Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. Welcome along to this month's episode of Dispatches with Dewa. Don't forget, if you enjoy this free to air episode and you want to hear part two, go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a patron with $5 or more per month. And you will get to hear Monday's patrons only episode. If you become a five dollar monthly patron, then you also get access to our daily, that's right, every single day, Monday to Friday daily episode of the Dispatches podcast where we engage with current affairs and cultural issues. So if that's something that you're interested in, make sure you go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a five dollar monthly patron. In the meantime, enjoy this free to air episode of Dispatches with Dewa.
Welcome to Dispatches with Dewa, the monthly episode of the Dispatchers podcast where we talk with political commentator Dewa de Boer about exactly what is going on in the world of New Zealand politics. And we discuss and dissect everything that's trending globally as well. Dewa de Boer is a political commentator who runs conservative think tank right minds New Zealand. He also writes a column for the BFD and he has a Friday morning radio show on reality czech radio. He advocates for a return to tradition, is optimistic about the future, and he lives in Auckland with his wife and their three kids. So without any further ado, let's get into this episode of Dispatches with Dewa.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Run out loud, better run on, run all day till you can be found. Run out loud.
Keep on running till the sun goes down.
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Dewa. Welcome back. Another month, another episode. And before we go any further, I have to say happy anniversary to you and your lovely wife.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Well, thank you very much. Ten years, it just flies by like it's absolutely nothing. And I believe you're having an anniversary this week as well. All right.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we're pre recording on Monday night. On Wednesday, it's our 20 year wedding anniversary. So yeah. Gosh, it's amazing to think 20 years under the belt, even ten years was a big milestone. Here we are at 20. So, man, time is ticking by. Tell me what's happening with RCR. You back on air?
[00:02:26] Speaker C: That's right, we are back on air. Started last Tuesday with the breakfast show Paul Brennan. Good as always. And my show was on Friday, 10:00 a.m. And I've got another one coming up this Friday at 10:00 a.m.. I hope, you know, I've got to, like, pull all the guests back together, get all the lines of communication started up again. So lots of busy work, but RCR is back. We've got enough funding to keep going for a good long while. The plan that was up on the RCR website where we were down is going to be, I guess, carried out step by step. And there's a great plan for the management there to make sure we're fully funded, fully operational for. Commercially viable for the next. Well, forever. For the next forever.
There are new features coming as well. I believe it's going to take a little while to get up and running, but there's the talk back functionality that people have asked for since the beginning. That's quite a big undertaking and I believe they're going to start including that in the breakfast show in the near future.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Oh, that is awesome. It's so good to have it back on air and it's great, I think, that independent venture, having people in that space who bring something different and, yeah, it is. Gosh, it's just great to have you back on air. One of the other things tonight, I should say, folks, is we're going to be really strict with the time. Finally, it's taken a few episodes, but I've actually set a timer and we're going to be really strict about this. We're going to have two solid 40 minutes episodes. So if you're a patron, you'll hear both. If you're not a patron, that's a good reason to become a five dollar monthly patron and you'll get access to the second episode as well. But we are going to stick to that time. I'm going to make sure that in honor of your 10th wedding anniversary, Dewa, that we don't go to long and I don't take you away from your lovely wife and family too long. So let's just jump straight into it. Winston Peters bathroom bill has made headlines, sort of. You think this would be bigger? I'd love to hear your take on this. Basically, it's a bill requiring, right, that any new buildings, they have to have both male, female and a unisex option. You can't actually have totally unisex spaces, I think, with shared cubicles. Right.
[00:04:33] Speaker C: One of the reasons maybe it hasn't got as much attention as you think it would get is because people can count the votes and see that it's sort of destined to fail. Like if it gets picked out of the biscuit tin, there aren't enough votes in parliament to pass it because you can safely say all the opposition parties will vote against it and then all you need is a handful of ACT MP's and National MP's to say, no, thanks.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Does that create a problem? Because this is what I was wondering. This potentially is the first bill they've actually had where there will be a genuine challenge to the liberal wing of the National Party, where they'll have to actually stump up. And potentially by voting against it, it seems to me they would put themselves offside with the ordinary mainstream silent majority of New Zealanders. Or do you see it differently?
[00:05:23] Speaker C: That could be a good play for New Zealand First. I can imagine the ACT Party is going to vote against it anyway. They'll make some claim about business freedom.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Oh, of course, yeah.
[00:05:34] Speaker C: Yeah. So the National Party could in its entirety vote for it and still have it fail. But then again, the liberal wing, I think, is not going to vote would. It's not going to vote for it. So I would see a split vote from the National Party on this, which is ammunition for New Zealand First, I think. So I don't see it causing rifts in the coalition, like it's. But if it gets picked. And again, it hasn't been picked up yet, but if it gets picked up, to me, it does very much look like New Zealand first can use it as ammunition against the liberal wing of the National Party.
However, some kind of conservative arguments could be made against the bill itself. I was looking at it thinking, oh, you're required to build three types of bathrooms. Like, you're required to build unisex bathrooms, basically, if you're putting up a new public or publicly accessible building. And I don't know, do I want to put unisex bathrooms in the public building if I'm having, like, male female bathrooms, which you would probably prefer to do.
