"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media."

"On my drive in to work [earlier this week], RNZ's Corin Dann challenged the Prime Minister about one part of his meeting with Australian PM Albanese. They had apparently promised to work toward some kind of joint ID and driver license system. [AUDIO, 04:15]...

"The PM's talk had this as all being about mutual recognition of driver licences. Which is obviously a weird justification. We already recognise each other's licences. And if Oz and NZ makes it tough for bars to recognise each other's licenses as ID, that's far more easily solved by just letting bars use the other country's driver's licence. The rest of it isn't needed for that problem. ...

"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media. It looks like this push started well before anyone was talking about that. ... Australia is running trials on ID/age verification setups for social media age gating; it looks like a report is soon due. ...

"[So] - both countries are working toward digital IDs, both countries five years ago agreed that they'd recognise each other's digital IDs, and this seems just to be reaffirming that prior agreement. I'd love there to be more assurance around privacy being important in the design of any of these in NZ. Because there are very bad versions that should not be supported. ...

"When the first a lot of us would have heard about a government digital ID is in context of a trans-Tasman agreement for mutual recognition, in context of Australia wanting to age-gate social media, and nobody particularly trusting that the age-gate system isn't intended to result in the kind of censorship being seen in Australia - not so hot."

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'To what policy problem is this the solution?'

"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."

"[T]he Environmental, Societal and Governance mantra ... has proven to be a drag on commerce since it emerged two decades ago. ...

"Social responsibility, the forerunner of ESG, was a popular way for executives to appear virtuous while spending their shareholder’s money ... [Milton] Friedman ... claim[ed] that there is only one social responsibility of business: 'to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.'

"The Chicago University economist was campaigning against business leaders voluntarily engaging in acts of moral worthiness with other people’s resources, but today we face a more pernicious evil; state-mandated virtue. ...

"Section 7A of the Financial Markets Conduct Act 2013 ... obligates certain large firms, from AA Insurance to Z Energy to prepare climate statements and report on their greenhouse gas emissions.

"It is an absurdly onerous regime that achieves nothing. ...'[C]limate change reporting,' harrumphed [Warehouse chair Joan Withers] to the NBR, 'is taking up more director’s time than financial statements' ... [with] not one carbon molecule less ... emitted as a result of the thousands of pages these reports produce. ... a symptom of a wider malaise. ...

"New Zealand has become trapped in a malaise of wanting to be seen to do good at the expense of achieving anything."

~ Damien grant from his column 'Why climate change reporting is achieving nothing'

John Bolton's Advice for Winston Peters

Winston Peters is in Washington DC today.

His best advice would be to not leave his hotel room at all.  To ring in sick. To bust out on room service.

His best advice is to not be noticed.

It's when you're noticed that Washington' Toddler-in Chief starts paying you attention. And that hasn't gone well for any (former) ally.

Nonetheless, as he already has meetings booked with the Trump Administration, Trump's former Secretary of State John Bolton has some advice for him that might be useful.

Perhaps one of you could pass it on.

I think people should understand that Trump is really an aberration in American political life.

Obviously he's president,  so it makes a a big difference. But he has no philosophy, he has no National Security Grand Strategy, he doesn't do policy as we conventionally understand that term. With him everything is transactional, episodic, ad hoc, annd seen through the prism of what benefits Donald Trump.

He has said many times he sees foreign policy as as being equivalent to the relations between the heads of two governments. So if he has a good relationship with Vladimir Putin he thinks the US has good relations with Russia.

Now, I'm not dismissing the role of personal relations in international affairs.  It obviously has a place. But that's not how Putin sees things. He has a pretty clear-eyed view of what he thinks Russia's national interest is, and he thinks he can manipulate Donald Trump. Trump thinks they're friends; Putin sees Trump as an easy mark. Trump just doesn't get it.

Now conversely, if Trump has bad relations with with a foreign head of state then he thinks the US has bad relations with the country. And unfortunately for Ukraine,  because of the famous 'perfect phone call' between Trump and Zelenskyy in the summer of 2019 that led to Trump's first impeachment, I think he he's never had a good relationship with Zelenskyy, notwithstanding Zelenskyy's extensive efforts to try and overcome it.

And I think that is part of what we've seen play out over the past several weeks.

So it is a fact that that Trump has basically reversed the US position, saying even before negotiations began there will not be a full restoration of sovereignty and territorial integrity no NATO membership, no NATO security guarantees, no US security guarantees — you know, these are all Kremlin positions.

The only unhappiness in Moscow these days is that they didn't ask for more. ...

I do think that the debacle in the Oval Office was a manifestation that Trump just doesn't like Zelenskyy, and now I think we're seeing an effort by Secretary of State Rubio and National Security adviser Waltz to try and bridge this over and get things back on an even keel.

Why Trump Misunderstands Putin & Ukraine
As I say, he thinks he's friends with Putin so your friends always tell you the truth, right. Just like he said in Helsinki that he
believed Putin and disagreed with American Intelligence on Russia's role in the 2016 election. Stunning to Americans that he would say that but you know do you trust your friends or do you trust the 'Deep State.' That's the Trump mentality.

I just think that it's important to to try and work with Trump on that understanding: that it's entirely personal. 

That he doesn't conceptualise foreign policy.

There's no strategy behind it.

His supporters say, you know, he plays this complex game of three-dimensional chess. No he doesn't. He plays regular chess one move at a time.

You know, there are theories that he was recruited by the Russians years ago. I don't see any evidence of it. I think his behaviour is explainable unfortunately in simpler ways. ... he operates on a day-to-day basis; there's no bigger picture; there's no hidden agenda. He just doesn't think that way.

When he ran the Trump Organisation in business, I was told he he would never set up a daily schedule. He'd come into the office every day and say, "Well what's going to happen today." Now, that may work in real estate in Manhattan; it doesn't work internationally.

But in many respects, Trump is still that same person.  ...

So in international Affairs other than his affinity for particular foreign leaders, he had no fixed points of reference.

And so, sure, he could adopt ideas, but changed them very shortly thereafter.

I said in my book that of the thousands of decisions that he made in his first term you you could take them all and put them together and they were like a big archipelago of dots out there. Now, you can try and connect the dots if you want to. Good luck. He can't connect the dots.

And, uh, understanding that I think obviously is important. 

Q: How should any of these foreign leaders, whether it's the Canadians, whether it's the Danish, how should should they be interpreting all that Trump is saying and doing, and what would you recommend they do in response?

Well I understand it's very frustrating to have to put up with this. All I can say is I saw it daily for 17 months. ...

But in Trump's world, he doesn't understand how to achieve the objective that he wants, and he may have some idea that it  would enhance his position in history if he could conquer Greenland [say], but it's it's not serious. 

It however shows an erratic, unsteady, and totally transactional presidency that has to unnerve our allies. And the best I can say is just grit your teeth. ...  so we don't do more damage than Trump himself is doing. ... 

From their perspective, they need to try and find ways to work with him. It's hard to predict who will be successful. 

It looks for example like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has so far pretty good relationship with Trump. I wouldn't necessarily have predicted that, but but it looks like it's off to a good start. Prime Minister Meloni of Italy, I think, has a good relationship. So does Victor Orban of Hungary — that's not a pattern we'd like to see repeated. But I think leaders are going to have to think about, uh, how to flatter Trump.

I mean I'm sorry to have to say that, but that's what gets to him.

So my recommendation [to Zelenskyy for example] would be to do what Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, did in the first term. Nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — and do it quickly before somebody else thinks of it. 

... the *state* of this nation! [updated]

"Brief thoughts on [the PMs'] 'State of the Nation' [speech]: Focus on economy is good. Saying 'economic growth' a lot & renaming the Economic Development portfolio doesn't do much.  [I'm] confused as to what the role of Invest NZ is compared with NZ Trade & Enterprise (NZTE). 

