Insolent Prick

Saving the Church

2007-09-19T19:26:00.000+12:00

I had the strange experience of sitting next to a retiring left-wing Auckland local body politician on a plane over the weekend. Her day job was a “landscape architect”. Some of the highlights of the conversation:

IP: Oh, so at which university did you do your architecture degree?

LWALBP: I didn’t do an architecture degree.

IP: Oh, right. So what does a landscape architect do? Are you like a gardener?

LWALBP: No.

IP: So you don’t dig holes and move soil around and plant trees?

LWALBP: (Mindless, incomprehensible babble proceeds)

Then this ripper:

IP: So, given that you’re retiring, what has been the highlight of your years of local government experience? What’s been your greatest achievement?

LWALBP: I was instrumental in saving the Methodist Church in Mount Eden.

IP: Oh, great. Why did it need saving?

LWALBP: Because the Methodist Church was going to sell it.

IP: Why were they going to sell it?

LWALBP: Because people weren’t going to church services anymore.

IP: Oh, right. So you got more people to go along to Church?

LWALBP: No, I secured council money to get a fundraising campaign, and got some money from Council to help keep the Church going.

IP: Why did you want the Methodist Church to keep going in Mount Eden?

LWALBP: Because it’s a pretty building, and people should be able to sit in their cafes and look at it while having their coffee.

Labour's Next Leader?

2007-08-30T12:29:00.000+12:00

I tend to agree that Labour's caucus would be bloody stupid to roll HC before the next election. Changing leader never works. I simply don't agree with the revisionist view that Moore helped Labour mitigate an absolute disaster when he was made leader seven weeks before the 1990 election: Labour had its worst result since 1935 at that time.

Helen Clark clearly has the support from Labour's three factions: the unions, the organisational wing, and the rainbow faction. None of them support Goff, and they never will. Helen Clark has successfully, over the last fourteen years, weeded out pretty much anbody who doesn't support her, and has fashioned the Party in her own image. That's good politics, and is a tribute to her political skill, ruthlessness, and longevity.

Goff's faction--the rump that still exists, consists primarily of Clayton Cosgrove, Harry Duynhoven, Annette King, Damien O'Connor, Dover Samuels, George Hawkins, and Paul Swain. Several of them are retiring at the next election. But that's it. Cunliffe could potentially support Goff, and he's politically much more closely aligned to him, but would only do so to see Goff fall flat on his face following a major defeat. Cunliffe aspires to the job himself, and would much rather take the deputy role to a left-leaning leader, see the leader take the hit, and slide into the job himself.

Having said that, Labour's MPs are a mercenary bunch: they don't generally have options outside of Parliament, and will swarm to whomever is most likely to save their skins. Maharey has cooked his own goose, and despite his prior ambition, he's now no longer interested in the leadership, and is most likely to announce in the next few months that he is taking up an academic post at Massey University and not standing at the next election. Mallard has also spoiled his ambitions with his muck-raking backfiring on him.

So who's left for leadership contention? Michael Cullen, a list MP, will retire soon after the 2008 election, rather than serve out a term in opposition. Annette King will be 61 at the next election: she would be a safe deputy leader, but she won't aspire to the role in opposition.

Mark Gosche has the political skills to grab the leadership if he wants it, but he's taken a back seat over the last few years to focus on his family life. He would have the support of the unions if he wanted it, and has the back-door cunning to snaffle the job for the Left in the Party. But there's no indication that he wants it.

Helen Clark will resign after the next election, but not before. Her problem is that there is nobody of the Left remaining who has the skills, and isn't tarnished by her office, to replace her. Pete Hodgson could emerge as an interim leader, which would satisfy the Left of the Party, but his macchiavellian tendencies, and downright human nastiness, will see him fall over quickly. Cunliffe could work as his deputy, hoping to inherit the leadership when Hodgson fails. Goff won't work as Hodgson's deputy.

Goff's only hope of winning the leadership after Clark steps down is to take over finance, and force Cullen out of the deputy leadership before the election. Both are reasonably likely. Goff will have to play a long game to undo Clark's years of stacking her party with her own supporters. If he takes the leadership, he cannot expect to get Labour into Government within the next two terms. That is a demoralising position for any leader.

Bad Nat

2007-08-29T19:31:00.000+12:00

One of the temptations of an opposition party running high in the polls, in a relatively strong economic climate, with large fiscal surpluses, is to do as little as possible to damage its political constituency by presenting alternative options to the electorate. There are sound reasons for this. The most important of which, on broad economic policy, is that the flailing Government, short of good ideas, will steal the Opposition’s agenda at any cost to retain office.

For this reason, the Nats aren’t going to announce any broad economic policy until after Michael Cullen delivers his last budget next year. Apart from the risk of copycat policy-making from the government in retreat, the Nats simply don’t know how much money there will be to play with. All the indications are that Labour will throw caution to the wind, and use every resource at its disposal to offer massive bribes to the electorate. Fiscal prudence will be the first victim of Labour’s 2008 budget. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Cullen revises the Reserve Bank’s inflation agreement, to allow Alan Bollard to allow looser monetary policy within Cullen’s massive spending binge.

I simply don’t agree with criticisms of John Key as Labour-Lite. We won’t know what the big ticket policy items are for another ten months. The proof of the accusations of pink toryism won’t have any validity until John Key and Bill English commit to higher government spending in the long term. Frankly, I just can’t see that happening.

While I’m sympathetic to the view that Kate Wilkinson didn't actually endorse the proposal (instead saying it was a "welcome contribution to the discussion"), she should have slammed it immediately. It’s simply bad political practice to encourage a document from the Families Commission that is economically unworkable.

The country simply can’t afford to pay new mothers parental leave for 14 months in the short, or even medium term. And nor should the National Party be welcoming it. Sure, Kate Wilkinson was only publicly stating that she will take the proposal to Caucus. Yet any indication that the Nats are prepared to outspend Labour with taxpayers’ money, is a bloody poor message to be sending to overburdened taxpayers. It’s bloody stupid to be hinting at a massive fiscal injection independently from National’s broader economic policy.

John Key took a much more moderate position on Breakfast TV this morning, and certainly wasn’t endorsing the proposal. But Wilkinson should never have been endorsing it in the first place.

What Wilkinson should have said, and what John Key should have said this morning is:

“Look. The reality is that after eight years of Labour Government, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen have thrown billions upon billions of taxpayers’ money at all kinds of social problems. Taxpayers have paid for it, and the cost has been years of missed opportunity for New Zealanders to grow their incomes. Governments generally don’t spend money better than individuals do. Labour has shown for eight long years that it is ideologically opposed to people becoming wealthier, and instead throws money at people it wants to bribe. National is committed to allowing New Zealanders who aspire to have more, to have the economic independence to make their own choices with their money.
The reality is that New Zealanders simply aren’t wealthy enough to afford such a gold class paid parental leave policy. We aren’t wealthy enough to pour billions more money into health and education, as Labour has done, with no improvement in outcomes. If we’re going to spend more taxpayers’ money, we should expect much better results for taxpayers. We just haven’t had the better results. We can’t afford to be paying 24,000 more civil servants, either. New Zealand taxpayers are struggling to get ahead, not because we don’t have a gold class paid parental leave policy, but because Labour believes in taxing New Zealanders so heavily that they can’t get ahead.
There is a problem in New Zealand with a low birth rate. It is an enormous financial commitment for middle income New Zealanders to have children. Ironically, the state currently encourages many people without the tools to advance themselves economically or socially, to have children they’re not equipped to have. That isn’t a workable policy prescription. The solution is to provide an environment where people take responsibility for the children they do have, and for the state to allow those who do take responsibility for their actions, to have greater freedom to exercise their choices with the money they earn.
This policy proposal from the Families Commission is a precursor to the Government bribing you again with your money at the next election. Michael Cullen will announce another $500 million in his budget, because he is hellbent on doing all he can to expand the size of the state, at your expense. That policy prescription doesn't work. You save and invest your money far better than Michael Cullen does."

