Andrew Dickens Afternoons

Some of the things that have scuppered the Labour Government are their use of hyperbole, and exaggeration, and magical word salads that are easily debunked and ridiculed

The good old favourites like the 100,000 houses from Kiwibuild or the light rail that would be started by 2021.

Too many times the words and promises have not matched the deeds and that reduces trust in their ability to govern.

So with this quite obvious it's a gimme for Opposition parties in their campaigning.

All they have to do is project competence, and common sense, and achievable goals and aspirations and we'd consider them a government in waiting.

So on Friday, Chris Bishop launched National's Electrify NZ policy. This is designed to create more renewable electricity to power on a green future away from oil, gas, and coal.

I was doing Drive so I got the first crack which is always hard because you haven't had long to digest the policy.

But right from the start, I realised that the policy principally involved shortening the resource consent process. I asked and Chris confirmed there was no financial help for generators.

I wondered whether this was just a resource management policy repackaged as an energy policy because Labour had just released its Second Harbour Crossing policy. I wondered whether this was just a piece of political flannel.

So Chris Bishop turned up on Q+A yesterday. By then questions had been asked of generators about what they needed. Turns out there are 8 wind farms already consented, but the generators are waiting for favourable market conditions. So consenting is not the immediate problem.

Now look, I have no problem with streamlining of resource processes. Nobody does. Minister David Parker has been wrestling with that for the past year. And Bishop's policy is not of itself bad. But… it's not a clean energy policy.

It's time for all politicians to realise that we're not stupid and present policy to us that makes sense and to back away from the bluster.  

We've had too much of it over the past 6 years and we won't want to vote for more.

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Welcome to the new world of performative politics and the battle of the outraged.

Though it's not a new world, but the same old world now amplified by social media and our move away from the written and spoken word and into pictures on screens.

The visit of Posie Parker went exactly as anyone could predict over the weekend and the fallout is just as predictable.

All sides played their part in this passionless play. All feeding on each other for validation. All throwing out vast generalisations.

It all started with with the calls to ban her entry. Free speech crusaders railed against it. Trans activists bellowed for it.  Ignoring the fact that entry could only de denied on criminal record. Posie Parker is many things but she's never been a criminal. But the drama acted out broadcast by media entities both professional and social who only report what's right before their eyes

Posie Parker is nothing without opposition and we'd all be ignorant of her stance if opponents hadn't highlighted it.

She claimed to be representing New Zealand women despite never having been in the country. I wondered what the point of her tour of New Zealand and Australia was for and it is obvious it was for her supporters back in the UK, therefore she needed the protests. She needed the pictures to become a hero for her people.

This was evident in her bizarre choices of venues in public open spaces both here and Australia. A security consultant over the weekend asked whether she was naïve or stupid in choosing Albert Park. Wide open spaces, hard to defend with easy access for supporters and opponents. I'm pretty sure Posie knew she was vulnerable and didn't mind. Remember, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux's cancellation came at the hands of landlords of the venues.

On the other side, trans activists needed a perceived threat to publicise their cause, so Parker was perfect. They amplified the threat and mobilised their forces and built up a lather. They talked about the threat to their lives of being trans and yet turned up to a protest with signs saying 'Kill the TERFS' with absolutely no sense of irony.

The Nazis smelt some attention in Melbourne and turned up with their masks and salute and got coverage. Brian Tamaki smelt opportunity to follow up his 'gays caused the cyclones' outrage. The Greens meanwhile smelt the opportunity to demonise all white straight males. Meanwhile, right wing and conservative broadcasters hitched their horse to the issues to push the "New Zealand has been trashed by a Labour Government".

So the actors played their part to a willing audience.

But it was interesting to hear a caller this morning talking about how 95 percent of the Albert Park protestors were polite and law abiding. Which was exactly what we heard about the Parliamentary protests on the vaccinations. Which is the truth.

What we saw this weekend was the extreme minorities of both sides having a go at each other which meant the news that the IOC has banned athletes who transition after puberty from Olympic Sports passed by with little comment.  

There's no drama when the grown ups speak.

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So, it's been a week since I was last on ZB, and last Monday we were talking law and order and what really needs to happen.

But of course in the week since, the former Police Minister Stuart Nash has had a spectacular meltdown and we now have our 5th Police Minister in 5 years. In fact, it's our 10th in 14 years. Police would like the revolving door to stop spinning so fast, but that's not in their control.

But the funny thing I noticed about Stuart Nash's supposed crime is how little anybody really cared. In fact, one woman questioned by telly over the weekend said the classic line: he was just saying what everybody is thinking.

