"The people who incoherently scream mixed messages into their megaphones about a range of unrelated topics are not the people to lead that environmental debate for us"

"Whether we talk about a business, a school, a sporting body or indeed a political party, plenty of organisations lose their way from time to time. In strategic planning reviews, we are often forced to consider the fact that our progress is not taking us towards our intended goal or our purpose. Sometimes it’s because we are off course. Alternatively, the destination or target may have changed without us noticing. Either way, a conscious change is usually required.
    "In the case of the Greens, that target is no longer the environment. Instead, their attentions are focused on the impoverished, the Palestinians, Māori and, most recently, each other. If these are the causes they wish to pursue, that’s okay. But these are not the aspirations of a genuine Green Party. In any review of their performance, it is awfully tempting to talk about the inappropriate behaviours in the parliamentary chamber, the shoplifting, the immigrant labour or the tantrums. But we don’t really need to, do we? Because there is a bigger picture.
    "In New Zealand, we don’t deserve the hard time we give ourselves on environmental issues. While our environmental standards might not meet the expectations of the protesting few, the reality is that we do better than most countries. ...
    "One of the reasons we do better than most is that those earnest Green party politicians from the 1990s ... I often wonder what [Rod] Donald and [Jeanette] Fitzsimons might have achieved if they had the social media channels available today.
    "However, the current Green Party show no signs of using those social media channels to lead another generation to a better environmental place. They don’t talk about the oceans or the bush. They talk about Palestinians, indigenous rights and the rainbow community. ... Are they off-track? Or has their purpose changed? ... the aspirations to be our environmental conscience have been overtaken by the desire to champion those whom they believe to be the downtrodden ...
    "I’d like to see us do the obvious things around our waste, our waterways and our oceans. And I’d like to see us acknowledge the challenges in each of those areas and to develop a plan that would see us lead the world.
    "But the people who incoherently scream mixed messages into their megaphones about a range of unrelated topics are not the people to lead that environmental debate for us."

~ Bruce Cotterill from his post 'Green Party's Identity Crisis Should Be Cause for a Rebrand'

Ode to a fig leaf [updated]

On the occasion of the announced retirement of Genetix Fitzsimplesimons, Liberty Scott strides on to the stage not to praise her career, but to bury it and to spit on its grave:

    There is much more than can be laid at the feet of the wolf in sheep's clothing. She looks like and generally talks like she wouldn't hurt a fly, but the truth is that she has been a force against reason, against science, against economics, against individual rights and has happily used personal attacks when she saw fit to do so.
    She is a simpering vapid scaremongerer. New Zealanders should be pleased this nice but dim woman has not been in Cabinet, and has at the most dabbled around the edges of power rather than been in control of it.

There’s more, much more where that came from.  Read on here: Farewell to the wolf in sheep's clothing.

The best thing about Fitzsimplesimon’s retirement?  In Rob Hosking's words in the NBR, the departure of Fitzsimons -- “who has become a sort of organically grown, carbon-credit-worthy fig leaf for what is basically a radical left-wing party” – and in particular the elevation of non-environmentalist Sue Bradford, will expose for all to see the antediluvian Marxism that is now the ideological base of the local Greens.

UPDATE: Searching Scott’s ‘Marxist Gits’ file uncovers another seriously good lambasting of the woman who is the human fig leaf for the Marxist martyrs in the Greens: Just one more chance.  [I thank our ActSupporting commenter for the pointer.]

Post-election reflections, 1

Liberty Scott has letters of advice and "support" to the incoming National Socialist regime and their coalition partners and sell-outs, to Jeanette Fitzsimons and to the departing Winston Peters, Helen Clark.  Read them all here.

He says it all really -- at least, pretty much all that I'd like to say.

Except these few points:  Maybe New Zealanders are more sensible than they're often given credit for. Despite the near wall-to-wall support for the Maori Party from the Maori (taxpayer-funded) media and loud if not stentorious backing for the racist Maori seats, the racist party only managed five seats in an electorate that only represents half New Zealand's Maori population.

Looks like there's more common sense out there than we might think.

And despite the years of indoctrination from schools, politicians and the media about the the bullshit of "sustainability and the "urgency" of environmental action -- all the mass hysteria and all the wall-to-wall fawning about the Green Party "Vote for your neighbours' children to be poor" campaign (and the polling that suggested they'd do wonders instead of barely survive), the Greens themselves only managed to grab seven seats, and rather than cementing their place in Parliament they've shown they could easily be the next minor party to lose their place.

That's another really encouraging signal showing the rude common sense of most New Zealanders.

It's heartening.

