Donald Trump won’t be too happy with Helen Clark right now, because she’s saying she doesn't want New Zealand to be an ally of the United States ever again.

I’m with her on that one – while Trump is president, anyway.

I’m also with Defence Minister Judith Collins who isn’t saying anything about Trump doing a review of the AUKUS military alliance with Australia and the UK, to make sure that it’s a fair deal for America.

I think Judith Collins going all quiet about this cloud over AUKUS is the approach we should be taking more broadly, as well. And New Zealand should be more like Switzerland and keep pretty much every country at arm's length.

As Helen Clark is saying, if you’re an ally, you can get dragged into all sorts of things you shouldn’t. Whereas, if you’re a “friend”, you can keep your head down, treat every country pretty much equally, and stay out of international dramas you don’t need to be involved with.

I heard former defence minister Wayne Mapp saying that the fact Trump has said this AUKUS review will be done and dusted in 30 days, shows that it’s unlikely that the U.S. is about to pull out.

Tell that to Dr Emma Shortis —who is a senior researcher in international affairs at the Australia Institute— who is pointing out that the submarine part of the AUKUS deal includes a “get-out clause” for the United States.

She reckons Trump is about to use that clause – not that she’s too upset about it. She’s saying today that AUKUS is "a disaster" for Australia and only ties Aussie ever closer to “an increasingly volatile and aggressive america”.

And, with respect to Wayne Mapp, I’m going to listen to this expert from Australia.

Understandably it’s caused a fuss in Australia, because they’re due to get a few nuclear subs from America as part of all this. Three second-hand submarines for $368 billion.

On this side of the Tasman though, the Government is keeping shtum, with Defence Minister Judith Collins not wanting to get dragged into it. Which makes sense, because —at the moment— we’ve got nothing to do with AUKUS.

The Government’s been making noises recently about doing a bit of tyre-kicking and seeing whether we might get involved at a lower level. “Pillar 2” is what they call it.

But there’s nothing coming from the Government about Donald Trump running his eye over AUKUS to check that America's getting the best deal. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark isn’t holding back though.

She says: "I would not want to see us back in the position where New Zealand is expected to spend a whole lot more money on defence; expected to follow the US into whatever its strategic venture is. I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War and New Zealand going into that for not a good reason at all and walking out the other end with Kiwis dying on the battlefield for no good reason. I don't want to see us ever in that position again."

I’m with her on that one.

Australia’s possibly feeling that way too, given that it signed up to the AUKUS agreement when Joe Biden was president. And, aside from wanting to get the submarines, and aside from the fact that it’s already ploughed $800 million into AUKUS, it might still be having a bit of buyer’s remorse given Trump’s unpredictability.

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Matt Doocey and Duncan Webb joined John MacDonald in studio for Politics Friday. They discussed Helen Clark’s recent comments around New Zealand’s relationship with the United States – do they agree?

On the topic of privacy versus safety, when it comes to mental illness, is keeping people safe a higher priority than keeping someone’s health private?

And Tourism New Zealand’s new 100% Pure marketing campaign has been launched, and Duncan Webb is not a fan.

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I’m all for the push to have wool carpet used in government buildings but I think it’s a mistake putting it in state homes.

Kāinga Ora has announced that, from next month, there will be woollen carpets in all new state homes. It’s also going to use wool if the carpet in existing homes needs replacing.

Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis says Kāinga Ora has managed to get a deal that will mean the wool carpet won’t cost any more than nylon carpet.

Which is interesting because, in December last year, KO said it had done some cost analysis work which showed that it could save roughly 34% using nylon carpet. So the wool carpet people have obviously sharpened their pencils.

Nevertheless, is it practical? And my answer to that is no it’s not. And will it end up costing us in the long-term? Yes it will, and I’ll tell you why.

But first, here’s why I generally like the government’s move to use wool carpet, but why I don't think it's a good idea in Kāinga Ora properties.

It makes perfect sense for the Government to be doing what it can to support our farmers who grow wool, who’ve been pushing it uphill recently. Wool has almost become a burden for farmers because of the returns they’ve been getting.

So good on the Government for going down the wool route, because it has to buy carpet, so why not buy the carpet that does the farmers a favour, while it's at it? Especially, when you consider the amount of money the Government must spend on carpet.

