Daily review 30/01/2025

Written By: - Date published: 5:30 pm, January 30th, 2025 - 13 comments
Categories: Daily review - Tags:

Daily review is also your post.

This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).

Don’t forget to be kind to each other …

13 comments on “Daily review 30/01/2025 ”

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  2. Dennis Frank 2
    30 January 2025 at 6:26 pm

    Huh. Shane Jones, in Jenna Lynch's report on 3 News just now, calling Ricardo M-M a communist. Ricardo ought to dare him to repeat that outside parliament. Sue him for reputational damages if he does. To prove the fact, the court would need evidence of membership of a communist organisation. Does R have such membership? I doubt it.

    • SPC 2.1
      30 January 2025 at 6:39 pm

      Jones is an embarrassment to his party leader as Minister of Foreign Affairs and to the Prime Minister – who will not want in him in any post 2026 cabinet.

      Does he think he is a GOP member of Congress?

      The American right wing jingoism – military action in the continent puting the left wing Hispanics/Latinos in their place. The coup, the invasion, the threat of sanctions.

  3. Muttonbird 3
    30 January 2025 at 7:09 pm

    Peters is in the find out part of fuck around and find out:

    RNZ approached the Mexican embassy, which confirmed it was "following up this matter through diplomatic channels".

    A spokesperson for Peters – who is the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister – said that "on reflection" their comments could have been "expressed differently".

    "The deputy prime minister has been made aware of concerns raised by the Mexican Ambassador with MFAT. He looks forward to seeing the Ambassador at Waitangi next week to discuss the matter," the spokesperson said.

    "In the heat of the moment in the robust environment of Parliament, sometimes some members say things when provoked that, on reflection, may have been expressed differently."

    I cannot believe he let, while a very capable young man, a still new MP get under his skin so much. Laughable for the self appointed master of parliament. Embarrassing for NZ and he knows it.

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/540410/winston-peters-backs-down-over-comments-after-mexican-ambassador-raises-concerns

  4. SPC 4
    30 January 2025 at 7:16 pm

    Seymour wants the RB to allow the banking sector to operate in a way where they would be less secure in a future downturn.

    Which might require government bail-outs.

    It seems this is his desired course, as each escalation of government debt is used by ACT to legitimise ending nation state governance as we know it.

    The issues are

    1.the power the Ministry of Regulation is to wield as a central agency, and whether its reach would extend to over-riding the independence of the RB.

    2.how strong the capital requirements on banks need to be to reduce risk

    3.the burden on the economy of a higher interest cost

    An option would be for government to place a 33% tax on larger banks and put the new tax revenue (above 27cents) into an insurance fund, this would allow the RB to ease its regime.

    The players

    ACT

    The specious lie of Seympur

    “These capital requirements were put in place in order for us to get through a major shock, and when the shock of Covid-19 came along, guess what! Actually, we were fine with the old capital requirements. We never needed to have them phased in at all, and we should drop them today.

    In the real world, the government supplied a wage subsidy and the RB supplied a huge amount of QE, so bank profits went up.

    WILLIS

    The desperate for growth Minister of Finance, takes another tack in support of change

    Willis has previously said she is open to making the Reserve Bank ease its regulation of banks.

    She’s prepared to override the regulator if a strong enough case can be made that reducing the amount of capital banks need to hold would improve competition and efficiency in the sector without undermining the stability of the financial system.

    She is saying to the Commerce Commission please convince me, so low interest rates can grow the economy (fuel speculation in the housing market – see the policy on Air B and B working holidays).

    https://archive.li/Hz41c#selection-3935.0-4109.180

  5. joe90 5
    30 January 2025 at 8:05 pm

    The French had the right approach to their oligarchy.

    /

    @yasharali.bsky.social‬

    1. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s former running mate, is threatening U.S. senators who don’t vote to confirm him with political ruin. Shanahan says she will spend her own money to ensure that they do not win their re-elections.

    https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t46sqvutibvsmjgwn6r6izve/post/3lgu3bbyzpk23

  6. tWig 6
    30 January 2025 at 8:39 pm

    I was thinking about the 'covid lockdown caused children to develop late', (all the govt’s fault). I wondered how much was actually due parents addicted to screens who fail to interact with their pre-schoolers, and who used the screens as full-time baby-sitters.

    The Guardian reports kids starting school in the UK are 'arriving at school in nappies – one in four who began reception last September were not toilet trained – …children with poor basic motor skills and underdeveloped muscles, which they linked with excessive screen use.'

    ' “I’ve got two children [in my class] who physically cannot sit on the carpet…because they don't have the core strength', reported one teacher surveyed by an early-childhood charity.

  7. tWig 7
    30 January 2025 at 9:28 pm

    The Guardian has been reporting over the last wee while on Germany's aggressively pro-Israeli stance.

    This historical historical backgrounder is a really interesting read. It postulates that denial and lack of contrition emotionally by everyday Germans for their roles in the Nazi persecution of Jews produced a performative, uncritical support for the Israeli state's actions, over the years. It has been especially obvious in the past year, when Germany has blocked EU action against Israel.

    'Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany’s first female professor of political science, [described] how “a functional philosemitic attitude” had replaced “a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance” ' in the 1960's.

    In a very nasty twist, far right anti-migrant German groups have stated an über-zionist stance, in order, simply, to demonise islamic residents of Germany (many of whom were born and raised in Germany itself, but who are denied birth-right citizenship).

    PS Reading further in, and a REALLY interesting read

  8. lprent 8
    30 January 2025 at 10:23 pm

    I added Croaking Casandra to the feeds. Interesting writer on economic, probity, analysis and treasury.

    I find that I disagree with a lot of his analysis on the pandemic response. Probably because as he said…


    You can find the full 700+ page report here. I haven’t read the full report but did read Chapter 6 on “Economic and social impacts and responses” (which starts on page 242 of the Report itself, or page 285 of the pdf).

    I haven't waded all of the way through it myself. However when I read his commentary on timeline, I have to wonder if he has ever read the history and subsequent lessons reported from the 1918 flu pandemic and its progress and economic impact on the economy. Because the economid effects need to balance against the actual results of of the pandemic response.


    The chapter is weak right from the start, when the Commissioners simply assert (there is no supporting analysis) that “the strict public health measures introduced in March 2020, especially the border closure and national lockdowns, were essential [emphasis added] to protect the economy and society from the immediate and devastating effects of the pandemic had the virus been allowed to spread unchecked”. There is no analysis as to what extent of restrictions was required (it is a very all or nothing assertion), there is no reference to the fact that significant reductions in movement were occurring prior to any legal restrictions…

    The point is that these responses aren't particularly susceptible to economic analysis because the very best data that we have fro NZ is from more than century earlier. Same with the US. You can read about the NZ experience in NZ History

    In the aftermath, the public sought answers from the government. What they got was a major reorganisation in the form of the 1920 Health Act, which Geoffrey Rice, author of Black November: the 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand, describes as ‘the most useful legacy' of the pandemic.

    One of the primary lessons was to not only restrict and quarantine at the border, but also to prevent movement and clustering within the population as soon as a threat was recognised. That was because diseases jumping species aren't exactly static. They often mutate rapidly and there are often quite unexpected demographic pocketing. In NZ this was apparent in the mortality rates in 2018/9. Taking a couple of examples…

    Māori suffered heavily: their overall rate of death was nearly 50 per thousand people, more than eight times that of Europeans. In one Māori community, Mangatāwhiri in Waikato, about 50 out of 200 people died.

    and

    The overall rate of death for Europeans was 5.8 per thousand people. But in some communities it was well above the national average.

    The most striking of these was the isolated coalmining district of Nightcaps and Wairio in western Southland. Its rate of 45.9 deaths per thousand people rivalled that of many Māori communities.

    Just to put that in context, the population of NZ at the end of 2019 was estimated at 4.979 million (it was estimated to be 1.15 million in 1918). Rounding at 5 million and at those rates.

    5000@5.8/1000 = 29,000 people
    5000@50/1000 = 250,000 people

    In 1918-9 pandemic killed about

    The way that you can find out which it was is to let the pandemic run its course of successive waves of mutation over an unknown number of years and analyze the economics afterwards. However I suspect that either of those, or the people struck down by the even higher spreads of covid than the flu would have caused economic chaos.

    Also if you remember the start of the covid spread, we were essentially back in the position of 1918

    One action taken in many town and cities was to set up inhalation sprayers that dispersed a solution of zinc sulfate. Though ‘medically useless', this was the only approved preventative for influenza known to New Zealand's Public Health Department.

