Maurice Williamson pwns all those who opposed the sales of the Westpac Farms formerly owned by they Crafar family.

This video has become a massive hit in the UK and with Simon Collins’ series in the Herald on inequality I think it is very ,very relevant to the debate. Certainly it is more accurate than David Cunliffe’s and Labour’s views on inequality:

Labour constantly says that there is overwhelming public opposition to the government’s mixed ownership model…oh really?

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.

You’ve just got to laugh at Winston promoting a story that involves financial misrepresentation. The man has no shame…

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.

Like Boris Johnson in the UK, Steven Joyce has explained in an op-ed piece about why we are struggling in New Zealand, basically because a bunch of can’ts keep stopping us:

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.

Prison might be a better bet for this bloke. At least his missus won’t be able to castrate him for borrowing a Moldovan dancer’s knickers.

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.

Boris Johnson has a wonderful way with words as he discusses the wonders of capitalism and why the British will never invent a Facebook. His explanation has many echoes for modern New Zealand too, where Labour and others constantly seek to destroy wealth.

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.

Imagine what they could do in South Auckland if the teachers union and their political wing, the Labour party, don’t get in the way.

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.

Cactus Kate referenced it, some people have been asking about it. It is the Half plus Seven Rule for Relationships: