Leighton Smith Podcast #266 - November 20th 2024 - Dr Michael Johnston

lives and destroyed reputations. By that, I means schools and universities have been difficult to counter. The interview with doctor Michael Johnson is I think quite revealing and should be heard by a wide range of people. Please do not hesitate to send it to anyone you think come is relevant.

And by that I mean parents, grandparents, teachers, kids, And it was hearing the intent of Donald Trump to eliminate the Department of Education in the United States that inspired by contacting Michael to invite him on, and he was

only too happy to He has plenty to say. At the back end of two double six, we make reference to other matters that are of interest to most of you, that are of interest to most of you, the WHO, the World Health Organization, the trashing of Parliament being amongst them, an artificial intelligence, and democracy also. But next Michael Johnson. Education has been a battleground for as long as I can remember, a war zone between specifically left and right,

socialism and freedom. Michael Johnson has had a lengthy career in education at all levels. He was when I became aware of him, he was at Victoria University. He is now. He leads the education work at the New Zealand Initiative, which is doing good things in spite of what you might read about it occasionally in well in the commentary

from some of some of the media. Michael Johnson, we've had you on the podcast before, of course, you know, stranger to people on this particular platform, and I have to say it's always good to.

it is such a political battleground. And the reason I say that is, actually we have quite a wealth of evidence on what effective teaching looks like and how to teach children to read, for example, and how to teach them in general along the lines of understanding human information processing, human memory, human attention, this kind of thing, and also the necessity for children not to be stressed in order

to learn best. There's all kinds of things that we know, and so why it needs to be a political battle is a little strange. And certainly why there is a conflict between left and right if indeed the distinction left and right really makes sense in the modern political context. So I think that's the only thing that I would question about your introduction, is what we mean by left and right and why things have turned out the way they have. I guess part of it is patch protection

on the part of the unions. They tend to oppose things like charter schools. They oppose things like structuring teachers careers so that they get paids according to the quality of their practice rather than how long that been teachers, which is the current scenario. So there are certainly some specific things that the unions influence labor governments over which makes reform more difficult, But I think the fundamental ground

of the battle is deeper than that. Arguably it goes back as far as philosophers like junjak Russo, who saw children as coming into the world more or less perfectly formed, and we messed them up when we've put them in formal education systems versus I guess a more pragmatic view of human beings, which is that there's there's a great deal of knowledge and disciplinary ideas that have to be inculcated in children and young people in order to make

them effective citizens. So there is that disagreement about learning itself. But really pragmatically, I think that we actually have good evidence on how education systems best function.

context of the sentence. And the trouble with that is that it disperses attension across all of these different cues instead of focusing it on the one that gives them the most information, which is the spelling of the word and the correspondence between that spelling and the sound of the word. And it also ignores the very great cognitive load that is imposed when a child is first learning

to read. It is a very difficult task. And so just focusing them on the most important information is what builds fluency the quickest, and there's a huge amount of evidence for that. But to turn to the question of why the whole language method got going in the first place, it comes back to a confusion about the difference between oral language or spoken language, and literacy. So oral language

is a human universal. All cultures have oral language, and interestingly, it seems to be a biological function in the sense that, well, anybody who has brought up a child themselves or been around very young children is amazed by the fact that a child acquires language in their second and third years of life at an incredible rate without anybody explicitly teaching them anything. And so there seems to be some sort of attemplate in the human brain that enables us to

acquire language in that way. But literacy is not like that. Literacy is not a cultural universal. It's about three and a half thousand years old at most, and until about two hundred years ago, very few people were literate, and so literacy is actually better described as a technology rather

than a biological function. And it's a big cognitive task to read and write, and so we need to take a structured, measured approach to how we teach it, and we do have very good scientific evidence now on how to do that, which is by focusing on the correspondence between spelling and sound.

years of practice. And the roots of that is that the university programs for training teachers don't focus on classroom management nearly enough, and so our teachers start in the classroom not knowing how to establish order in those classrooms. Well, if you've got classrooms that are not well ordered, you've got no chance of teaching effectively. So that's the very

foundations which are missing. Until now, we've had a curriculum that is very loose and doesn't specify very much at all in terms of what should be taught in our schools. That's changing with Minister Stanford's reforms and as of next year there will be new curricula for English and mathematics in our primary schools. That will be followed by more curriculum development over the next couple of years until we