    Which was just as effective as all of the early treatments for covid, including all of the known medical support in hospital. About the only thing that was different to 1918 was that we have better control of the bacteria that often killed people whose immune system had been compromised by an attack of flu or covid.

    One alarming rumour that turned out to be true was that some victims' bodies turned black. It was pneumonia, rather than the virus itself, that caused this. Pneumonia can lead to a condition known cyanosis, where ‘the amount of oxygen exchanged into the bloodstream is drastically reduced, and the skin loses its normal health pink hue, turning a dusky purple'. Historian Geoffrey Rice has described pneumonia as ‘the real killer in 1918'.

    The nett result of the 1918/9 epidemic

    In two months New Zealand lost about half as many people to influenza as it had in the whole of the First World War. No other event has killed so many New Zealanders in such a short time.

    Roughly NZ had 18k casualties in WW1, 12k in WW2, and 9K in the 1918 pandemic. In 2020-2023 – about 3K.(wikipedia)

    The country recorded over 2,274,370 cases (2,217,047 confirmed and 57,323 probable[a]). Over 3,000 people died as a result of the pandemic

    Roughly fatalities were about 0.6/1000 population. Despite a much wider spread than was evident in 1918 and much much more infectious disease pattern.

    422,409.6 confirmed cases per million population (430,679.4 confirmed and probable cases per million population).

    However almost all of those cases were after vaccinations became available and most of the deaths before vaccinations started. Cassandra likes quoting US studies that are somewhat irrelevant without looking at results like this

    Of course, no country let the virus “spread unchecked” but the US is often used as a foil and counterpoint to New Zealand and Australia, and for all the differences in approach it is striking how similar the respective paths of real GDP per capita proved to be (for quite different health outcomes of course).

    Cassandra probably needs to look at comparison of results (my bold, wikipedia again)

    A paper published in 2023 in The New Zealand Medical Journal wrote that if New Zealand had the same mortality rate as the United States, around 20,000 more people would have died. The report said that New Zealand's success was caused by controlling the virus for two years until most of the population could be vaccinated, and that the country's health system was ready.[308]

    In other words somewhere around 4.6/1000 fatalities. So if this supposition is correct, then

    Which bearing in mind that both various governments of the US put in some very large efforts into containment and quarantine, which eventually failed through a lack of will to protect, that similarity of real GDP per capita result looks remarkably effective.

    In effect Cassandra is arguing that not taking as much effort to protect would have raised real GDP. I'd argue that their own figures show that is not the case. All three nations would up with just under 5% real GDP growth by the end of 2022 and I'd take a bet that when you look at the cost to NZ (in terms of additional debt) it wasn't that much larger per real GDP capita than the US or Aussie.

    However what I do agree with is that the royal commission report stage one looks light on all analysis. The purpose of these reports is to try to get the responses for the next major pandemic be more effective than the last. However poor reports that don't get analysed fully in the aftermath don't help for the next pandemic.

    Problem is that we're not likely to get a century, it is more likely to be decades before we get another side spreading outbreak. The frequency of widespread non regional epidemics has been rising over the last 30 odd years, fortunately most have tended to burn themselves out like SAR-COV-1. They disable or kill their hosts before they do wide infection.

    So it pays that despite the political wish to leave all this behind them, looking at and criticising reports is a valuable response.

    • Michael Reddell 8.1
      31 January 2025 at 8:05 am

      Thanks for alerting me to this comment. I think you've gotten rather the wrong end of the stick in interpreting yesterday's post. I'm very well aware of the 1918/19 experiences and literature (groaning bookshelves of pandemic book etc), including Rice's book which I was first alerted to when I was involved in whole of government planning for H5N1 back in 2005/06.

      No one doubts that distancing and reduction in movement was essential to getting the replication rate below 1. The question really is quite what extent of legal restriction was required and how much of a reduction did or would have happened voluntarily (fear was real, and rational), Goolsbee and Syverson for example used mobile phone data to estimate that almost 90% happened pre restrictions in the US. And again, as I note in my post, I'm not championing any particular different policy approach to the movement restrictions, but I am highlighting a point (many economists have made) about the lack of cost-benefit analysis (less about whether restrictions were needed but re the specific form or length). For example, officials themselves concluded that construction work should never have been banned in the first lockdown – doing so would have failed any rational cost-benefit assessment, and there came at an unnecessary economic cost. Evaluations do not need to take an "all or nothing" approach to the restrictions, but should include evaluations at the margin. Was there really a strong public health case, for example, for outlawing parents giving driving lessons to their children who were already within the same bubble?