    "The idea of less saying 'no' is great but it is not a policy or a roadmap. 

    "There was a whole lot of nothing in that speech. Aspiration, ideas, hopes. We need some steel spines & brass balls when it comes to the economy. Nicola & Luxon need to stand up & unapologetically declare that they are going to be brave, bold, ruthless. Spending has to come down. Growth doesn't matter if spending outstrips it. 

    "I am underwhelmed and anxious. I'm a swing voter; past two elections I've voted centre-right. That State of the Nation speech has given me anxiety. With scores of advisors, comms people, ministers etc that was what they came up with? I WANT THE GOVT TO SUCCEED!! Because I want to live in NZ. 

    "That was depressing."

          ~ Ani O'Brien

"Luxon’s ‘going for growth’ just grows the government bureaucracy. ...

    "Christopher Luxon’s State of the Nation speech on the economy strikes, but misses the mark, with no announcements that will increase New Zealand’s productivity, or unshackle the private sector that drives growth. 

    "[T]he speech was more about 'feels' and repeating old announcements than concrete policy changes to improve New Zealand’s prosperity.

    "The only exception is, bizarrely, another government agency, apparently to attract foreign investors.”   

    “The speech represents shifting deck chairs, not the sort of economic reform the times call for.” 

    “People don’t invest in a country because a government agency tells them to. Claims that this model is seen in Ireland or Singapore are fantasy. Investors in those countries don’t have among the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Today’s speech would have meant something had it tackled our tax settings or securities law which make investing here so unattractive.”

    “New Zealand’s lack of foreign investment isn’t because of a lack of bureaucrats. It’s because we don’t offer competitive investments. Today’s speech lacks the seriousness or urgency in ‘going for growth’.”
          ~ Jordan Williams

[Hat tip cartoon Dr Stephen Clarke]

UPDATE:

Eric Crampton tries for more optimism. Like Denis De Nuto, it's all about "the vibe," he reckons: 

A shift in vibe has to be backed by more than speeches. The culture in our bureaus and agencies needs to change, along with the regulatory regimes. That will take real work.
    But the shift in vibe is welcome. It’s time to build.

#TopTen | #3: A can-kicking ex-PM

 

Today, last year’s third-most popular post here at EnZed’s fourth-most read political blog asking … for all his tremendous popularity, is John Key the almost unique example of a Prime Minister without a legacy?

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In years to come, I suspect, John Key’s long-term legacy will be seen as being the PM who kicked the can down the road.

He was a man who without question understood many of the issues a new government urgently needed to address, and even clearly articulated before his first electoral victory what that government needed to do to address them. Yet he didn’t do any of them. Not one.

Instead he smiled and waved, and he kicked the can on down the road.

John Key said in 2008 that "Nanny State is storming through your front door.” She still is. He did nothing to stop her.

He said (correctly) that in hoovering up well over a third of working New Zealanders and turning them into welfare beneficiaries Labour’s Working for Families programme was “creeping communism.” Yet he never touched it when in office, and the unsustainable welfare programme is now cemented in and generations of children will grow up knowing nothing but mooching as a way of life.

He said that Labour’s election bribe of interest-free loans for student was “unsustainable.” He did nothing about it in office, and the tertiary and student-debt bubble he subsequently oversaw continues to inflate.

He supported Don Brash in his call for One Law for All, and ran on a platform that promised to abolish the Maori seats. Eight years later separatism now, if anything, is worse – partly because his government has been propped up for three terms by MPs holding the very seats he had pledged to abolish.

In his first election, at at time when the global economy had already melted down, his signal policy was a programme of very substantial tax cuts –“a tax cut programme [fully costed and funded] that will not require any additional borrowing” – a “pledge to deliver about $50 a week to workers on the average age” – and a promise not to raise GST. He broke both promises. And taxes remain too high, even as government debt and spending increases.

On present numbers and demographics, superannuation is a ticking time bomb. He knows that. He knew it when he promised not to touch it. And even with explosion coming on, he didn’t. It still ticks – and the sound is getting louder.

He oversaw a disaster-recovery programme in what was the country’s second-largest city that took power away from property owners and vested it in instead in several layers of bureaucracy and grand plans from which the central city is still struggling to recover – if it ever will. It could have been different. But it wasn’t.

Aware back in 2007 that housing was already severely unaffordable, he articulated then an unbelievable solution to fix it. Which might have. Yet he never did any of it it, not one jot. Instead he left the the bubble to inflate, creating serious imbalances, rampant consumption of capital, and leaving a generation locked out of home ownership.

Taking office in 2008 government debt was just over $10 billion. In eight years he has taken it six times higher – with no plans in place for it to retreat.

When he took office the wage gap with Australia made us the poorest ‘Australasian state,’ with the average NZ wage around one-third less than the average Ocker. He made that one of his main tasks. His top job. Eight years later, after refusing to do anything to lift NZ productivity (and refusing to even listen to proposals that might), that wage gap remains the same, and the average Tasmanian still earns more than we do.

This is a man who resolutely refused to make hard decisions. Who elected to promise much, and deliver little.

To smile and wave, while refusing to spend his considerable political capital on what former National leader Don Brash calls “the crunchy issues.”

He's jovial, he's friendly, he's cordial ... he's very much seen as one of us and in that sense he's done a good job. But has he tackled the big issues facing New Zealand? Unfortunately not.

It’s said that Key is respected in Australia for keeping the electorate close while still making significant reform. Yet with respect, what reform?!

If Helen Clark’s inadvertent legacy was to cement in virtually all of the reforms enacted by Roger Douglas, then John Key’s will be to have cemented in hers – while offering none of his own, not one, as any kind of counterweight.

It’s said that NZ is better now than it would have been if any of Key’s opponents had been in power – and, certainly, you have to shudder if you imagine where the likes of a Cunliffe-Norman team would have driven us.

But John Key has done precisely nothing to arrest the slide towards big government that makes the policies of a Clark or Cunliffe possible and the statism they promote still palatable – and when one of their ilk does take over again (and with MMP still in place, against which he refused to campaign, then that is more likely than not sometime soon), they will have a state more swollen after his eight years to play with, and the Clark platform he so carefully maintained to give them a flying start.  As Peter McCaffrey observes from Canada,

for many 'conservatives' who seek to maintain the status quo, that [preservation] can be considered an achievement in and of itself.
But for those of us who are reformers, who think government is too big, who think bureaucracy is out of control, who firmly believe in new ideas and policies, then leaving Helen Clark's status quo largely intact (if not worse in some places), is no success.

New Zealand under John Key was always “on the cusp of something special,” which now with his end is revealed as being only the campaign spin that it was.

He is well liked, and by very many. And with the many parts of the state that needed rolling back, and that instead have been allowed to grow even more tumescent, that is perhaps the very worst thing one could say about a Prime Minister after eight years in office …

[Hat tips Peter McCaffrey, @caffeine_addict. Key Cartoon by Richard McGrail, Thatcher pic and slogan FNK Creative Workshop.]

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Tomorrow, last year’s second-most popular post, on the most pressing can that Key kicked so thoroughly down the road … or tried to.

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Blessed news indeed!

 

As Mark Twain once reminded us, “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”

And comes the news today that the legislature has now blessedly ended its session for the year.

Hosanna!

What a shame so many of their agents out there in the EPA, ACC, BSA, OIO, OFLC, OTS, TPK, MoBIE, ComCom, GCSB, NZCS, NZQA, OSH, OEC, Human Wrongs Commissariat and IRD won’t also be slumbering over the break.

But Twain only pointed out the lack of safety while the legislature sits. He made no promises about its absence.