do have a knowledge rich curriculum. So I would say that's a good direction that we're going in to look for something nice to say about our education system. But you know, the other thing that we need to talk about is how our schools are organized. At the moment, they're all independent crown agencies and there isn't nearly enough cooperation between schools, and that drives I would say, increasing

educational inequality over time. Because schools that are well provisioned with I would say parental resources in communities where their boards can bring on board lawyers and accountants and so on. Those schools that buy and large well governed and functional

a lot better than schools that lack those resources. So I think we need to find a way to bring schools together into more functional communities of schools where those who are operating in better off communities can really share their resources a bit more with those who are not, and try to really get to grips with educational inequality, because not only do we have falling standards in things like literacy and numeracy, and that's been well discussed in

the media. Also have some of the largest gaps in the world between the young people who do the best and those who are really being left behind, and that gradient is socioeconomic.

cultural capital backing you. And when the education system itself is not well structured, it means that those who are not who don't have the benefit of those kinds of resources get left more and more behind if the system itself is not doing its job well enough. So no, I don't think that there's any evidence for it being a racial or ethnic issue at bottom.

that point of my life. And I said to her, I would like to anonymously establish a scholarship for a married child. And she exploded, not angrily. She said, another scholarship or something along those lines is something we don't need, because that's not the problem. The problem was the background, etc. But my comment to her had led into this was that I don't believe that Mary or marry kids are

any less intelligent than any others. I think all races are pretty much pretty much equal, even when it comes to when it comes to such things. And realizing at the same time that that I was stomping on Thomas Sole, who has written a couple of very good books like Race and Culture, and pointed out that there are differences in the talents of various countries, like Italians who go to South America and carry on with the specialty areas that they're renowned in. It was just one that's one

that springs to mind. So they conquer that particular share of the market and they do very and they do very well, but it's not it's not or it wasn't for me. An IQ thing. It was just the cultural background, right or right?

is any different. Their ultimate mission is to teach the universal disciplines or subjects derived from the universal disciplines, in order to set children up well with powerful knowledge. And by the universal disciplines, I mean things like mathematics, science, exposing them to the great literature of the world from

all different cultures. These kinds of things are what builds the platform for young people to have successful lives, and so wherever they're coming from and whatever their backgrounds, that should be the aim. Now, there are different challenges associated with different children. You know, some children do come to school with particular learning needs and difficulties, and we need to address those.

with culture, et cetera is appropriate. I can't disagree to a limited extent, but I not in danger of and are we not doing it locking them in to the past and to culture and into a culture that well prevents them from breaking free.

intimidating institution. So that's the entry point. What we're aiming for is to have I mean, the ideal is that all young people, regardless of their background, leave school well educated in the objects derived from universal disciplines like science, mathematics, history, etc. Because that is what gives them the knowledge and based on that knowledge, the ability to think through ideas in a really coherent, disciplined way, and that's what sets them

up for success in life. Now, in the senior years of school, I think we do need to think harder about the pathways that young people follow. Frankly, I think we send far too many young people from university to university, and we don't send nearly enough into apprenticeships and trades, and that's because we have this misguided view that a university education is somehow inherently superior to being an electrician

or a plumber or a trades person. So I think that's a cultural issue we need to face up to and do something about. And I have some ideas about that too. But up until the senior secondary, all young people should be taught to read and write and do mathematics and learn about science and history and so on, and that should be a universal offering.

Science is a particular one with unique characteristics, and if we're going to teach science, then it needs to be taught in terms of what it is, rather than trying to bring in knowledge systems like muttering amati that might have their own contribution to make, but which are not themselves science. So that was all they were saying in this letter.

natural world. It's been refined over literally millennia. I mean, we could go back to ancient philosophers like Aristotle to start to see the first terms of scientific thinking back in the ancient Greek world. But it developed over many, many centuries. It brought in knowledge from the Middle East and India and many different cultures, and it's really not until the twentieth century that it really formed into what it is now, which is the most powerful system we

know for testing theories about the world. And the reason it's so powerful is because it has at its core the idea that, first of all, there is an objective reality the way things are, but we always will have imperfect access to that, and so all we can do is build theories and try to knock them down with evidence.

And it's the trying to knock them down part what Carl Popper called falsification that makes a scientific theory scientific, and that is a unique approach to the testing of theories with evidence, and it's built the prosperity that we have in the world now, has given us the technologies we have. I think it's also got a lot to

do with democracy. I don't think it's any accident that Carl Popper, the greatest philosopher of science in history, in my opinion, was also a philosopher of democracy and open society, because there's a lot in common.

say and who governs them. In other words, we have government by consent and not just some feudal overlord telling us what to do or some tyrant but ultimately it's underpinned by a particular culture, and that culture is one in which we're prepared to tolerate difference of opinion and

to use our free speech to resolve disputes. And so you know, a democratic legal system is another pillar of an open society, where disputes and criminal matters are resolved on the basis of evidence in courts, and we have things like juries and so on. That's an open society.

