Category: new zealand

South Africa in New Zealand 2017 Limited Overs Series Preview

The theme of revenge for South Africa’s 2015 Cricket World Cup semifinal loss to the Black Caps has been well established. The Proteas came to Auckland with every reason to think they had what it took to seize a place in the World Cup final, but were denied at the last moment.

The Limited Overs leg of this year’s tour begins tomorrow and involves six matches. For South Africa there might be something of the 2015 World Cup about it, as the final match is, once again, at Eden Park.

The leg begins with a T20, also at Eden Park. Much of the interest in the T20 revolves about the late call-up of prodigious Auckland talent Glenn Phillips, who is replacing the injured Martin Guptill.

The 20-year old Phillips is already being talked about as a talent on the order of Kane Williamson and Tom Latham. In last year’s Super Smash he scored 369 runs at an average of 46 and a strike rate of 143, including one century scored at a strike rate of 200.

That is the sort of hitting the Black Caps will need at the top if they are to find an adequate replacement for Guptill. In limited overs matches the Black Caps know that if Guptill goes big, they win, because his striking ability is unmatched.

New Zealand sit comfortably on top of the current world T20I rankings, with South Africa at fourth. It’s almost exactly the other way around in the ODIs, with South Africa ranked at the top and the Black Caps third.

Despite that, the Black Caps are currently paying $2.34 on BetFair to win the T20, so there appears to be some value there.

The South African batting features four of the top ranked seven batsmen in the world at the moment, in AB de Villiers, Faf du Plessis, Hashim Amla and Quentin de Kock. With any four of those players capable of a matchwinning innings, that makes the Proteas top order arguably the strongest ODI top order that has ever come to these shores.

The Black Caps, for their part, have a diverse and highly skilled array of artillery to break through this. But barring Trent Boult, who is currently ranked the No. 2 ODI bowler, none of them can rightly be said to be at the same skill level as the South African batting lineup.

Although there is much to choose from out of Matt Henry, Tim Southee, Lockie Ferguson, Mitchell McClenaghan and Adam Milne (the latter two returning from injury), none of those names pose the known and established threat that Boult does.

Probably the Black Caps will pick Trent Boult, one of the two speedsters (likely to be Ferguson who is in the squad ahead of Milne) and the other spot will be decided by who is best for the conditions out of Henry and Southee.

Ish Sodhi will also be back in case the Black Caps decide to try and strangle the South Africans with the spin of Sodhi, Mitchell Santner and perhaps even Williamson. If the seamers end up getting dominated by the superb Proteas batsmen, expect a wholesale shift to Plan B: strangle by spin.

The South African bowling unit would generally back itself to defend the large totals their batsmen would expect to put up. They have the No. 1 ranked ODI bowler in Imran Tahir, and the ever-more impressive Kagiso Rabada, who is ranked equal with Matt Henry at 7.

Rabada ought to find New Zealand pitches to his liking, with his Courtney Walsh-style action a test of any batsman’s technique. Chris Morris might be hard to get away but Wayne Parnell, JP Duminy and Andile Phehlukwayo will not be names the Black Caps batsmen are afraid of.

Dean Brownlie scored an excellent 63 in the Black Caps’ Hadlee-Chappell winning effort in their last ODI against Australia, and he has been selected to open in place of Guptill for the first two ODIs (Guptill is expected to be fit for the third).

The rest of the Black Caps top order looks very strong, with Latham, Williamson and Ross Taylor making up the remainder. With Luke Ronchi back in the ODI squad there is plenty of middle order hitting power as well.

Expect a high-scoring series in stark contrast to the recent Hadlee-Chappell, as both South Africa and the Black Caps have considerably stronger batting lineups than they do bowling attacks. It is, however, likely to be close, with a 3-2 win to the Proteas probably the slight favourite over a 3-2 to the Black Caps.

The NZ Political Establishment and the Media are in Bed With Each Other

The carry-on implied in this image is far more wholesome and honest than any news article written by Jo Moir.

