I’ve spent the last few days wondering if I’d been transported to an alternative universe. Everything seems topsy turvy. Some things were normal.
The Crusaders were still dominating and moving towards a title just as they have done now for near enough 20 years. I read a report that said that the Crusaders are 20 per cent better than any other team in the competition and another comment on social media that the Crusaders are the best sporting club in the world.  I’d agree with both of those statements.
The Warriors were losing a game they should have won. Their form was topsy turvy again but that’s not topsy turvy at all - that’s 100 per cent normal. And then there was the news that Joseph Parker had been put down and lost gallantly.  Again that didn’t surprise me.  I saw a comment that Joe is a talented but polite boxer who was shocked at Whyte’s brawling. Joe talks about unleashing the mongrel but the problem is there’s no mongrel in him.
So so far transmission as normal. But then there was this headline from Liam Dann: Trump farm policy is pure socialism.
He’s exaggerating a bit but not wrong. This week President Trump unveiled US$12 billion worth of farm subsidies. And to give the farmers the subsidy he’s using taxpayer money to buy milk, soy beans, pork and grain directly from farmers at a guaranteed price.
Sound familiar? Soviet or Chinese style command economy, the government distorting the market, fixing the price. While he claims the idea is only temporary over the trade war it has infuriated many Republicans who claim this takes the States straight back to 1929. It’s proof that Mr Trump is not all that most expect. Including his friends.
And then I woke up this morning in an alternate universe. Mike Hosking’s lead interview was Sir John Key on the global economy. Meanwhile the actual leader of the National Party, Simon Bridges, was arguing for an education policy of smaller class sizes that the National Party actively argued against a few short years ago? Fresh from his first National party conference Mr Bridges wasn’t even on the breakfast show. Kerre interviewed him at 9am.
This was all a bit weird. Simon Bridges has been on what I call party paternity leave. For 70 days he’s been trooping around the country meeting the people, mostly National Party people. While that is admirable he’s been notably absent from the countrywide conversations, at the same time the prime Minister has been away on maternity leave.
Actually Mr Bridges has been away longer.  I tweeted this and National MP Chris Penk got all up in arms saying that Mr Bridges has done 66 public meetings and been in parliament so don’t call it leave. That’s true but that ignores that politics is perception.
After 70 days doing his tour Simon Bridges came back into the national limelight this weekend. He chose to promote a policy that his party fought to not put in place when they were in power. He missed the sitter in business confidence, he left that to the Sir John Key, who got the headlines and the respect. Who’s running this show?
It was very telling that Mike’s first text this morning said 'Bring back John Key', Simon Bridges and the National Party brains trust just blew it, it’s Politics 101.

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Entertainment reporter Karl Puschmann joins Andrew Dickens to discuss the next big TV reboot in the works.

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To end the week some points.
If you were listening yesterday at 3.30 pm I exploded that the bid to have a concert at Eden Park was over.  It was another example of long term dithering over public assets by local and central governments that blight our public policy.
10 years ago tax payers money was sunk into a facility for the Rugby World Cup.  $250 million worth.  The ratepayers of Auckland also had to pony up.  And for all the money we spent we have a venue too small for cricket, too big for league and club rugby, and not available at all for any other events.  In other words unfit for purpose. Rip the thing down and build something that works.
The minority that prevented the concert could also prevent the Indian cricket tour at Eden park.  Because of time differences the Indians would like the day night games to start an hour later so their fans can watch their team on telly. To do that needs a resource consent. We’ve just seen how well that went and how much that costs.
The point is why did the government and the council fund a white elephant. Particularly the government.
Then there’s the news that the City Rail Link is too small and so hundreds of millions of extra dollars have to be pumped into the tunnels to make them bigger. They should have been future proofed in the future.  It’s not that the future wasn’t seen it’s just that the future is happening sooner than expected.  So who was too cheap to underfund a 100 year asset in the first place.  The government and the council
It’s just like the Harbour bridge scenario. 
There’s a whole lot of whingers with little vision who hamstring ideas for a false economy and they’ve cost us billions through the years.  Shame on them all.  Particularly the various governments who have wasted taxpayers money on petty politics.
Now the National Party annual conference is this weekend and it welcomes back it’s leader Simon Bridges who’s been on a 70-day road trip meeting the peeps. In the paper this morning he says he’s a work in progress.  That’s fair enough but every time a real leader has arrived they tend to arrive fully formed and ready to go.  A week is a long time in politics so 70 days was an eternity. Simon better be ready to rock.  Because while he’s been away Mark Mitchell has been impressing on the Mike Hosking breakfast show.  National is starting to have the creeping irrelevance that Labour suffered in the Goff/Shearer/Cunliffe days.
And finally good luck to Joseph Parker for his fight with Dillian White.  There’s no doubting Joe has got something but it’s time to see it in action.  Lose this one and it’s a slippery slope to retirement and owning a suburban gym and thinking I could have been.

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Eden Park has been forced to withdraw from holding the "Million Babies" LifePod Appeal concert.
The Eden Park Trust announced this afternoon that due to time constraints and the prospect of substantial Environment Court costs, it has been forced to cancel the concert, planned for Waitangi Day.
At the start of the week, the Trust's lawyers advised that the process to obtain a consent for the concert was likely to stretch beyond October and cost in excess of $750,000, not including The Trust's legal costs.
Trustees then had a meeting and concluded that it is not viable for the stadium to continue with its application due to the likely costs and timeframe for court proceedings.
The Trust hoped it could work with the minority who objected to reach an agreement for this one-off worthy event. This would have avoided the Environment Court process but unfortunately, that was not to be the case.
Chief Executive Nick Sautner said, "Although we respect the process in place, to bring events like concerts to our stadium we also have to work in with promoters' lead times which include confirming the venue as well as securing ticket on-sale dates."
"Unfortunately this time it was unworkable but we now look to the future to ensure this half a billion dollar asset can host unique and memorable events for the city."
Plans for the Live Aid-style concert were announced by Sir Ray Avery, a former New Zealander of the Year, in the hopes of raising money in an effort to help save babies around the world.
Avery wants to build enough LifePod incubators to save a million babies and the concert was the first step in raising the $4 million needed to make 2000 pods.
Hundreds of people made submissions on whether the concert should be allowed to go ahead, with some local residents posting strong criticism, most notably former Prime Minister Helen Clark.
The trust's application for the Million Babies event, lodged on June 6, said noise levels during the concert, between 7pm and 10.30pm on Waitangi Day, could exceed 75 decibels for about 30 houses west of Sandringham Rd and 80 decibels for another small group of houses near the northwest corner of the park.
Consultation with the community included making its environmental planners, traffic, acoustic and lighting specialists available to address any concerns as well as bringing locals together through stadium tours, a 'Friday Family Fish 'n' Chips' evening and other events to inspire open conversation and share the recent independent research.
LISTEN ABOVE AS ANDREW DICKENS SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE EDEN PARK CHARITY CONCERT BEING CANCELLED

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So here we go again.
The nurses are now voting on the fifth offer from DHB’s in what is becoming a long-running saga.
There’s no real new money in the latest offer other than further addressing the issue of safer staffing, and it brings forward a new top salary step for senior nurses.
The union, the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, is suggesting once again that nurses accept the offer. They say the nurses now have some concrete mechanisms to address the main issuess and they want to crack on putting some money in the nurse’s pockets and implement the positive stuff.
So will they go for it? Who knows? Certainly, there are some nurses who are staying staunch.
Comments made overnight on a Facebook group for nurses are overwhelmingly negative about the offer. The page is run by registered nurse, Danni Wilkinson, who spoke with Mike Hosking this morning.
She thinks the union negotiators are over it and have lost the will to fight. She says they should be going back to DHBs and saying okay 15 percent is catch-up and we need 1500 more nurses and that should be the bottom line. She also claims that public support is still strong.
Which it is and it isn’t. This is a highly anecdotal story about a coffee I had with an acquaintance two days ago. We were talking about the nurses. She’d recently had an operation and she said the care was amazing. She was also surprised at the number of immigrant nurses and how many of them were doctors in their own country, forced to nurse because their qualifications were not transferable. They, therefore, gave her magnificent and knowledgeable care.
So my acquaintance said the nurses deserve more money. I asked her if the government can afford it and she doubted it.
But then she told me something sad that I’ve been bracing myself for.
A friend of hers was scheduled for an operation on the day the nurses struck for the first time in a generation. He has pancreatic cancer. His operation was cancelled and rescheduled for two weeks later.
He’s just had the operation and they closed him back up without doing anything. In the fortnight, the cancer has spread too much. He was told to go home and prepare for the end. They gave him 18 months.
There was a long silence between us as we digested that. I asked if he blamed the nurses. Apparently, he doesn’t. As he had accepted the inevitable before the delay but there is regret that there are weeks and maybe months he will miss.
So now we wait for the vote and the possibility of another strike. It’s an online vote. We’ll find out next week. Another week of delay and stasis and no extra pay for nurses.
The thing is another strike might fray the nerves and the support if more stories like the man who missed the window for an operation because of the strike arise. This has already dragged on for a year and five offers. It sounds like the union negotiators are over it. It sounds like the DHB are set in their ways. It sounds to me like an increasingly entrenched stalemate.