And it contrasts with tyrannical societies, with their feudal or fascist or communist in other words, where all of those what all of those have in common is authority figures just telling people what to do by dictat and threatening them with violence if they don't.

to think critically. Now much is made of critical thinking in our current curriculum, but what has missed is the necessity for critical thinking to be built on a base of knowledge. Without quite sophisticated knowledge, which critical thinking is just not possible. And it's not just the knowledge of the facts of the world or the facts are important. In addition to factual knowledge, we need knowledge of systems of thinking that enable us to get better representations of

truth over time. Whether it's in history or science or mathematics, these are all disciplines that have methods for weighing evidence and for resolving disagreements using that evidence. We never get to a perfect understanding of how things are, which is why it's always a work in progress. And it's that endless contestability, which is the essence of the versal disciplines as well as democracy.

I think that the education system schools need to be accountable to the country for doing a good job, and for that they need feedback. That means we need to measure how they're doing and for that to be known, and that in a sense becomes a mechanism of competition because you get to see what is functioning better than what else. But I don't think that having schools cooperate is actually a barrier to doing that, and I think we can set things up and I'm just thinking through

this now. I'm going to write a report about it next year. So the ideas are not yet fully formed. But we already have communities of schools. They're called kahuiaco, but they're not very well structured or resourced. And I think we have this strange situation where we have a kind of megalithic ministry of education that just keeps growing and growing over time. It's got thousands and thousands of

public servants working for it. It's also got regional offices, so there's a massive bureaucracy and then we've got basically

nothing between that and individual schools. So what I'm thinking of is a way of organizing our schools into groups, and I would set them up such that the primary schools and secondary schools that were working together tended to have children who passed through the primary schools into the secondary schools and the same group, so you have a more connected up view of the children as they passed through, to have a mix of socioeconomic circumstances within them, so

that the resources were able to be shared across different kinds of communities. And critically, I think that these organizations should be owned by the schools themselves and become the units of accountability. So if you have to some extent a competitive element that might take place within these communities. But also you'd have the different communities across the country and we could compare how well each we're doing.

So you could have a situation where you know, it's a really good maths teacher was the condo for a couple of years to work for this community and to lead professional development across a range of schools, and that way you spread that good practice across schools instead of having it all focused and where that teacher is working. And for sure that school then loses that teacher for a couple of years, but they're making a wider contribution there was I was thinking, though, I was thinking more

of the same teacher teaching it. I mean, that's their specialty maths at level three or whatever, and they've got a couple of classes, classrooms, they're dealing with the school that they're at, but they've got plenty of time up there sleeve. I'm guessing. I'm guessing, why can't they work out with another local school that this teacher is shared between them and they do both schools at that level.

teachers need to learn better than universities do. So there would still be a place, a strong place for teacher educators, but let them be employed by the schools themselves. Let the communities of schools have their own qualification. And look, there's already a model for this taking place with the community of schools in Auckland that has got a teacher qualification that they run and they train teachers in schools, and I think that this is the way ahead with

teacher education. So it'll take a while to ratchet up something like that, but I think that the remodeling of the education system along the lines that I'm talking about would really help. Other things that these communities could do is instead of you know, if you need an educational psychologist to assess a child for dyslexia or ADHD or whatever it is, you don't have to wait months for

the ministry to allocate one to you. Instead, you have a cadre of specialists working for your community who circulate around the schools and do the work that needs to be done. And that's going to result in a more efficient allocation of resources like that as well. So I think these communities could take on a lot and that importantly,

they would also be the center of accountability. So at the moment, we have almost no feedback from schools to parents, to government, to the state, and that's because we just don't collect enough data and report it. Schools run assessments, but they keep those data to themselves.

their community and let me finish. Then the community itself would aggregate that data and report it to the center, and that would be It would be the community as a whole held accountable for those data.

way to solve our data problem. That idea does need a bit more thinking through, in particular what to do when you've got a whole community that isn't functioning well, But I think it would take the heat off individual schools as well as building an incentive structure for the schools to help one another more for schools that we're doing well, say in literacy, to be able to help ones within their community that we're not doing so well because they've got a collective interest in the data that

they're reporting to the center.

the classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion officers. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls' sports. Throughout his campaign, the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be won back from the left. Now that he's won the White House, he plans to use federal money as leverage to advance his vision of education across the country. Now, in so doing, he's vowed to disengage the Department of Education.