.

Fitzsimons’ Values Party: They won the nuclear war!

“Credit cards and a Maserati,
Don't go to films
‘Less he knows they're arty
Likes Womens’ Lib
And the Values Party,
He’s a Rasta, he’s New Wave,
Don’t do nothing
Less he’s told exactly how to behave . . . ”
- ‘Rebel,’ by Toy Love / Chris Knox(1978)

LAST NIGHT JEANETTE FITZSIMONS brought down the hemp curtain on her thirteen-year Parliamentary career. When an MP gives their valedictory speech, all their colleagues and the whole commentariat comes out in force to review their career.

But I’m not going to do that now.  No more than I did last week.  Instead, what I want to review (just briefly) is the ‘career’ of the Party with whom she was first associated.

Back in the early seventies there was a political party called the Values Party. (“She likes Women’s Lib and the Values Party. . . ”)  Non-threatening, non-violent and never any hope of winning a Parliamentary seat, they ran a programme based around saving the whales and the Tangata Whenua; around multiculturalism and mediocrity; promoting state support of everything except the production that would pay for it; attacking the “obsessions” with competition, money and personal gratification and promoting instead the spiritualism of sacrifice and “sustainability”—long, long  before any of these ideas were politically fashionable.  They were the original politically correct “rebels.” And they made them fashionable.

Tripping over their sandals, banging their head on their wind chimes, reeking of patchouli and clad in the inevitable tie-died macrame, at the the time they only appeared to be a threat to themselves, but a careful review of the Values Party programme would show that the Values Party have been one of the most successful parties of the last four decades. They never got an MP within a hippie’s roar of Parliament, but just take a look at the core Values programme (conveniently laid out for us by Claire Browning). and review for a moment how the ideas they brought to the fringes of the political table four decades ago are now front and centre in so much of what passes for political debate today:

Politics -- MMP, and open government, including freedom of information, now given effect by the Official Information Act.
International relations -- an independent foreign affairs stance (eg, ANZUS withdrawal), an anti-nuclear, nuclear-free stance, anti-apartheid in sport.
Law -- New Zealand’s highest court should be a New Zealand court not the Privy Council, Fair Trading and Consumer Guarantees policies.
Race relations and status of Maori -- strengthening Maori cultural identity and tino rangatiratanga, a Maori Minister of Maori Affairs.
Status of women -- a suite of policies to remove discrimination and gender bias against women in employment, healthcare, public participation (eg, jury service), and in the home (eg, deploring gender stereotypes, and proposing matrimonial property reform).
Individual responsibility for moral behaviour -- eg, homosexual law reform.
Immigration -- a cautious multi-racial population-replacement immigration policy (as opposed to Eurocentric).

The foundation planks of the Values’ manifesto gave birth to the nostrums of ecological collapse due to climate change; to the soft fascism of political correctness and the collectivism of failure; to the mush of multiculturalism and the mainstreaming of “minorities”; to the “politics of enough” and a  “redistributive philosophy” in which the state would recover and share around the wealth of “the excessively greedy or fortunate”; to anti-capitalist assaults on consumerism and industry; to the greening of socialism and the throttling of capitalism--and they brought these all to the mainstream.  They didn’t just gave birth to the Greens, they gave birth (almost unobserved by the mainstream) to the political agenda of the last forty years.

What was wildly “way out, man” then is just mainstream and taken for granted today.  That’s the extent of their victory.

THE VALUES PARTY PROGRAMME was so wildly successful because their members, and many former members, all  understood they were involved in a battle of ideas—at a time when most of their opponents would barely be said to have an original idea between them.  And they had patience. They knew that to capture the mainstream they had to capture the young—and that to capture the young they had to capture the education system, so they could tell those youngsters how to behave.

And so they did.  And then those youngsters grew up, and took with them those ideas they’d imbibed when their brains were still tender.  It was always a battle of ideas—a battle in which they still give no quarter.

As Ayn Rand put it, “a political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; whereas a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." I very much doubt whether Ms Fitzsimons would ever put it quite like that, but she would be one of the few in the present Parliament who would understand.

Because, you see, you could always smell the ideological uranium on Fitzsimons’ breath. You could always smell it on her colleagues.  Which is why the Values Party won the nuclear war. 

They won it because, for the most part, while their opponents  were fussing about with the tactical weapons of pragmatism and politics—by refusing to confront the fact that bad ideas can only be fought by better ideas—the strategic nuclear weapons launched by the Values alumni were already having their victories.   While their opponents were figuring out the tactics of political musketry, the Values’ troops were (in the words of Chris Knox’s song) preparing everyone to be “told exactly how to behave.” Not for them fussing about with poll numbers, seats and cabinet rankings. They always knew that in the end it didn’t really matter how many MPs you sent to parliament, but how many ideas.

And that’s why the Values Party won.

The lesson, for most of us, should be obvious.

Tipping point?

The world is warming … to common sense. European political leaders have realised that strangling their economies in pursuit of a fiction is just dumb. “Instead of standing by plans to cut CO2 emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, the actual reductions,” says the Wall Street Journal Europe, “might be as trivial as 4% if all exemptions are factored in.”

Four percent!  Clearly, Europe is cooling on global warming.  And:

Kevin Rudd's announcement of a carbon emissions reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020 demonstrated that his pre-election claim that climate change was the great moral issue of our time, and demanding that Australia lead the way, was what Winston Churchill would call a terminological inexactitude: a whopper, a piece of bare-faced duplicity of epic proportions. But thank goodness Rudd and his colleagues deceived us [See Janet Albrechtsen: Blessed change in the climate]

Five percent! Australia too is cooling on global warming. 

The world is clearly coming round to common sense on the great global lie.  And with the forthcoming select committee inquiry into global warming here, New Zealand has the same opportunity to resile from the bullshit, and to step back from Key’s ludicrous pre-election promises to strangle NZ’s economy by up to fifty percent in order to fix a non-problem.

Thank goodness then for Christopher Monckton’s Open Letter to John Key on Climate Change.

One would like to think it could be the necessary tipping point here.

NOT PJ: Dancing with New Zealand’s Next Biggest Loser

Bernard Darnton offers some helpful suggestions on how to boost viewership of Parliament TV… 

Politics geeks have printed off their copies of the Parliamentary seating plan and locked their Freeview boxes to Parliament TV.

For some reason there are people who voluntarily watch this stuff – regularly. Don’t get me wrong: there is some value in watching Parliament. It’s like eating haggis. It’s something you should do once, for educational purposes, but don’t be surprised when you feel disgusted and don’t ever want to do it again.

The greatest commotion so far in this 49th Parliament’s short life has been over the 90-day probationary period for new employees. This is a stunningly good idea. The New Zealand public has just hired a bunch of new employees and it would be nice to know we could toss out the reprobates if they don’t behave.

Even better, if Parliament TV wanted to bump up the ratings a bit they could run it as a competition. Bring in Donald Trump for a series of Parliamentary Apprentice: “You’re fired!”

The Athenians knew a thing or two about democracy, having invented it, and they came up with the brilliant idea of ostracism. Each year they would rope off part of the agora in Athens, hold a tribal council, and vote someone off the island. Well, out of the city. The nominated person was exiled for ten years. Think how much sooner Winston would have gone under the rules of Survivor: Molesworth Street.

If we voted one MP a week out of Parliament we’d be down to a sensible number in just a couple of years. No more need to invent nonsense ministries to quiet the ranks. As a bonus, 99 cents per call to the 0900 number for getting rid of the buggers would probably fund all the government functions that we actually need.

Given that people will watch any old crap, Parliament TV could pack its schedule with dozens of shows like this. Rodney Hide’s formidable being-on-telly experience would set him in good stead for Dancing with the Members and he’s already got plenty of points on the board for Parliament’s Biggest Loser – a much contested title.

The choice of Lockwood Smith, a former game show host, as Speaker is inspired. No one could be better qualified. “Your starter for ten. Has the Minister received any reports showing the government in an improbably good light?” Bzzzt…

You at home could join in too. In Mitre 10 Nightmare Home contestants will attempt minor renovations while busybody neighbours appeal their choice of paint colour to the Environment Court. In the final episode, when the renovations are eventually complete, a gay building inspector will come round and criticise the contestants’ choice of lightbulbs and shower fittings.

New Zealand Idol could present some problems. No doubt our representatives would be keen for the title but, seriously, anyone who idolises MPs needs mittens and rubber wallpaper. New Zealand Idle, however, could become the smash hit of the season. The contest is wide open. Last year’s champion, Judith Tizard, isn’t returning and all-time superstar Jonathan Hunt’s seat has long gone cold despite decades of gentle warming. Let’s hope the competition for this one is stiff because, if all MPs did as little as these two, New Zealand would be a far freer and more prosperous place.

I hope this comes to pass. With more time spent preening for television and less time spent passing legislation – and don’t forget the frequent eliminations of contestants – it would be goodbye Big Brother and goodbye Supernanny state. But a warning: These programmes will contain scenes that some viewers may find offensive.

Lock up your valuables: the legislature is back in session! [updated]

It’s time to quote Mark Twain again, who reminds us that “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” 

The legislature is now back in session, and far too swiftly for my liking.  Time to lock up your valuables.

Remember just because you’re not interested in politics, it doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you.

Just for your reference then, here (complete with my comments) is the 27-point “action plan” that the new National/ACT/Maori/Dung Government hope to impose on the country before Christmas which now has two additions (about which see below).

Here’s the Speech from the Throne, which outlines the new Government’s programme beyond that – or at least as much as they want to talk about at this stage.

And here’s the new seating plan for parliament, for those who (for some unfathomable reason) like to watch the imbeciles on television, and who’d like to know which moron is which [hat tip Kiwiblog].

The two immediate additions to the government urgent programme over and above the previously announced “first 100 days action plan” are to implement Wayne Mapp’s proposal allowing new employees a ninety-day trial with their new employer before the full panoply of restrictive state-imposed employment law comes into play (a small advance for employment law, but at least some small help to employers and employees in what is about to be a very troubled employment market), and the announcement of the make-up and terms of reference for the select committee inquiry into so called “climate change” -- which has explicitly at least ruled out an inquiry into the science behind the scare stories, concentrating instead on guessing what other countries might do about the scare stories, how they might respond to what we might do, and whether a carbon tax or a trading scam is the right way for NZers to be fleeced.

You can see the make-up of the committee and the terms of reference here (hat tip NRT: head to the bottom of page 9 for the inquiry details).  Time to start putting together your submissions.

UPDATE: Lindsay Perigo is cautiously excited:

The most promising moment of today's Speech from the Throne came right at the start, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.
"Just four sentences in, after noting the new government's commitment to economic growth, the Governor-General read out the following:
'In pursuing this goal of economic growth my Government will be guided by the principle of individual freedom and a belief in the capacity and right of individuals to shape and improve their own lives.'
"This is probably the first time in living memory the principle of individual freedom has been mentioned at all, let alone as central, in a formal government agenda," notes Perigo.
"Of course, too much shouldn't be expected from a government stuffed with anti-freedom conservatives and the occasional unreconstructed Muldoonist, but it's fair to assume Prime Minister John Key knows what his party is supposed to represent, and we freedom-lovers will be demanding that he deliver on his welcome inclusion of it in today's agenda-setting document.

However … read on for his full analysis of the Speech from the Throne.

It's going to take more than a razor gang to fix this! [updated]

Around sixty years before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed midst great hope and expectation, and New Zealand began working towards the "modern democracy" it is now, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

How far are we from that time? Well, consider some figures from a Bernard Hickey column that has attracted little comment, but shows we're now at the cusp of a historic turning point:

[From 1999 to today] both local and central governments grew consistently and faster than the rest of the economy [as did] the number of people receiving benefits, Working for Families payments and/or working for local and central governments...
This means that now we have 1.85 million people working and paying taxes to 1.75 million who receive benefits or work for the government. This near 1 to 1 ratio compares with a near 1.5 workers to 1 beneficiary in 1999.

Let me repeat that: in New Zealand's modern democracy1.75 million adults now rely on income taxes paid by 1.85 million working adults. [You can see here how those figures are made up.]

It's going to take more than a razor gang and a bubbly personality to fix that.

UPDATE 1: Speaking of democracy, what would Alexander Tytler say about this: How Obama was Elected.

I know for sure what Bill Weddell would have said: "Democracy is the counting of heads regardless of content."

UPDATE 2: Yes, I've been corrected by Redbaiter. It's Tytler, not Tyler.

Coalition, coalition, coalition [update 3]

To quote the great philosopher Tom Waits, "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."  David Farrar has all the small print about the 'coalition' deals between National & Act, National & Peter Dunne Nothing, and National and the Maoris.  I'm going to try and digest the details before commenting too much, and suggest you do the same.

In the meantime, how about thinking about a decent acronym for the new National/United/Maori/ACT Government?  NUM-nuts is the best I've thought of.

UPDATE 1:  From the NACT agreement:

"National agrees to a review by a special select committee of Parliament of the current Emissions Trading Scheme legislation and any amendments or alternatives to it, including carbon taxes, in the light of current economic circumstances and steps now being undertaken by similar nations."

On the surface, this is great news.  But I wonder which party, ACT or National, the "review" of the Emissions Trading Scam is intended to protect?  That is, is it a review designed to quietly extinguish the scheme, as I would like, and on which ACT campaigned?  Or to delay implementation of National's own ETS scheme?

And when will we know for sure?

In any case, the Appendix to the NACT agreement gives more details of the terms of reference for the proposed Climate Change Select Committee, which potentially offers plenty of scope to "hear competing views on the scientific aspects of climate change from internationally respected sources and assess the quality and impartiality of official advice" -- i.e., to point out the many warmist myths on which policy has to date been prepared.

One would hope that such a committee would prove as impartial and objective as the Royal Commission that so glorious kicked the Genetic Engineering bogey out of the park.  "Technology is integral to the advancement of the world," they said. "Fire, the wheel, steam power, electricity, radio transmission, air and space travel, nuclear power, the microchip, DNA: the human race has ever been on the cusp of innovation. Currently, biotechnology is the new frontier. Continuation of research is critical to New Zealand's future."

I look forward to a similarly ringing burial of the warmist mantra.

UPDATE 2: Blair M likes the NACT Agreement.  Gives ACT a soapbox and the Tories a spine, he reckons -- although it could also be a 'Public Choice form of National 'privatising their gains' and nationalising their dead rats by blaming them on the smaller party.

UPDATE 3: And Lindsay Perigo congratulates Rodney Hide on his Local Government appointment, although he doesn't seem to realise the portfolio doesn't unfortunately cover the RMA.  That's Environment. And the loathsome Nick Smith's got that portfolio sewn up -- he's the worm who calls the RMA "far-sighted environmental legislation."

Scientists for sophistry

What was once a serious group of objective scientists, the 'Royal Society of NZ,' now appears little more than a partisan, muck-raking rabble less interested in the supposed objectives of fair or responsible comment on scientific matters than they are in protecting their sources of funding, which for the most part (with most of the Society's luminaries) is based on peddling the warmist litany.

A recent press from the Society's "Climate Committee," consisting entirely of persons whose livelihoods rely upon the maintenance of the warmist myth, was issued in response to an increasing sea of doubt in the warmist litany -- in the Society's words, "the controversy over climate change and its causes, and possible confusion among the public." This "confusion" is manifested in the likes of polls that show the bulk of the public considers the likes of the Society's luminaries to be talking nonsense. Which they are. And increasing evidence that global warming promises have become "a gushing source of national hypocrisy. It's politically incorrect to question it, and political suicide to do anything about it."

Dr Vincent Gray is one former member of the Society who has resigned in protest at the public statement, which purports to be "a statement to make absolutely clear what the evidence is for climate change and anthropogenic (human-induced) causes." As Dr Gray points out, it is nothing of the sort.

Science has been politicised, and the Society's own press release is a measure of how much. I urge you to read both the original presser and Dr Gray's response.

UPDATE 1: There's no smoke and people should be fired says Dr David Evans, former consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector...
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly?

As he goes on to record, the evidence has quote simply never arrived, and "since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts...

Read on here for Dr Evans' exposition of the facts that changed his mind.

UPDATE 2: John Lennon would disapprove, as to would anyone with an ounce of musical taste, but there's a chap here at YouTube who would like you to Imagine a World Without Global Warming. Perhaps that should read, 'Imagine a World Without Global Warming Hysteria'?

UPDATE 3: Read Christopher Booker's entertaining take on the empty words spewed forth into the oriental air at the recent G8 summit. "As well as having no idea how they could achieve such an absurdly ambitious target [as their trumpeted but far from serious fifty-percent reduction og emissions by 2050], they may inflict immeasurable damage on their economies just by trying to do so," says Booker.

UPDATE 4: As NZ's emissions trading scheme still falters for a lack of political support, folk elsewhere are beginning to realise the buying of carbon indulgences has the very opposite effect to that which emission trading supporters. See Justin Danhof's report and explanation of why cap and trade could backfire.
Simple answer: It's our old friend the law of unintended consequences again, which probably helps explain why the European Union's cap-and-trade system isn't working, and why NZ's never will.

UPDATE 5: Comedian Dennis Miller points out that it's weird when you're the only one at a dinner party who's not convinced New York City is going to be underwater by 2057 -- didn't people like this used to be derided as cranks?

NZ blog rankings, March/April

The lads at Tumeke have again done blog readers a service with their ranking of the NZ political blogosphere for March-April just out overnight, with some big changes in the top ten.  You can see it here.  Not bad work for "an insane, radical, anti-semite, Maori-lover, thieving, prisoner-whore" and "a fat, lefty, peacenik, traitor, fag."  Not bad at all.

The chief value of the rankings isn't just boasting rights for bloggers (oh, okay, I'm up from sixth to fourth, jumping ahead of the Green Party's Frog Blog, nyahh, nyahh), it's in the service it offers blog readers.  You may not be able to read the news from twelve different angles as you can in the UK, for example with their wide-ranging and entertainingly opinionated newspapers, but if you read the top dozen NZ political blogs every day you can achieve something of the same effect.  (And if you do read the top dozen NZ political blogs every day, you'd be well advised to download and use an RSS newsreader to make your reading easier.)

But there's still plenty of gems outside the top twelve, some of which Tim Selwyn (he's the the insane, radical, anti-semite, Maori-lover, thieving, prisoner-whore) has highlighted in his summary of the rankings. (And don't worry, that's his own self-loathing autobiographical description.)

I like Tim's summary of #34 Liberty Scott -- "think: Idiot/Savant's style, Trevor Loudon's research, Peter Cresswell's thinking" -- but  I'm not sure the description is entirely intended to be a compliment.

Anyway, take some time and do some exploring.

The Government report card: 'Not Achieved'

Libertarianz party president Craig Milmine welcomed an enthusiastic group of activists and supporters to the election year party conference in Auckland over the weekend.  Here's a lightly edited copy of his welcoming speech:

Good morning

My name is Craig Milmine, president of the Libertarianz Party, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2008 Libertarianz Annual Conference.

I am proud to preside over Libertarianz because it seeks to protect individual rights and works to reduce government interference in all aspects of our lives.   Since I'm a teacher in my professional life, I would like to present this morning an NCEA report card in individual rights for the parliamentary parties, and offer the only sane and rational alternative available: Libertarianz.

Let's look first at the Labour Party's result for 'Helping the Poor: 101,' which will assist in showing you that at this 2008 general election the Libertarianz Party is effectively the only opposition party around.

In an upcoming election where there is no discernable difference between Labour and National, or Labour and anyone else, Libertarianz is the only party that in this election will be offering tax cuts and cuts in government expenditure.  We do not have our heads in the sand and think we can have our sand and eat it too; unlike every other party we understand that cutting taxes means cutting government expenditure. We are the only party that knows that cutting taxes and government expenditure is a good thing, and why.

• We know that reducing people's dependence on the state promotes independence and cooperation. Living on a state benefit would have to be one of the most soul-destroying and ambition-destroying lifestyles there are. It offers no incentive to improve your lot; it leaves beneficiaries at the mercy of the bureaucracy; and it actively punishes beneficiaries for earning money by imposing an incredibly high marginal tax rate on any earnings you might make.
• We know that at the same time as having supposedly record low unemployment levels, the Clark Government also has a record high number of people on state benefits. Along with the usual array of benefits, there is Working for Families where families on the government benefit are given an incentive not to work because (once again) the marginal tax rate actively punishes families for earning more money.
• We know this too: that Labour is determined to have more beneficiaries stuck in poverty with barriers preventing their ascent, because Labour needs a poor class who they they rely upon for votes.

Cutting government expenditure is a fantastic thing and Libertarianz are proud to say it. Cutting government expenditure allows us to cut taxes. Cutting government expenditure allows people to keep their own money in their pocket, or their savings account.  Cutting government expenditure means that government consumes less, while businesses can invest more.  To everybody but Michael Cullen and Bill English, it should be obvious which is more productive.

As a transitional policy, Libertarianz will happily support moves to remove all income tax below $10,000, effectively making this a tax-free threshold for everyone. This will reduce the high marginal tax rate that beneficiaries face when they look for paid employment. This simple act will do more to help Labour’s underclass of poor than anything they have offered up in their eight and a half years of born-to-rule power.

With the value of the surpluses that Labour has been taking, they could have gotten rid of GST altogether. This would have directly helped the poor of New Zealand because the poorest in New Zealand have to spend the highest proportion of the income on GST. I am brought to the conclusion once again that Labour needs the poor to stay poor so that the Labour Party can maintain their block of gratefully miserable beneficiaries.

At a time when low-skilled jobs are being exported overseas, the government has raised the minimum wage –- effectively driving these industries out of the country even faster.  As the market responds to a more expensive labour market, the results are a smaller manufacturing sector, automated supermarket checkouts, low numbers of restaurant serving staff per customer and highly automated factories .

We are seeing all of these in New Zealand but we still have record beneficiary numbers and the largest drop in people in paid employment in 19 years.  These are the people locked out of earning a wage by the government making their labour too expensive. Price fixing of low-skilled labour through minimum-wage laws is causing unemployment, poor service and the flight of New Zealand industries overseas.

If elected Libertarianz will move to reduce or preferably remove minimum wage laws in New Zealand.

So by Labour’s declared standards of “we must help the poor,” Labour themselves are failing abysmally. Only Libertarianz will remove the government barriers that are keeping  New Zealand’s poor poor.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the Labour Party. Perhaps its time to give them some NCEA gradings. Being a secondary school teacher I have to give out the grades of Not Achieved, Achieved, Achievement with Merit, Achievement with Excellence and Not Yet Competent. At this point I must ask you all to stop laughing.

For all the reasons already stated, I’m going to give the Labour Party a Not Achieved for 'Helping the Poor: 101.'