It should have been a huge opportunity to slate the excesses of this Labour Government, that they have set up the absurd Families Commission, full of irrational civil servants, who have nothing better to do other than come up with stupid policy proposals that just aren’t affordable. Instead, Kate and Judith have missed the boat by taking a woolly approach that will never be implemented.

When the Poultry Comes Home To Roost...

2007-08-27T13:22:00.000+12:00

Politics can be a dirty game. Just ask Don Brash.

Having inherited the leadership of the National Party after its biggest ever election defeat in 2002 to within a whisker of winning the Treasury benches in 2005, it was always clear that Labour’s knives would be out for him.

It is an unwritten convention in New Zealand politics that while politicians themselves are fair game, an attack that is likely to bring harm against the family of the politician isn’t. The Press Gallery generally cooperate with this. Thus when Trevor Mallard and David Benson-Pope claimed under parliamentary privilege that Brash was involved with another woman, Brash decided he’d had enough of politics: that his family and personal life were more important than becoming Prime Minister.

It is the nature of parliamentary life that MPs spend most of their time away from their families. This puts a strain on their relationships. They are also permanently in the public spotlight, and are subject to the kinds of temptations away from home that they simply weren’t exposed to prior to coming to Wellington.

MPs from all sides of the House have, in the past, suffered marital breakdown. It isn’t new in politics. It’s also not uncommon for a jilted spouse, out of spite, to break the story: thus David Lange’s split with his wife hit the headlines in 1989. So too did Don McKinnon’s, some years later, in similar circumstances.

The story is never about the break-up, or the infidelity, for good reason. Gallery journalists are not immune to aphrodisiacs of fame and power, and are frequently too close to the political players to risk damaging media relationships about matters that the public doesn’t want to hear about. Yet when a jilted wife decides to out her husband for having an affair that has led to the end of a long-term marriage, the story gathers a degree of legitimacy.

So too is there legitimacy around a public figure making public, moral statements that are at odds with their behaviour. The hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the US house of representatives, leading the charge against Bill Clinton, after thrice-married Gingrich had served divorce papers against his critically ill wife while he was having an affair, made Gingrich a legitimate target. Brazen hypocrisy, as Gingrich found, is bad politics.

So too is the story of Trevor Mallard’s marital split legitimate. This is the same man who hounded Don Brash out of public office. It is simply cowardly for the Gallery to put Mallard’s break-up—which they have known about for two months, after Mallard went around the Gallery explaining it to them, and how he expected them to respect his privacy—in the context of all the other failed marriages in politics.

Again, the story isn’t about Mallard’s marital split: it’s about the hypocrisy of a man who deliberately conspired to dirty political life in New Zealand for political gain, engaging in the same kind of behaviour that he alleged of Don Brash.

Trevor Mallard’s family legitimately deserve privacy at this time. Mallard himself doesn’t deserve. It has been well known in Wellington for some time that Mallard’s marital split has not come about simply due to the stresses and strains of political life: there is another person involved. It is time the media fronted up and asked Mallard the hard question: in light of the way he used Don Brash’s personal life to destroy Brash’s will to continue in politics, what right does Mallard think he has to be treated with respect and privacy when his marriage breaks down?

Muckraking Tony Censors Blog--Again!

2007-08-24T10:59:00.000+12:00

You would have thought that Tony Milne, Labour Party council member and left-wing candidate for Council, might have learned from his last censorship activities: despite his attempts to conceal the outrageous and defamatory claims he made on his blog about Mayoral front-runner Bob Parker, it appears that Tony still has time to read from Pete Hodgson's song-sheet.

I made a comment on his post pointing out that I expected Tony to censor it, but the fact that Tony got into hot legal water the last time he engaged in muck-raking doesn't seem to have deterred him.

Tony Milne is not a bad guy. He's relatively bright, given the company he keeps. But he does seem to be very misguided. It's clearly not in his nature to engage in this kind of shit-flinging. How much pressure are otherwise good and hard-working Labour Party officials under to attempt to assasinate the character of National's leader?

How long before these otherwise upstanding and loyal Labour Party members see the light, and accept that trying to pull down John Key will only damage their political fortunes further? Or is another strategy at play? Is Pete Hodgson on a suicide mission within the Labour Party: to harm its electoral chances so significantly as to prime the Party for a total purge next year?

The Party Line

2007-07-23T23:55:00.000+12:00

Question: What is the connection between David Benson-Pope lying to everybody again about the activities of his staffer, and rules to “enhance the transparency of campaign finance laws”?

Answer: On the face of it, nothing.

Except when you consider this.

It isn’t just Helen Clark, David Parker and David Benson-Pope who are spouting this spineless waffle. All the Ministers are, at any opportunity.

The wonks are in overdrive coming up with this shit. Throughout the public service, sustainability has become the catch-word for more money. Leading the charge is the Ministry for the Environment, with all sorts of useful advice on how to be green.

But it is everywhere. The Ministry of Economic Development--those who never actually create any economic value--tell us how to run sustainable businesses .

Thus, tourism has to become sustainable tourism. Transport, the biggest single industry contributor to carbon emissions, is obviously fronting a big chunk of the work. MAF has come up with a big body of work to look at agricultural sustainability. The Ministry of Education has advisers telling schools how they should go about building “sustainable buildings”. Te Puni Kokiri now exists to promote Maori economic transformation in an environmentally friendly way. Research into sustainability has become a key theme. All in all, there are some 22,000 pages and policy documents on government websites discussing environmental sustainability.

Evidently, it hasn't occurred to anybody in government that government itself would be a whole lot economically, and environmentally sustainable if there weren't so many fucking civil servants blowing so much precious air talking about it.

The communications units of the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Economic Development are being beefed up this year in anticipation of outrageous levels of public spending in the second half of next year on reducing energy use and environmental sustainability. Huge advertising that will echo everything that Labour has said, but done nothing about, its biggest policy platform of this term.

Millions upon millions of taxpayers’ money will be spent by government departments preaching Labour’s dying gasps of office. As a voter, you simply won’t be able to tell the difference between a Helen Clark advertisement for Labour, and a Helen Clark advertisement for sustainability. You will be overwhelmed with so much crap on television telling you to turn off your lights, drive more slowly, wear warmer clothes, shit less often, and swimming to Australia rather than flying Emirates, that you will be oblivious to the noise of any other kind of advertising on television. Except for the one with Jonah, that tells you that you should keep on watching telly and rack up more energy use, and not pay your power bill.

Because the Government hopes that by making a whole lot of noise about what you should be doing to drastically change your lifestyle, you will lose sight of the fact that on sustainability issues, the Government hasn’t actually achieved anything. Transport emissions have flatlined because of rising international oil prices: not because Labour’s done some grand and brilliant thing to magically make people more efficient. Agricultural emissions have climbed. Industrial energy consumption has grown with economic growth. As the government has hired tens of thousands more civil servants to huff and puff their way through analysis, so too does the Crown’s carbon footprint now need a much larger shoe.