I don’t have a dollar figure for you, but I was reading a briefing that was written for the incoming government after the last election, which said that the Government has approximately 1 million square metres of office accommodation around the country, costing approximately $330 million a year.

That’s a lot of potential floorspace for carpet and that’s a lot of potential floorspace to get our farmers' wool all over.

But here’s why I don't think it’s a good idea having wool carpet in state homes.

Government buildings —such as government department offices and schools— generally have cleaners going through pretty much every day. And so if the DOC office or the local primary school has wool carpet, they get cleaned pretty regularly, don’t they?

A Kāinga Ora property is different. The only time cleaners get sent into a state house is when someone leaves or is booted out.

And this isn’t me tarring every state housing tenant with the same brush, because most tenants are probably very good. But we’d be naive to think that every tenant vacuums the carpets every day. We’d be naive to think that every state house tenant is a cleaning freak and will do everything they can to keep stains out of the carpet.

I remember when we put wool carpet in —it was when the kids were still quite young— and we did everything we could to stop it getting marks and stains on it, but it still got stains and marks on it.

And I’ve seen nylon carpets in action, and you can’t deny that they are brilliant for keeping clean. I’ve seen red wine spilled on nylon carpet and you can pretty much just wipe it away.

That’s the kind of carpet that Kāinga Ora should be using.

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I’m not exactly sure where to start with this, because it is just so tragic and there is so much to it.

I could start by ripping into the people who run Hillmorton Hospital, in Christchurch, for not doing more to try to prevent one of their patients murdering a woman at her home in Mt Pleasant – because I want to rip into them.

I could start with the thought that ran through my head when more details emerged at Elliot Cameron’s sentencing yesterday for the murder of 83-year-old Faye Phelps, but I’ll come back to that.

Where I’m going to start is with what the cousin of Elliot Cameron said after the sentencing. Because it doesn’t just relate to this tragic case, it relates to other tragic cases we’ve seen too.

And it’s all to do with how out-of-kilter things have got when it comes to protecting people’s privacy versus protecting people from danger.

Alan Cameron is the cousin of the killer, and he is saying that people like Faye, and anyone else this guy did garden work for or had dealings with, should have known that he was a mental health patient living at Hillmorton Hospital. Especially given his threats to kill someone if he was forced him to leave the hospital.

They should have known that he’d been in mental health care for most of his life.

Alan Cameron says: “Just shoving people out into the community isn't good enough, without ensuring that there are supports. I feel if more could have been done it might well have made a difference.

"To protect his privacy they won't involve the family, but he wanted my involvement."

He says people should have been informed that his cousin was living at Hillmorton because they could’ve then decided whether they wanted anything to do with him.

He says: "It would have put others on alert to observe him and to keep a note.”

And I couldn’t agree more.

Because Faye Phelps had no idea. She was completely in the dark, all in the name of protecting this man’s privacy.

Just like the probation people couldn’t knock on the doors of people living near that guy who was released from prison and ended up murdering the Colombian woman living next door to him.

She was in the dark too, because it would have breached that guy’s privacy, as well.

So when are we going to wake up to the fact that this obsession with privacy is killing people?

Because there is no way that Elliot Cameron should have been allowed to come and go from Hillmorton and do gardening work for people without those people whose homes he was going to having any idea about him.

You could say that anyone can ask questions but when you hire someone to do gardening, you ask them about things like their availability, price etc.

Faye Phelps was never going to ask him if he was mentally unwell, was she? She should have been told. Because, if she had, she might still be alive.

But we will never know that. Or more importantly, her family and friends will never know that. Either way, Faye Phelps and the people who loved her were let down big time.

As Faye’s daughter Karen says: “Our family never thought in a million years something like this would happen. The reality is it could be any member of the public next.”

Which brings me to what went through my head when I saw the reports on the sentencing yesterday. Straight away I wondered how many other patients are walking out the gates at Hillmorton, jumping on buses, and none of us have any idea.

Faye’s daughter Karen is thinking the same, saying: “Public safety must come first and should always have come first. Sadly, it wasn’t prioritised, and the result is what happened to my mum.”

As for Hillmorton Hospital – you would think, wouldn’t you, that the people running the place would have learned a thing or two from that tragic case three years ago when one of their patients stabbed a woman to death in broad daylight.

Maybe they have, but it doesn’t look like it. And they need to learn pretty quick that protecting people’s safety has to come first – even if it means breaching someone’s privacy.