For their grade in 'TAX:101,' you will recall that in 1999 the Labour Party pledged no tax increases for 95% of the population. With over 15% now in the upper income tax bracket -- inflation caused by government expenditure has pushed incomes into higher tax brackets -- while new taxes on petrol, and increased taxes on cigarettes and alcohol have added to this effective tax increase, I think it is fair to give the Labour party a Not Achieved for 'TAX:101.'

Michael Cullen has been promising tax cuts since 2004 – perhaps in this instance we should take him at his word about promised upcoming tax cuts and say that it is Not Yet Competent for 'TAX:102' – however missing the assessment deadline by four years would normally count as a Not Achieved, even under NCEA's low standards.

In 'Economy:101' -- the Labour Party upon taking office promised to turn New Zealand into a knowledge economy and raise our incomes up into the top half of the OECD.  That’s a pretty straight forward Not Achieved.

In 'Education:101' – literacy rates are appalling. Not Achieved.

In 'Health:101' – Not Achieved doesn’t even begin to describe the mess that is the public health system.

In 'Free and Fair Elections:101,' the Labour Party initially did not achieve, but in an unprecedented revision of the course through retrospective legislation, Labour managed to Achieve with Merit in the newly named course of 'Protection of Incumbency:101.'  This course has recently awarded a scholarship to Robert Mugabe, so the Labour Party is in good company. Of course in passing 'Protection of Incumbency:101' they automatically failed to achieve in 'Rule of Law:101' and 'Lack of Corruption:101.'

In fact, looking at Labour’s record of achievement – there are only two things a libertarian can find favour with; these were the passing of the Civil Union legislation and prostitution legalisation. That is all I can find in nine years of rule. On that basis, it is well and truly time for them to go.

But what of the alternatives.

Let’s take a minute to count all the ways that the National Party policies differ from the Labour Party’s.

• The Labour Party has bought a big train set.  National has pledged not to sell it.
• National is looking to reintroduce Think Big for telecommunications. Labour is looking to Think Big with Rail.
• Labour will continue to grow New Zealand’s bloated bureaucracy.  National will keep our bloated bureaucracy as it is.
• The Labour Party will not charge interest on student loans. The National Party will not charge interests on Student Loans
• National will bring in tax cuts without any cut in expenditure. Labour will bring in tax cuts without any cut in expenditure.
• The National Party supported banning Party Pills. The Labour supported banning party pills
• The Labour and National party will not get rid of the Maori seats
• Labour and National both supported the prohibition on smacking.
• Labour will introduce policies to destroy New Zealand’s economy in order to have no actual impact on global warming. National has berated the Labour Party for delaying the introduction of policies that will destroy New Zealand’s economy in order to have no actual impact on global warming.
• Both National and Labour support the Resource Management Act, which is preventing new, cheap electricity generation. The RMA is now restricting housing development in New Zealand so much that we have some of the most expensive housing in the world as a proportion of income. The mortgage interest payments alone on the average house price in New Zealand is nearly twice New Zealand’s average income. That is without paying any of the principle off. Both Labour and National’s response to this has been a mixture of more rules and regulations about forcing developers to build cheaper housing.
• The one thing to National’s credit is that they will get rid of the Electoral Finance Act – the largest assault on Free Speech that New Zealand has seen since the Muldoon era of controlling the media. For this National should received an Achieved – which could rise to an Achieved with Excellence if only they would get rid of taxpayer funding of political parties, and remove the law that prevents political parties from spending their own money on election broadcasting.

So, while I will be thrilled to see the Labour Party go because I believe that politicians should be changed as regularly as nappies– and for the same reason -- National offers absolutely no alternative.

What of the other parties?

The report card for the Greens reads as follows (in language that would not be deemed "supportive" enough to go on an actual school report card):

• 'Legalising Marijuana:101' - the Greens show a general disinterest in this subject – which is a shame because it was the only thing they were good at.
• 'Transport Efficiency:101' – The Greens opposition to any transport initiative except highly subsidised, often empty, wasteful, carbon dioxide spewing buses and trains indicate that they have no fucking clue about the environment whatsoever.
• 'Energy Alternatives:101' – The Greens's opposition to electricity generated by hydro, coal, gas, wind or nuclear indicates that for the Green Party, the lights are not on, and there is nobody home.

Moving to New Zealand First:

• In accepting the 'Baubles of Office:101' Winston has done exceptionally well and he has continued to excel in the course 'Typical Xenophobic Rant Against Anyone Slightly Foreign:101,' managing to just outdo the Maori Party.

In 'Being a Member of the Labour Party without Actually being in the Labour Party:101,' United Future and Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party have done very well this year, andhave excelled in Lapdog:102 and 103. However they will need to maintain this level of achievement in the course of 'Being a Member of the Labour Party Without Actually Being in the Labour Party:101' if they want to be a member of the National Government next year.

Out of the parliamentary parties – that leaves the ACT party. What have they been up to?

When Labour, United Future, the Greens, Jim Anderton and NZ First were rorting the electoral system, Rodney Hide was busy showing off his new body. The leader of the Libertarianz got over showing off his body years ago and (much to the consternation of Dunedin’s letter posters) and has moved on to showing up the government. While Rodney Hide was busy dropping his dance partner on dancing with the stars, Bernard Darnton was dropping off papers in the high court challenging the Labour party’s 2005 election pledge card rort. An action that Bernard would have won, had the government not retrospectively changed the law.

However in doing so, Labour started the electoral slide that they are now experiencing. Labour’s slide continued with the passing of the anti-smack law. Libertarianz were right there in the organisation of opposition to this law. Mitch Lees organised a march on parliament. Where were ACT?

My understanding is that the ACT tax policy is that the total tax take will not rise beyond the level of inflation. This makes ACT the only party in parliament not offering a tax cut!

If any one of these parties offered a consistent message of freedom and rolling back state interference in our lives then we could dismantle Libertarianz right now and join them. However, there is no sign of that happening. Libertarianz has been around 12 years and we are here to stay.

We are effectively the only opposition party. We have been in amongst all of the important political questions of the day from the freedom of speech, free and fair elections, through to providing real solutions to government caused problems such as housing unaffordability and a failing health system.

When we make submissions to parliament, our principles are recognised and the politicians occasionally take heed of what we say. The “nanny state” argument is reported as being a “huge” factor by government insiders in preventing the government from introducing even more draconian legislation than we have already seen.

At the Last election, all of the small parties were squeezed by a close election between National and Labour, and the Libertarianz vote was squeezed by a National leader with visible libertarian leanings.

All that has changed. The National Party is the Labour Party is the National Party is the Labour Party. One party has a lot of teachers, gays and unionists, the other has a lot of farmers and middle class businessmen. The people may be different. The policies are not.  They are statist from top to bottom.

Libertarianz have very different policies. Our policies are radical in that they will get the state out of our lives and allow human ingenuity, ambition and compassion to flourish. We offer an enormously positive and liberating set of policies. In contrast to every other political party we are offering to hand back control of your life – to you.

Libertarianz has developed a number of transitional policies that show how we can reduce government in a step-by-step process – always with the libertarian goalposts in sight. Today we will hear another of the transitional policies being presented.

We have some strong advertising campaigns well into the planning stage. Today we will present Libz.TV and Libz in Print.

This election, Libertarianz will be putting up more candidates than ever before – both in electorates and on the list. Nominations are still open but we already have more people putting their name forward to stand as electorate candidates for Libertarianz than stood in 2005.

Many of these candidates are first-time candidates and we will be hearing from a number of them as well as some experienced ones throughout the day.