The Government also wants you to forget in election year that the one tool that industry has to mitigate its carbon emissions—planting trees—has been wiped out by a greedy, tax-addicted government that is not just confiscating forestry carbon credits from industry, but also penalises foresters for not planting trees in the first place. It is the great nationalisation of forestry by any other name. The result of it is that there are fewer new trees being planted now than in several generations. New Zealand’s forestry stock is smaller now than fifty years ago.

You won’t hear that next year, because this Labour government doesn’t actually care about the reality. To ensure that you don’t hear about the reality of what is happening in the forestry industry, Labour, through Mark Burton, is introducing a piece of legislation banning the forestry industry from promoting its message next year, under the guise of restricting “third party advertising”.

You won’t hear from industry affected by Labour on its all-talk, no-action sustainability message. You won’t hear the contradictions, because only the Government, through its stupendous public information campaigns, will be telling you their side of the story.

The astonishing reality is that the reason David Benson-Pope and Helen Clark needed Madeleine Setchell out of her critical role at the Ministry for the Environment was not because they don’t trust her neutrality. On the contrary, they trust Satchell’s neutrality too much. The last person they need managing the Government’s biggest re-election spend-up is a person who might actually exercise a degree of impartiality and objectivity.

Not at all. For this kind of crusade, Labour needs somebody much more partisan.

Miss Piggy in Pink

2007-07-18T16:53:00.000+12:00

Hot on the heels of Labour’s back-down on the Therapeutic Medicines Amendment Bill, there is no good news that Labour’s fortunes will improve in the next six months. Instead Labour is setting itself up for further electoral humiliation by treating taxpayers and democracy alike with contempt.

Mark Burton is a bumbling failure, and waste of political space. October’s local body elections are fast approaching, yet the Local Government Minister presides over a portfolio that has done nothing to radically reduce the unconscionable waste that Auckland’s civic leaders are engaging in. Instead of fixing Auckland’s not inconsiderable problems, Burton responds in the House today with this stunning piece of bureaucratese:

Hon MARK BURTON (Minister of Local Government) on behalf of the Minister with responsibility for Auckland Issues: The Government is working in collaboration with Auckland councils on governance arrangements, because it is committed to promoting Auckland’s future as a world-class, internationally competitive city region. Key elements of this work include a stronger regional governance structure, an overarching regional strategic plan—that is, a “one plan”—and the regional sustainable development forum to develop such a plan.

He says nothing about capping rates, eliminating tracts of public servants who populate the seven local authorities in Auckland, or anything remotely concerning local electors in Auckland: good water systems, good roads, and a transparent and understandable, unified resource management and building structure.

The problem isn’t that Mark Burton is lazy. Instead, Burton is distracted. He has set his sights on silencing opposition to the Labour Party’s more extreme activities, and the moves to squash anybody who disagrees with the Labour Party take much higher priority than reforming the mindless garbage that is local government in New Zealand generally, and local government in Auckland in particular.

Next week, we will see Burton introducing the Electoral (Small Party Bribery and Labour Party Enemy Gagging) Amendment Bill into the House. The Bill will have two parts.

The first part will reallocate the taxpayer-funded slush account that determines how much of your money that political parties can blow during an election campaign on television advertising. The broadcasting allocation model that the Government proposes is a classic example of pork-barrel MMP politicking. In exchange for the support of the Greens, United Future, New Zealand First, and Progressive, Labour will give them a larger share of a bigger pool of broadcasting money to campaign at the next election.

This move is nothing short of corruption. The Labour Party clearly hasn’t listened to voter outrage at how they stole public money at the last election to pay for their campaign: they are extending the model again to give more money to their friends.

The broadcasting allocation model doesn’t need reform. It needs to be scrapped entirely. The model is an anachronism of two-party first-past-the-post electioneering. The only acceptable reform is to remove the funding source entirely, and raise the thresholds of party campaign spending, to allow each of the political parties to spend their own money on television advertising.

The second part of the Bill is even more insidious: it places draconian limits on how much third parties can spend advertising their positions. The Government calls this the “Exclusive Brethren clause”. That is bullshit. In reality, it limits the amount any third party can spend on any measure.

Let’s take the recent example of the well-organised opposition to the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill. My own view is that the legislation was a no-brainer. I find it staggering that such a trifling little move as applying the same regulations to voodoo remedies as pharmaceutical remedies stirred so much public debate. In the end, Health Minister Annette King blundered, and allowed voodoo science to mount much better arguments against the legislation than she could.

Yet that is political debate in action. Annette King’s performance was a political experiment rivalling Dr Bunsen Honeydew in incompetence.

To appropriately extend the Muppet analogy even further, Mark Burton has turned himself into Sam the Eagle of New Zealand politics. Having failed to win the argument on supplementary medicines, the Government now wants to ensure that there is no further opposition from interested parties on future legislation. Burton will try and ram this act of political censorship through under urgency.

And there’s a good reason why it wants to do it.

Labour’s problem is that it has left its legislative agenda too late to hold honest, open discussions and bed policies down before the election. As Idiot Savant notes, In November, on the eve of election year, the Government will introduce its policies on climate change.

A big chunk of the policy will involve hammering the forestry industry by placing impenetrable penalties on cutting down trees. Not only do forest owners miss out on the carbon credits that the Government confiscates from them: they will be thrashed for not creating the carbon credits in the first place.

Understandably, foresters are pissed off. So too are the thousands of mum and dad investors who ferreted away a proportion of the money that the government hasn't yet extorted from them as a savings vehicle, only to have it compromised after the fact by a Government that concerns itself more with punishing productive business than creating wealth for New Zealand.

On their behalf, forest owners will launch a major campaign expressing their position. The Labour Party does not want voters to hear the forestry industry’s arguments on the cusp of an election year, because they know they simply no longer has the political capital to win the small arguments, let alone the big ones.

This has nothing to do with "evening the playing field" of democracy. No single lobby group has anything like the power and authority of central government. Cabinet Ministers individually have whole swarms of press secretaries and policy analysts to mount the best arguments. If the combined resources of the $60 billion state cannot beat a $1 million advocacy campaign by a lobby group, then that speaks wonders about the paucity of the state's ideas. There is no place in a civil society for eliminating the competition for ideas in debate.

The last thing the Labour Party needs going into an election year is to lose the major debate about its major platform of its third term: sustainability. Its only means of winning the debate is by using the coercive power of the government to silence other views.

It’s time to play the music, and bring down the curtain on this muppet show of a regime.

Did Sneaky Tony Get The Lawyer's Call?

2007-07-16T21:49:00.000+12:00

Whale-Oil highlights a sneaky change from Labour Party national councillor, and left-wing Christchurch city council aspirant Tony Milne on Tony's website.

Mustering the kind of bitchiness that only the radical left can manage, Tony referred to certain nasty "rumours" surrounding Christchurch Mayoral front-runner Bob Parker.

A sneaky revision of Tony's post deleted the reference, but he didn't remove an admonishing comment from innocentIII, tut-tutting Tony for reverting to socialist type.

Why did Tony remove the venomous remark? Was it simply an attempt to clean up his own behaviour, or did he get a call from Parker's lawyers threatening a defamation action?

Naughty boy, Tony. You should know by now that if you aspire to becoming a public figure, and you're going to engage in mud-slinging, you don't put yourself on the wrong side of litigation. The Labour Party just doesn't have enough money to bail you out.

Slightly new look...

2007-07-16T18:12:00.001+12:00

Slightly new look to the site. Mainly 'cos I wanted to include a couple of features that weren't available on the new version of blogger.

Consequently, I've got rid of most of the old links. Any readers who think they're worth adding to my links should add comments here.

Peak Oil for Dummies

2007-07-15T17:33:00.001+12:00

Over at Kiwiblog, one of the themes of resident freak commenter, Roger Gnome (a Political Science honours student at Otago who normally runs the theory that New Zealand would be much better off if all employers were exterminated, and everybody was unionised), is peak oil. Along with the apparently looming global warming crisis, the world as we know it is reaching the end of “cheap oil”. According to the theory, new oil discoveries are in decline; production from currently exploited oil fields is at its highest point, and as demand for oil increases as the global economy grows, the price of oil will massively skyrocket.

There are two general theories around peak oil: the first that an imminent crisis is upon us, that by 2010 oil demand will outstrip production and prices will increase to a point that will cause global recession. The second, less gloomy theory, is that oil production will plateau, prices will increase gradually over time, and oil and energy uses will change to divert the gloomy outlook that the peak oil theorists advance.

The major problem with the peak oil theory is that the economic assumptions that they have been stunning in their flaws. In 1974, Marion Hubbert developed the “Hubbert Peak Theory", and applied it to a range of mineral resources: natural gas, coal, and metals. His predictions have had a mixed reception: he suggested coal reserves would last another couple of centuries. His natural gas claims relied on what was initially fairly scant knowledge of natural gas reserves.

Initially the alarmists claimed oil production would peak in 1989. Hubbert calculated that oil production would reach its peak in 1995. Later, he revised his predictions to 2005. The current consensus from peak oil alarmists is that 2010 is the year when oil prices will rise so dramatically as to cause global crisis.

The reasons for the changing predictions are much more broad than the environmentalists who advocate the theory want you to know. To make accurate forecasts about oil production on the one hand, and oil consumption on the other, you need to have a clear picture of the variables. The variables include the use of technology (which determines how easily you can drill the oil out of the ground), the accuracy of estimates of oil reserves, the alternative uses of oil and its substitutes in energy production, and geopolitical factors, in both OPEC and non-OPEC countries, which have major effects on the production of oil.

Suffice to say, for the last twenty years, peak oil enthusiasts have systematically taken a pessimistic view of oil production in their estimates, for both OPEC and non-OPEC countries. While proven middle eastern reserves are generally overestimated to gain better production rights within OPEC, knowledge of existing reserves in non-OPEC countries is fairly well documented. Yet peak oil proponents using the hubbert forecasting theory have monumentally failed to accurately estimate production and reserve levels even where there is good knowledge about oil reserve levels.

The reality is that oil production is determined by demand for oil, and geopolitical factors, rather than the status of reserves. Proven oil reserves are not running out anytime soon. Production technology is improving, making it less expensive to exploit existing proven reserves. Relatively high levels of oil now have nothing to do with oil supply, but everything to do with geopolitical tensions, and OPEC’s ability to exploit those tensions to maximise their oil returns
And, as we have seen in New Zealand’s Great South Basin this week, as oil prices increase, it becomes more economically viable to exploit other oil resources at current prices. This is consistent with a global trend of additional oil supplies coming onstream, outstripping demand for oil.

So here we have a pattern over the last twenty years: peak oil enthusiasts denying the data, making henny penny predictions about oil production which never eventuate, and continuing to extend the crisis date outwards to suit their analysis. Recent peak oil alarmists have claimed variously that “peak oil” will result in energy wars, recession, starvation, and worldwide devastation.

The predictions just don’t stack up with the facts. Existing oil reserves are in a very slow decline. That goes without saying. But existing oil reserves do not equate to total reserves, particularly as prices encourage new reserves to come onstream.

There is a common theme among those who advance peak oil theory. They are almost invariably from the environmental lobby. They are not in the business of making accurate economic forecasts. If they were, their predictions of peak oil prices would have led them to invest in oil companies, and made them very wealthy if their theory panned out.

The environmentalists' solutions for this supposed peak oil cataclysm aren't based in reality, either. As with the Kyoto Protocol, the rising demand for oil isn't coming from the Western society that the green lobbies want to punish in their great leap backwards, but from China and India. The US, and the OECD generally, is consistently investing in less oil-dependent technologies anyway. Meanwhile, as the ever-choking smog clouds rise over Mumbai and Shanghai, their increasing consumption of oil been an even greater contributor to rising prices than instability in Iraq and Iran.

There is no need for panic. The environmentalists’ will to transform people’s views through scare-mongering has little to do with oil production and supply, and everything to do with their desire to punish oil companies and reducing human dependency on oil. It’s an environmental argument, and trying to produce fringe pseudo-economic petrification theories as an excuse is as dishonest as their data.

STUPID COMMIE BITCHES

2007-07-14T13:07:00.000+12:00

Maia-watch is, admittedly, an amusing game to play on the internet. It ranks even more highly than Idiot-watch and Jordon-watch. Here we have a trio of cloistered, fringe pinkos who have nothing better to do with their time than loathe the system that gives them the luxury and freedoms to protest.

But by far, Maia-watch is the best fun of all, because she is just such a preposterous freak. Fish in a barrel.

It is no coincidence that the New Zealand blogs that most vigilantly scream against oppression are the first blogs to ban any comments that diverge from their own views. In recent months, in turn, Maia, Jordon, Idiot, and Tony Milne have all either tightly moderated comments, or banned them entirely. So much for liberty and wanting to explore other world views.

Maia is a stunning example of the excesses of the welfare state, and how socialists have become totally disconnected with sensible New Zealand. She is a screaming, hysterical, radical feminist Marxist who can only advocate her astonishing views by leeching off the education and welfare system that capitalism affords. One of my favourite aphorisms, “there is no welfare without wealth”, is completely lost on her.

Maia is the high-tide mark on welfare system abuse. Here we have an able-bodied, reasonably intelligent, active person with some skills, in a market that is crying out for skilled labour. Instead of going to a job every day and contributing to society, Maia works as a semi-professional rent-a-crowd member. She attends every protest under the sun.

If, like Nicky Hager, she were independently wealthy and reliant on a trust fund, such social indolence could almost be tolerated. But instead, we the taxpayers of New Zealand are the trustees of Maia’s funding source, and she abuses it at every opportunity.

Take this post, in which Maia expresses adulation for American communists in the 1940s and 1950s for brainwashing their children, and causing children to play Stalinist games involving persecution. In Maia’s world, not for the first time, we see children are a conduit to ideology.

Or try this perplexing piece of trolldom, where she makes the peculiar claim that “our racist police and justice system disproportionately beat-up and lock-up Maori much more frequently than Pakeha.”

Here Maia admits that in the past she has protested at Anzac Day dawn service, and has that perennial issue of how to diminish the public's perception of soldiers' bravery. She asks how is it that we commemorate soldiers, but not people who die from illnesses. Well, duh: it does not take an act of bravery to contract typhus. It does take an act of bravery to go to war to defend your country against totalitarianism, and defend the freedoms that non-combatants, such as Maia, take for granted every day.

Maia is very vocal about rape and rapists. Here Maia defends a woman who made false rape complaints by stating that the Police take a woman-hating view of rape anyway, that rape is no more subject to false complaints than any other crime, and implies that the woman who made the false complaint was most likely crying out for help as the victim of previous abuse. In this peculiar “all men are rapists” catch-all, Maia ignores the fact that Police can only investigate actual rapes that have occurred. In Maia’s world, whenever a rape allegation is made against another man, that man should be arrested and thrown in jail, because it is highly probable that at some point he has raped a woman before, and the Police are rapists for seeing the world any differently to her.