Oh, and two last things.  Last night there was a massive 11% swing to the Libertarianz.  Very heartening indeed.  ;^)

And is anyone else looking forward to seeing Rodney Hide being made Minister of Jails?

UPDATE 1:  Is anyone else heartily sick of the drivel about how the media and the politicians drove Winston out of Parliament?  IN the end it was his own lies and crookedness that did him in. And rather than doing him damage, the last few months of near-constant media and political attention dragged out of irrelevance and almost got him over the line on the night.

The media and Rodney Hide were not his nemeses; they were almost his saviours.

UPDATE 2: Some difficult choices now for John Boy, not least finding competent ministers inside the National Socialist caucus. He'll obviously play off the Maori Party and ACT in negotiations, but he'll need to resolve one potential thorn in the side now before it causes sepsis.  With the worst economic calamity in decades upon us, what does he do with Roger Douglas -- the only finance minister now in Parliament who's dealt with a crisis before. Better, John Boy will surely be thinking, to have Douglas inside the tent pissing out, that outside the tent pissing in -- because as the crisis gets worse, that will become awfully corrosive.

I quite like the idea floated by The Hive, that if Helen is given the Ambassador's job to Washington (she'd have no problems cosying up to Obama to protect our trading relationship against his protectionist instincts, and whatever else you may think about her, her free trade credentials are moderately sound) then perhaps Don Brash's unique skills could be put to good use here in an economic advisory cabinet.  A team of Roger Douglas, Roger Kerr and Don Brash would be a team of formidable talent, not to say credibility, in providing the sort of advice a responsible government would need.

UPDATE 3:  Oh, and I can't fail to point out the country's most principled electorate.  :-)

UPDATE 4: Former Libertarianz deputy Deborah Coddington suggests in today's Herald that the only ones who will be "ungraciously" dancing on the grave of Helen Clark will be "organisations such as the Business Roundtable and parties like the Libertarianz."  How ungracious of her. Here's the tune the Wellington Libertarianz were dancing to last night.  And here's what we were dancing to in Auckland.

Sacrificing industry to ignorance

Both major NZ parties plan to throttle New Zealand industry with an anti-industrialist's wet dream: retention of the Resource Management Act, which makes it all but impossible to build anew for industry, and imposition of an Emissions Trading Scam, which will all but throttle existing industry.

At back of the flat-out insane Emissions Trading Scam is the flat-out wrong global warming scam. 

With parts of the northern hemisphere now under several inches of unseasonable global warming (in other words, snow), Christopher Monckton's timely open letter to John McCain is just as much an open letter to every western politician who wishes to sacrifice industry to ignorance:

Sir, every one of the reasons that you have advanced for alarm and consequent panic action has been demonstrated to be hollow and without any scientific foundation or merit. Yet, if your proposal to close down three-fifths of the economy of the United States is to be justifiable, then not only the false scientific propositions but also the false policy propositions that you have advanced must be shown to be true. Here, then, are ten propositions, with each of which you appear to agree, each of which is actually false. All of these propositions must be proven true before any action is taken to tamper with the climate, still less the fatal, self-inflicted wounds that you would invite your nation to make to her economy...

[Hat tip Owen McShane]. Read on here for the best summary of the collapsing warmist science you'll see this side of thirty-years of static temperatures and increased Arctic sea ice.

Ask Jeanette Fitzsimons about it alll next time she accosts you in a shopping mall.

Minor leaders farce

I have to confess I didn't manage to watch the whole of the "minor party leaders debate" last night.  I was bored rigid.

There were too many of them for a start to actually have a debate, so in the absence of a serious interviewer we got instead just lame pantomime, with Sainsbury playing Widow Twankey. 

More sense might have been had if Neanderton and Dunne-Nothing had been dropped: since their parties, such as they are, attract less support than Libertarianz, they were there not so much to say what their parties could or would do, but only to indicate what they would like to do if they got their own feet under the cabinet table again -- once we'd heard them confirm which Team they were backing (Red for Neanderton, Blue for Dunne-Bugger-All), they should have been ushered from the stage.

And there was nothing new from from the others -- nothing coherent from Peters, and nothing that made sense from Fitzsimplesimons (anyone who thinks building bicycle paths and railway tunnels is the key to economic recovery should be introduced to the carers at Auckland's Mason Clinic) -- and what they did say indicated all too clearly they have no clue at all about either the urgency of the present crisis, or its depth, or what the hell a government needs to do to confront it.

It was a pantomime that makes clear enough why MMP has delivered only farce.