Yeah. I don't fully understand the intricacies of the bill, but I could see once you get into the nitty gritty and looking at all the details, it could. And you could make a very good case against the bill saying, hey, it's not very helpful. And actually had the pastor's wife at church say she was a little bit worried, you know, she heard about it. I had to tell her, don't worry, it's not going to pass. But she was worried. She said, if I have to take one of my kids into, like, the bathroom, have to go into the men's bathroom to supervise my young children or sons, they then will I get fined because I'm in the men's bathroom? Yeah, that kind of situation. So it comes across as very unwieldy, unpractical thing. Unless, of course, I haven't looked at the fine detail because it seems to me like the bill is designed to fail.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Well, it's kind of an interesting one, isn't it? It's almost like can you solve liberalism and the sort of managerial liberal estate that we sort of find ourselves living under, laboring under. Can you actually solve that with more of the same? And I don't think you can in one sense. But at the same time what it also does is I guess it keeps that issue alive in a sense and challenges the prevailing ideology to actually at the very least justify its own sort of tyrannical imposition upon our public spaces. But hopefully you'd think it might actually moving forward. I mean, I think the potential here for New Zealand first is to certainly keep the voter share going into the next election and maybe even pick up a bit more. If the voters do get disenfranchised with national in general, maybe they will really start looking in numbers to other parties to satisfy their needs as things get a bit more divided in our culture.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: Absolutely. A very good move from New Zealand first to just focus on this issue even if they can get wins, even if the, the, you know, the thing, the proposals they're putting forward aren't ideal.
Keeping this alive issue, keeping, you know, hammering, hammering down on it, trying to consolidate their vote in this area all very, very positive for them.
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Just before we came to air tonight to record, it's Monday night. We're recording, you're listening to this first episode on Friday morning. So obviously a bit of water could have passed under the bridge between now and then. But just as we were coming to air I saw the news that the Court of Appeal has overruled a previous court ruling whereby the minister for. Is it Arangatamariki? I'm not sure what.
[00:09:01] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's her ministry. Right. So her ministry portfolio. She was summons to appear before the Waitangi tribunal. They said, we are summonsing you to give account. We demand a sacrifice and come before us and give account of what you're, you know, why you are. Was it defunding? Wasn't it? Whatever the issue was, they wanted her to justify a government decision. She said, no, I'm not going to do that because I'm not accountable to you. I'm accountable to the New Zealand people.
You know, it's not your role to do this. And then they took the case to court. The Crown lawyers argued their case, and they won. And then it went to the Court of Appeal. And now the Waitangi tribunal has won. But it's kind of a Clayton's victory because the ruling from the Court of appeal, the report and concern in particular that it was concerning, has already been published by the Waitangi tribunal. So they said, look, she can't be summonsed to appear now because you've actually completed the report process anyway. But I guess it creates a precedent. And I gotta say, I'm a little bit concerned about what this precedent actually means. Do we now have an extra arm of governance in New Zealand that we never actually agreed to as a people?
[00:10:12] Speaker C: The specifics here that they were publishing, they were reporting to was actually a government policy, government commitment, a promise to repeal one of the sections of the Orangutamariki act that had to do with placing placement of children. So they basically were uplifting children from european. You know, they were placing Mori children in, say, you know, with european parents and saying, oh, your culture is inappropriate. The children need to have their own culture. They need to have their Mori culture available to them, whatever. And so they would then relocate those children to mori families or so on. So it was basically a core part of policies that both act and New Zealand first have to get rid of, basically, racial prescriptions in legislation. And that's what the Waitangi tribunals said about.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: So I was wrong. It's not a funding issue. It's that particular issue there. And that's the specific point of debate.
[00:11:11] Speaker C: Exactly. And this is, I think, the specific clauses referred to as like a cultural requirement or cultural preference clause, something, some technical term was being applied there. And the Waitangi tribunal actually, in New Zealand, law is actually part of the judiciary, basically. And it is like a commission of inquiry. And a commission of inquiry in New Zealand, law does have the ability to summon people, to appear, to give testimony. So they do have that power to actually summon people for specific purposes. The problem is the Waitangi tribunal legislation specifically says if a matter is before parliament, it's not under the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Obviously, when they put it up, created the tribunal, they wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to interfere with legislation. And the tribunal has now basically said, come up with this brilliant idea that's going to backfire on them, to say, oh, great, let's investigate policies before they get to parliament, which the Court of Appeal I believe is technically correct in its ruling, to say, well, yes, the tribunal does have the power to make summons because it is allowed to make summons.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: It's an investigatory body, right?
[00:12:25] Speaker C: It's able to investigate.
Its job is basically to summon people. But normally it wouldn't summon ministers because ministers would voluntarily comply and so on.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: This is the first time this has ever happened.