I think it’s outrageous that Hillmorton Hospital thought it was fine for a guy who repeatedly threatened to kill to come and go as he wanted, and not tell innocent people that their gardener living in mental health care and has been for most of his life.

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Labour's leader says Te Pati Māori should focus on the issues most New Zealanders care about.

Parliament last week voted to hand down the harshest suspensions in history to three MPs over a haka performed during the Treaty Principles Bill vote.

Labour's Willie Jackson and Adrian Rurawhe argued the punishments were too harsh, but also suggested the Party could compromise or say sorry.

Chris Hipkins told John MacDonald housing, health, and education are the main things Māori around the country raise with him.

He says that Te Pati Māori made their point around the haka, but he thinks people want to see them get back to debating the big issues now.

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How would you feel if the Government came out and said solar energy is the future and it was going to throw everything at it?

Because that’s something I think it needs to seriously consider doing.

For me, there would only be one fly in the ointment – I’ll get to that. But it’s not enough for me to say that the Government shouldn’t be ploughing money into solar energy.

Lodestone Energy is in the news today talking about its latest solar farm, which will cover 42-hectares in the Clandeboye area in South Canterbury. There’s also the big solar farm being built near Christchurch Airport, among others in the South Island. Which is brilliant.

But I think our reliance on private operators to get these things up and running is very risky. Which is why I think the Government should be getting some skin in the game, as well.

Now before you start thinking, “what about SolarZero?”, that’s different to what I’m talking about. That wasn’t about solar farms, that was a joint venture between the Government and a private outfit which supplied solar panel kits to homeowners.

But it does show the risk of relying on private outfits because SolarZero went into liquidation and that was it.

I’m not saying that Lodestone Energy, which is behind the solar farm at Clandeboye, is a risky bet. I only want the best for them.

But as anyone in business will tell you, nothing is guaranteed. That’s why we don’t have a solely private health system. Why we don’t have a solely private education system.

If anything, state ownership is —at the very least— a backstop.

And that’s why I think the state needs to get more involved in solar power generation.

The potential fly in the ointment is use of land that might otherwise be used for things like growing food, but I can live with that.

The Government might point to the Christchurch Airport solar farm and say that the Crown has a 25% share in the airport, so it's already investing in solar generation, but that would be dancing on the head of a pin. I’m talking here about the Government allocating money to the construction and operation of state-owned solar farms.

But how would you feel about that?

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“A complete balls up”. How about that for what might be quote of the day?

That’s how Christchurch city councillor Andrei Moore is describing the council’s handling of the housing intensification row.

It’s a row that has been shut down for good by Housing and Resource Management Minister Chris Bishop, who has rejected Christchurch’s bid to have its own, separate housing intensification rules.

Which I have no problem with. If he had given-in to Christchurch, it would’ve opened the floodgates right around the country. So good on Chris Bishop.

It’s a final decision too, by the way. No correspondence will be entered into. The council can’t blow any more money running off to the environment court. So Christchurch has to like it or lump it.

What it’s going to mean is high density, multi-level residential housing in the CBD (good), Riccarton (good), Hornby (good) and Linwood (good).

Even if it means neighbouring properties losing sunlight. Which is not necessarily good - but that’s just reality. We need to get over that.

Not that I’ve felt that way from the outset. When these new rules were first proposed three years ago, I didn’t like the sound of them.

And there was no shortage of people saying they felt the same way. And I suspect that a lot of people will still be very unhappy about the prospect of a new place going up next to them and losing their sunlight.

But that’s just reality. I accept that now.

Because what other option is there in a city where the population is only going in one direction?

Do we want the city to spread out even further, chewing up land that is much better used for things like growing food? Of course, we don’t.

If there’s one very small example of how the city has just kept on spreading outwards, it would be Musgroves - the second-hand building supplies outfit in Wigram.

I’m still amazed at how that place is surrounded by buildings now. When I remember it being pretty much in the wops not all that long ago.

And, if we don’t allow the city to become more built-up, we’re just going to see more and more houses built in places like Rolleston and Prebbleton. Which aren’t in Christchurch - they’re in the Selwyn district.

Which means more and more people travelling into the city every day, using Christchurch’s roading infrastructure but not paying a bean towards it. Because they pay their rates to Selwyn.

But let’s come back to councillor Andrei Moore - who is saying today that the council has ballsed this up.