Rescuing defeat from the jaws of recovery

In the thirties they were called "public works projects," massive spending on which dragged resources away from productive enterprises and delayed the necessary recovery for years.  Now it's called "investment in infrastructure," and while the buzzwords have changed, in a time of economic crisis the two big parties have both hung their hats (and our heads) on the same old failed nostrum -- big spending on big public works projects --  to get us out of the economic mire.  Spending that can only be paid for out of ten years of borrowing.

So much failed thinking in just one shared policy. 

Meanwhile, one of only two NZ finance ministers to pull NZ out of a previous economic mire is now going in to bat at this election with a policy to keep growing the state, while cutting the money that pays for it -- meaning the inexorable reek of deficits emanates from this source as well.

So much for radical solutions to real problems.

A while ago I made some excellent points (if I say so myself) that public "investment" in infrastructure:

1. sucks capital away from profitable private investment ; and
2. since real infrastructure investment repays the investment whereas public investment doesn't,  government spending on infrastructure is essentially consumption spending.

To say nothing of what government-borrowing to pay for deficits does to bid real capital away from businessmen and entrepreneurs -- the ones we actually need to grow the economy.

To illustrate this point again, an avid reader (whose initials might be A.B.) has sent me an excerpt from one of the investment papers he analyses for a publicly-owned European rail infrastructure organisation. He says that in such papers there is a note saying that "Net Present Value & Internal Rate of Return analysis is not applicable for Socio-Economic Projects."

Forget the jargon (I did), but do note the package deal: "Socio-Economic Projects," as opposed to actual economic projects.

In other words, when you're analysing real infrastructure investment you should expect it to repay the investment; whereas when you're examining "socio-economic" projects you should expect to see your money poured down a black hole -- but with some really colourful excuses to explain why.

For example, a UK railway line (for which a higher speed main line & a motorway already exist as alternatives) was previously closed -- by a government body -- just for sheer lack of use.  No chance at all then that any "investment" in such line would do anything other than use up the resources "invested" in it.

But that's when you look at real economics.  In the fantasy world of "socio-economics" in which reality has been suspended, an analyst can read the following benefits of "socio-economic investment" in such a line:

• To improve direct access to labour markets in BigCity1 and BigCity2 for people living in Hicksberg and Wopwopsville.
• To stimulate the economic growth of the Hicksberg and Wopwopsville Council areas by improving the connectivity of the area and thus encourage inward investment.
• To assist in the delivery of social inclusion to communities in Hicksberg and Wopwopsville, particularly in the Smalltown to Smallertown corridor.
• To contribute significantly to increasing the number of people using public transport in Central Socialistland and to provide these people with direct access into the national rail system.
• To offer a sustainable public transport alternative to the local motorway that will be attractive to car and other vehicle users and thus reduce the rise in road congestion and subsequent environmental impacts.
• To facilitate connectivity between existing services thereby creating a viable alternative to the BigCity1 - BigCity2 main line route, and consequently alleviating congestion during the peaks.

And the price of delivering all this "social inclusion" and other politically correct benefits? The local currency equivalent of $1.07 billion NZ dollars!

We should take comfort that it at least makes FailRail look cheap (and we can see where Jeanette Fitzsimons and Mike Lee get their "analysis" from). But this is what happens when politicians direct investment instead of entrepreneurs: they chew up real resources that could have been used to make everyone better off.

That's NZ$1.07 billion that entrepreneurs won't get to invest profitably. It will go instead to:

• bid up the prices of public works contractors, bidding them away from profitable work elsewhere
• bid up the price of building supplies companies, bidding these materials away from profitable work elsewhere
• paying large sums to adjacent land owners for access to land worth virtually zero
• paying the exorbitant fees and levies of the local environmental protection agency, the national waterway protection board, the local heritage protection agency (not to be confused with the national historical preservation agency, who will also be consulted); and a host of other consultants my correspondent's employers will retain to represent them in dealing with all those agencies.

And of course, since this project has been publicly announced and touted by politicians, it is work that "must be done" -- without delay! -- and so the amounts of taxpayer money handed over for the aforementioned works, access and consulting will be far above amounts that a private investor would pay.

Now, aren't you glad the Red and Blue Team are going to beef up the RMA to make "work of National importance" easier, and increase public "investment" in infrastructure. The NZ Contractors' Federation sure is ...

Nick Smith at your Xmas table

NZ's Environmental Risk Management Authority -- the crowd National's Nick Smith's wants to make into an even bigger bureaucracy called the Environmental Protection Agency -- has just sent out a memo "reminding importers that under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, Christmas crackers are covered by the definition of, and controls on, the importation of fireworks."