The people who were most vocal about Nashie's misbehaviour were the opposition MPs. Particularly Mark Mitchell and David Seymour.

"A flagrant overreach of ministerial authority and an instantly sackable offence" they chanted in unison.

What Stuart Nash did was suggest what the police should do operationally. The Cabinet manual for all parties forbids this. It also forbids instructing the judiciary. These are facts that the opposition choose to ignore when they spin their "the Government is soft on crime" line. Operationally the police and the judiciary will be exactly the same no matter what the government.

And last week the talkback also seemed to ignore was is really possible.

We had suggestions of trucking offenders off to other countries and overseas detention camps. International Law Courts might have something to say about that, I said.

Callers wanting judges to be told to increase their sentences. Can't do that they're independent.

Mark Mitchell even phoned and said what was needed was more wrap around services, which is exactly Labour's line, and military academies. Which he told me were already operating well in Whenuapai and elsewhere.

Now I can find no mention of military academies for offenders anywhere in New Zealand. The closest is Vanguard school, which is a special character school which started as a charter school. It's one that requires a voluntary choice by parents and kids who are committed to a change. And the thing that Defence Forces have told me is that they don't want feral, foetal alcohol affected, life time crims to rehabilitate.

And towards the end of the conversations, a caller texted me and said you've dismissed all our ideas, what are yours?

I guess the first thing I'd do is support the police more. Having talkback callers parrot an opposition line that police have no respect anymore damages only the police and empowers the crims.  

I'd insist on a standard ratio of police numbers to population. An idea and target floated in 2022 but still being missed. The problem is churn. We're employing new police, but they're not replacing the police who have had enough and are leaving the force. So I would up the numbers of new police.

And like everyone, I'd like to toe rags identified early and interventions put in place.

Policing and crime is not simple and the soft on crime rhetoric helps no-one.

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Have you ever considered how amazing it is that the health system operates at all.

If you think about the pure logistics of every operation that will happen in New Zealand today, it is an awesome collaborative exercise that most industries couldn't match.

A half dozen extensively skilled practitioners have to meet in a purpose built room. Some of them will have studied for 15 years or more to be at this level. The surgeons not only need knowledge but physical prowess and stamina as surgeries can last as long as 12 hours or more.

The whole team need to be spotlessly clean and hygienic.  As does every piece of highly technical equipment they're about to use.

An army of post operative carers need to be ready to provide 24 hour attention after the procedures.

It's a small miracle that happens every day and we take it for granted.

But at the same time as recognising the brilliance of our health system, we also have to admit the system is broken.

The past weeks' headlines of staff shortages, room shortages and bureaucratic bungles are evidence of this.

So how can we have a system packed full of so many intelligent, skilled and hard working professionals fail so spectacularly.

At first glance, miserable investment by successive Governments. As the population of New Zealand swelled by half a million over the past dozen years, did we see a corresponding increase in facilities and staff? No, we saw extravagant claims of extra funding which in reality was barely keeping up with inflation.

Auckland City Hospitals new building was opened 20 years ago.  It has 1100 beds and saw Greenlane Middlemore and Starship integrated into one complex. Auckland got less beds at a  time when it needed more.

Our traditional DHB model never helped with competing regions sabotaging each other.

And we have a bureaucratic class between the politicians and the workers that spend more time trying to hide the deficiencies and avoiding blame than they do trying to make sure the dollars reach the patients.

We know this after the departing spray by outgoing chairman Rob Campbell. A man who was not appointed to overhaul the system as people erroneously say, but to oversee the people charged with the overhaul. As we heard he was not impressed with their torpor.

Are we prepared to fix the system.

I don't believe so. We're too busy using it as a political weapon.

When former Minister David Clark threw Ashley Bloomfield under the bus during the Covid days we roundly turned on him.  The concept of Ministerial responsibility.

But as the Simpson Roche report showed us. The Ministry was failing to inform Bloomfield and the Government accurately, meanwhile not dispersing orders downward.

It's a broken underfunded, understaffed system with some mandarins who are hesitant to change.

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So it is now officially the silly season as Christopher Luxon finally got off his State of the Nation speech and released his first policy in the election year.

And who saw that coming?

National has promised it would give households with a joint income of up to 180-thousand dollars a year a 25 percent rebate on their child care costs.

Now strangely enough the last politician to use an early education bribe was Jacinda Ardern. And that was only last November and the new settings come in next month.

National has taken that policy a bit further.  It's a classic case of not staying in your lane, hijacking another party's policy to swing some of their supporters your way. And that makes it good politics.