And you talk about the thousands of people in the department in this country. It made me wonder if there was a similar approach that maybe we could look at. But it's not. It's not easy because he's going to send it back to the States. We've got the States to send it back too.

that's the answer to that part of the question. I would downsize the Ministry greatly and reallocate the resources to the communities of schools for which they would have to be accountable that's an important part of it, making sure there is accountability for how those resources are used. And at the moment, the ministry isn't really held to account for presiding over twenty bus years of educational decline. So I think it is time to try something different. To

turn to what Trump is saying about education. There's a lot in that which I agree with. I think it is true that education systems across the world have become captured by certain ideological ideas, and that is not good educational practice because, to use a bit of a cliche, we need to teach children how to think and not

what to think. Having said that, lightly worried that Trump might implement ideological ideas of his own, and so that to me would be not fixing the problem, but just changing the problem.

and what's the difference between sex and gender? And if we could have open discussions about that in our classrooms that were not dominated by ideologies, then we would be using that issue as which is, you know, obviously of contemporary social interest, because it's all over the place at the moment. If we could have open discussions about it in the light of evidence, then people would be taught to draw their conclusions based on evidence instead of ideology.

who is in the classroom? Right the process to legislate the amended Form of Relationship and Sexuality Education RS into the school curriculum has seen the divers the diversion of much needed administrative and teaching time and resources away from education fundamentals such as reading and numeracy, the standards of

both of which have fallen alarmingly. The decline in reading and numeracy standards caused by the impact of COVID related policies has seen the UK achieve its worst standards since two thousand and six and the US the worst in the history. Anyway, I won't go on, but.

today are actually the first public airing of them. I'm not the only one have thought along these lines, of course, but I do think we need to think very carefully in terms of the ministry being an autocracy. Well, in some ways it probably is, but I think in ways that it needs to assert a bit more control. It's actually left things way too up in the air for a long time.

it'll collapse, it'll never go anywhere. Was totally wrong. So the question is is AI in a similar similar category? Is it a danger as much as it could be a positive. How do you I know how you see it because I've read I've read your articles, but take it from where you want.

these calculators to do it for them. And of course the flaw in that is if they don't learn to do arithmetic to the point of what we call cognitive automaticity, which is to say, you know, you know your times table's cold, and you know how to add numbers together using an algorithm pretty straightforwardly and without much effort, You're just not going to have the cognitive resources to take

further steps in mathematics. So everything that arithmetic depends on, which is just about all of the rest of mathematics, you're never going to be able to learn with any fluency. So fast forward to AI. The same kind of argument applies to learning to write. If you have an AI producing writing for you, and there are some people who have commented on the potential for AI to obviate the

need for children to learn to write themselves. Because they can get AI to compile the facts and write a reasonably cogent, if not exactly inspired piece, then they can spend their time thinking critically about what the AI has produced. Trouble with that is that, first of all, as I said before, to think critically, you need a lot of knowledge, and so just outsourcing knowledge production to AI is not going to teach you knowledge. And secondly, writing is itself

a tool of thinking. So when we write, if we're writing fluently and well, we are able to compile our ideas, rearrange our ideas. In other words, we can get out of our heads onto the page, as it were, our thoughts, and then that gives us the kind of headspace freed up to be able to think through those ideas properly, to self criticize our ideas, and to rearrange them to

improve our arguments. So writing is itself a really important tool of thinking, and we mustn't allow AI to subvert the necessity for young people to learn to write and to think and to acquire knowledge of their own. I think there are some opportunities that are offered by AI educationally, but it's much more in the category of feedback to children.

So you can imagine young people perhaps producing a piece of writing of their own and then feeding it to the AI, which doesn't just sort of rewrite it for them, but says there are some problems with the way you've structured this sentence and that sentence, and maybe even have you thought about this counter argument to this idea. So in other words, it's it's acting more as a coach. It should also always be under the supervision of a

skilled teacher. We shouldn't just let AI take over in the classroom.

Is there, apart from anything else, that's quite hard to control what young people do with it?

kinds of responses it gives you. So you could train it on a whole bunch of documents from a particular ideological perspective, and if you did that, the responses that produced would be from that ideological perspective. And I think there is already an extent to which the AI engines are trained in something of a biased way. There's a research called David Risado from Dunedin who has done some really great work showing how various AI engines are politically biased.