Then we have Maia searching her own blog statistics, and seeing that somebody googled her with the terms “rape a woman” and “get away with it”. This followed Maia’s comments that men get away with rape with impunity. Her next move was to post that she is now “terrified that this man is now going to add to that number.”

And that folks, is just in the last three months. That’s excluding Maia’s bewildering paranoia earlier in the year that a toddler child she is babysitting will grow up to be a rapist.

Here Maia jumps on the fringe bandwagon again as she protests outside the Australian “Embassy” (sic) about John Howard’s plans to stop Aboriginals from abusing their children, murdering each other and wallowing in booze and drugs. Maia’s solution, apparently, is to give Aboriginals a whole pile of money to allow them to choose their own destiny (plainly ignoring that the latter has been federal Australian policy for the last thirty years, and has failed spectacularly).

And finally we have this “capitalist dogs” comment which stirred so much ridicule towards her in the blogosphere. Maia has never held down a proper job or worked in an honest occupation her whole life. She protests anything that moves. She has been brainwashed inside the respective departments of Women’s and Maori studies at Victoria University. This prejudices her against anybody who invests money in a business to create wealth.

Clint Heine held Maia to account last week, asking the quite legitimate question as to where she got the money, as a welfare beneficiary, to go to Australia to shit-stir over there. In response, one of Clint’s commenters suggested that Maia needed a dildo up her.

And then the crap really began to fly. In her own inimitable style, playing distraction-debate better than anybody out there, Maia claimed rape. Or at least, threatened rape. Not only was James, apparently, a wannabe rapist for suggesting that Maia needed a dildo, so too was Clint for allowing the comment to stand.

Thus the pinko end of the blogosphere seethed and writhed in self-flagellating ecstasy, as they found themselves the victims of attempted sexual assault. All from an initially crass comment from somebody who is prone to making crass comments.

Clint shouldn’t have to apologise to anybody in the blogosphere for the tone of one crass comment made by somebody else. There was not a single allegation of sexual abuse, and it takes an extremely warped mind to interpret the statement “get a dildo up you” as an intention to commit sexual assault.

Clint was doing no more than calling Maia to account for being a stupid, hysterical bitch who exclusively cloisters herself among people who don’t question her pathetic, taxpayer-funded anarchist lifestyle. Maia posts into the blogosphere outrageous man-hating, anarcho-communism. It is totally appropriate for Clint to ridicule her. He can’t do so on her blog, since she’s banned his comments.

It isn't because Maia is a woman that she's being held to account. It's because she's making ridiculous, stupid comments on her blog. If Maia is going to insist on posting her outrageous views, she should expect that from time to time people will call her out for being a stupid bitch. Calling her a stupid bitch is one of the many freedoms that we have in a liberty-driven, capitalist society that also allows Maia to advocate her freakish world view.

UPDATE:
Angelfish takes Maia to task for labelling everything rape, and diminishing rape as a term. Maia responds by pointing to a post from Simon, who suggested that he would offer Maia a job in his Karangahape Road establishment. Maia claims that Simon is also threatening sexual assault, as cutting off her WINZ income by offering work in the sex industry constitutes rape.

At no point does it occur to Maia that she has broader employment alternatives, outside of WINZ. She could simply go out and get a regular job.

Oh, what a sordid bunch they are...

2007-07-11T13:19:00.000+12:00

Those who have been involved in local government for a long time will tell you that it is a complex beast. Local government politicians will point to their grand plans for greater civic outcomes. They will point to every infinite activity that their council is involved in, and waffly pinko bullshit, such as “develop people and community focused policies”. That’s City Vision for you.

Their core principles are:

1. Make Auckland City Council more democratic through effective public participation and political accountability
2. Promote a diverse city that provides opportunities for participation and belonging for people from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds
3. Conserve our heritage, promote quality urban design and celebrate our arts and diverse cultures
4. Honour the Treaty of Waitangi and continue to strengthen our partnership with tangata whenua
5. Enhance the principles of public service in our Council through responsible social, financial and environmental approaches to the management of the city
6. Implement policies that address social and economic inequalities in the community.

Yes, that is the actual politically correct hogwash that substitutes for policy from that sorry bunch of losers. What is missing from the formula—staggeringly—is not a single commitment to delivering quality roading, water or wastewater services. Nor does CityVision make a single commitment to improving building consents or RMA processes. The touchpoints between ratepayers and local authorities—the services that ratepayers actually use from Council—are the great hole that has been lost in successive local government engagements in the last twenty years. CityVision is simply the apex of absolute disgust with which ratepayers hold local government generally. While CityVision councillors swan off overseas on exhorbitant junkets, ratepayers are seeing less and less actual service delivery. At the same time, in the last six years, local government spending—and ratepayers’ contributions—have grown a massive 60%.That kind of wanton profligacy simply isn’t sustainable.

What CityVision won’t tell you is that they hiked rates more rapidly than any other Council in Auckland history.

There is one thing that council is mandated to provide that overrides everything else in the community: basic roading, property consents process, and basic civic infrastructure.

It is here that I have reservations about supporting Citizens and Ratepayers Now in Auckland City. Yes, they are the only group in town who can make a difference. The question is, will they?

This is C&R's one chance in a generation to get Auckland City back on the right track, providing the basic civic needs of Aucklanders. They need to apply real focus and bloody-minded commitment to achieve it.

Aaron Bhatnagar has posted about some of the outlandish spending proposals of CityVision. Pet projects from drop-kick pinkos who seek to build empires to themselves are vastly wasteful, of course. It goes without saying that that kind of spending simply has to cease. But it would be a totally inaccurate picture to say that is the only thing wrong with local government.

No more sorry example of the excesses of Auckland City, and just how the city has lost its way, can be seen in the Queen Street upgrade. Queen Street used to be a busy, bustling, if slightly drab part of the city. For the last six months it has been absolute hell to drivers, pedestrians, shopkeepers, and businesspeople alike. The entire length of the street has been torn up for "improvements". All along the street are signs telling us how much better Queen Street will be once the changes are through.

Yet much of the work in Queen Street has been shabby and tawdry. From Mayoral Drive to Wellesley Street, a vast flood of water floods down the footpath when it rains, leaving pedestrians ankle-deep in water, rather than flowing into stormwater drains. The quality of the paving is appalling: poor quality workmanship paid for by a Council that does not hold its contracted services to account. Instead of working its way along Queen Street piece by piece, and focussing efforts to concentrate all the services gradually along the Street, the idiots who planned the works have successfully taken the entirety of Queen Street, and much of the CBD with it, out of action. Gallingly, so inept is Auckland City that it has produced signage announcing all of the wondrous things that the new Queen Street will provide. Including a sign announcing that a lovely new park bench will be bolted to the ground on the footpath. Cost of the signage? $4,000. Cost of the park bench? $1,000. Value of pissing off ratepayers by wasting their money advertising stupid inane shit? Priceless.

And now we have the not very surprising news that the costs of the upgrade have blown out by 100%.

A friend of mine is a manager at Auckland City. He is politically pretty left-wing, which normally discounts him from being a friend of mine. Yet I keep him around because I can berate him about the outrageous activities of Council. Three years ago, he used to put up good counter-arguments to my suggestions that Council is a wasteful pile of manure and needs fundamental change. Now the counter-arguments have ceased. He now agrees that a complete clean-out of council administration is needed. Staff turnover is running at over 30%. Council management is awash with unnecessary layers of administration that do nothing, and have no performance targets. Service delivery has declined. Large tracts of bureaucrats exist simply to promote their own projects, and stymie others. Huge numbers of civic servants are employed to monitor a vastly increased number of external consultants. When a consultant fucks up, contracts are renewed. Nobody is ever held to account. In this environment, the few talented people are leaving in frustration, leaving even less quality behind.

