About 50 protesters marched from Wellington’s Civic Square to the grounds of Parliament in drizzly weather this afternoon, yelling “keep public assets” and “no asset sales” as they waited for politicians to address the crowd.

Several politicians spoke but Mr Peters, who had indicated he would do so in a press release yesterday, initially declined to address the protesters – to cries of “shame” from the crowd.

Mr Peters later decided he would speak after all, but protest organiser Jonathan Elliot, from the Occupy Wellington group, would not give Mr Peters the microphone.

“Where’s the microphone?” Mr Peters asked several times.

Mr Elliot accused him of going back on his word and said, “Occupy Wellington does not deal with grandstanding.”

50 people? Pathetic.

Millions of taxpayer dollars have been handed out to organise family reunions, it has been alleged.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said this afternoon that about $6 million of tax-payer cash had been “squandered” on a Whanau Ora programme that funded “family reunions”.

“Whanau Ora is a waste of tax-payer’s money. It’s going to be a disaster for Maoridom. It’s a pet idea of the Maori Party and John Key is selling out on separatist policies,” Peters said.

The people who say “we want jobs” but then in the next breath say “but you can’t do that … you can’t build that there … you can’t expand that … you can’t explore for that there … you can’t live here … you can’t invest in property here – you just can’t do that!”

And very quickly we start limiting our options. Through the 2000s, as a country, we progressively boxed ourselves in more and more to depend on fewer and fewer industries based on what the “can’ts” said. At the end of it the government of the day was pretty much down to talking only about two of the ingredients – skills training and subsidising entrepreneurs that don’t use resources (the so-called clean-tech sector) – as the bits the “can’ts” were most comfortable with. The rest was off the table.

Lots of Can’ts.

The irony is a lot of the “can’t” behaviour is designed to protect a Kiwi way of life that wouldn’t be here if those who say “you can’t” had applied their rules 50 or 100 years ago.

The reality is you don’t build an economy by lopping off an arm and both legs before you start. A small country like New Zealand has to make the best of all its natural advantages to lift incomes and give more people more chances to make it while staying right here.

We therefore need to stop the endless debate about which industry will save us and focus on all industries where New Zealand has a natural advantage. That’s why the Government is implementing and further developing its 120-point action plan that will help build a stronger, more competitive economy.

That doesn’t mean you don’t take care. Big developments need to have the right environmental protections and mitigations, industry needs good health and safety law, and foreign investment should be sought where it adds value. Ensuring those safeguards are in place is a far healthier approach than just saying no.

We live in a world increasingly without borders – at least not as our grandparents knew them. People these days can base their skills, their capital and their ideas just about anywhere. They don’t have to be in New Zealand.

So when we think about the “you can’ts” we need to think about the mobility of people and money. Each time we say “you can’t” carries a cost. That doesn’t mean we should always say “yes”, but we do need to carefully weigh up the consequences of saying no.

And we should learn to stop listening to people who in the one breath chant “more jobs, more jobs” and then in the next breath say “but don’t do that, or that, or that”.

We need to encourage the development of all of our opportunities if we are to prosper.

I have long held the view that when people say “you can’t” what they really mean is they can’t.

The captain of the capsized Costa Concordia could be sentenced to a cumulative total of more than 2,500 years in prison if convicted of causing a shipwreck, abandoning ship and multiple counts of manslaughter, it emerged on Monday.

The length of sentence was calculated by Italian newspapers, which totted up the jail terms that Capt Francesco Schettino could face if convicted on all the charges that are expected to be brought against him.

He could face an eight year jail sentence for every one of the 300 passengers and crew he allegedly left on the crippled vessel when it grounded on the shores of Giglio island on the night of Jan 13.

He reportedly escaped in a lifeboat and watched the rest of the evacuation from shore.

He would face an additional 15 years in prison if convicted of manslaughter and another 10 years if found guilty of causing the shipwreck.

A total of 32 people are now feared to have died in the accident, which happened when the 950ft-long vessel sailed too close to Giglio’s rocky coast at the beginning of a week-long Mediterranean cruise.

A court in Florence on Monday heard a request by prosecutors in the case to have Capt Schettino, 52, removed from house arrest at his home in Naples and returned to prison. Prosecutors argued that there is a risk he could try to flee the country or interfere with evidence before his trial starts.

As we gaze in stupefaction across the Atlantic at these spooling zeroes, we are forced to ask ourselves an embarrassing question: why isn’t Mark Zuckerberg British? There seems no reason in principle why we should not be equally blessed with the entrepreneurial drive that has produced Facebook, Google, Twitter and other such zillionaire-spawning companies. We have the right timezone for an international media giant; we speak the world’s language; our capital is one of the safest and most liveable big cities in the world. We have all sorts of geniuses installing themselves in the vicinity of Shoreditch’s Silicon Roundabout, and no less an authority than Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales says that London is now the world’s best place for an internet start-up.

It is not as though we lack potential Zuckerbergs. Our universities are pullulating with brilliant young men in T-shirts who like playing Call of Duty and have slight difficulties with girls. We are fantastically fecund at coming up with new games and new apps. The very concept of the World Wide Web was devised by London-born Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So why isn’t there a British Facebook? Why aren’t these billions about to explode into the pockets of people in this country?

Well, to see the answer, you have to go back to The Social Network, the wonderful film about the birth of the company. It was about the war between Zuckerberg and the preppy Winklevoss brothers over the paternity of Facebook. It was a feud that began at Harvard, and in many ways the environment resembled Oxbridge – gowns, rowing, fusty old traditions, oak-panelled dining halls. And yet what struck me as deeply un-British, and unlike Oxbridge, was the maniacal determination of these undergraduates to get rich, the single-mindedness with which they set about it – and their unalloyed joy in success. Making money seemed to them a good thing, even a great thing, and these days it is not clear how widely shared that assumption is in this country.

Let us imagine a British Zuckerberg. He and his fellow billionaires would be the object not just of envy, but of resentment. There would be debates in Parliament, instigated by Ed Miliband, about the scale of his prospective wealth, and whether it was tolerable in a fair society. Wherever he lived, the British Zuckerberg would be tracked down by anti-capitalist protesters, and even now, in all likelihood, the pop-up tents would be appearing on his lawn. His new-found wealth, in short, would not be the subject of simple amazement. It would provoke amazement and a fair degree of rage; and that – to put it mildly – is not a climate that is conducive to wealth creation.

It is one thing to object to bonuses that are explicitly funded by the taxpayer. It is another thing to start attacking “Mammon” of any kind – because as my old schoolmate Ed Miliband has found, it is very hard to make a distinction between “good” enterprises and “bad” enterprises, between good money and bad money, between profit that is socially useful and profit that is not socially useful. In the general confusion, there is a danger that banker-bashing will metastasise into an all-round scorn for all varieties of money-making instinct – and I can’t believe that is in the economic interests of the country.

We need to stop wasting our energy in hating the disgusting affluence of the top 1 per cent, and we need to start doing more for the bottom 20 per cent. The poor and needy will always deserve help, in taxation and in philanthropy – but we can’t expect to generate either, on the scale of the Americans, if we continue to denigrate wealth-creators. In the US, unemployment is now falling sharply, in contrast to Europe and indeed to this country. Jobs are being created, not least because America is full of people who are not only scrabbling to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but who know that if they make it they will receive admiration from their fellow Americans, rather than chippiness and disgust.

I have no idea whether the myriad Facebook investors are correct in their potential valuation of this company. I don’t pretend to grasp the economics of the web, which seems to me to be a colossal destroyer of value, reducing the price of text, music, images and voice telephony to virtually nil. But one thing is for sure. If the Facebook bubble bursts, the investors won’t blame Zuckerberg. They will shrug their shoulders and gamble on something else.

It’s called capitalism. It’s about ideas, energy, innovation and reward, and we need to remember that for all its defects, humanity has yet to come up with a better way to run an economy.

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an “unstructured” place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs—the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was “not inspired,” Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.

As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley’s school was turned into an academy—a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.

Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half come from homes poor enough to earn free school meals and more than three-quarters do not speak English as a first language, making its intake exceptionally “challenging”, in Whitehall jargon.

Now when Mr Riley meets teenage students they seek advice about university. His dream is to return to Paddington Academy to teach full-time. It is easy to see why. The school is a success, recently earning an “Outstanding” grade from Ofsted school inspectors. It is, more subjectively, an impressive place. It feels calm and academically ambitious. It hums with optimism.

We actually have nothing to lose in trialling Charter Schools…it is apparent as the nose on your face that the current system is failing those in lower decile schools.

Read the rest of the article and learn what makes a great school.

A common charge from academy critics—notably teachers’ unions—is that they practise selection on the sly by excluding difficult pupils. Early on, Paddington did expel some pupils from the old school, but now takes hard cases itself. At a morning meeting, staff discussed the progress of a new pupil rejected by all neighbouring schools: it went well, they agreed, considering it was his first day out of prison. Yet students feel safe. It’s better than primary school here, says a 12 year old: “People respect you.”

⁴ Love wisdom like a sister;
make insight a beloved member of your family.

The Electoral Commission has referred the following matter to the Police:

• ACT on Campus ‘Not your typical party’ flyer, baseball cap and t-shirt.

It is the Electoral Commission’s view that the publication of the ACT on Campus flyer, baseball cap and t-shirts constitutes a breach of sections 204F and 204H of the Electoral Act 1993 because the items are election advertisements that did not contain a valid promoter statement and were not authorised in writing by the ACT party secretary.

As this matter is now with the Police, the Electoral Commission will not be commenting further.

Now if the Police could progress the log jam of complaints referred to them I might have just a bit more confidence in our Electoral System, that repeat offenders and law breakers actually get prosecuted.

Every year the Herald seems to run a series of case studies where poor unfortunates volunteer their income and expenditure details to contribute to “struggle street” stories.

The problem is that as I have analysed before the people used are one step short of having no brain matter whatsoever.

I am now starting to think these are the best examples the Herald can find and that in fact there is a perfect positive correlation between stupidity and faux poverty and inequality in New Zealand.

Today’s example tried to play a hardworking UK immigrant man with an idiot of a wife against a pair of breeders. A ridiculous piece by Simon Collins who is old enough to know better.

True to form politicians from the left couldn’t help themselves and we were treated to some David Cunliffe incomprehensible poverty poetry right up there with his fabulous rendition “I am Harvard”. A capitalised allegedly educated attempt at something we have only seen in the blogosphere from the brilliant mangled mind of Phil Ure.

Cactus then goes on to examine the information the Herald dished up to us.

“The Strugglers” are a mis-matched 51 yo with a 29yo. Craig and Carla.

Right away Carla is breaking all manner of female common sense. At 29 yo and a woman if you are to break the half + seven rule and hook up and breed with a man 21 years older then let him be one who is at least self-supporting.

Else you are better off on your own or an underachiever your own age with a chance of changing his future.

…Carla not only puts up with an underachieving bloke dumb enough to be interviewed by Simon Collins, she’s got a SOCK (some other c—-s kid or as the Herald terms it “cinderella syndrome”) on the scene. The good news is she doesn’t have to put up with Craig around the house as he has to work seven days a week.

Sticking the harsh but wonderful Suze Orman test on them we get the following:

1. Two cars of $160 a week. Beggars belief as to what cars they bought/financed.
2. Child support for SOCK of $132 a fortnight. So Craig can’t afford his first child. How on earth did Carla think this would end up?
3. Credit card debt. Go figure. Who gave them a credit card?
4. Petrol of $120 a week. So $280 a week is being spent on cars?
5. Wear shoes til they have a hole in them? Seen my shoe collection? I think most people do this. Even I resole.
6. An old couch? So what most student flats have them and at 29 yo she’s not much past that.
7. Laptop won’t work. Cancel the broadband then.
8. Haven’t had a family holiday. Hardly the biggest sacrifice. The UK immigrant couple didn’t make any money for five years working all week.
9. They eat meat and veges sparingly and eat noodles, risotto or macaroni cheese. Along with most of Italy and their people seem alright.
10. At 51 years old this is as good as Craig is going to get. Carla will have to enter the workforce at some point however with three children the welfare system heavily stakes any advantage to her doing so.

The conclusion is that inequality is created by bad choices. No one forced these two to have three children of their own in addition to a SOCK.

Of course, at 51, Craig only has to wait 14 more years before he can sit on his chuff while Carla will be put to work only to come home to a moaning broken-arsed pensioner with a gold card that is of no use to man or beast unless you like off-peak travel.

You would expect that losing an astonishing 47 kilograms would be a load off Dawn French’s mind as well as her body.

Yet the 55-year-old star has confessed she is not entirely happy about her slimline shape. Miss French, who was 121kgs before she cut out chocolate and carbohydrates, pointed out that losing her “lovely blubber” made it difficult to swim in the sea because it is too cold.

And in a frank interview, she added: “I had great fondness for that other body. I knew it very well and I don’t know this one as well, not yet.

“I was never actually unhappy then so it’s not the case that I was miserable and I’m happy now.”