    As such Christmas crackers require a completed Certificate to Import Explosives from Erma (the Environmental Risk Management Authority) New Zealand before they may be imported into New Zealand,” the circular states.
    It is estimated that only approximately 60 percent of Christmas crackers being imported into the country obtain the required certificates.

So that means no Christmas crackers this Christmas, just like there's no decent fireworks on fireworks night.  And it also means that this summer you'll have Helen Clark in your shower, Jeanette Fitzsimons changing your lightbulbs, and now Nick Smith sitting at your Xmas table holding a wet blanket.

That's a pretty foul trifecta.

A hopeless shower

It's like you've just won the radio competition from hell, and for your prize Helen Clark and Jeanette Fitzsimons will be jumping in to join you in your morning shower -- and to show you who's in control they're going to force you to turn the tap down. Permanently.

Anyone who already knows the green-plated building regulations under which builders, designers and developers have laboured for years will be unsurprised at yet another imposition that makes decent showers illegal -- but for most of you, Nanny's new rules on showering will be a straw that challenges the strength of your camel's spine.

They've fucked up everything else, and now they're fucking up our showers.

"First they came for our lightbulbs," says DPF, and now they're coming for our showers.

It's time to tell Nanny to fuck right off.

Debating leaders' debates

There is more heat and light generated in getting to a leaders debate these days than there is from the damn debates themselves. 

We can all remember last election how Jim Neanderton and Peter Dunne-Nothing stamped their feet like spoiled children when TV3 took away their rattle -- in the end TV3 were unable to rule the Tantrum Twins out of the leaders' debate only because the twins used the power of the state to force a private broadcaster to act in a way they, the politicians, wished them too.

So much for their respect for the freedom of the Fourth Estate.

This year they're throwing the same tantrum again, joined this time by Rodney Hide and Jeanette Fitzsimons who've also been excluded from the playground main leaders' debate this time.  It looks at this stage as if TV3 have shrugged rather than capitulate again, but TVNZ resolutely continues with plans to hold "two head to head debates between Miss Clark and Mr Key and a separate debate for minor party leaders."

Good.

Despite the wishes of all the minor party leaders, the best evidence suggests that either Clark or Key will hold the office of Prime Minister after the election, and a thorough examination of both, without the distractions of bevy of other buffoons, is essential. What's needed is less of a gameshow, and more of a grilling.

And a thorough examination of the buffoons minor leaders is also necessary, but with the emphasis here mostly on what they consider crucial to coalition, without the distraction of hearing them comment on issues on which their views are almost wholly irrelevant. And on this former Alliance leader Laila Harre has a plan.

Since the needs of both debates are different, so too should the debates themselves be separate. And since the need for a thorough examination is paramount, what's needed is interviewers able to give a thorough examination of their interviewees -- something of which NZ's two main broadcasters are sadly lacking -- instead of becoming the main event themselves (something of which NZ's usual stock of interviewers  are all too adept).

UPDATE: Jim Mora has invited me on Radio NZ's Panel this afternoon to debate the debate about the debates with Chris Trotter and Jeremy Wells.  Should be a good ... discussion.

Exit Maid Marian

Twice in her parliamentary career I've been surprised to find myself cheering on Marian Hobbs, who gave her valedictory speech to parliament last week.

Who wouldn't be surprised?

The  first time I found myself in her corner was with her resolute defence of science and genetic engineering in the face of Nicky Hager and "little creep" John Campbell's pathetic 'corngate' beat-up in the run-up to the 2002 election, when civilised New Zealanders were silently and not-so silently applauding Clark and Hobbs for allowing a GE crop to reach maturity, and reflecting that things could have been a lot worse with Nick Smith in the Environment chair, and will be a lot worse if rumours about Jeanette Fitzsimons taking the chair in a post-election Labour Cabinet were to come to pass.

The second time I applauded Hobbs was just yesterday when I came across her valedictory speech, and not just because she's leaving parliament, but for for her observations on the state of journalism which she identifies is more focused on personalities than it is policies.   This is not just the complaint of someone who's had a bad run with the media -- although it is partly that -- it's also right on the money.

    "Politics is about making decisions, be it the laws we pass or the budgets we approve," she said.  "But modern news media doesn't evaluate our decisions in the light of which policy is best.
    "Instead they build a web around personalities and behaviour. It's about a smiley new face versus the one we are familiar with. The news is about decision makers, rarely about decisions."

This is the reason scandal-mongering and smiley faces flourish in the corridors of power, while policy-makers are either ignored or pursue their work in the shadows - often to the detriment of those whom their policies damage.

"You need only to sound assertive, even when you don't know what you're talking about," she said.