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In the age of Spotify and Apple Music, it may seem hard to believe, but CD compilations are still going strong.
The UK edition of Now! That’s What I Call Music has released it’s 100th edition, 35 years after the first edition was released.
In honour of the album’s centenary, the latest version includes a series of greatest hits from the last four decades, with hits ranging from Red, Red Wine to Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
The former got a little on Andrew’s nerves when he learnt the news the other day.
LISTEN TO ANDREW'S TORTURE ABOVE

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Well, Tauranga’s Bella Vista debacle stumbles on with the Council announcing its plans to compensate the 21 property owners caught up in a schemozzle of a project.
And true to this story’s form, it’s got people up in arms.
At its essence, the council deal is the cost of the house they purchased about 3 years ago plus around $10,000 - that’s to cover expenses. You know, lawyers, engineers and the like.
The homeowners had already said they wanted market value and so this sort of deal was never going to make them happy. And of course, that’s the market value of a house that was actually worth anything, because the current market value of the Bella Vista development is approximately nothing, zilch, five-eighths of F.A.
And the $10,000 is a bit of a slap in the face because could you put a value on the homelessness of 2 years, the insecurity of whether your entire life savings have been destroyed, the fear that you owe a house load of money but have no house? 2 years of staying still. Actually no. 2 years of going backwards.
Some residents have already filed documents in the High Court against the council, seeking damages of $50,000 per property plus costs and damages and who would blame them.
From my point of view, the council failed miserably in its job. But the developer did too. No one from the council told him to buy that land or develop that land or do an entirely unsatisfactory job. He built unliveable homes.
Bella Vista Homes director Danny Cancian got my goat when he said the council never asked him to complete geotechnical reports that were required under its rules. That may be true but at the end of the day, Danny did not follow the rules in the first place. He was building the houses. The houses he built were condemned. And how much compensation is he paying? Well, nothing.
It’s a mess.
And as I heard some of the heartbroken homeowners this morning I also thought how much blame rests at New Zealand’s entire housing market and the continuing belief in the myth of the affordable family home.
These were half million dollar houses. The affordable home. And they got exactly what 500,000 buys you in Tauranga. Unliveable homes on unstable ground, facing South, living cheek by jowl. I have almost no doubt in my mind that if the foundations had worked we would have found that the buildings were leaking and mould ridden within months.
3 years later the affordable house in metropolitan areas is assessed by the government to be 650,000 dollars. 150 grand more. The government wants to build 10,000 a year of these and 100,000 in a decade. So here’s the question.
Do you have any confidence that the houses they’re building will be any better than the houses built at Bella Vista?

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LISTEN ABOVE AS PETER BURLING AND BLAIR TUKE SPEAK WITH ANDREW DICKENS
Peter Burling and Blair Tuke have confirmed their intention to try to win another gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games as well as being part of Emirates Team New Zealand's defence of the America's Cup.
Burling and Tuke dominated the 49er class in the last Olympic cycle, winning every major regatta after the 2012 Olympics, including four consecutive world titles and an Olympic gold in Rio 2016.
Since Rio they have dedicated themselves to helping Team NZ win the 35th America's Cup in 2017 and more recently completed the 2017/18 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race.
The pair have made no secret that another Olympic campaign was high on their agenda but wanted to wait until the Volvo Ocean Race had concluded to reset goals with their core team.
Burling and Tuke will once again work closely with Hamish Willcox and David Slyfield to try to win another Olympic gold medal in 2020.
"It's not a decision we made lightly" said Tuke. "Representing your country at Olympic level is the highest honour and we are both incredibly focused on defending the Cup for New Zealand as part of Emirates Team New Zealand. We wanted to ensure we could give both campaigns everything we've got."
Burling added: "We know the combination of Olympic and America's Cup sailing complement each other. It creates a really high-performance environment across all areas of sailing for us to push ourselves and be at the top of our game."
The duo has the support of Team NZ and Yachting New Zealand.
"It's great to have them back in the 49er," Yachting New Zealand high performance director Ian Stewart said. "They are special sailors and will strengthen our goal of winning at least three medals in Tokyo but, more than that, their experience and leadership will have a massive impact on the ongoing development of the NZL Sailing Team."
Team NZ COO Kevin Shoebridge continued: "We are happy to have Peter and Blair back as part of the team dedicated to the defence of the America's Cup. Once again, we're fully supportive of them integrating the Olympic 49er campaign with America's Cup commitments.



"Collectively we are an incredibly strong and talented team that is focused on defending the America's Cup and that allows our core sailing team including Peter, Blair as well as Andy Maloney and Josh Junior to remain in peak sailing condition running parallel Olympic campaigns."

