A District Court judge heckled Winston Peters mid-speech. Called him a liar. Told staff "there's a room full of judges next door" who'd back her up. The Northern Club banned her permanently. The judiciary? Let her keep her gavel. Thread 🧵👇 Judge Ema Aitken disrupted a NZ First fundraiser at Auckland's Northern Club in November 2024. She accused the then-Deputy PM of lying, called his comments "disgusting," then tried to weaponise her fellow judges against the Executive.

1/5 Since posting about Hipkins' COVID vaccine lie yesterday, one thing keeps coming up:

People think he gave evidence to the Royal Commission.

He didn't.

Written responses only. Never under oath. Never cross-examined.

That needs to change.

🧵 2/5 Hipkins told the Royal Commission (in writing) that he never received advice about vaccine risks for teens.

Cabinet papers prove he did. December 2021. CV TAG advice. "Unnecessary risk" for under-18s.

He had it. He sat on it. He denied it.

1/ Following the 2020 election, Labour looked at new policies to bring into the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act (SERPA) to fix what they saw as some outstanding issues with the act. One of these issues was disposable vapes.

They received advice that they couldn’t just ban disposable vapes out right.

So, they looked at ways to ban it by the back door.

One of these ways was to require single use vaping products to have a removable battery.

They included this proposal in a policy consultation paper that went out to the public, which the public then had the ability to submit on.

However, when the regulations were drafted and came into law, it was clear that they had made a mistake and the removable battery requirement was to apply to ALL vaping products, not just single use ones.

So, while trying to ban disposables via a dopey back door, they accidentally went and banned all vaping products by requiring them all to have a removable battery. 2/ They looked at fixing it before the election but eventually just gave up and went to the polls.

By going back to late 2020, it puts @drayeshaverrall very much in the hot seat.

By October 2022 it was then only on disposables with MoH sounding that they did not want more regulations () :
“…we did not recommend any changes to existing vaping versions to the Health Committee. These provisions are relatively new and the public health sector’s ability to enforce the new vaping provisions has been compromised by its role in the COVID-19 pandemic response. A concerted compliance and enforcement effort must be undertaken before determining whether such changes are needed, and this will be a focus of the smoke free work programme over the next four years.”

In other words, @minhealthnz wanted to let existing regulations bed down and the only thing of focus were disposables.

Before Christmas 2022 the only mention of batteries was in electrical safety regulations.fyi.org.nz/request/24188/…