We plan to fight this election as serious contenders. Our ideas are interesting, principled and they work. This makes a huge contrast with the other parties. If we can get the necessary publicity and funding -- and our programme for both is already underway -- we can make a realistic go at getting Libz in parliament. Electoral success in New Zealand is not that hard, despite the Electoral Finance Act.

I hope that by the end of today that you will come away with ideas, confidence and networks to enable you spread the freedom message this election.

Well, that completes the report card, so it is now my great pleasure to declare the Libertarianz Conference open for business. . .

You can visit the Libertarianz website now and join up for Election '08.  Go to it!

UPDATE 1:  A video of Craig Milmine's report card for the National Party's performance -- part of what  got you all so excited here -- is now up at the Libz TV site.

Enjoy.

UPDATE 2:   We said earlier in commenting upon this post that

    If we are under some misapprehension [about ACT's tax policy] Rodney can simply stand up in Parliament this afternoon and announce ACT's tax policy is to cut taxes to [?]%.
    He can then announce a long list of freedom related policies, legislation ACT would repeal, spending cuts ACT would manifest and all other measures that [former] ACT supporters desperately want.

And it looks like Rodney and Roger were listening.  Today at lunchtime, Rodney and Roger held a press conference to announce at least the first of the two points above.  Reports Stuff:

    ACT would immediately make the first $10,000 of income tax free, which would give an average wage earner an immediate tax saving of $50.
    Then it would abolish the 39c "envy rate" and make the whole system as low and flat as possible.
    ACT will release details of its tax and other policies on Sunday.

Do you see now what honest criticism can do? I look forward now to seeing announced on Sunday the long list of freedom related policies, legislation ACT would repeal, spending cuts ACT would manifest and all other measures that [former] ACT supporters desperately want to see.

Another dead rat: Emissions Trading

As the Bill setting up the government's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) heads to parliament for a vote, parliament's most boring man, Peter Dunne, warns the scheme is in danger of collapse.

This is excellent news!

As everyone but the Green Party is slowly starting to realise, the scheme is an impost on industry that businesses just can't afford, while the science behind the scam is looking increasingly theadbare -- it's both unnecessary and destructive but, despite Dunne's heads up, it's not over yet.

The scheme is in danger, argues Dunne, because of the increasing uncertainty around its introduction, especially since the Helen Clark's 'dance of the seven veils' over fuel taxes and the delays and exemptions to the scheme -- a belated realisation that the costs the scheme will add to doing business in New Zealand is going to be calamitous. These announcements of delays and meaning are scaring of those who expected to make big windfalls from the rort.

It's also in danger because the Greens now say they won't vote for what they see as a watered-down impost on industry -- they don't want to give local industry an out, they want to see the full environmental noose applied. And while the Greens voice the fears of their voting public, United and NZ First have been reading the signs of opposition to the scheme from what they hope is theirs, and are rapidly backing away from giving Clark's scheme the support it will need when it comes to a vote very shortly.

However, it's not all good news. We're not entirely out of the woods yet: there's one twerp who is still likely to give it life. With the Greens threatening to pull out," notes the Dominion, "Miss Clark said Labour would look to National for support." Enter stage left, John Key. Flip Flop Boy. The Smiling Ass. Instead of reading the signs from the voting public, John Boy is still listening to his advisers. Clark's backdown on the new fuel tax is not good news, it's "an embarrassment," says John Boy. Labour's partial retreat on the global warming bandwagon is not a welcome sign they're listening to the voting public, it's a sign of "Labour of failing to deliver on climate change" says John Boy.

They guy is an idiot. Anyone with a brain could see that "failing to deliver on climate change" is a good thing.

Remember how the smiling twerp signed up to resuscitate Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill, just days after his MPs stood on the steps of parliament telling bill opponents they were dead against it? Expect to see history repeated as he signs up to a deal with Helen to resuscitate Helen Clark's anti-industry bill.

How many dead rats can you swallow before you choke.

"Ban the yobs": Which yobs?

The Herald has the news that the Clark Government is about to introduce to parliament this year "a British-style behaviour order to curb anti-social crime."

The proposal, which would establish a scheme for Rotorua [allowing police to issue "community protection orders" against people convicted of a range of mainly property-related offences], has previously been rejected by politicians because its aim - to bar criminals from the city's central business district - had problems complying with the Bill of Rights.

No problem to an MP like Steve Chadwick, the bill's co-sponsor with Annette King, and the main promoter of the ban on smoking in bars -- which has equal difficulties complying with the Bill of Rights.

First of all, we should ask why this law is necessary.  Why are people who've been convicted of  property-related offences free to walk the streets anyway?  Answer: Because the courts don't take burglary and other property-related offences seriously anymore .  Is that good enough?  No, it sure as hell isn't.  Do we need more bad law to fix the result of bad justice?  No, our lawmakers should be concentrating instead on fixing these fundamental failures of our justice system that much more urgently need addressing.

Remember that law, good law, is intended to protect me from you and you from me. Specifically, it is intended to protect you against any initiation of force or fraud by me, and me from any initiation of force or fraud by you.  That's all good law should do, and when it doesn't do what it should be doing, which in this case is to protect us from criminals who've already been convicted, then we start to see laws like this that start to stretch the boundaries of what good law should be doing.

This works both ways.

There is an expectation that if you violate good law, that you will be handled under due process, and that the punishment will fit the crime. This is all part of what it means to have objective law. This is what freedom looks like. This is what Annette King wants to overturn with what is called in the UK 'Anti-Social Behaviour Orders' (ASBOs), which give police the power to deliver summary justice, and courts the power to turn minor offences into a five-year stay in jail if they're arbitrarily deemed to be anti-social.

She means it. We should take this seriously.  If yobs strolling town centres are dangerous enough, then out of control politicians using potentially uncontrollable law to do us over is far more dangerous, since these are the very people who are supposed to protect our rights.  Frankly, when it comes to yobs, the ones in the parliament are far more dangerous to our rights than the ones strolling the streets of our cities.

But as I say, it should work both ways. There's also an expectation that when criminals are convicted, then they lose certain rights (after all, if they don't respect them, why should we).  In which case, and only if safeguards can be put in place to ensure these orders can be applied to convicted criminals, then the orders could be justified -- but that's a big 'if,' especially with the likes of Steve Chadwick involved, who wouldn't know a proper right if she fell over one in the street.

Now having said all that, you might already have observed that the issue doesn't even arise in the case or privately owned property.  This bill is designed to to bar criminals from a city's central business district, and since it requires government action to effect such a ban there are attendant Bill of Rights issues. But just think how it works when a shopping mall wants to bar undesirables from their property . . .

NB: You can read the BBC's ASBO Chronicles to

The poor are still with us

"A rising tide lifts all boats."  I don't know about you, but I well remember Helen Clark telling the country at the last election that her wise and benevolent government was committed to programmes that benefit everybody, across the board.  "A rising tide lifts all boats," she said.  Helen's welfare state, (in which she'd just enlisted half-a-million new beneficiaries in the Welfare for Working Families package) would fix all problems, lift all boats and put a chicken in every pot.

Well, if the report issued earlier this week by the Child Poverty Action Group is to be believed, there are at least 185,000 boats that aren't part of Helen's 'rising tide.'  Tide's out.  They've missed the boat. According to CPAG's figures, which haven't been seriously challenged, "at least one in five children in New Zealand was living in poverty while 185,000 were living with severe or significant hardship"  -- "with the children of beneficiaries the worst affected."

That should worry Labour supporters, shouldn't it?  The whole raison d'être of the Labour movement, if it still has one, is supposed to be that it looks after the little guy.  For nine years, the Clark Government has grown the size and penetration of government to an all-time high; it has and stamped on enterprise and applied the screws and levers of big government to the problem of poverty, all while global commodity prices have given us the type of economic golden weather that is the greatest salve for poverty anyone could possible conceive  -- in other words, they've never had a better opportunity to apply their philosophy to power -- and now, nine years after this Labour Government took the reins of power, all the little guys they're supposed to be looking after are missing their boat. 