And he does that by giving them questions from things like the Political Compass test and seeing where they pitch up. And most of the AI engines have a fairly pronounced left wing bias, and one might suspect that they've been trained.

which people need welfare. We should always be looking to improve their capabilities so that they don't have to stay on welfare and stay dependent, because that's not a recipe for a meaningful life. Education has a really important role to play in that for families that perhaps have been stuck in a welfare trap for more than one generation. It's pretty bad when a child has never seen an adult who has a full time job, for example, and we need to find a way out of that.

In contrast, I agree with you entirely. In contrast, under the German dual training system, fully half of school leaders take up apprenticeships. Now, the reason it got my attention was because a number of years ago I met two young Germans who were visiting Australia. My father was married to a German and one of them was related to it.

So I found out the bit of detail they were on the doll and they were traveling the world and if memory serves me correctly, they could do that for two years without repercussion.

can be employed as an apprenticed by a company. They don't have to pay for apprenticeship training because the companies actually pulled the resources and fund a system whereby they're trained, they work several days a week in the company, and then they're studying with a tertiary provider.

could adopt. And really what I'm focusing on at the moment is what we can do in the senior secondary school to make the trades pathway much more visible and much more accessible to young people so that we don't end up with twice as many going on the doll as we have leaving school and becoming apprentices If we could even capture you know, that eleven percent and go from six percent going into apprenticeships to something like fifteen percent, that would be a really good start.

antihistamine made in Switzerland to the highest quality. So next time you're in need of an effective antihistamine, call into the pharmacy and ask for Leverrix l v Rix Levrix and always read the label. Take us directed and if symptoms persist, see your health professional. Farmer Broker Auckland. Here we are in two double six, that is Podcast two double six with the mailroom and missus producer. How are you feeling after your beach walk?

to allow them to keep doing it. It is a well established tactic of groups such as these to go the government or establishment into taking the sort of action that could allow them to I foul and act hurtful and indignant. Also, schools and teachers are breaking their contracts with the Ministry of Education. As public servants, they are

obliged to be seen as politically neutral. Yet twice last week I saw the pupils and teachers of the two local schools in my area marching around holding Mauri flags, and teachers and pupils alike wearing red hats with white feathers on them. So children as young as five are indoctrinated into this. These children will no doubt be included in the inflated figures reported by mainstream media. Equally upsetting, says Lynn. Is Chris Luxen going to take any meaningful action?

I feel he should be supporting his coalition partner. I know he has reiterated ad nauseum his feelings that he doesn't like the bill, which I take to mean he's wanting a quiet life. With all due respect, he should be better than that, and I intend to make him aware of my thoughts for all the good that that will do. I will stop my rant later, as I know abler pens than mine will be writing to you on this subject, but I had to express my feelings

of fear about this. The Treaty Principle's bill is doing no more than maintaining the principle of one man, one vote, and lind says, I use man in the genetic sense, as in mankind. Change it if you don't want to risk cancelation. Another sinister aspect another sinister aspect of life now and she says, thank you for your time. That's from Lynn Linda.

those people who called the election for Trump. During this election, I was most interested in the way election processes were handled post twenty twenty A note that quite a few states in private entities instituted measures to counteract voter fraud prior to the last week to well, he says, to last week's elections. Honestly, on the day, my main interest was how the timings and results from the seven swing

states were progressing, and I was not disappointed. However, in the wake of Trump's win, the Republicans and supporters were quick to credit success to their campaign activating voters to the GOP cause. This may be true, but if we put some context around the popular vote, things look slightly different, although still great from a GOP perspective. In twenty sixteen, Trump received sixty three million votes and Clinton sixty point

one million votes. In twenty twenty, Trump received seventy four point two million votes and Biden eighty one point three million votes. Really, in twenty twenty four, Trump has seventy three point six million votes at the time I write this email, while Harris has sixty nine point three. This will increase slightly without thinking too deeply. In comparison to the twenty twenty election, Harris has lost eleven million votes,

while Trump's vote count remained roughly the same. The red wave looks in reality to be a receding blue tide. Has something more sinisterive been exposed by this outgoing tide of Democrat votes? I wonder, and then it break it's without evidence. I wonder, without evidence, if we are seeing a relatively clean twenty twenty four election where voter fraud has been effectively stymied, and the twenty twenty overcount is now obvious, or at least obvious enough to need openly

explaining both for and against arguments would be welcome. Please keep up the great work, Chris. I sent that off to to Patrick actually with a question. I don't think I have a reply at this point, but I'll keep you in touch if I do.

notable absences of endorsement from the older appointees. There are arguably too many cass now the currency of the honor has been devalued. When I started as a lawyer late nineteen sixties, there were only a handful of QC's in New Zealand. Now we're overrun with them. But I digress. I fear we're hurtling down a slippery slope. Don't think I'm overstating things, do you? If we have twofold systems, how does anyone with very mixed genes determine where they stand?