He said back in April that he thought it was nuts that the council was insisting on pushing back on more intensified housing in Christchurch.

He said - and I agreed with him a hundred percent at the time (and I still do) that “it’s high time we wake up and deal with the reality of city growth”.

What’s more, it hasn’t been cheap. The most recent, available figures show that the council has spent about $7 million fighting the Government’s proposals.

It’s not a total loss for the council. Three of its ideas have been accepted by the Government, which include increasing the building height limit on the old stockyards on Deans Ave to 36 metres.

Mayor Phil Mauger says: “We obviously wanted to get our alternative recommendations approved. So, to only have three of them get the tick, is a kick in the guts.”

As a result of the Government telling the city council to pull its head in, we’re potentially or eventually going to see 10-storey apartment buildings within 600 metres of suburban shopping areas. Even if it means neighbouring properties losing sunlight.

Urbanist group Greater Ōtautahi thinks it's brilliant and gives the city certainty.

They say the quarter-acre dream of a standalone house on a large section is unsustainable.

Spokesperson M. Grace-Stent says: “Not everyone wants to live the exact same lifestyle. Allowing more housing to be built allows people to make that choice for themselves.”

They say: “We want people to be living near the city centre, near the amenities, not pushed out further and further into the Canterbury plains”.

And they’ll get no argument from me.

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Imagine a school having $800,000 in the bank.

Imagine all the things a school could buy with that amount of money.

This is a state school I’m talking about, not a Flash Harry private school that can put the call-out to the old boys and the old girls when it needs cash to do something.

So a state school with $800,000 in the bank, and this state school has to spend that money fixing up a cock-up forced on it by the Ministry of Education.

The cock-up I’m referring to is that disastrous experiment called the “modern learning environment” – where our kids have been the guinea pigs, forced into huge barns instead of your old-school single-cell classrooms.

And the school I’m talking about, having to spend $800,000 of its own money to get out of this ideological nightmare, is Shirley Boys’ High School in Christchurch.

Good on it for flipping the bird at the modern learning environment, but I think it’s crazy that the school has to dip into its own reserves to pay to sort it out.

I know whether it’s the school that pays or the Ministry of Education that pays, it’s all pretty much taxpayer money. But the difference is Shirley Boys' is spending money it’s actually got in the bank, which could be spent on all sorts of other things. That’s why I think the ministry should be paying for this work.

I’ve been anti this modern learning environment nonsense right from the outset. Which was pretty much straight after the earthquakes when schools in Canterbury needed rebuilds.

And what happened is the powers-that-be jumped on the bandwagon and started telling schools that this is how it was going to be. That, if they wanted classrooms, they were going to be barn-like structures with up to 200 kids in them.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Government and the Ministry of Education forcing this one. There were some teachers and principals who thought it was a brilliant idea too.

I’ve mentioned before how I was on the board of our local school for about six years, and they got sucked into the modern learning environment frenzy.

In fact, they didn’t wait for new buildings. They had the caretaker knocking out walls left, right and centre every weekend, it seemed. And I thought it was nuts at the time and I still think the concept is nuts.

As does Shirley Boys'. As does Rangiora High School, which did the same thing. It cost them even more – they spent $1.5 million turning their open-plan classrooms into single classrooms.

But here’s what the principal at Shirley Boys', Tim Grocott, is saying about why they’re doing it.

"The level of distraction was just too high. There was too much movement going on. They can hear what is happening in the class next door. Particularly if something was being played on TV or anything like that. So that level of distraction was a negative factor."

He says the school did a formal inquiry into how the kids and the staff were finding the open-plan set-up and found that there was widespread unhappiness and so the school had no option but to do something.

So it started the work during the last school holidays and will finish it during the next holidays.

Tim Grocott says the changes that have been made so far have gone down very well.

He says feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive and instantaneous”. I bet it has.

He says: “The staff on the first day were absolutely thrilled. One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her classroom because she was so thrilled to have walls. The boys are just much happier too."

Tim says he thinks that open plan classrooms are a flawed concept that just did not work for his school.

Are they ever.

And the Ministry of Education needs to admit that and needs to front-up with the money to pay back Shirley Boys’ High School for the $800,000 it’s spending to fix up this flawed concept, and elsewhere too.

Or, more correctly, it needs to front-up with the money to pay schools back for the mess caused by this failed experiment.

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