The policy is not cheap at $249 million dollars. But National says it will claw that money back from the amount consultants currently charge the government.  There's a certain irony that National will fire consultants to give tax rebates so that parents can hire consultants to look after their children.

Now painting the consultants as the bogeymen makes sense on one hand and none on the other.

As Ben Thomas said yesterday "no-one has sympathy for consultants," so they're fine to paint as bad guys. But I think you'll find an awful lot of the consultant economy vote national so they won't be feeling the love. Consultants are a 1.7 billion dollar slice of our economy. Target them and the economy at large will take a hit.

It's easy to scapegoat consultants. But we need to remember that government after government of all colours has made the consultant a more and more necessary evil.

Since the 80s governments have tried to reduce the size of the civil service and their pay by coring out their full time paid experts and hiring consultants project by project. Private practice has been doing this for years. It's the call centre in the Philippines trick.

National has uses them as much as anyone because they are always on a mission to reduce the public service.

So now it works like this.

Politicians, who know nothing, come up with an idea. They hand it to the Civil Service, who have no idea, so they hire a consultant to find out if the idea works and if it does they then advise how to make the idea happen.

More and more the consultants are the ones who scope, cost, plan, and facilitate large projects like roads, bridges, flood protection, and water needs.

So, if you reduce public services you will need private consultants.

Which means the question for National going forward will be, "How can you reduce both public servants and consultants if you want anything to be done?"

And maybe the answer is that National hasn't got anything it wants done.

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Former National MP Chester Borrows has died, aged 65.

He was diagnosed with cancer last year.

Borrows campaigned in two elections before winning the Whanganui seat in 2005, which he held for four terms.

He served as Courts Minister and Deputy Speaker of the House in John Key's Government, before retiring in 2017.

Andrew Dickens reflected on the political legacy of Chester Borrows after his death.

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As part of getting back to basics and bread and butter, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced that Three Waters is over.

Just the name, mind

It's an acknowledgement that the Opposition's campaign against Three Waters has tarnished its’ name.  So it's gone.  Not the reform. Just the name

That was met by crowing by National Party members.

In reply, I have said all along that I will not be voting for any party that doesn't have a cogent water reform policy.

If you've listened to me you'll know that Labour's water reform rankles with me because of the appropriation and redistribution of assets and debt raised on them.  It penalised the councils doing well and rewarded councils that have been slack in investment and maintenance. But it did address the issue of raising enough equity to fund the work that is necessary for a water system we can be confident in

So I was quite excited to see that National had finally stirred itself to present a water reform policy which they've called "Local Water Done Well".

So what is it?

Well in Chris Luxon's words: "a National Government will set and enforce strict water quality standards and require councils to invest in the ongoing maintenance and replacement of their vital water infrastructure, while keeping control of the assets that their ratepayers have paid for"

So far that's what we already have.

But it's made even harder for councils because the Government will create an agency to oversee and demand the Councils do a good job.

So there will be greater scrutiny and obligation on Councils to get it right, which is going to cost a lot of money.  So where's that coming from?

National will ensure that water assets and income are ring fenced from the Council's other activities so they'll be able to raise capital separately from the Council's books. But that doesn't help smaller councils with less assets and ratepayers

To help them they suggest the smaller cash strapped councils band together and form regional co-operatives to give them the ability to raise more money.  I'm starting to laugh now because that just seems like Three Waters, only voluntary.

National's plan is magical thinking. It's the status quo with even more costs.

It's worth reminding yourself that Water Reform is necessary because we don't have enough water pipes and the ones we do have are breaking and leaking and we need money to fix them.  It doesn't matter if that money is $130 billion as Labour says, or $100 billion, or $50 billion.  It's money that Councils don't have and to get it we're all going to have to pay more. Either through sky rocketing rates or massive new water charges.

National doesn't address that.  Nor does Labour.  So I guess I'm voting for no-one this year.

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It's been a week since I was on the radio.

It's been one of the worst weeks in New Zealand as Cyclone Gabrielle did its worst in areas that were not expecting it.

There's much to talk about the present but talk has started about the future.

To fix our battered country up is going to take a lot of money. 13 billion was Grant Robertson's first forecast.

Where do we find that? Over summer I was bailed up by a grandfather who felt for his grandchildren who were being lumbered with a crippling debt because of this bloody socialist government.

I said the debt is not that bad in reality. This weekend Stephen Toplis the BNZ economist talked about our current debt to GDP target of 21.4%. Currently we're about 30 percent.

Now to give you some context on that debt. Japan tops the list at over 250% debt to GDP, The United States is around 120%, Canada 110%, the UK at 100%.  Now sure, these are not levels to aspire to. So let's look at our brothers Australia. They're on 36%.

My point is that we're not the macro financial basketcase that many make us out to be because they just hate a left wing government.

I don't care what the government's colour is. I just care about the numbers.

So Stephen Toplis says if we move the debt target from 20.4 to 27 percent then that's 20 billion we can borrow without any impact on our debt rating.

The numbers say we can do this. So take heart.

But it's important that we rebuild better.

Take the Redclyffe substation that serves Napier.

Even at a casual glance it looks vulnerable. Built by the sea, by a river, and on a flood plain.

The substation was designed in 1927 and refurbished in the 1970s and was designed to withstand a “one in 100 year” flood.

Now first it's important to understand 1 in 100 year floods.  What that actually means is that they have a 1 per cent chance of flooding in any given year. It's an international standard thought to be a fair balance between protecting the public and overly stringent regulation. With over 300 days in the year it's possible to have 1 in 100 year floods 3 times

In fact if you know anything about statistics and the concept of annual exceedance probability you'll know that the real probability is that there'll be a flood every 20 years. Water experts have debated forever the wisdom of saying a 1 in 100 year flood when what they're really saying is a 1 in 20 year flood on average.  It gives false security

This substation has had plenty of opportunity to be made more resilient but we didn't because we're cheap.

The Napier expressway could have been raised higher over its flood plain but it wasn't.

Our cellphone network can be made more resilient but it hasn't been.

It's time to stop doing only enough to get by until tomorrow because it will only become more expensive the longer we leave it.

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Philip Duncan from WeatherWatch joined Andrew Dickens to give an update on Cyclone Gabrielle and the current weather around the country.

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There is so much to unpack from the great Auckland anniversary weekend flood and organisational screw up that I’m just going to detail a few points.

Firstly that the storm was unexpected and unforecasted. Well, it was and it wasn’t. All Spring we were told that La Nina was into its third successive cycle. The implication of that was a very warm, wet, and windy summer. Well that sure came true.

Some have immediately jumped onto the storm as evidence of climate change. Except this weather cycle was already predicted and has happened many times before. Climate change may be adding to the impact of La Nina, but that’s a very difficult calculation to make and certainly not one that should be barked at local body politicians hours after the event.

Forecasters knew it would be a significant event, but not quite as significant as it turned out to be. That said, the fact that we sent 40,000 Elton John fans out into the eye of that storm and the concert was not cancelled until 15 minutes before showtime is still inexplicable to me.

An earlier declaration of a state of emergency might have prevented the exodus of innocents into harm’s way.

So, the state of emergency was not declared until 9.30 and then made public at 10.18pm at night. The Mayor explains that this was when the emergency services officially informed him that they were overwhelmed. This is all technically correct but it lacks basic common sense.

It's not what the Mayor and his advisors got wrong. What was lacking was leadership and communication. Proactive leadership from a mayor and emergency staff. Geeing us up. Helping the spread of information.

Auckland Emergency Management issued no social media alerts for four hours between about 6pm and 10pm. I find that incomprehensible. But also incomprehensible is that the Mayor didn't recognise the problem and kick them into action. Not for the first time, Mr Fixit didn't know what to do to fixit.

Wayne Brown doesn’t get it but others do. Thank God.  

Councillor Richard Hills was brilliant on twitter. Praised by Mt Albert MP Jacinda Ardern on Saturday for his compilation of info. Councillor Desley Simpson was the real Mayor on Facebook and posted all night long.

Marcus Lush’s programme stopped my son going down an on ramp closed by a fallen tree with just minutes to spare

From the Mayor’s office we got no advice on how to cope all Friday evening. We got one picture of him signing a piece of paper and that’s it.

And that was symbolic arse covering. Look I did something. The next morning he was sniffy about twitter versus official channels. Well, Twitter saved my family mate. Welcome to 2023.

Mayor Brown's performance is part of the pantomime of leadership amongst the politicians we see these days, which views the pursuit of political power as some sort of theatresport, rather than a competition of valid and workable ideas.

We saw examples all week long. Jacinda Ardern steps aside for Chris Hipkins and suddenly we think that the Labour Party has essentially changed?

Nicola Willis saying raising the minimum wage by a few cents would be inflationary after spending last year claiming a tax cut for the rich would not be.

It’s time to remember: many of these politicians aren’t leaders, they’re politicians. They'll say anything to keep power and popularity.

They’re people who don’t get that government is different than business because you have to worry about everything and everyone all the time and not just your mates.

And it appears that many of them really don’t care for what Christopher Luxon charmingly calls the bottom feeders.

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