Auckland's Asian population, for instance, becoming a high percentage of the populace they and other more recent mixed heritage immigrants. What for them? Seymour is courageous and absolutely correct. A huge amount of discussion needed. Too many second rates in the media who need to be given a wake.

They are an embarrassment to this nation. Yes they are.

up anyway. Late in your podcast two five seven with mister Paul Merrick mentioned a book that Amazon band and is no longer available. He mentioned that he would send you a PDF of the book, So I'm wondering if I can have a copy of that pdf to read. I'd also like any information on treating COVID short and long.

as applied to all pharmaceutceutical drugs to be applied to vaccines. Three, the removal of legal indemnity for vaccines I reckon number four, the studies of vaccines versus an actual placebo. Then, in Brackett's the placebo used is either a neurotoxic EG aluminium or another vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule. It would appear these are reasonable requests that surely any parent considering

vaccinating their child would want. Instead, all they receive is gaslighting behavior by their gp that all childhood vaccines are safe and effective. The media asks no questions. Worse, they attack anyone who raises concerns. Shame on them. No wonder people are switching off from mainstream media. One can almost smell the death throws of a desperate, captured, paid off media cheers Caroline, Very aggressive, Caroline, But I know there is much sort along those lines.

she won't front up. Surely as a public servant she should. This is a highly toxic chemical and I am extremely concerned that this is going unchecked as overdosing too especially babies and young children is toxic. Can you please investigate this? The US is going to ban this chemical in all their drinking water on the twentieth of January twenty twenty five. Israel banned in twenty fourteen, saying it was dangerous. The

warnings on fluoride toothpaste as they do not swallow. So how does the Ministry of Health know everybody is getting the right dosage? Unless they can prove this one hundred percent, they should immediately stop. Strangely, I can't even get a reply from either Shane Ready or Diana Safati on this. Perhaps you can, Linda. What's going to take place in the US I think is yet to be refined. But if they followed this path, then isn't Australia going to

do something as well? I think? But I either way, anyway, this needs to be looked at. My mind has been cast back to a period of time when we had the Prime Minister's scientific chief were laying on the law that this wasn't going to change because it's perfectly safe. I've pondered that ever since. To be honest, let me

finish with this. One English writer and defender of Western civilization, Douglas Murray, has something to say that is very pertinent to New Zealand and the situation we are in today. He does not hold back. Mister Murray's words give rise to the question why is there no one in New Zealand defending our developed culture with the same kind of zeal The narcissist mister Whititty exercises in his drive to

return us to pre European culture. In my humble opinion, Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill is doing something quite minor compared to what really should be done. For just a few examples, the defunding of all government race based departments, the closure of the Waitangi Tribunal, and the removal of taxation concessions for all so called murray enterprises. Mister Whiteitty is welcome to what he perceives as his own culture if he wants it so badly, but he should not be robbing

every other New Zealander in pursuit of that objective. Neither should he be making a mockery of our Parliament. There should be far greater sanctions applied for his barbaric behavior this week. Now, that brings us to the end of the mail room. But I have reserved a commentary for following up immediately, well very shortly, that I wanted to spend a little time on, So I'm not including it in the mailroom because missus producers got things to do, no late, and I love being here, but you still

have things to do. I got a lot of driving to do. Yes, I do so, thank you. We shall see you next.

his recent podcast to New Zealand. When the famous star of What Is a Woman? And Am I Racist? Dedicates nearly one third of his entire podcast to New Zealand politics, you can be sure that New Zealand has either done something extraordinarily good or in this case, catastrophically bad. In his podcast, Matt Lambastard, the Teparti Mariri, the Marry Party

inmates who turned out Parliament into a political asylum. The caption on his YouTube video says Parliament in New Zealand descended into tribal stone age grunting on behalf of so called indigenous rites. This is a preview of what our country could look like if we keep apologizing for our history.