[00:12:35] Speaker C: Hasn't a minister being summoned, being summoned like this? Because in the past, ministers have given testimony, you know, voluntarily. They have never been summoned. And that that's what's created the problem here. And obviously that if, say, that they were investigating after some legislation had been passed, I guess the minister might be more happy to voluntarily appear. But in this case, she has basically said, like, it's not the. It's legislation we're going to put before parliament. Why am I being summoned to a court? And it's a fair complaint to make. And people are rightly upset because this is basically the judiciary meddling in the affairs of parliament and using a loophole to do it by investigating matters before they get to parliament, because as soon as it gets to parliament, they're legally not allowed to interfere with it. So it's a political action by the judiciary that's technically legal but is very, very bad news for New Zealand.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Well, it's pretty serious, too, isn't it? Right. Because the potential going forward is that you have MP's who actually become fearful of being called before a tribunal just for doing the basics of their job. And especially if you're a new Greenhorn MP. I mean, we're talking about a fresh government here and a fresh set of MP's. And I don't imagine it would be a particularly peaceful thing to be told. Right. You've got to go and appear before this tribunal over something you're doing in your nine to five day job. You know, it just seems to me that there's real potential for abuses here.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. That's why I see this as just a really bad move for the tribunal, because it does give the government more ammunition to rein in the Waitangi tribunal here, which very many ministers are seemingly itching to do. They want an excuse to go after the tribunal. Now they've got it. So we'll see if they make the most of it, because this does seem like the perfect case where either or perhaps at a very minimum, the tribunal could be amended further to say, hey, if it's in a. You're not allowed to investigate the manifestos of political parties.
That's absurd.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: This is the managerial state, folks, we should say in action, where you realize pretty quickly the power doesn't lie with the.
That's the throne. Not that I was gonna say crown and throne together. It doesn't lie with either the crown or with the. With the person who wears the crown or who sits on the throne. It lies with the people who sit the power behind the throne, and that is the bureaucratic managerial class. And, yeah, gosh, they are flexing their muscle here.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Debbie tell you, tucky. Alrighty, folks. So that theme song, dewa, that means, speaking of government, it's time to ask the big question. How the heck is this coalition tracking? What does your glorious automated, manually entered data tracker have to tell us now about the state of government at the moment? The political tracker.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: Thanks for pointing out. The automated tracker involves all the manual input from me.
Put the dates into spreadsheets.
A lot of the work at the moment is a little bit easier because I can just go through the press releases from the beehive, which is nice and straightforward, because then they sort of. You can see, okay, what does the government want me to know in terms of what it thinks it's accomplished that makes my life easier? But we've had a few changes. We're now up to 46 items delivered, up from 40 last month. So another six items ticked off. And we actually talked about some of those already. The woke sushi was one of the coalition commitments. So reducing, you know, saving money on school lunches, making truancy data available, and improving education through structured literacy, like phonics. The therapeutics bill is being repealed. I've marked that one off because they've basically introduced the bill to repeal it, or announced the introduction of the bill to repeal it. And this also means the bill basically stops taking effect right away, because on paper, it had required several regulatory bodies to be set up to go into effect from the last labor government, and that work will basically stop. So it'll never actually go into effect, and it'll be formally repealed later this year. But the therapeutics bill, if anyone is listening or is worried about that bill, you know, regulating private medicines and I guess, herbal remedies and things like that.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Health food stuff, right?
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So there was. It was quite potentially quite far reaching. And that's gone now, basically, with the announcement, it's dead. And those are the big, big changes, I guess, from then, we're now officially at 20% delivered on what I'm tracking. So one in every five items. And looking back over it now here, that's basically it. Most of the achievements were done in the education camp. I could quickly mention law and order. They increased funding for the Department of Corrections and potentially increasing prison capacity that was delivered this month as well.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: One thing that sort of is starting to stick out a little bit to me now is it feels like for the first time and well, gosh a long time, we are now dealing with a government where it's not simply business as usual. And what I mean by that is previously you have your labor, your progressive coalition, progressive government and they just go about engaging in their revolutionary policy changes. Then you have a national party that comes in and they just oversee the policy changes and don't do much repealing. If they do make changes, their policy direction is really purely around economic libertarianism, generally speaking, total free market, you know, look after the big business guys, look after the corporations, that kind of a thing. But what we're starting to see now, because we've got some of that going on for sure, but what we are also starting to see now is some actual shifting of the ideological and philosophical policy settings. Right? It's not simply around economic differences now this is actually starting to look more like there are some philosophical drivers at work here trying to actually say, hey, hold on, what the last government did was the wrong direction and we've actually got to change direction, not just say, oh, that was wrong, we wouldn't have done it and then do nothing about it. There's actually, it feels like there's something a bit more substantial happening this time.
[00:19:11] Speaker C: That's definitely the case with the, just going through all the things they've promised to do if they deliver. There's a very big change in direction for New Zealand, big changes in education, big changes in law and order, big changes in infrastructure projects. And I guess the way that the culture war as we were discussing before is being inserted into some of these coalition commitments by New Zealand first, all very, very promising because if we just had business as usual, say we had a national party government and it had a couple of hangers on Klingons with a confidence and supply agreement, blah blah blah, it would all just be business as usual, as you say. And the fact that we have this beautiful list of coalition commitments makes to me is a really big positive change for New Zealand, especially, I guess conservatives, more right wing people, not because we're being delivered a whole bunch of stuff, but because this shows us basically, hey, we can get a wish list in here if we keep voting.
