Morning roundup

Another 'everything is stupid and broken' compilation from the closing of the browser tabs.

• Pharmac's comms team lied, repeatedly, to Today FM about an upcoming announcement. Then when Today FM reported on the very strong rumours it had heard, Pharmac's CE, perhaps mistakenly believing that TodayFM had had an embargo copy and had broken an embargo, announced they were blacklisted from any future interviews. Pharmac had set up a cozy feel-good exclusive for Patrick Gower so he could gush about the announcement. The drug is incredibly expensive per quality-adjusted life-year that it provides. Nobody has said anything about whether Pharmac has negotiated a good price, or whether cost-effectiveness has stopped being primary at Pharmac. If it's the latter, then Pharmac could have done more to help people by putting its limited budget to other uses. But Gower apparently teared up about how great it all is so all must be fine. Those providing 'fawning coverage' will get the exclusives. Others won't. 


• Our Prime Minister describes what was, odds-on, a deliberate attempt to entrench policy while under urgency and in very severe violation of constitutional norms - and criticised as unconstitutional and undemocratic by the country's main constitutional law experts - as 'quirky'. Quirky. Right. 


• Hiringa Energy tries setting up a windfarm and hydrogen plant, which would initially produce urea fertiliser. Greenpeace ties it up in the courts for years because it doesn't like urea. There are ample other suppliers of urea who would provide it if Hiringa didn't. Making sure freshwater management is set properly and that emissions from fertiliser on-paddock are correctly accounted really matters, but you sure as heck don't fix any of that by blocking one potential plant. The point was probably to excite Greenpeace donors about their fight against Big Fertiliser. A better court system would make Greenpeace face the full cost that it has imposed on others. We do not have a better court system.


• Wellington Hospital's emergency department is falling apart at the seams. 


• We're in a desperate labour shortage. The Immigration Minister still wants to make it harder for the spouses of migrants on work visas to take up employment. This kind of crap has been one reason some medical professionals have been leaving NZ - it's just too hostile to the rest of their families. 


• TVNZ's Jack Tame interviews the Broadcasting Minister. It becomes very clear that the Broadcasting Minister thinks Tame should be toeing a company line on policy. He goes on to criticise Tame's "negative interviewing" style. Thomas Coughlan is good on this episode. In that same interview, Jackson says Meta and Google have three to six months to cough up enough money for NZ media companies or he'll act. This is the behaviour you would expect of a Minister of a half-way respectable country, or of an extortionate mafia thug?