Yesterday the Stuff news portal published one of the most one-sided pieces of pro-Government propaganda one could ever hope to see in a supposed democracy with a free press. It’s an apology piece written by media prostitute Jo Moir, and it aims to erase the historical record of Peter Dunne’s actions to resist all change to the cannabis law in New Zealand.

‘Prostitute’ is perhaps the wrong word, as most New Zealand sex workers will not allow you to piss on them and they therefore have more shame than Jo Moir, who will, it appears, write absolutely anything for money. Jo Moir has no shame, and this is why she has produced a one-sided piece of propaganda worthy of a Soviet-era newspaper.

It was titled ‘Peter Dunne feared for his and his family’s safety and may have broken the law allowing medicinal cannabis to be imported’ and sought to present a crafted image of Dunne as someone who is not responsible in any way for the current illegal status of cannabis medicine.

The article tells some transparent lies, such as “The hate mail, abuse and threats all started when Dunne approved medicinal cannabis for [Nelson teenager Alex Renton].”

In reality, medicinal cannabis users have hated Peter Dunne ever since he made it a condition of his support of the Labour Government after the 2005 General Election that absolutely no change be made to the regime of cannabis prohibition.

The article then quotes Dunne as saying he “almost” has respect for medicinal cannabis users, and also gives him a platform to blame recreational cannabis users for “hijacking” the cannabis law reform debate.

This piece of excrement masquerading as a piece of journalism even quotes Dunne, as if it was a self-evident truth, that the only reason why he has received this abuse was because of the apparently coincidental fact that he was the sign-off for medicinal cannabis in New Zealand.

It makes no mention at all of Dunne’s well-known demand that if his party should support the Labour Government after the election of 2005 there would be no progress on cannabis law reform.

Moir can’t even take Dunne’s cock out of her mouth long enough to ask basic journalistic questions that a Year 11 English student could have thought up, like: “Are not all these death threats perhaps a sign that the cannabis laws you have forced on us since 2005 have caused a large amount of genuine suffering and people are right to be angry about it?”

Or: “Do you regret the fact that, given there are at least 37 opioid overdose deaths every year in New Zealand on average and given that legalising medicinal cannabis is known to reduce opioid overdose deaths by 24.8%, your actions to prevent medicinal cannabis law reform in New Zealand since 2005 have caused the easily preventable deaths of at least 100 Kiwis?”

The sycophantic article makes no mention at all of all the people who have suffered under our barbaric cannabis laws, or of those who continue to suffer. The last two lines of it even goes as far as to recount Dunne’s hope that he can escape the consequences of his political crimes.

Make no mistake – Peter Dunne is a criminal. His actions since 2005 to resist cannabis law reform have killed at the very least a hundred New Zealanders by withholding a needed medicine, and have caused between three and seven billion dollars worth of bureaucratic waste. He should be tried on a hundred counts of manslaughter.

It’s probably understandable that the Dunne family received death threats. How could any concerned mother whose child had been psychologically destroyed by the untested mystery drugs known as “legal highs” not be angry at a politician who saw the destruction of that child as an opportunity to make money?

It must have crossed the minds of a large number of desperate people that doing physical harm to Peter Dunne might be the only way their cries for help would ever be heard.

The actions that Peter Dunne has taken as an MP since 2005 to hinder progress in cannabis law reform has caused the deaths of hundreds of Kiwis. If the media of this country were not lower than street whores, they would have held this remorseless psychopath to account.

Understanding New Zealand: Maori Party Voters

The Maori Party is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, they represent Maori, but not all Maori – only some. Let’s get the obvious one out of the way: the correlation between voting Maori Party in 2014 and being of Maori descent is an extremely strong 0.91. The correlation between voting Maori Party in 2014 and being a Pacific Islander was a not significant 0.01, and the other two correlations, with being European and being Asian, were both significantly negative at -0.35 and -0.30 respectively.