If we keep voting and everything will be fixed. Not quite, but you can get big wins across the line every election cycle. It would be possible to push harder. I think that's very encouraging. To people on the more the right side of politics here.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Well, it's quite funny, really, isn't it? A lot of the left have been freaking out about, oh, the Trump style politics and the culture war. It's coming to New Zealand. Well, finally we're actually starting to see some genuine traction in that regard. And you're right, I think once people start to get a sense, a sniff in the air, hey, we can actually shift the dial a little bit here. We don't have to be sort of subservient and beholden to crazy revolutionaries and just constantly take a beating from them or watch the national party, you know, pause the beating for three years and then it resumes three or six or nine years after that. We can actually shift the dial. We can push things back. We can change direction here. I think it actually starts to breed confidence. Right. Leadership is a magnet. When things start to change, people realize, hey, you know what, we can actually do some stuff here. And that's a good thing, I think, for genuine conservatism or people who genuinely care about a post liberal order, it's not going to happen overnight and we're not utopianists. But definitely it does breed a bit of hope and probably excitement. Right?
[00:21:38] Speaker C: And there are many issues where, say, popular opinion sits one way across the western world. Like immigration is a good example. I saw a map of Europe today. Every single european country is like 70% to 90% of people say, lower immigration, please. And yet that's not allowed. You know, the democracy trade might. Democracy with a capital D won't deliver that policy even if, like, almost everybody wants it. And really there has to be a. Basically, yeah, people need the confidence to be able to see and vote for the politicians who are going to deliver it. At the end of the day, in the system that we have, that's the only way to get change, unless you plan to step outside the system altogether. And once you get a little bit of it, once people get a little taste of being able to punch back, as it were, then you know that we can have a snowball effect.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Alrighty. That was the political tracker for another month. Dee. What? We are powering ahead. This is great. I'm looking at the timer, it's counting down. But I'm confident we're going to get through these issues. As promised, folks, don't forget, this is the free to air episode. But if you're a patron, you get a second episode on Monday exclusively for our patrons only. To get access to that, go to patreon.com. Leftfootmedia become a five dollar monthly patron. The link is in today's show notes and you will get to hear part two of our conversation on Monday. Dee. Well, let's jump into some other issues, though. We had last week, something that I don't think I can ever recall ever experiencing in my life. I've lived in New Zealand almost 50 years now, priority of my life, and I have never experienced a sudden shock warning that if you don't actually turn off your lights tomorrow morning, we might have to shut off the grid. We're gonna have to move power around. We've got the ability to turn off people's water cylinders, and we might be forced to do that because we don't have enough power. Holy moly. The first thing I said to my wife was, this is eerily reminiscent of South Africa and what was going on even, what, five, six years ago, where they were moving power around the grid because things were just not being run well, this is kind of out of the blue, isn't it?
[00:23:59] Speaker C: First, to address South Africa, because I've interviewed people from South Africa very recently. This is not something that was happening years ago in South Africa. This happens today, every single day in South Africa. They have between eight and 12 hours of load shedding, which basically means they cut your power for eight to 12 hours a day in South Africa.
No, this is kind of not really what's happening in South Africa, thankfully.
And it was, I guess it was a. It was an unexpected cold snap. So to take the. I guess the more positive view of this is that it's not very often, like you mentioned, it's not very often that we get to the point where we are running out of power in New Zealand in our.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: But I would say, and can I push back on that?
[00:24:44] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Because I thought I was. That was my thinking initially. And then I read this morning, well, this afternoon in the paper, we're still not out of that danger zone. And I'm thinking, what? We're days later? And is this them desperately trying to convince us to keep saving power, or do we have something a bit more going on here that's a bit threatened then?
[00:25:03] Speaker C: It's strange because you think they've had a few days to bring extra capacity online and, you know, get things settled. So that's a little bit of a worry, because ideally you do want your grid to be at a point where you're not. You don't have tons of reserve power generating capacity. That's billions of dollars of assets sitting there, never being used. So you kind of want to be, you know, have the electricity market at such a point where you're every now and then bumping up near the top of what you can produce. Obviously we do have some big problems in new Zealand in terms of adding new supply. Seems to be very difficult.
The Greens very much opposed to generating more power, but we also have a strange push towards renewal. Was a green eco, you know, electric, electric vehicles and plug in.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Well, I was about to say that.
[00:25:53] Speaker C: As it takes a lot more power, so you want. You need to be running ahead of that. You need to be calculating, okay, how in the next ten years, in the next 20 years, in the next 50 years, how much is that going to cost? How much power are we going to need? Are we building that? And it doesn't seem clear that we are. And also we're importing more coal, you know, we're running out of natural gas. I saw Shane Jones was harping on about that. You know, he wanted to make sure that we had more of that available in New Zealand. And it is a little bit of a case of, I guess we've had a decade of neglect, a decade of a government that was very much opposed to more infrastructure and that's probably left us a little bit behind. I wouldn't say it's critical. I wouldn't start to freak out. I think it's probably, like I said, it's a bit of a wake up call.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: One thing it made me think of was a friend of mine who actually, up until very recently, up until last year, was actually living in the UK. And she is someone who very much would be. In fact, she did vote Ardern previously in a previous election, and she's someone who's very much in that, probably what you would call the more sort of urban lawyer type, that sort of set. And she said her experience was everyone in the UK, they were heading 100 miles an hour for EV vehicles and this, that and everything else. And then they had some issues with power shortages and all of a sudden people started shifting their purchasing habits back and people started talking more about petrol cars again. And it's very interesting how something like this can actually create a mentality shift. To me, this is a wake up call.
Everyone was warning, look, how the heck are we actually going to have the capacity for people to charge vehicles on the existing grid on top of all the other needs?
And also, as you've said and others have pointed out, this was Ardern's captain's call, wasn't it, to say, we're not going to explore natural gas options. We're not going to open up new gas fields, things like that.
[00:27:47] Speaker C: That's right, she did. And that's more on the extraction side. I'm not sure what happened. When it came to new Power projects. The big thing that they were wanting to build was the Lake Onslow Power pumped hydro, which is basically a super inefficient way where you kind of use electricity to pump water up the Hill.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[00:28:07] Speaker C: Like in those. And when you. When there's a lot of. I can't. I can't remember the maths on it, but it was. The idea was like, when power is cheap, you could pump it up the Hill and then when power's expensive, then you run it back down. But it just seems. It seems like there's a thousand better Ways, cheaper Ways to do that.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, this sounds like an irish white elephant, this. Yeah, this sounds like an irish power station. It doesn't sound like they've thought this.
[00:28:35] Speaker C: But that was genuinely the power, the big power scheme that the Ardern government had. They were going to pump water up the hill, I guess, in winter or whatever, and then they were going to run it down the hill to generate the money back.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: Oh, man. Well, something flowed down the hill and it wasn't water.
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting too, because it's also surely for some people, this has got to be a bit of a challenge to the green energy notion. Look, it would be lovely if you could somehow make this work, but we've got more power generating windmills than ever before. You know, you fly over or drive past the big fields just north of Wellington, everywhere they kind of visual pollution. Actually, we've got a lot more of these environmentally friendly options, but they clearly, they don't produce enough power. People have been warning about this, they just don't produce enough power to meet demand. And unless you're a nazi type green person who's going to say, well, you know, you'll be living in your house with no power on and you'll love it, and if not, you're a filthy heathen who hates the environment and mother earth is punishing you, then the reality is, I don't think this is the way out, is it?
[00:29:43] Speaker C: No. Unless you're planning to put solar panels on your home, that's the kind of thing that I would say. If you get an electric car, make sure you've got some solar panels looking to your own generation as well. Again, it's not the cheapest, most effective way to generate power at a small scale, but for personal backup, you know, for, if you, if you don't trust the grid and you want to avoid situations like we had this week, you know, making sure that you kind of can generate your own power, and then you can have your car battery that can act as a, as a, as a sink for your power. You can always switch things over so you could potentially run your house off your car in an emergency and things like that. So you, if you look into that, if you're a bit of a prepper, a doomsday prepper, and that's the kind of thing you want to do, there are options there for things that are electric. Otherwise you are quite vulnerable to situations like this. Unless, again, we don't know if the government is going to announce massive overcapacity, but usually, like I said right at the beginning, very expensive, very wasteful to have excessive amount of electricity generation sitting around that you never use.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Two other questions before we move on from this topic. Number one, can we play the blame game here? Because I know what we saw, saw on Twitter was the progressive side was saying, oh, look, this is the coalition of chaos. Look what they've done to us. They've already, it's only six months and we're in the dark, or about to be in the dark. And then on the flip side, you've got people saying, look at what the last government left us with. I kind of feel that it is, this is a last government issue. It feels to me.
[00:31:22] Speaker C: But what's your take when it comes to power generation? Those projects take years. So, yes, it could be a yes, the last government should have authorized some war. But power generation, I guess they did. In terms of windmills, nice, nice, beautiful windmills. I guess there just wasn't enough wind on that morning. You know, the polar vortex was not generating enough wind to keep the lights on.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: Well, it's a sweet spot, right? Because if you get too much, they've got to shut down as well because they can't operate in high winds either. Because it's not dangerous. It's too dangerous, I think.
[00:31:55] Speaker C: And, yeah, what we have, we have a few backup generators and things. Huntly is a good example. I mean, a little bit more of that might help. I think they must have turned everything on and it was enough in the end. People listened. That's the other option you've got, is that people listen to the warnings say, turn your, turn your lights off, and blah, blah, blah. And then the few rebels like me who turn all the heaters on instead, we get to enjoy the benefits because there's enough people who listen to the government and listen to the warnings to turn everything off.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it's funny, that was an interesting point for me about how people still actually do listen to authority. But I did wonder what happens if everyone charges up everything tonight? The power goes out early. But one last question on this. Do you think that maybe this little incident could be a bit of a wake up call for a few more Kiwis who maybe were sort of blissfully unaware? They sort of thought, no, no, it's all good. The last government was amazing and. Or they weren't that bad. Is this one of those moments where you go, what, we're about to have no power? Maybe they weren't quite as good as what I thought.