Auckland City needs much more than cancelling the Left’s absurd policies. It needs a complete clean-out of civic administration, starting with the top. CEO David Rankin has to go. So too do at least eight of the twelve layers of management. All service delivery functions should be outsourced to private entities, and Council should hammer external providers to deliver what they are contractually obliged to do.

Council needs to get back to basics and focussing on its core responsibilities. I don’t want to hear about rates rises being capped at the level of inflation from Citizens and Ratepayers. That simply isn’t good enough. Auckland City Council is a fat, lazy, bloated dog full of cancer. It needs to be put down. Council staffing could, and should, be reduced by at least thirty percent. Council functions should be restricted to fixing its roading, water, and wastewater services, and providing the best possible services to ratepayers that are not otherwise delivered to the community.

The formula isn't complex at all. Improve basic service delivery for things that ratepayers actually need. Get rid of the bullshit. Slash the local government bureaucracy. Hammer your service providers to perform. Provide strong roading, water, wastewater, and council services.

Bad management and poor civic administration has flourished under Dick Hubbard’s council because left-wing councillors simply do not have a grip on what is happening in the city.

I hope like hell that Citizens and Ratepayers have a sweeping majority after October 13 this year. I hope also that they have the balls to carry through with the drastic reform that Aucklanders need.

Double, double, toil and trouble...

2007-06-27T09:23:00.001+12:00

One of my occasional correspondents, that bastion of personal human industry and frequent flyer miles, the Hon. Judith Tizard, has had a rough time of late.

Poor Judith. It's bad enough that she has to cope with the combined stresses of being an associate arts minister and minister of consumer affairs. In addition, Judith has the considerable responsibility of being patron of the Auckland gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual communities, and Helen Clark's closest personal friend. While Judith doesn't have to put up with the drudgery of living in the Prime Minister's home anymore, she does have to put up with taunts from the National Party about her work ethic. That kind of workload is enough to drive anybody to tears.

This is simply not fair. In almost eight years of ministerial, sub-cabinet office, Judith has been nothing if not loyal to Helen Clark. When other Labour MPs have shown disloyalty, Judith has been there to comfort the Prime Minister.

It just isn't on for Jonathan Coleman to refer to Judith Tizard's broomstick. While Coleman galavants around in the knowledge that his medical knowledge was acquired through a legitimate public learning institution, Tizard is correct that it is sexist and mean to bring up the vexed issue of the Minister's domestic duties. Judith wants the world to know that since becoming a minister outside cabinet, she has not touched a vacuum cleaner, a dust-cloth, made the bed, scrubbed the toilet, or done anything close to operating a broomstick.

On the other hand, Judith Tizard is an excellent cook. Being the quintessential entertainer, and as one of the unofficial hostesses at Premier House, she has developed a reputation for fine dining and food. Take this recipe of Judith's for French onion soup, a favourite in the Labour Party caucus:

JUDITH TIZARD'S "ONION SOUP" RECIPE
1 large black pot (if a pot is unavailable, a cauldron will suffice)
6 large brown onions, sliced thinly
2 gallons of dog stock
6 legs of toad
The hair of one albino monkey, or alternatively, one of Darren Hughes' eyebrows
3 fenny snake skins
Salt and pepper to taste
Babboon's blood optional.

EXCLUSIVE: Local Government Conference Announced

2007-06-22T15:31:00.000+12:00

I am delighted to announce this afternoon a $15 million conference to take place at Waitangi, on the Chatham Islands, in the week of 5 October 2007.

The conference will be the largest ever gathering of local authority politicians and employees ever held in the Southern Hemisphere. The gathering will draw together some 1,200 local authority politicians across the 86 territorial local authorities in New Zealand, as well as some 25,000 people directly employed and contracted to local government.

Local government in New Zealand spends some $6 billion of ratepayers’ money annually, and consumes approximately 4% of GDP. The summit will bring together interested parties to discuss some of the most pressing issues of modern local government.

The three day conference will include keynote speakers of an international calibre on such innovative subjects as:

How to Eliminate the Last White Straight Male from your Workplace—Local Government New Zealand Chair Basil Morrison
The RMA, And How It’s Just Too Permissive of Sensible Development—Mayor Bob Harvey
How to Railroad, and then Withdraw from, Massively Expensive Projects that the Public Doesn’t Want—Hon. Trevor Mallard
Ministerial Vetoes: Why Judges are Bastards when they Overturn Them—Chris Carter
How To Rort Ratepayers With Water Charges When You’ve Promised them Otherwise—Dr Bruce Hucker
Ratepayers Views and How to Sideline Them—Open Panel Discussion
Resisting Local Government Reform—Your Job Is More Important Than Their Money

The all expenses-paid conference will be free to all local government interested parties in New Zealand. The conference will take place the week before local government elections this year. Sponsored by a group of interested ratepayers, the $15 million summit will take place in the idyllic surroundings of Waitangi, on Chatham Islands. Conference attendees will be provided with free airplane transport to Waitangi, free airport transfers, outstanding conference and accommodation facilities, and fittingly sumptuous food and beverages on a local Chatham Islands theme.

Attendance by all local government mayors, elected councillors, community board members, senior management, middle-senior management, middle management, middle-junior management, senior-junior management, middle-junior management, associated management and related support staff is compulsory. Prospective candidates for local authority representation in 2007 are strongly invited to attend.

Conference organisers state that it is their desire to thank all the people involved in local government for the outstanding work that they do in guarding and maintaining ratepayers assets, and for the stellar work they do every year in adding value to the towns and cities in which they operate.

Conference organisers report that on the final day of the conference they will be holding a special fireworks display, of a kind never before seen in New Zealand. Following negotiations with Yuritkin Abdurakhmanov, the Associate Director of Black Market Sales in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the conference organisers have announced a particular treat for attendees. “We have spent some $25 million in addition to the conference expenses for some of the most eye-wateringly brilliant pyrotechnics available in the world today,” says Geoff Rateful, the chairman of the conference organising committee. “Some ratepayers might consider this to be an unnecessarily extravagant move. We believe, however, that local government members in New Zealand deserve every luxury we can provide for them.”

In unrelated news, the International Atomic Energy Agency has disclosed that an anonymous customer has recently spent $25 million on a “suitcase nuke” device in Tashkent. The vessel transporting the device was last spotted heading East from Lyttleton, New Zealand.

Just Good Friends

2007-06-18T23:29:00.000+12:00

I have eleven Sarahs in my cellphone contacts list. One of them I vaguely remember as a former boss’ wife, who brought her husband meat rissoles into work one lunchtime. I ate the rissoles, got her number, and texted her every week for the next six months asking for more of the rissoles. She never delivered again. I don’t know why I still have her number.

The others I have known more intimately at various stages in the last couple of years. They never cooked me rissoles, and probably never will. With the exception of all but two, whom I have been seeing recently, I don’t think I will see them again. I would delete all their numbers, but I can never remember which ones are meaningful numbers, and which ones need to be trashed.

I am always suspicious of the proclivities of guys who claim to be straight, and yet have lots of chick friends. It has always occurred to me to be a total waste of time. Chicks, in the main, are not very smart, not very good at sport, overly emotional, frequently cranky, and really rather dull. They are, as a gender, prone to blaming others for their many errors, are incapable of taking responsibility, and refuse point-blank to continue a thought to its logical conclusion.