There's a lot of that about, isn't there. When the focus of reporting is on "the game," and who's "winning it" rather than on policies and who's being done over by them, it's no wonder that flatulent fools like Winston Peters -- who's never read a whole policy document right to the end, but is a master at sounding assertive -- gets all the media time he does, while policy analysis -- even on the blogs -- is little more than left versus right.

UPDATE: "As the media often rate how well MPs are doing," David Farrar asked MPs to reverse the favour, and score the media and press gallery.  The results are here: MPs survey of the media.  On a scale of 0-10, very few scored over 5, and then only barely.

Greens' Fitzsimons favours toxic poison drop

WHILE THAMES RESIDENTS PROTEST against the Department of Conservation's 1080 aerial drop in the Coromandel Ranges, dropping the toxic poison over 13,000 hectares from Jeanette Fitzsimons bit of “green heaven" in the Kauaeranga Valley all the way up to Te Puru, the clean, Green Party Leader pleads in today's Hauraki Herald for “tolerance.” “She did not know anyone who was comfortable with poison being dropped from the air," the local paper reports, "However, 1080 was necessary to ‘hold the line’ until a more effective pest control method was developed."

If recent polls can be trusted, Fitzsimon's party will experience a rather effective pest control method come November.  But it does seem strange to see the Green leader plead for tolerance for toxins, when opposition to toxins and the like was once the Greens' raison d'être.

Perhaps when the toxins are delivered by Nanny it's okay?

But why should hunters and land-owners have to be tolerant of a poor decision made by government without any reference to those directly affected?

Fact is, DoC's use of 1080 has been intensely destructive to everything but possums, on which it has only just held the line.  After many years and over a billion of tax payers dollars spent on possum control we still have the same 70 million possums we had at the start. Not successful and of very little, if any, benefit. 

No wonder DoC staff joke that the best way to protect the kiwi is to give it them to exterminate.

The so called possum problem is largely a manufactured one by the Government agencies who stand to gain from perpetrating it. DoC claims that the 70 million possums in New Zealand eat about 300 grams each of foliage each day, resulting in a whopping 21,000 tonnes of vegetation being consumed daily.

What they do not tell us though is the forests of this country produce about 300,000 tonnes of new vegetation daily. 

The economics do not make any sense either. The New Zealand Conservancy Authority states that the economic costs attributable to possums is estimated to be between $40 million and $60 million per year. Yet over $130 million is spent each year by State, private individuals and businesses on control. Not much benefit in something that uneconomic, or in the costs to game hunters and food gatherers who face a stand-down time of 6 months or more, and the considerable risk of contaminated meat, and the considerable costs to farmers directly and indirectly of aerial spreading of such a toxic poison on and near their properties --including in some cases whole farms -- with no compensation for their loss.

There are three main limits to possum populations in any given area; in decreasing order these are dry nest sites, food supply and (to a much lesser extent) play areas. Possum populations cannot go beyond these natural barriers, so despite DoC claims to the contrary, they simply cannot explode without control. In fact, many areas of New Zealand do not have any possum control, without any of the adverse effects that DoC claims they should experience.

Further, concern about damage done to endangered species by possums is more than offset by the damage done by 1080 itself.

THE ARGUMENT OVER THE use of 1080 shows once again the problem of a lack of private ownership.  To control a pest on government land, the government tramples on the rights of everyone - no matter how ineffective the control, or how toxic the chosen pesticide.  But governments always favour blunt instruments, in complete disregard of the damage they cause.

The use of 1080 itself should not be banned. What should be stopped is the widespread use of 1080 whether a landowner consents to it or not. 

1080 use should be controlled because of the downstream effects on almost everything, including invertebrates, birds and fish -- and all those good things that hunters like to shoot. There's no need for a ban, however, because widespread private ownership and rigorous common law would effectively do this anyway, as a responsible property owner would have trouble guaranteeing no harmful effects to other property owners. 

What needs to be emphasised is that in free countries free people own the land, not the Government.  It's the government's ownership of land that causes the conflict, not the possums.

Greens reveal their approach to law and order

While demand grows across the country for increased action to protect individuals from criminals, the wife of Green Party list candidate Gareth Hughes releases the Green Party's informal law and order policy at the Green Party blog, announcing that for any "proud activist ... within reasonable limits a bit of trespass, a bit of property damage, a bit of general disruption is fine. Quite fun, too." [Hat tip Whale Oil]

Since one searches in vain for a law and order policy at the Greens' site, feel free to ask co-leaders Jeanette Fitzsimons and Russel (with one 'l') Norman if they agree with that informal policy, and if this is indicative of the Greens' general attitude t0 people and their property.

Email Jeanette: Jeanette.Fitzsimons@greens.org.nz
Email Russel (with one 'l'): Russel.Norman@greens.org.nz

The oxymoron of Green business experience

I posted yesterday on the sad and sorry lot that are the Greens' new 'high-flyers,' as revealed by their own words. This morning The Frog (who is paid for by you, the taxpayer) defends, or tries to, the all too obvious charge that the Green Party knows nothing about and has no experience of business by posting a list that "proves" their top twelve candidates for 2008 are steeped in business experience (complete with careful massage -- David Clendon, for example morphs from Resource Consultant, ie., parasite, to "Business Adviser").

They have to go to twelve because that's the first genuine appearance of genuine business experience among the planning lecturers, "community development workers" and "climate change campaigners" that dominate. I invite you to view the complete list of losers who seek political power over you, and ask yourself how many have spent any appreciable hours earning a genuine profit instead of sucking off the taxpayers' tit?

Looks like Green business experience is as much an oxymoron as 'Australian culture,' or 'government initiative.'  More like ivory tower experience.

UPDATE:
Q: What's the biggest theft of NZers' property rights since the war? 
A: National's Resource Management Act.
Q: How many of the Greens' top twelve have been feeding from this particular trough?
A: Fully one third of them, for most of their working lives:

• Jeanette Fitzsimons: Planning Lecturer
• Metiria Turei: Resource Management Lawyer
• Catherine Delahunty: tutor and 'mediator' under the Resource Management Act
• David Clendon:  Resource Consultant and lecturer in the RMA

UN & Anderton learn good economics! (updated)

Crikey! Jim Anderton and the head of the United Nations -- the head of the godamned UN! -- are both on the correct side of the economic argument on food production! Liberty Scott has the stories on this amazing development:

• UN Secretary General demands free trade in food
• Anderton is right

They're both far better than the raving lunatics at last weekend's Greens conference like Jeanette Fitzsimons, who has built a career on "fear, irrationality and ignorance," and Sue Kedgley, who has gone to argue the opposite of good sense at the UN food conference.

UPDATE: Paul Walker sees me agreeing with Neanderton and the UN and asks, "Has Peter Cresswell gone completely mad?"

Cue Card Libertarianism: Renewable Energy

Each 'Cue Card Libertarianism' entry forms part of a series intended to introduce newbies to the terms used (or as used) by NZ  libertarians. The series so far can be found archived here, and the Introduction here.

RENEWABLE ENERGY:  To the paltry strength of human muscles and draft animals--which for centuries before the industrial revolution powered the poor production that kept the population in poverty--human beings finally added man-made power to their repertoire, "power far greater than that found ready-made in nature in the form of wind and rushing or falling water."*

And with that discovery and production of industrial strength energy came the industrial production that fuelled the enormous explosion in population, wealth and human fecundity that characterises industrial civilisation.

This man-made power, and the energy released by its use, is the fundamental cause of our higher living standards, and is the result of advances in both theoretical and applied science and in technology. Man-made power is fundamentally human brain power applied to the specific issue of energy production.**

Energy is the very lifeblood of an industrial civilisation.  Hence the hysterical opposition of civilisation's opponents to energy production, and their concomitant support for so called 'renewable energy.'

Renewable energy may be defined as energy produced by means that would be uneconomic without such tax breaks and subsidies.  The distinguishing characteristic of so called 'renewable energy' is not that it is renewable, but that it doesn't produce reliable energy.  For opponents of industrial civilisation, this attribute is not a curse, but a blessing. This largely unspoken argument was voiced by "soft energy" advocate Amory Lovins in a 1977 interview,

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. [Amory Lovins interviewed in 'The Mother Earth–Plowboy‘ magazine, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22]

This is why, for the most part, the "renewables" so heavily touted just aren't available, and just don't produce enough to keep industrial civilisation going. The fact is, they aren't intended to.

What distinguishes the "new energy" touted by the likes of Amory Lovins, David Parker, Nick Smith & Jeanette Fitzsimplesimons from the "old energy" on which industrial civilisation depends is that while "old energy" is reliable and actually produces energy, so called "new energy" is still experimental, and mostly doesn't.

In other words, it's the modern day equivalent of snake oil.

While "old energy" fuels the world's industry, "new energy" still requires your money to prop it up and barely scratches the surface of the sort of capacity required for a modern industrial nation. Aware of this, former Australian PM John Howard said recently (and accurately):

Let's be realistic. You can only run power stations in a modern Western economy on fossil fuel, or, in time, nuclear power.

Alan Jenkins from NZ's Electricity Networks Association issued a similar warning two years ago which has still been widely undigested, saying

It's very hard to invest in coal [because of Kyoto], nuclear's a sort of four letter word... hydro is suddenly becoming too hard... what's left? ...we can't do everything on windpower.