[00:33:01] Speaker C: Maybe they would have been more likely if the power had actually gone out. Like, we seem to have things under control at the moment.
It's hard to know if people think that far back, if they think that far ahead.
Yeah, it's always hard to. It's really hard to make a guess as to how events like this impact people. And depending on where they get their news from, they may just blame, like you said, they might just blame the coalition of chaos, they might blame this and that and the other thing, you know, they might blame all those rich, greedy people who have all their power on all the time and heaters, and I'm too poor to afford a heater, but they won't blame the previous government for that either. So who knows?
[00:33:42] Speaker A: Two other issues and, man, we are doing well. I'm looking at this clock. I'm really impressed, mate.
[00:33:46] Speaker C: This is great.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: We are just caning this. The Julie Ann Ginter incident with. I always want to say her name wrong. I always want to say Ghoulie angter, but it's Julien Genta. The incident with Matt Doocy, he's in parliament. I don't really care what was going on beforehand, but she crossed the floor and she carried on remonstrating with him.
Yeah, and finger pointing and kind of unheard of, as far as I'm aware. I'm sure it probably has happened before, but we just haven't had social media and livestream video of it. But how serious do you think this was?
[00:34:20] Speaker C: I was one of the few people to publicly defend Julianne Genter and say, you know, I'm with. I'm with Julianne Genter, someone who should be yelling at Matt Jucy every single day for the rest of his life.
And I did see there were a few kind of comedians I saw on Twitter who were making fun of Matt Ducey, saying that he was intimidated by Julian Genter and how emasculating that must have been. Say that you were intimate. You know, how I was intimidated by this woman who came up and yelled, you know, yelled at me. So it is a little bit, I think a little bit too much niceness going on in parliament. Like, oh, everyone has to be on this good behavior. You know, back in. Back in the day, you can read. You can read about. And I actually looked this up. It's not that long. I was like 2007, I think somebody actually got punched in the face in parliament.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:35:10] Speaker C: And they used to have brawls, actually, to this day, in eastern european parliaments, you can get news articles of brawls breaking out, like massive fistfights between government and opposition mp's back in the United States in the late 18 hundreds. I think one congressman actually got caned in Congress.
That's how bad things got. So I kind of like the idea of the politicians kind of fighting it out a little bit more. Obviously, people make comparisons, like workplace. Well, this is unacceptable in the workplace. I like to think parliament is a little bit more cutthroat and a little bit more, you know, it's the political difference in society that's kind of working itself out.
Should get a little bit more. Should get a little bit more heated, a little bit more feisty. In your face. Yeah.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know, I'm kind of in two minds about that. I kind of get that argument that people might. Well, you wouldn't have this in the workplace. But then I also think, well, if someone actually needed to be told in the workplace, you would never get physical. But to actually wander up to someone and say, look, mate, sort your garbage out, like back in the day, that's what would happen. If you're a tradie and you were an apprentice and they did something wrong, man, you knew you were going to get an airfall and they were going to stand in front of you with a manual and they're going to point to all the things that you got wrong. They weren't going to hold back. So, yeah, I don't know, it's definitely. Both sides made a bit of hay out of it, that's for sure. But it's fair to say this did create a bit of a controversy again for the Green party. This is Chloe's first major outing in an internal crisis of sorts. Even though they've got another one quietly brewing away in the background that she's probably quite happy is not getting the limelight. How did you rate Chloe's handling of it, where she came out and said, I'm not going to make excuses, as she made yet another round of excuses?
[00:37:02] Speaker C: Well, that's exactly what the Green party do and I think the media lets them get away with it as well. So how did she do? It's hard to know, hard to give an accurate assessment of how well she did because she gets let off easy by the media. She's the media darling. They ask her a few questions and then they let her go.
That's the end of it.
But the Green party is having a very bad time at the moment. They're doing okay in the polls for some reason. This just goes to show how bad Christopher Hipkins is because the Labour party vote was bleeding over to the Greens for a while and some of the polls have been swinging up and down. But the reason why the Greens are polling so high is because Hipkins is so bad. So even though the Greens have lost five or six mp's in six, I think six mp's in six months or something.
[00:37:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:48] Speaker C: I mean, that's just insane. That's madness. Any other party would be in the headlines every single day waiting for the next scalp and waiting for the next domino to fall. But with the Greens, you think about the fact that they are bleeding out mp's, they've got, they're bringing on, you know, number, I don't know, 16, 1718 on the list working their way down to some, you know, whatever washed up communist that they've dredged up from the other side of the world. Nobody knows who they are. And they're getting into parliament now quietly under the radar because all the, all the, you know, all the big names, bigger, I say big names but, you know, more well known higher ranking green mp's are just getting wiped out one at a time.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: Well, that's a really good point that you make. What happens next? Because potentially we could be in for some real fireworks ahead as the more firebrand, revolutionary lunatic types who never normally would stand a chance of actually getting into parliament. They are now in parliament and they have a bit of limelight and the potential to say and do crazy things. So I wouldn't be surprised if kind of like the australian Greens, they seem to be. The australian greens seem to be really out there and they're sort of known for crazy statements or acts and everything else. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a bit of that.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: Just having a quick look here now at the website, the latest guy who came on, because I was thinking, I'd seen this guy posting on social media for years. Crazy communist dude. His name is friend. I'm gonna give him a shout out. Francisco Hernandez.
