gorgeous 30 hours in the Wellington catching up with my youngest and enjoying the capital’s street life.
I know it wasn't your average weekend and that wasn't just the weather which was positively Mediterranean, I’ve got some classic shots on my Facebook page by the way.  It was also the weekend of the Cuba Dupa festival, the celebration of Cuba Street as the thriving beating heart of the Greater Wellington community.
It was notable as this was a major event in a city outside of Christchurch that was compromised by the increased security level that is our new norm after the Christchurch Mosque attack.
Two weeks after the event the organisers and police decided that the job of protecting 100,000 people on a street in Wellington was too great and so Cuba Street was not closed and most of the musical acts were moved into inside venues.
At first, I thought that this was an over-reaction and that in changing our lives it was an example of the perpetrator winning, but I was wrong. The street may not have been closed but it was thronged. There were two outside venues I visited, Glover Park and the Heard Factory square. Yes, we were wanded and had bag checks but it didn’t kill the vibe. And the indoor shows were hot sweaty fun.
This was a glorious middle finger to terror.
But at the same time, the alleged shooter mumbled into life through the media after a Corrections source revealed he was making a complaint about his rights being denied.
Many of us including myself and the Prime Minister have promised never to say his name, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about him. So, it would be nice if Corrections could plug these sources for the victims' sake. I can’t blame the media for reporting the truth because there is a market for this junk.
I could have predicted that this would happen as the man is not stupid. So far he has been charged with only one murder. You can see why he believed that he is allowed his one private visitor a week, his legal advisor and his phone calls thinking that he has the same rights as any other charged with murder. But he's not as smart as he thinks he is, as Corrections believe they are within their rights to withhold privileges.
So nothing to see here. But because of the leak, it ended out all over our Sunday front pages. Note to the Nation: Just turn your back on him because attention is what he craves.
Now one final note on Wellington. Your traffic congestion from the airport to the city through the Mt Victoria tunnel is atrocious. Tailbacks from the tunnel to the airport roundabout all weekend long. Kent Terrace is a carpark, not a road.
It beggars belief that the capital of our nation is linked to the airport by a two-lane tunnel built in 1931. A second tunnel has been mooted and a test boring made in the 80s but somehow the money was not available.
It was ironic that the lead story in this weekend’s Wellington paper was about Save the Basin. The lobby group which helped bring down the Basin Reserve flyover proposal, preparing to stop a potential second Mt Victoria tunnel. One of their major concerns is the destruction of the character of the historical Mt Victoria suburb.
Well newsflash Save The Basin, Mt Vic’s character is already in tatters with the amount of stationary traffic clogging the tunnel's feeder roads and I say this lovingly as a former resident of the suburb. This is a job that should have happened 40 years ago.

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Adam Keown talks with Andrew Dickens around his immediate thoughts and feelings post the National Memorial service in Christchurch.
LISTEN TO ADAM KEOWN TALK WITH ANDREW DICKENS ABOVE.

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For the third Friday in a row tears have been shed as the nation mourns a crime than still amazes us happened here. The last fortnight has been incredible with each day packed with more and more to digest. The pace has been hectic. Of course we’ve seen that pace affect Winston Peters. It’s also an incredible feat of emotional endurance by our Prime Minister.
But the people I most want to reach out to today are our police force. My producer and I are hearing stories of how this fortnight has stretched our officers and their families. From that first moment a fortnight ago the pressure was on and it would have been the hardest hour of the involved police’s life ever.
What then happened was the largest police investigation in New Zealand’s history with 500 officers on the case. Police were flown into Christchurch from around the country. Plans were scrapped, families left behind.
The security now required nationwide is also taxing on time, energy and capacity. So much so that many of the gatherings in towns to watch this morning’s Remembrance Service had to be cancelled.
We’re hearing of eight day weeks, long hard days fully armed guarding the nation’s mosques. They’re working their butts off.
This week we’ve also heard criticism of the police response from anti-terrorist experts from Australia which I felt was unwelcome. But pile that onto any guilt or sorrow the force is already feeling about that evil day and you know our thin blue line is being stretched. And yet they have responded day after day after day. 
To our police, I say thank you. Stay strong. It is appreciated.
And I have to say something about Brexit. We now wait for a vote tomorrow on what is known as MV 3, the third modified version of the Theresa May deal, after the speaker finally allowed it through. PM May sweetened the deal for her parliament by offering to resign if the deal is approved, stepping aside to allow someone else to see it through to the end.
Because of this sacrificial move the most stringent critics have indicated they may fall in behind the deal. World champion hypocrites like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg who have previously described the deal as plunging the UK into slavery are suddenly saying they’ll vote for it.
The personal ambition is breathtaking and obvious. All these Brexiteers want to do is vote for cat vomit, watch May resign, stage their own coup and then tear the whole thing up. And this is what has coloured the whole sad affair. It’s a political parlour game played out in fantasy land by players only interested in their own power and not their country’s wellbeing.
Meanwhile out in the real world, faced with such uncertainty, businesses and factories are abandoning the UK like rats from a sinking ship. The Brexiteers may indeed win the battle only to find the war has been lost and they’ve inherited a shattered and divided land.

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