We can't, can we.

Which puts into context the attacks on coal by global warming zealots like James Hansen, who declares,

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

You might now begin to see the reason behind the virulent attacks on real energy.  They are attacks on production and human fecundity itself.

Yet even as they're draining our lifeblood, the anti-industrialists are still taken seriously.

Go figure.


This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by New Zealand libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993. The 'Introduction' to the series is here. The series so far can be seen down on the right-hand sidebar.


* Andrew Bernstein, The Capitalist Manifesto.
** George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics

Labour outlaws Greens

New blog The Dim Post looks to be outstanding satire.  It reveals, for example, how the Green Party intends to support Labour’s law to outlaw the Green Party:

The Labour Government's proposed bill to dissolve the Green Party took a step closer to being passed into law today after Green leaders Jeanette Fitzsimons and Russell Norman confirmed that they would vote in favour of the legislation.

The Environmental Electoral Vengeance Bill is currently before the Justice and Electoral select committee. If the law is bought into effect then membership of the Green Party will become a criminal offense punishable by ten years in prison and fines of up to three hundred thousand dollars.

‘This bill clears up many of the problems caused by potential Labour supporters casting their votes for inappropriate parties,’ Justice Minister Annette King announced during a pre-committee press conference. ‘It is undemocratic and unfair for votes rightfully belonging to Labour to be squandered on a bunch of hippies...'

Green Party cooperation was critical to passing the controversial law. The National Party withdrew its support when Justice Minister King introduced an amendment incorporating National into the bill.

While the National Party will not be outlawed, votes cast in favour of the opposition party will be transferred to Labour and counted in their favour. Under current polling this will see Labour voted back into power with approximately 110 seats and able to govern alone. National leader John Key has condemned the bill and criticized King’s handling of the legislation, although he has confirmed that if he somehow becomes Prime Minister he will not seek to change the bill in his first term.

As David Farrar says, "That one hits the mark on so many issues."

What's a railway worth?

Here's a question that's launched a thousand dinner parties: how much is your house, car or railway line worth? Well, maybe the first two questions anyway.

The short answer to "How much is something worth?" is "As much as someone is willing to pay for it on the open market" -- "someone" in this case being the willing buyer who reaches agreement with your willing seller. That explains why your house is worth less than your friend's house in a more popular area, and why your other friends' rarer and more sought after car just sold for a higher price than your run-of-the-mill old bomb.

All things being equal, the value of things on the open market is the price that a willing buyer is prepared to pay a willing seller.

This explains why the government was able to buy back the railway lines from the previous owner for the princely sum of one dollar: on the open market, that was all the rail lines were really worth as rail lines.

In fact, the lines would have been worth far more as real estate, but as a network of steel rails carrying near-empty trains around the place it's likely that the lines were worth even less than one dollar, and reinforcement for this view comes from the fact that only a government was even interested in picking up the tab for them -- since governments have a sure eye for a losing proposition, it's a fair bet that we're talking about something that's worth less than nothing.

So government bought back the rail lines. And now the Government is talking to the owner of the rail rolling stock about buying that back too -- all lock, stock and rusting old rolling stock of it. Why are they interested when no other buyer is? Simple. As Liberty Scott said when these negotiations first began, "it's a dud investment. Something socialists are good at finding."

Rail owner Toll Holdings wants seven-hundred million of our dollars in return for handing over the whole train set. The government has offered half-a-billion dollars of the money they've stolen from us. No one else is likely to offer one cent, which is a sure sign the whole train set isn't worth even that much. So what happens to half-a-billion dollars of the money that's been stolen from us if the government does 'invest' it in rail? Answer: within a very short time the whole railway -- all lock, stock and rolling stock of it, will be worth less than one cent, which is what our investment will then be worth. Only a government or Hugh Fletcher could destroy so much value in just one investment.

Half-a-billion dollars is roughly the amount New Zealand's sheep farmers earned last year for exporting sheep meat. Half-a-billion dollars invested productively could be worth roughly double that in ten years time -- that's what free enterprise can do, and it's how country's make themselves rich. Instead, in ten years time, the government will have turned the equivalent of New Zealand's entire sheep meat revenue into something equivalent to the value of a rotting carcass -- which I'm afraid pretty much describes New Zealand's railways.

Whether the whole operation is nationalised or not, the taxpayer will still lose either way. We're already paying to subsidise a failing operation, and renationalising it won't stop it losing money. Renationalising rail will simply make the socialists in cabinet feel good, and pose yet another problem for John Boy's will-they-wont-they non-policy makers, but it won't for a second change the all-too transparent fact that this is going to be a dud investment.