What a shameful indictment of the state of New Zealand politics. Furthermore, local YouTuber Fonga Ray Tim never heard of him, but now you have had a funnier caption saying New Zealand's low IQ special needs primitive MPs perform a Marie Harker war dance when they don't like the vote. Close quote that young to Party Mary MP, who violently tore Act's Treaty Principle's Bill in Parliament and started the Harker in defiance of the Speaker should be fired, jailed and rehabilitated,

or maybe just jailed. She is categorically unfit to be an Why the majority so silent on these parliament terrorists? In the recent Free Speech Union agm held in Auckland, Professor Nigel Bigar suggested that the problem lies with a mild risk averse majority who often wants to keep out of trouble. As a result, they inadvertently allowed the aggressive

noise of the minority to intimidate the majority. In this case, says the author, I believe the majority of New Zealanders, especially white New Zealanders, have been conditioned to self censor on all matters pertaining to Mary, for fear of being labeled racist by actual racists like Willie Jackson. Well, for once, I hope whatever is happening in America will happen in New Zealand, because we too need to fight, fight, fight.

It was slightly more aggressive than I read, and to be honest, so I self sent a little bit now to respond to Linn's letter and be put it this way. The detritus there was witnessed in part of it last week. It has a source. It goes back a long way. It's the result of a great deal of cowardice, or if you prefer, an unwillingness on the part of governments on both sides of the aisle to take action, to take firm action to resolve issues, and well as the

saying goes, kick the can down the road. It falls into a similar category as printing dollars, printing money the future generations paid for, and the most recent labor administration has shown us how to do that big time and screw the country now I've made reference. Oh Now, if you want to get the Matt Welsh piece the video, just do a search on Matt Walsh's en Z clip Matt Walsh's end z clip and you will find it. Now.

I've made reference recently to Robert McCulloch from Auckland University, professor of economics, and part of the reason was because I discovered him and he was writing for his own blog and I really liked what he said, except did I say it again, it's got an overrider that he's had to go with a couple of people who who I'm familiar with, put me in a precarious position. However, on the seventeenth of November he wrote the following, Now

we know how New Zealand's economy became broken. The Judiciary wrote a communist style constitution without consultation, without people knowing. The treaty debate is great. We've just found out, courtesy about King's Councils, what has broken the economic of this nation.

It has only just been revealed, thanks to their letter to the PM, that the Judiciary invented their own set of treaty principles, the main one of interests to economists being the requirement of equitable outcomes, which are our fully part of our constitution, so much so that the councils call them settled constitutional law, unable to be adjusted by Parliament, let alone upstarts like Acts Seymour and the likes of whom they swat by referring to as being part of

the government of the day. It's sort of a throwaway and part of the government of the day. According to the lawyers, we the little people, just vote for day to day administrators, whereas the profound, unalterable constitutional principles governing us in an enduring sense are written by people with bigger minds, our judges. Most of us have heard about the principles before, but until the treaty debate was opened recently, we had no idea that they were so embedded into

our constitutional arrangements. Many countries have affirmative action programs. However, I know of no country, he writes, no country that has a constitutional requirement of outcomes not opportunities being equalized amongst the citizenry, other than maybe a few commoner states that failed and no longer exist. The reasons are obvious to economists, but not to our judiciary. Now that's only

a little that's half of it. Maybe because he doesn't write long pieces, which makes it much easier to punch through more of them. I suggest you have a look at it, and you want to know how to get it. McCulloch, Robert McCulloch m a double CUBLC and you'll come across his lot. It's worth it's worth keeping in touch with now. Another thing I mentioned was AI and democracy because we discussed AI at the end of the interview that we had with Michael Johnson. And this is an alternative approach.

Shall we say how AI threatens democracy? The explosive rise of generative AI is already transforming journalism, finance, and medicine, but it could also have a disruptive influence on politics. For example, asking a chatbot how to navigate a complicated bureaucracy or to help draft a letter to an elected

official could bolster civic engagement. However, that same technology, with its potential to produce disinformation and misinformation at scale, threatens to interfere with democratic representation, undermine democratic accountability, and corrode social and political trust. Like we need more of it.