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Another day and another survey commissioned by a player with skin in the game. Today it’s cannabis law reform
Yesterday we had a survey on hardship commissioned by the Salvation Army.  Because of the method of the survey, it was an opt in on a website offering financial rewards, it was easy to doubt it and I think it actually rebounded of the Sallies. Too many people said that the survey was exaggerating the hardship, which meant that those people also ended out minimising the extent of hardship in New Zealand and on reflection, I was not proud to be one of those.
So today, the headline reads “Support for legalising cannabis getting higher - NZ Drug Foundation”
Well, it was never going to read that support was decreasing was it? Given the interests of the commissioner of the survey. Too much skin in the game for anyone to believe that the survey was objective.   The results were released in a press release from the NZ Drug Foundation.  Now if they wanted more currency I would have given the results to other parties to see their analysis.  But that’s not the way the game works
So the the survey  found 35 percent of people want cannabis to be legalised and 32 percent are in favour of decriminalisation.  The combined number of 67 percent in favour of legalisation or decriminalisation is two percent higher than the 2017 result of 65 percent.
Now remember that headline.  Support for legalising cannabis getting higher.  Strictly speaking two per cent is higher.  But it’s also less than the margin of error which was 3.2%
So while it is true that two thirds of those surveyed would like to see a change in our cannabis laws, I wouldn’t go round trumpeting that support is growing.
So what do I make of it? I think everyone’s pretty well made up their mind. We’ve batted this around for long enough the whole thing is a Groundhog Day debate.  I haven’t heard a new angle on the debate in years.  So what should we do?
As he continues to show the Acting Prime Minister is pretty good at the job.  This morning he said let’s just have a referendum.  Don’t let the politicians decide for you he said this morning. And I agree. The talking is over, we’re going around in circles.  Let’s do some voting.
Winston Peters wasn’t the only one talking some sense this morning on the radio.  There was the uni tax professor when asked what to do about dairy robberies because ciggies have got so expensive he said make supermarkets sell them.  When told that the dairies may then go broke he said dairy owners just have to make themselves as secure as supermarkets. He also mentioned selling cigarettes in pharmacies. It seemed so easy and logical.
What do I think? No more tax.  We’ve hit peak ciggy tax.  Stick them in supermarkets and pharmacies alongside cessation practices and maybe vapes.  Honestly, that will put even more off than a tax hike.  And I know.  5 weeks ago I told you I’m a smoker and I was going to stop using willpower and vaping because the whole thing was too expensive and I was getting too old for the game.  I’m now 5 weeks clean and not tempted by the foul things at all.
Trust me because on this issue, unlike the drug foundation and the Salvation Army, I no longer have skin in the game

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Another winter’s day Monday and another litany of claims that the country is going to hell in a hand cart. Firstly today the Salvation Army launched it’s winter appeal by releasing a survey.
The first I knew of it was when I was Television One’s breakfast panel this morning. There the survey was headlined like this. “Shocking new Salvation Army survey finds nearly half of New Zealanders have gone without heating, 37 percent have skipped a meal as winter costs bite”
Now to be honest I don’t know where the shocking part of the headline came from mainly because I think we’ve all been there.
For instance. In my house we have strict rules about heating. It’s on for one hour in the morning and two hours at night and if you get cold go get a puffer jacket. We have slowly been replacing the insulation in our house. Actually to be honest we’ve been installing it because as we found out a few years ago our 100 year old house had not one fibre of insulation.
My bedroom is not insulated. This morning at 7am it was 7 degrees Celsius. We counter that with a good duvet and a quick dash to the kitchen each morning.  So we go without heating but because we choose to. We could overheat the house if we want to but choose not to.
This is not to discredit the survey’s findings but like all things they need a closer look especially as it is released on a day the charity is seeking to raise money. So the survey was done by Pure Profile. Here’s what they say on their website.
“Since 2000, more than a million people have chosen to join Pureprofile to share their opinions and unlock the true value of their data. They answer questions via our mobile and web apps to build a secure asset from their information and in return receive personalised content, insights and financial rewards.”
So it was an opt in with financial rewards.
What I can say is that some people are poor, some people can’t afford their heating costs, some people also skip meals. Some people also can’t afford to heat their house because they want it at 22 degrees 24 hours a day. But the figures are designed to be disturbing for maximum impact.
I thought the same as the litany of business confidence results came out and a number of chambers of commerce blamed the government for sinking confidence levels. One common complaint is that the government is getting rid of the 90 day trial. Which is not entirely correct.
They’re taking it away from companies with more than 20 people. The common complaint that the loss of the 90 day trial will hit small businesses is just not true. And the legislation doing it is still well away. Just a little bit of fake news going round.
It’s similar to the whole Russians rigged the election debate. While intelligence agencies and the President have admitted that the Russians have meddled in the information flow around the election, no-one has ever suggested that a Russian ever cast a vote.
As far as we can tell so far every vote for Trump was an American vote. Words like rigged or hacked do not mean the same as meddled.
The world is full of people using language that flatters them the most. Just be aware of it and realise that fake news is not a new invention and it’s used by everyone with something to sell.

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