I have come to the inevitably stunning conclusion that chicks make passable girlfriends, good housemaids, and excellent mothers. But with few exceptions, not as friends. Which is why I have devised a system to classify the chicks I know into these three categories:

The older woman. Being an orphan, I have no shortage of women over the age of 35 who mother me. I send them cards on Mother’s day, and in return they cook me dinner when I am hungry. I expect them to scold me when I misbehave or speak rudely to others. I don’t expect them to tell me about their sex lives, because, frankly, thinking about your mother having sex is just sick. I’ve found that if I don’t forget a mother’s day, I can maintain long-term, platonic relationships with these maternal surrogates.
The housemaid. In this category I include secretaries, receptionists, waitresses, airline hostesses, nurses, and retail shopgirls. These are all jobs that a chick does best. In one of my local bars recently, a male waiter, whom I have nicknamed “Spike”, asked me what I wanted to drink. I looked at him sulkily, and then texted the three hot waitresses who were otherwise occupied with other customers, demanding that they look after me instead. I really don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect if I am paying exhorbitant prices for drinks in a bar with hot chicks that I will be served by them, rather than the spotty guy with stupid hair. These chicks exist in part for me to flirt with them, which I do excessively. But they also exist to serve, and in that respect, it is unwise to have sex with them.

In my experience, the only possible consequence of shagging a chick is that at some point in the near future she will become extremely cranky with me. Since I have never taken to saliva-laden beverages, I’ve never thought it appropriate to seriously hit on a waitress. If I did start shagging a chick who worked in one of my bars, either she would have to stop working at the bar, or I would have to find a new one to drink at. I don’t like going to new bars, so that rules that option out. In that sense, these chicks are not friends. They are hot acquaintances who serve my immediate needs. I do not keep their cellphone numbers so that I can spend time with them and learn interesting things about their otherwise inane lives. I mean, really. If they were such terribly interesting human beings, what would they be doing working in a bar?
Girlfriends. I do go through a lot of these, often concurrently. It never ceases to amaze me why I am not on better terms with many former girlfriends. Some of them, to be fair, have been purely psychotic . More have demonstrated that they have no sense of humour. Such was the case with all of the dour chicks I have dated in the last few years who showed no sense of humour when I didn’t call them back. Still more have demonstrated a variety of social problems, ranging from vegetarianism to owning too many cats to not being willing to iron my shirts. The latter point is really pretty critical to me. If my charm is no longer strong enough to encourage a girlfriend to iron my shirt, then in my view the relationship is irreparable, and I am only delaying the inevitable, and making it harder for them by pretending otherwise. But do you think I get credit later on for dumping them?

My main fault as a man, I suppose, is not my lack of modesty, but that I am just so bloody good looking, and charming to boot. I acquire female acquaintances very quickly. I don’t need to hear a chick’s perspective on the world to understand how a chick thinks. A chick’s thinking is invariably inferior to mine, and no matter how many times I listen to her jabbering, I am not going to become a more intelligent human being for listening to her.

With only a rare few exceptions—primarily chicks who I went to university with, and have cunningly, and surreptitiously turned into mother figures as they’ve aged and I haven’t—I don’t delude myself into thinking I can be friends with chicks.

There are some guys I know who go out of their way to be friends with chicks. Even ugly ones, which I have always thought as particularly pointless. They consider themselves to be more evolved species, and even make such absurd claims as being able to understand that futile, incomprehensible beast that is woman better.

I mean, really. What the fuck kind of point are they trying to prove?

Power Games

2007-06-04T23:06:00.000+12:00

I never cease to be amazed at the distances that the Left will travel to spin in their favour, at the expense of truth and human dignity. The death of Folole Maliaga is the case in point.

Let’s look at the facts now in the public domain. Folole Maliaga was morbidly obese. She was suffering from critical respiratory failure, as a result of that morbid obesity. She was released from hospital, with a stiff cocktail of drugs and a breathing machine, to deal with that respiratory failure, and was told that her death was imminent if she did not dramatically change her lifestyle.

Instead of taking the drugs, Mrs Maliaga rejected them in favour of “traditional Samoan medicines”, while continuing to use a very non-traditional oxygen machine. It has also become clear that that machine was not designed or expected to support life.

Mrs Maliaga did not pay her power bill. She also did not pay her telephone bill. What tends to happen, when people do not pay their utility bills, is that they get cut off. There really is little point in having chargeable utility services if nothing happens when people don’t pay them.

When the power to Mrs Maliaga’s home was disconnected, Mrs Maliaga’s family sat around and sang hymns for a period of three hours.

Mrs Maliaga died.

This is a story that can be interpreted in several different ways. The mass media-driven hysteria, emphasised in the blogosphere and among left-wing activists with barrows to push, is also becoming more subdued with a critical eye being cast on what really happened. The "Mercury are Murderers!" brigade is looking more ridiculous as the other contributory factors in Mrs Muliaga's death come to light.

There are already far too many players in this absurd scenario.

When the story first broke, SOE Trevor Mallard called for calm, requested that the public wait for a police investigation into the affair, and refused to comment on the situation. Ducking for cover? Well, not quite. It’s difficult for a Minister without the information to make a useful comment without appearing heartless.

Doug Heffernan from Mercury didn’t help his own career prospects by wading into the argument as soon as the news broke, defending Mercury. When you’ve got an hysterical family member making accusations against the company, it simply isn’t wise for a CEO to even attempt to counter the accusations immediately.

His response should have been: “We are extremely sorry that Mrs Muliaga died. We will be conducting a full investigation into what we did, will cooperate with any police inquiry, and will take full responsibility for any consequences that occurred as a direct result of Mercury’s actions. Our thoughts are with Mrs Muliaga’s family, and we will do anything we can to help them.”

Easy press release to write. It doesn’t accept culpability for her death, doesn’t suggest Mercury will dodge responsibility for it, and gets rid of the beat-up for a bit. The PR guy who thought otherwise should be fired, and Heffernan’s own head will probably roll for his naivety in failing to do just that.

But the two most troubling aspects of the case concern two of the most vocal self-appointed Mercury critics, and the media’s blind, uncritical acceptance of what they have said.

Brenden Sheehan, who has variously been described by sloppy journalists as Mrs Muliaga’s nephew, her son-in-law, and “relative”, is not a media novice. He is the chief shit-stirrer for the Public Service Association. In recent times, he has led PSA strike action against TVNZ, Radio New Zealand, and the Public Trust.

Sheehan is head of the PSA in the Hawke’s Bay. With his very calculated usurping of Mrs Muliaga’s spotlight, and particularly given the nature of some of his public comments, it’s not certain whether Sheehan is pursuing the interests of the Muliaga family, or his own political interests.

It is understandable that when a person dies in tragic circumstances, that family members may seek outside parties on which to scapegoat their grievances. What is astonishing is that the media can allow a seasoned political manipulator such as Sheehan to use the tragedy for downright opportunism.

The second unforgivable personality is Helen Clark.