Francisco Hernandez. And he's a filipino guy from, I don't know, somewhere down south. Yeah, he's crazy. The craziest communist ever on Twitter. He scrubbed his twitter like I thought, great. When I saw he got into palm. I'm going to check out his Twitter account because obviously after he didn't get in, he was very critical of like the Greens and the campaign and stuff because he didn't get in. And then he was ripping into all these people and now he's gone and often deleted his Twitter account. So that's a bit of a shame. But yeah, so they're getting all these wonderful people and who would never have made it and who would deliberately place low to keep them out of parliament and like, you know, give them a false hope that they're going to get somewhere and they all, you know, now they've got all these comrades coming in and it's going to be an interesting. It's going to be an interesting two and a half years.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it'll be lots of fun and drama at the coffee house.
Last issue before we end this episode. Don't forget, folks, if you want to hear round two, we go for a whole other episode after this. On Monday, you have to be a five dollar monthly patron. Patreon.com leftfootmedia the link is in the show notes the prime minister. We were going to talk about this last time, but we ran out of time. The prime minister has signalled that the government is actually going to crack down really hard, actually, on parents for the current low school attendance rates. And what we've got is that the figure that keeps cropping up is the fact that only 46% of students are regularly attending, according to the most commonly quoted data. Now, what that actually means in practice is a whole nother question, but certainly this does seem to be. Now, a lot of people are just very flippant about school attendance. So do you have any theories, first of all, about why, before we even get into the policy question, do you have any theories about why the attendance rate is like this now?
[00:40:59] Speaker C: So I'm not, I'm not too sure about the 46% figure. Like maybe that's like high attendance across the term. And they might, might say if you miss three days, you no longer count as the highest attendance.
So that could just be somebody gets sick for a few days in a term and they're out. So you have a little bit more of that in terms of parents keeping kids home when they get the sniffles, you know, the long consequences of COVID policy impacting society. Oh, Timmy's got the sniffles, better keep them home kind of situation. You even saw schools updating the guidelines saying, you know, hey, if your kids got the sniffles, it's okay to send them to school because they're not going to die. And like, you know, education is more important than worrying about the sniffles. So that was a big thing.
Attendance in, I guess, South Auckland, my in the hood, maybe a bit lower, just, you know, people checking out. Parents don't care.
Obviously the school curriculum is garbage as well. It doesn't help. So you've got, you've got a lot of those different bits and pieces going on. But you do have now attendance data being published by the government, so it's going to make a big difference.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:11] Speaker C: And I, like I had, I had the, I had the attendance window here somewhere so I could read it out. But I have done something with it. But it was like 80%, 80, 80% to 86% at the current term on the level that they wanted it at. Not sure what they.
What 86 attendance means and how many days you can miss to get 86%, but their target is like 90% and they're currently in the eighties for the metric that they're using. Like I said, I just lost the tab that I was going to read it out from. But that's. So the government is measuring it. It is something that's very transparent now for the first time ever.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Well, it must be the great conspiracy. Google doesn't want us to talk about it, but my theory before we get into the policy reaction to wrap everything up is that I think you're right. It's a combination of factors. I do think now, though, that what I have seen is even parents that probably, or certainly families, and in situations where previously they would have just said like, you gotta, you go to school, kids, there is an increasing sense of people just, they're looking at school and they're going, well, I've got often I've got teachers teaching errant ideologies. The curriculum, like you say, is just, it's a bit of a crapshoot at the moment whether my kid is actually going to get something of substance. Teachers often, you know, seem a bit ill disciplined themselves. There are good teachers there, but it does seem that it's also a lot of ill discipline within the industry itself. And you sort of just look at it and you think, well, and then on top of all of that, like, you say you've been indoctrinated to behave a certain way around illness. And then it's sort of like, I get the feeling that a lot of parents are just like, look, I think my child would learn more if they actually stayed home today. And we went, I don't know, fishing or we took off a day early to the family holiday up north to Wellington or whatever it is, you know, that in actual fact, that might be more beneficial. And can you really blame them? Because probably that could well be the case.
[00:44:05] Speaker C: I'm a big supporter of that in a sense of the flexibility that we have in New Zealand for parents to take their kids out of school and go and do something like, say, go on holiday a little bit earlier.
And this actually something that's illegal in other countries. And I'm hoping it doesn't end up like that in New Zealand because there is a kind of the crackdown on truancy and start finding parents if, if the kids aren't at school. The country I've got the most knowledge of here is the Netherlands, but I'm guessing there are many other countries like that. But it's basically illegal to take your kid out of school, even for one day. So if you want to go on that holiday one day early or whatever, that's actually illegal. And you can get fined like hundreds of euros for just like, have, you know, intentionally taking your kids out of school for even a day. There was a scandal years ago now with the king and the queen took their kids to the Olympic, the Winter Olympics in Canada. I'm not sure how long ago that was. But anyway, they took their kids to the Winter Olympics and they had to, like, make a public apology. And it was a big drama because the kids, the king, you know, the, the Crown princess, miss, missed three days of school and there was like a big controversy.