What may seem incredible if you look at Parliament, but not surprising if you knew about Kiwis, is the size of the negative correlation between voting National in 2014 and voting Maori Party in 2014: this is -0.75. That is enough to suggest that the average Maori Party voter has very, very little in common with the average National voter, even though the Maori Party supports National in Parliament.

With no other party was there as large a negative correlation with voting Maori Party in 2014. Voting Maori Party had a correlation of -0.64 with voting Conservative, and -0.29 with voting ACT. Imagining some kind of blend of National, Conservative and ACT voters can give us an idea of what an anti-Maori would be like if one existed.

Maori Party voters were indifferent to the Greens. Voting Maori Party in 2014 had a correlation of 0.02 with voting Green in 2014. They do, however, seem to like the other strongly pro-Maori parties. Voting Maori Party in 2014 had a correlation of 0.41 with voting Labour and a correlation of 0.46 with voting New Zealand First.

The strongest correlations with voting for the Maori Party were with Internet MANA (0.84) and the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party (0.85). Those two correlations may give a clue as to the sense of betrayal that many hard done by Maori will be feeling at the actions of the Maori Party MPs elected to Parliament, who raised tobacco taxes and did nothing about cannabis prohibition.

There is a fairly big difference between some correlations that the reader may have expected to be close to equal. One set of them relates to the strength of the correlation between being educated and being Maori and between being educated and voting Maori Party.

The correlation between being Maori and having a Bachelor’s degree is -0.45, but the correlation between voting Maori Party in 2014 and having a Bachelor’s degree is only -0.28. There was a similar pattern for all of the postgraduate degrees.

For being Maori and having an Honour’s degree the correlation was -0.46, but for voting Maori Party in 2014 and having an Honour’s degree it was only -0.29. For being Maori and having a Master’s degree the correlation was -0.45, but for voting Maori Party in 2014 and having a Master’s degree it was -0.28. And for being Maori and having a doctorate was -0.41, but for voting Maori Party in 2014 and having a doctorate it was 0.27.

A similar pattern repeats itself if we look at correlations with income bands. The $60-70K income band is perfectly even, in that the correlations between being in this band and being either Maori or voting Maori Party are both exactly 0.00.

For all of the income bands below this, the correlation with being Maori was more strongly positive than it was for voting Maori Party in 2014, but the opposite was true of the three income bands above this one.

A similar pattern repeats if one examines the difference when it comes to claiming benefits. The correlation between being on the unemployment benefit and voting Maori Party in 2014 is 0.79, but the correlation between being on the unemployment benefit and being Maori is 0.91. Similarly, the correlation between being on the invalid’s benefit and voting Maori Party in 2014 is 0.59, but the correlation between being on the invalid’s benefit and being Maori is 0.77.

One difference, and one major clue as to how Maori Party voters differ from general Maori, is that the correlation between being on a student allowance and voting Maori Party in 2014 (0.26) is stronger than the correlation between being on a student allowance and being Maori (0.20). This tells us that the average Maori Party voter is generally more driven and aspirational than the average Maori.

A general picture emerges of Maori Party voters being significantly better off than the average Maori person. This cannot be explained by turnout alone. The correlation between turnout rate in 2014 and being Maori is -0.75, and with between turnout rate in 2014 and voting Maori Party in 2014 it is -0.74. So there is no significant difference there.

This is supported by general measures of health and well-being. The correlation between having never smoked tobacco and voting Maori Party in 2014 (-0.55) is weaker than the correlation between having never smoked tobacco and being Maori (-0.73). In a similar vein, the correlation between being a solo parent and voting Maori Party in 2014 (0.66) was not as strong as the correlation between being a solo parent and being Maori (0.79).

There are several potential implications of this. One of the most notable is that, if Maori Party voters are actually significantly wealthier than the average Maori, a partnership with National as not as odd as it might otherwise appear.

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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.