Miss French, who appears with Alfred Molina in the BBC sitcom Roger And Val Have Just Got In, added: ‘When we filmed the series, I’d lost about 4st but I’ve lost 7st 7lb now. I don’t want to lose much more but it’s funny looking at Roger & Val – because I look so different now.’

The actress strongly denies that her weight loss was the result of a gastric band plus the stress of her divorce from Lenny Henry.

She said: “I don’t eat bread, potatoes or pasta now. I don’t have chocolate in my house. That is really hard.”

David Cunliffe posted a bizarre attempt at prose at Red Alert.

Cactus Kate suggested the drop kick in the article should have invested (or WINZ) $300-$400 in a vasectomy. Not a single line of complaint from Calre Curran.

Then I come along and question their mental faulties in bringing yet more hungry mouths intot eh world when they could barely feed the ones they already plus his SOCK. On top of that I suggested that what David Cunliffe was trying to do was blame john Key, and I quoted David Cunliffe.

For all that I got a warning. How utterly bizarre. Warned for using David Cunliffe’s own words. So I posted a comment asking for clarification:

It sat in moderation and never appeared because Clare Curran removed all my text and replaced it with a warning:

So, you get warned, I imagine if I quote David Cunliffe again I will be banned. Clare really hasn’t learned an awful lot about how I operate. Once again she has walked right into a great big SMOG where labour MPs are now censoring people because they quote other Labour MPs.

For the record here is a reminder of what Clare Curran is trying to ban me for, David Cunliffe calling John Key a “greasy little fella in the blue suit”:

China has banned its airlines from paying charges on carbon emissions imposed by the European Union.

The charges that took effect last month are aimed at curbing emissions of climate-changing gases but airlines say they are an improper tax. Dozens of countries including the US, China and Russia oppose them. New Zealand has also raised concerns.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted the Civil Aviation Administration of China as saying the airlines are not allowed to pay the tax or add other fees without government permission. The ratings agency Fitch warned in December that the conflict could spiral into a global trade dispute. The same month a European court rejected a lawsuit brought by US airlines.

Beijing could have unusually strong leverage in a possible dispute because its state-owned airlines carry large numbers of Chinese and other Asian tourists to Europe. Any disruption would hurt Europe’s travel industry when the continent is struggling with a debt crisis and high unemployment.

Air New Zealand is majority owned by the government, easy peasy. Mega brownies points on offer from our Chinese friends.

This is really the elitism of tenured education staff and their fervant belief that only the teacher unions are allowed a say about eduction. It is typical socialist we-know-best attitudes.

Nanaia Mahuta jumped right in:

Labour’s education spokeswoman Nanaia Mahuta said Ms Isaac’s appointment was political opportunism from the Act Party.

“I see it as no surprise. She has strong linked to the Act Party and they’re putting in one of their mates to push along their ideology.

But if you look at her lifetime at the public trough you can see she is actually far less qualified to talk on anything, let alone education, yet for some reason the union dominated Labour party has seen fit to appoint her as Education spokesperson. I think that everytime Ms Mahuta opens her gob to talk about Education she is told to sit back down until she has done her time in the education sector.

Then there is Catherine Delahunty:

Green education spokeswoman Catherine Delahunty today described Isaac’s pending appointment as ”disturbing”.

”The trial now looks like a joke.

”It shows this is nothing to do with education, it’s to do with the Government’s agenda to turn the education system into a business opportunity.”

Isaac’s three terms as a school trustee did not qualify her for the role, said Delahunty, who has also been a school trustee.

”This is a major political platform for education. It is a change in direction. It is not something for amateurs.”

Catherine Delahunty should take her own advice and STFU about education as well. She isn’t even remotely qualified to even issue press releases on the subject. I find it highly ironic that her favourite recipe is for a fruitcake.

It was nice of the opposition to focus on qualifications for speaking about education. Now they can just shut up.

Labour leader David Shearer has proposed changing the honours system so that Waitangi Honours are handed out instead of Queens’ Birthday or New Year’s honours.

Mr Shearer made the suggestion after the dawn service in Wellington today. He has previously called for a more celebratory Waitangi Day, after protests de-railed Prime Minister John Key’s welcome onto Te Tii Marae.

“I think it should be a national day we actually celebrate. I’d like to see, for example, our honours list come out on Waitangi Day rather than Queen’s Birthday or New Year. I’d like to see us talk about the great things New Zealanders have done. It’s too often focussed on the negative and not the positive.”

Yeah, that’s gonna win lots of votes for Labour.

Venezuela’s left-wing president has raised the stakes over the Falklands Islands by pledging his armed forces would fight alongside Argentina in any conflict with Britain.

The inflammatory promise from Hugo Chavez came in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the April 1982 invasion of the islands by Argentina.

At the same time Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted the deployment of a British warship and Prince William to the Falklands was ‘entirely routine’.

Mr Chavez was speaking at a meeting of the left-leaning ALBA bloc, an alliance of eight South American and Caribbean countries, which backed Argentina in its long-running dispute with Britain over the islands.

Argentina calls the islands Las Malvinas and claims they were ‘stolen’ by Britain 180 years ago.

‘The issue of the Malvinas Islands is an issue that concerns us, especially with the strong language that has emerged from the British government, accusing Argentina of being colonialist,’ Mr Chavez said at the meeting in Caracas. ‘I’m speaking only for Venezuela, but if it occurs to the British empire to attack Argentina, Argentina won’t be alone this time.’

I hardly think the Venezuelan Navy or Air Force will cause the British Armed Forces more than a moment of concern just before they blow then out of the water and sky. For a start they have no ability to sealift or airlift troops to the Falklands, and even if they did it would be unlikely they would even get there facing up to HMS Dauntless let alone the Trafalgar Class sub currently lurking in the Southern Atlantic.

Hugo Chavez should stick to drug running lest he destroys his country’s ability to defend itself playing silly beggars with the Argentinians in a game of high stakes against a country that has demonstrated a willingness to smack up upstart countries trying to take its land.

Queen Elizabeth celebrated 60 years on the throne on Monday to become the second British monarch to reach that milestone.

During her reign, the royal family has faced tumultuous times and moments of plummeting popularity, above all after the death in 1997 of Princess Diana, the hugely popular ex-wife of her son and heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles.

But the royals are enjoying fresh support after the wedding last year of the queen’s grandson, Prince William, second-in-line to the throne, to Catherine Middleton.

Elizabeth II, 85, became queen aged 25 on February 6, 1952 on the death of her father George VI, while on tour in Kenya with her husband Prince Philip.

And to celebrate all sorts of things are planned:

Celebrations on Monday will be low key. The queen will spend the day carrying out formal duties in Norfolk, eastern England, visiting a town hall and a junior school.

There will be gun salutes at the Tower of London and at Hyde Park, while two specially commissioned photographs of the queen and Prince Philip will be published on a website launched to mark the jubilee.

Including a crap website that looks like it was built by 4 year olds.

“One of the guys grabbed me around the waist and pushed me against the pole. I kind of pushed him away, but he came back again.

“He grabbed me again and pushed me back towards the pole trying to kiss me. I punched him in the face and ran back home and called police. If anything it’s a warning to young girls: Don’t go out alone in the dark at all.”

This girl ok because she fought back. Note she didn’t use a girly slap either, it was a punch in the face.

Oh and one other thing:

I don’t recall Labour or the Greens or Winston Peters protesting all those land sales to Americans, Canadians, Israelis, Swiss, or Italians….but boy have they carped on about sales to Chinese investors.

The numbers just don’t support their worry, even when you add in the Westpac Farms formerly owned by the Crafar family.

Deborah Coddington shows us what Maori should be focussing on instead of constantly looking backwards inventing grievances:

Then we have those who don’t deserve to be called mummy. On Monday police charged Matthew Ellery with the murder of Ngaruawahia baby Serenity Jay Scott-Dinnington, found last April with appalling injuries. Ellery was Serenity’s mother’s boyfriend.

Why do these women let these mongrels into their lives? If these mothers were animals they’d fight to protect their babies from these predators.

In Once Were Warriors Jake the Muss was this country’s hero, when it should have been Beth, with her line: “You’ll never hurt my babies again, Jake.”

Unfortunately there aren’t too many Beth Heke’s around it seems.

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence.

⁶ Take a lesson from the ants, you lazybones.
Learn from their ways and become wise!
⁷ Though they have no prince
or governor or ruler to make them work,
⁸ they labor hard all summer,
gathering food for the winter.
⁹ But you, lazybones, how long will you sleep?
When will you wake up?
¹⁰ A little extra sleep, a little more slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest—
¹¹ then poverty will pounce on you like a bandit;
scarcity will attack you like an armed robber.