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:45:13] Speaker C: So I don't want that. I don't. That's just, that's insane. And I don't. There's no reason to have it. So.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Yeah, they had to euthanize one of their children. And as a punishment for.
Look, honestly, it's funny. I think some people, I do have to say, because this was the final question I have for you. Do you think that just cracking down on parents is actually a sound policy response to this? And I guess, should families have a right to take a more relaxed approach. Because my concern is people might well be about to discover just how tyrannical and certainly authoritarian the liberal state, so called liberal state can actually be when it wants to be, particularly when it sees ideological schooling and economic schooling effectively, you know, so that your child will be a good functioning part of the economy. When that's being interfered with. You've got two arms, if you like, the ideologues and the corporations sort of are not getting their, their pound of flesh from the schooling system. And that, you know, you don't want that coming at you.
[00:46:14] Speaker C: No, no, you don't. You want the schools to perform well. Like you should be measuring the outcomes of the schooling system as a whole. You know, what it's, are students passing and so on. It's far more important than is the attendance rate above a certain figure. But I guess they've sort of worked out like, okay, well, the high attendance rate is at least required for good outcomes at school. And the target I'm seeing here, I finally found out while you were talking. So the government has a target of 80% regular attendance in each term by 2030. To achieve this, we're advising schools that they need to aspire to reach an average daily attendance rate above 94%. So I'm looking here, they're publishing weekly data so I can look at last week's data to see how many students actually attended school across every single day across all the public schools. And I guess they're only on, I haven't checked if they're measuring private schools as well there, but, and they're currently at about 86%. Between 80 and 86%. Friday seem to be really bad, you know, dropping down below 80%. So it's interesting you're spell to see this. And I guess, yeah, the targets that they're looking at for their, for what they consider to be regular attendance. It could be that in cases of like, chronic truancy, where kids are disappearing from the school system, and it's because they're from low socioeconomic backgrounds and it's because the parents are, you know, there may be good opportunities for the, you know, to follow up there. But like I said, and like you've said, the concern is that this becomes a state overreach problem. This becomes the problem with the state starts dealing with technicalities and punishing people for doing things like, you know, for parents making decisions for their own children and saying, hey, actually it's okay if you miss some data school because we're going to go and do something else that's not what you want, but you do want to deal with parents who just don't care. So it's hard to strike that balance. But it's theoretically possible if it's done right, keeping the risks that the government, a government policy set up to achieve one aim may end up achieving an entirely different aim in ten years.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: I guess it all depends too, on a few factors, not least of which is how many mp's actually still want to take their own kids out of school early to avoid having to pay the exorbitant Air New Zealand fees by leaving a day early for school holidays and things like that. And I guess it's also one of those typical vagaries of liberalism where 1 minute it's not about family, it's about the individual. Next minute it is about the family. They sort of, they don't really support the family, but they put all the burden of responsibility on them in some areas. And so, yeah, it'd be interesting to see how this plays out. With that said, we have actually done pretty good. We've just gone over the 40 minutes mark, so we're doing okay. And we're going to wrap things up now. Before we do that though, and we wrap up this free to air episode DeWa how can people follow your work who are not patrons? Where do they find you?
[00:49:13] Speaker C: All of my older articles are published on rightminds NZ. I've got a Saturday morning column at the BFD and a Friday morning 10:00 a.m. To 01:00 p.m. Show on RCR. Tune in via the website or the app and that's most of it for now. In addition to this show here. And of course, if you just want to interact with me on a daily basis, I'm on Twitter at rightmindsnz and I'm also on Telegram eodeboer alrighty folks.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: Thanks again for tuning in. If you are a patron, you can stick around because you're about to hear another episode on Monday. You can hear part two. If you're not a patron and you want to hear part two, go to patreon.com forward slash left foot media and become a $5 monthly patron, less than the cost of a cup of coffee each month and you get access to the second patrons only episode. We've got lots of good issues to talk about in the second episode. Diva we're going to be talking about.
[00:50:06] Speaker C: Go sign up now. Go to patreon.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Patreon.com Fomo FoMO Trump court case the big rally for Trump over the weekend, we're going to talk about the israeli conflict and is this going to break America? The proposed invasion of Rafa, what does that mean? The Ukraine, that thing is starting to get out of control as well. And if we get time, we want to talk about a moment of, I guess, clear hypocrisy of liberalism, if you like, emanating from Australia. That does relate to New Zealand as well, but there's lots to talk about. But only patrons get access to that, so. Yeah. The link is in today's show notes. Don't forget, forget to become a $5 monthly patron. Thanks once again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth, and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the dispatches.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: When I was young? My daddy said? Gotta keep one eye opening your bed? Cause there's a time coming when the devil fingers stay prepared?
Cause if you don't run this town? They'll walk all over you?
Run out loud on? Keep on running till the sun goes down? Run out loud? It'll run on? Run all day till you can't be found? Run out loud? Gotta run on? Keep on running till the sun goes down?
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me?