There's a point to make here that should by now be obvious to all but the most braindead socialist, and which even supporters of privatisation seem to have overlooked. When the NZ Rail dinosaur was hocked off the argument used was that private business would run rail more "efficiently." This was the justification at the time for all the morally necessary privatisations done in the late eighties and early nineties. This was in all truth utter nonsense. In truth, "efficiency" is only ever one part of the economic story of privatisation; only one of the strings in the privatisation bow.

The full economic argument for privatisation includes the urgent necessity to discover what government-run industries are really worth -- something that can only be established by private ownership in an open market -- and then to invest industry and capital to make them worth that, and more. In the case of rail, the real value of the rail network was less than a dollar, and on the open market the rest of the train set looks to be worth little more. In fact,without the ongoing subsidy courtesy of the taxpayer (ie., money thrown straight down the rail corridor), rail operations would have ceased long ago, except perhaps for the three or four lines able to keep their heads above water -- indicating that in this day and age the real business of rail is not transporting things and people, it's farming subsidies from governments, and that the country's 'rail network' is far from being "vital infrastructure" -- more like an expensive, arthritic and completely futile waste of precious resources.

UPDATE: Naturally, when the discussion is on planes, trains or automobiles, one needs to check out what Liberty Scott has to say today. He's not just better informed than Jeanette Fitzsimons, he's better looking as well.

Dullards behind blackouts ahead

New Zealand's power generation is in crisis. At a time when the country faces imminent blackouts it's worth reminding ourselves that the government's latest 'energy strategy' sees the construction of reliable new coal and gas plants banned, the recommissioning of new coal and gas plants put on hold, the construction of new hydro schemes made well-nigh impossible, and almost complete reliance on near non-existent "renewables" and the fickleness of wind generation for the extra capacity so urgently needed (and even Jeanette Fitzsimons is giving up on wind power).

The threat of blackouts is the product of the extraordinarily bad energy policies followed by the governments of the last twenty years, and of the even worse strategy they intend to follow in the next ten.

The energy strategy for the next decade is endorsed by both major political parties.  It is not so much a strategy for more energy as it is an anti-industrialist's manifesto.  New Zealand's power generation is in crisis -- it's in crisis because politics has trumped prosperity, and because the country's voting public just doesn't care.

Pictures from Auckland's free speech march

Momentum is building. Yesterday, five thousand of us took to the streets in Auckland to protest the Clark/Peters/Fitzsimons/Dunne Electoral Finance Bill: protesting the speech rationing, democracy rationing and electoral corruption that this Bill entails: protesting now while it's still legal...



Keep sending me pictures.

UPDATE: More pictures and story at Infonews, No Minister, and at Whale Oil's - who was out with his video camera, so keep checking back at his site for more.

TV3 report here. "Strong message sent to Government" says TVNZ.

UPDATE 2: John Boscawen thanks supporters.

UPDATE 3: More pics and commentary at MikeE's, including this pic above and the accompanying potent observation:

The above photo shows that freedom of speech and the EFB is no longer a beltway issue. Today we had conservatives and liberals, left and right, maori and pakeha, anarchists and statists marching side by side in disgust at the EFB. Some might claim that this is a National and ACT thing. It wasn't, I spotted: National, Act, Labour, [Libertarianz,] Socialist Workers, Free Palestine, Maori Sovereignty movement, Tuhoe Anti-Terror Bill protestors, war veterans, mothers, accountants, lawyers, students, anarchists, businessmen and women all marching against this disgusting piece of legislation. They will not stop, this bill will will be the end of those politically who support it.

He's dead right, and more mongrel MPs should be listening. As a few free-speech-supporting green friends have said to me, a few of whom marched yesterday, "We didn't vote Green for this!"

UPDATE 4: More pics here of Saturday's march for democracy and free speech, including a surveillance photo of the plotting beginning at the aftermatch...

March for Free Speech!

Send Clark, King, Peters, Dunne and Fitzsimons another message this Saturday in Auckland: Get your placards, effigies and chants ready for another day out in the sun, and join the second Auckland protest march -- AND LET'S HELP KILL THE BILL! Says organiser John Boscawen. "The PM was not impressed with 2000.....so I want to give her 5000." Start going through your address book now.

Assemble outside the Town Hall from 2pm for a 2:30 start, and join thousands of other good New Zealanders speaking up for freedom in this country. And once again, keep an eye out for wankers like these who might be there to hijack the march, and your free speech.

See you there! March for your free speech now, while it's still legal!