With all that on its side, and if you believed that the Clark Government knew what it was doing, you'd be worried, wouldn't you?

Don't worry about it, said Labour's Minister Ruth Dyson.  There's only 130,000 in poverty.

Oh, that's fine then.  We have more people on benefits now that at any time in the country's history (largely due to the Welfare for Working Families package, which has sucked in so many middle class families into becoming beneficiaries), the biggest the welfare state has ever been -- more spending on welfare than ever before -- and it obviously hasn't solved poverty at all.

What's to be done?  Beats the hell out of Ruth Dyson, who trumpets the lowest unemployment figures since Methusaleh was a lad (while ignoring the 200,000 or so now on other benefits) and says "Don't worry"; it beats the hell out of the Child Poverty Action Group, who tell us  (against everything history and research should tell them) that all we need to do it raise benefits; it beats the hell out of 'economist' Susan St John, who (with a straight face) blamed the problem on policies that "promote paid work as a way out of poverty" which, she says, "a major reason for the widening gap between rich and poor"; and it sure beats the hell out of the rest of the poverty industry who've been fighting this War On Poverty since Methusaleh was born, yet after all that time they still find the scoreboard against them. 

Shouldn't they be asking themselves some serious questions?  Or are the poverty industry and the politicians happy to accept that "the poor are always with us" because they're convenient voting fodder to keep the same old game going on.

"The poor are always with us" say the politicians -- the very same politicians who really need the poor. They need them as lobby fodder. It's the poor who provide their power base. Who else would see the poorest of the poor and still want to take the money out of their pockets they could have used for food, but a politician? Who else could watch the poorest of the poor struggling to afford the places in which they have to live and still want to severely restrict the supply of new housing -- who else but politicians?

It's time to put people before politics. Stop stealing.  Stop paying people to breed.  Stop forcing them into factory schools that only teach illiteracy.  Just get the hell out of their way.

The poverty industry blames the problem of poverty on 'the promotion of paid work' and says the solution is more welfare.  Yet as welfare researcher Lindsay Mitchell concludes, "It is the availability of welfare that is central to the child poverty problem - not the availability of work. The solution does not lie in simply giving people more money." Seventy years of just giving people more money has not made things better, it's made them worse. In the last ten years alone around $150 billion has been taken from taxpayers and spent in a war on poverty, that's one-hundred and fifty billion dollars on a war that no one is winning; not the government, not the taxpayer, and as recent studies all show, not the 200-300,000 or so who've been the targets of this war over the last ten years: we're all worse off except for the politicians, for whom this massive sum amounts to very cheap and efficient vote-buying.

That's $150,000,000,000 -- enough to have given every beneficiary in the country a massive $500,000 each to start their own war on poverty, and it still hasn't worked. And it won't. It never will. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke,

the spending of this truly vast amount of money -- an amount more than half again the nation's entire gross national product in 1995 -- has left everybody just sitting around slack-jawed and dumbstruck, staring into the maw of that most extraordinary paradox: You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

When do we realise that government welfare doesn't work -- not for anyone -- and least of all for those who it is supposed to help. Let's try something else. Let's try to stop stealing. let's give people back their future and the money stolen from them, and let them get on with fighting their own goddamn war on poverty.

If these reports tell us anything at all, they tell us it's becoming urgent.   Accordingly, here's a simple suggestion to help the poor: stop stealing from them.

• You could remove GST in its entirety and still leave the government's accounts in the black, and at a stroke you will leave money in the pockets of the poor to pay for food and housing and heath care.
      But it won't happen.
      It won't happen because the poor are such good lobby fodder for a certain kind of politician: Those who put politics before people.

• You could relax restrictions on land use so that people can build wherever and whatever they wish on their own land, at a stroke promoting choice and reducing housing and rental costs, allowing the poor a crucial foot up on the housing ladder.
      But it won't happen.
      It won't happen because environmentalists put the environment before people -- and politicians let them.

Make it Auckland **Domestic** Airport, say Beagle Boys

Two ministers with nary a clue to rub between them have just declared victory on behalf of every xenophobe in the country who wants a say in other people's business: like a pair of malignant Beagle Boys, Commissar Cosgrove and El Presidente Parker gave voice to every ignorant fear that Canada Pensions plans to ship Auckland Airport off to Manitoba or Montreal, and refused permission for owners of their airport shares to do what they wish with their own property.

To pinch Leighton Smith's line, the place is no longer Auckland International Airport.

For a country almost completely reliant on international trade and international investment, and a people seemingly in love with international travel, New Zealanders (on whose behalf the two Commissars made this decision) are remarkably wary of foreigners, and remarkably interested in having a say in things that are none of their bloody business.

This was a deal worth 1.725 billion dollars.  A deal between owners and buyers.  It was nobody else's business.  Got that?  It was definitely not a decision for a lawyer known worldwide for lacking even the basic ability to file proper documents (that's the smug git on the right), and a sawdust caesar who has achieved no distinction outside the bullying of car drivers, builders and real estate agents (that's Comrade Cosgrove complete with punch 'n' grow hair hat on the left).  Take a good look at the two self-important swine who set themselves up as judge and jury of other people's business, and ask yourself what gives them the right to do so.

But these two ignorant pricks unable to see past their own noses "see no benefit" in the deal for New Zealand-- neither of them with a brain able to see past a hoped-for benefit to their own electoral hopes this year:  "No benefit" in the sum of $1.75 billion being invested in New Zealand -- "no benefit" in the right of airport shareholders to choose themselves what they do with their own property -- "no benefit" in letting investors overseas know New Zealand is open for business -- no, "no benefit" at all, say the blind and blinkered Beagle Boys.

The airport is a "strategic asset" whose ownership the "people of New Zealand" need to retain, declared the two numb nuts.  What the hell is a "strategic asset," and how the hell would Canadian ownership (not control, which Canada Pensions had already ruled out, just partial ownership) interfere with whatever bullshit definition of "strategic assets" these two clowns could dream up.  What the hell sort of decision is it that dramatically lowers the value of the very asset they deem worthy of their protection?  And just finally, let me point out that the only "people of New Zealand" whose decision on the deal matters are those New Zealanders who agreed to sell their shares.  It's not your decision, nor that of these two wankers; it's the owners' and the owners alone.

This decision is a disgrace.  Said investment analyst Simon Botherway last month, the grounds for this decision are not rational, they are wholly political.  The two are obviously mutually exclusive.  The decision is wholly irrational, utterly xenophobic, and sends a clear three-word message to overseas investors interested in taking an interest in this place: "Don't bloody bother."

NB: Don't you love this delightfully circuitous definition of "strategic asset" from the Local Bloody Government Act, 2002, s.90(2):

Strategic Asset, in relation to the assets held by a local authority, means an asset or group of assets that the local authority needs to retain if the local authority is to maintain the local authority’s capacity to achieve or promote any outcome that the local authority determines to be important ...

In other words, a "strategic asset" is anything we say it is.  Beautiful, huh?  Such is the quality of lawmaking we've come to expect from our lawmakers.

UPDATE:  REUTERS: Shares in NZ's Auckland Airport fall 10 pct on open.  Good news, huh?  The share price for NZ's Auckland Airport over the last year tells a story familiar to Telecom shareholders subsequent to the government's nationalisation of their copper network, and to Air New Zealand shareholders subsequent to their refusal to let Singapore Airlines invest, and to ... well, you can draw up a bloody list, can't you.  These are just the higher profile, more easily shown examples of what government meddling does to local businesses.