This essay analyzes the scope of the threat in each of these spheres, and discusses potential guardrails for these misuses, including neural networks used to identify generated content, self regulation by generative AI platforms, and greater digital literacy on the part of the public and elites alike. Just a month after its introduction, a chat GPT, the generative artificial intelligence AI chat bon hit one hundred million monthly users, making

it the fastest growing application in history. For context, it took the video streaming service Netflix, now a household name, three and a half years to reach one million monthly users. But unlike Netflix, the meteoric rise of chat GPT and its potential for good or ill spark considerable debate. Would students be able to use or other misuse the tool for researching or writing? Would it put journalists and coders

out of business? What it's hijacked democracy? As one New York Times up head put it by enabling mass phony inputs to perhaps influence democratic representation. And most fundamentally or apocalyptically, could advances in artificial intelligence actually pose an existential threat to humanity? And these are things I had in mind when I will raise it with Michael. If you want to read the entire discussion. Search how AI Threatens Democracy?

Simple How AI Threatens Democracy got two authors. Sarah Krepps is a professor in the Department of Government, adjunct Professor of Law, and the director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. Doug Kriner, the second author is the Clinton Rossiter, Professor of American Institute in American Instituts in the Department of Government at Cornell University. So the both at Cornell. George Freeman dot his degree at Cornell. I'm just throwing for interest. Take now, there is one other

thing that I want to mention. I raised the subject of the who again with Michael, and there were parts of it that I wanted to dive into, but I left them out until now because they're sensitive to some people. But after all, we're all adults and we can or should be able to cope with such things. Look Who's in the Classroom? Written by Hugh McCarthy. Now you'll find it, I think I might have mentioned you'll find it on

Brownstone Institute. Here's Hugh McCarthy's a bio. He retired as a head teacher after twenty three years in that role. He also lectured in a postgraduate leadership course at the University of Ulster. Hugh has served as a director of two of Northern Ireland's major educational and currently serves as a ministerial appointment on one. He has fifty years of experience in education. He lives just outside Belfast, married to Lorraine and made all this but nevertheless and has three sons.

Hugh holds a master's degree in distinction in education financial management and an honors degree in chemistry at a BA in public administration over educated if anything now in reference to the WHO at its interference in education in the next section zo page four. In the next section, the who's approach to sexuality education is discussed. It is summed up by the statement a child is understood to be

a sexual being from the beginning. The basis for this is explained in the section entitled Psychosexual Development of Children and argues the need for an early start to sexuality education. Psychologies, especially developmental psychology, they claim, purports to show that children are born as sexual beings, whatever that means. This approach is then transferred into education school and the classroom via

the guidelines offered to teachers. Now where it gets sensitive, but I'm going to include it because I think it's important. The guidance given for ages six to nine recommends a curriculum content which includes six to nine, remember sexual intercourse, gender orientation and sexual behavior of young people, enjoyment and pleasure when touching one's own body, masturbation, self stimulation, orgasm.

Then from nine to twelve, the curriculum content includes how to enjoy sexuality in an appropriate way, first sexual experience and then covers off the pleasure, masturbation and orgasm just

for good measure now. Whilst in the International TechEd Guidance, the learning objective for five to eight year olds state that learners will be able to identify the critical parts of the internal and external genitals and describe their basic function, and from night to twelve year old learners they'll be able to describe what sexually explicit media, pornography and sexting are,

and male and female responses to sexual stimulation. Knowledge in brackets explain that many boys and girls begin to masturbate during puberty or sometimes earlier, comes under the heading of knowledge. Again, the guidance also refers to teaching the material in an interactive way. I am at a loss, he writes, to know how this can be done without graphic images and the lead discussion taking place. It clearly establishes a culture and sets out a norm for what is acceptable to

teach young children, and the guidance goes further. It also provides detailed guidance for the teaching of RSC. So what is RSC RS is relationship and sexuality education. Now I shall now just refer to his conclusion. Well, actually maybe I won't because fairly long, but the beginning of it. It is right that schools pass on broad moral and spiritual values. These values will include respect, tolerance, and caring

for others. It seems to me, however, that the RSSE issue appears to be the driving culture in some schools to the marginalization of more vital components to the roles of schools. Children are being forced to accept this culture which surrounds the actions of the school. Much guidance from the authority speaks of promoting the culture. This is far removed from providing information. And there's quite a bit more.

This is the who now. By the way, if you think, if you're thinking, doesn't happen here, you're deluding yourself sadly, or maybe just not in a possession of information. I dealt with this briefly, fairly recently with a high profile school in this country, a high school, high profile school of the private nature, when I had communication from parents and they were disgusted and they were basically told to

bugger off. And on that unsavory note, I will say if you would like to write to us latent at newstalks ab dot co dot nzid or Carolyn news Talks of dot co dot nz. We shall return in a few days as always with podcast number two hundred and sixty seven. Until then, thank you for listening and we'll talk soon.