      All that said, my main focus is the economic dimensions of the policy response, and the interesting (somewhat surprising) lack of difference between, say, the US real GDP track and that of say Aus and NZ. The mortality differences though are reall and important.

      • lprent 8.1.1
        31 January 2025 at 11:08 am

        Thanks for that explanation.

        That is also the kind of cost/benefit analysis that would be useful – like site construction work.

        The issue with that I can immediately see would have dealt with a number of guesswork issues in the detail. Quite simply there is missing information to make a educated guess about the likely epidemic effects – ie the cost side outside of construction companies profits.

        For instance that in Auckland, many if not most sites in 2020 were using large numbers of construction workers, mostly Filipino these days, working in teams who were o were living in what are effectively boarding houses. See BERL report where they were regarded as being crucial to projects.

        Teams are also involved in most of the renovation and building maintenance work – for instance just painting my apartment building (60 one bedroom apartments) for scaffolding and painting, so you'd have to consider that as well. Not all 'construction' work is isolated from the people around them.

        Which if you have a look at the experience of Singapore in the pandemic with offshore workers, that kind of accommodation is an ideal vector for transmission. The conversations I have had with some teams working here, they aren't housed quite as badly as some in Singapore. But certainly it isn't far off it.

        If I'd been looking at making decisions in 2020, I'd have been looking to find out what the accommodation of construction workers was like in a constrained housing market, and finding little information. That is noticeably absent from the BERL report or any public report from INZ or MoBIE as a whole.

        If you have a look at the royal commission report from 1920, one of the hot-spot danger areas was any site that had dormitory living. This included the boarding houses at the time as well as dormitories. The examples were soldiers, miners, construction workers, and pretty much any migrant workers. It was also listed as a reason for the very high fatality rates amongst Maori living at pa sites. Certainly when I was an army medic, it was highlighted during my training.

        Was there really a strong public health case, for example, for outlawing parents giving driving lessons to their children who were already within the same bubble?

        That one I'd agree with. But I'd want to see exactly what the regulation actually said because it makes no sense if it was in 'the same bubble'. It does if they were concerned about children who were not in the same bubble – like separated parents.

        Evaluations do not need to take an "all or nothing" approach to the restrictions, but should include evaluations at the margin.

        Problem with writing regulations and legislation (or for code which I do for a living) under time pressure is dealing with the detail so that it covers edge cases. Just identifying all of the edge cases is a lot of time and work.

        Usually you don't. All or nothing is exactly what you do on the first pass if you don't have a up-to-date design, and then you adjust later on. Problem with a pandemic is that it is usually for the wrong disease type. MoH wouldn't have had a detailed plan for this kind of disease.

        The plans that were in the Ministry of Health would have been for a avian or swine influenza of the types that we had in 1918, a fast killer like SARS-COV1, or a Ebola style. These are all characterised by rapid transmission and relatively easy containment because the symptoms arose at the time when transmission was highest. That was why the SARS-COV1 outbreak was so easy to contain. Just look for elevated temperatures and isolate.

        Problem was that SARS-COV2 wasn't like that. It was a rapidly spreading population endemic viral disease with a really large genome compared to influenza. Transmission usually preceded symptoms which meant that by the time you knew that there was a cluster, everyone had dispersed to infect others. Look at the Bluff wedding reception cluster for instance.

        That was what constrained the response, especially in the first response and lock downs.

        That is why Covid-19 is now endemic in human populations just as it is in bats and other animal species.

        The devil is in the details and it is bloody hard to know them at the start of a pandemic. Which was what the 1920 royal commission concluded and tried (successfully) to prevent causing the fatality rates of 1918-19 in 2020

      • Incognito 8.1.2
        31 January 2025 at 5:28 pm

        Are you arguing that allowing the NZ population to self-regulate, i.e. voluntarily, public health and social measures based on fear, for example, would have been an overall effective and sufficient response to Covid-19?