Clark’s potential choice of targets was broad. They included:

The hospital that discharged a critically ill woman with an oxygen machine at home, reliant on her continuing to use a complex cocktail of drugs to assist her to breathe. Hard for Clark to take this option, at it would undermine public faith in a public health system that she has poured billions of dollars into.
The social welfare system that was sufficiently inflexible as to provide the means for a critically ill woman to pay either her power bill, or her phone bill. Again, Clark has championed how much better social services are under Labour, so this isn’t viable.
Annette King, who as health minister began a vastly expensive anti-obesity campaign, which in Mrs Muliaga’s case, hadn’t filtered through. Difficult to criticise her own Minister.
Mrs Muliaga and her family, who chose not to call an ambulance when the power was disconnected. Hard for a Prime Minister to make that call without appearing heartless. Given Clark’s historic reputation for warmth and tenderness towards other people generally, it would be out of character for Clark to take this step.
Mercury Energy. A subsidiary energy retailer of an SOE. Potentially a big, callous, corporate beast that Labour voters love to hate. The risk of criticising the energy retailer is that it will lead to massive shareholder value, but given the public’s general loathing towards utility companies on the whole, it’s much harder for the energy retailer to look good.

Of course, the PM could have simply stayed out of the debate completely, allowed the police to conduct an investigation, and for the facts to rule, but the chance of the media exposure when she needs it most became too good to miss.

She did it with a style that only she can manage: she refused to acknowledge Mighty River Power executives outside Mrs Muliaga’s home, and has pointedly ordered Mighty River to apologise for their role in Mrs Muliaga’s death. By doing so, she has effectively jeopardised Mighty River’s legal position before an autopsy has been carried out, and by sanctioning the blame against Mercury before a police inquiry has been carried out, has led to a massive loss in shareholder value in the state-owned company.

For what benefit? A couple of photo opportunities at a time when she needs them most.

Practical Application of Labour’s Electoral Act Reforms

2007-04-12T13:11:00.000+12:00

Hand-wringing socialists are coming up with piss-poor on-line defenses of the Labour Government’s gerrymandering of the electoral act to silence its critics in election year, and provide a forum for its own friends—the unions—to launch full-on attacks against the Government’s foes.

Welcome to the law of unintended consequences. Except in this case, it is easy to believe that the Government actually intends these consequences to occur. What Labour has done is make no distinction between organisations that exist to advocate in the public’s mind on behalf of its membership—such as the Employers and Manufacturers’ Association, the Cancer Society, the Heart Foundation, and Federated Farmers; and those organisations that have the membership clout, and affiliations with the Labour Party, to significantly change public opinion merely through promoting issues among its own membership—such as trade unions.

The difference between trade unions and other interested lobby groups is one of incumbency. Trade unions already have the Government’s ear, through their dominance of the Labour Party. Andrew Little doesn’t have to mount a public campaign to get the Labour Party to listen to him: he just calls up a Labour Minister and lets them know his thoughts. The organisational advantage for the Labour Party is that through its relationship with the unions, it has a captive market of members among which to advertise Labour policies.

Not so with the Heart Foundation. The only way that it can get the Government to act in its interests is through political lobbying, and spending resources winning public hearts and minds to make it a public issue. And here lies the great gerrymander of Labour’s electoral act reforms: it favours interests that are already close to Government, while severely restricting the right of those organisations that aren’t cosy with Government to generate public interest.

Let’s look at specific examples of public lobbying by special interest groups over the last few years, and which campaigns will and won’t be allowed under Labour’s proposals:

Rev Up The Government: Remember this? A group of Auckland pro-roading interests put together a campaign promoting increased spending on roads in Auckland. Exactly the kind of public lobbying that has been used to raise awareness of public issues in election year. In 2005 the campaign received particular attention because the Labour Party hijacked the website in a patsy pro-Labour transport initiative. Now, under Labour’s proposals, the Rev Up The Government campaign would not be allowed to spend more than $60,000 in an election year. That’s five modest advertisements in the NZ Herald.

PPTA Campaign Against the National Party: The PPTA spent massive amounts of money in 2005 attacking the National Party, among its 15,000 members. All perfectly legal under Labour’s proposals.

Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind: Spends substantial amounts of resource lobbying Government for better services for its members. If it spends more than $60,000 publicly promoting better services by Government for its membership, it will break Labour’s proposed law. The RNZFB's membership already wants better services for its members. The only way they're going to get them is by either lobbying government, or publicly encouraging non-members to support policies that will further the Foundation's interests.

PSA Campaign Against the National Party: 55,000 members. Can spend as much money as it likes promoting the Labour Party to its membership.

Employers and Manufacturers Association: Spends money lobbying Government on everything from better tax treatment of research and development, industry training, and lower compliance costs for business. If it spends more than $60,000 in election year promoting these issues, it will break the law.

EPMU: 50,000 members. Unlimited spending on promoting the Labour Party to its members, and attacking National.

Federated Farmers: If the FART tax campaign had taken place in an election year under Labour’s proposals, Federated Farmers would have broken the law.

No More Rates Campaign: Spent more than $60,000 on newspaper advertising pressuring Government to limit the rating powers of local authorities. Government eventually acknowledged that it was of sufficient public concern to warrant a select committee inquiry. Would have been illegal under Labour’s proposals.

A cursory look at Scoop's Politics thread gives readers an idea of the huge number of special interest groups that spend significant resources promoting its views to bring make its issues, public issues. Some are successful in geting the public behind them; others, like the Exclusive Brethren during the 2005 election, actually hurt National. Yet in Labour's cynical move to create itself a political advantage next election, it will wipe out the ability of all of these organisations to spend more than $60,000 publicly promoting their own interests.

Fuck YOU, You Thieving Bastards!

2007-04-10T10:09:00.000+12:00

The Labour Party has managed, quite successfully over the last seven years, to introduce stalking horses for broader policy measures that suit its own interests. By framing the debate, applying its monumental spin machine to the task, and distracting the opposition off-message on trivial issues, it can then follow-up with the sucker-punch of inevitability. It is inevitable, once campaign finance laws are introduced restricting the ability of political parties to raise money, that laws providing for taxpayer funding of those political parties are introduced, to “protect democracy”.

It has been good politics until now. Now the public are sick of these lying, cheating, self-serving bastards. The National Party should take note.

The Labour Party wants to cut off National Party funding—donations from individual members—any way it knows how, while preserving its own funding base—the unions—and enshrining that in law. That is one outrage, which the National Party is focussing on.

But the main outrage is Labour’s assumption that the public will accept spending millions of dollars a year of taxpayer’s money on political parties to spend and campaign as they see fit. This is the point that National needs to consistently run home: having been caught cheating stealing taxpayers’ money at the last election that they weren’t entitled to, and having legislated it to make that spending lawful after the fact, the Labour Party now wants to keep its filthy snout in the trough.

Labour’s argument for doing this is dishonest, and yet again assumes voters are too stupid to spot self-interest where it lies. The justification for Labour’s public funding is that its donation disclosure regime will make it harder to raise money. Well, Labour can’t have it both ways. Either it is benefiting from loose donation disclosure rules at the moment—allowing it to receive, as National does, large tracts of funding from a small pool of donors, or it doesn’t.

The reality is that Labour’s funding has dried up. Its only source of money is the unions. Labour is massively in debt, following the 2005 election spending fraud. It doesn’t have any other means of raising cash. This sudden concern for the integrity of party funding—that hasn’t occurred to Labour to be an agenda item until, miraculously, it reached the stage in the political cycle where it was raising less money than National—has become a lobbying position for dipping in to taxpayers’ funds permanently.

Well, Labour: you can have all the disclosure rules you want next election. It isn’t going to stop you from being voted out of office. But the cynical vote-yourself-cash policy will be repealed by National. There is no public mandate for you to steal yet more taxpayer money and spend it on staying in office.

Labour’s exemption on unions campaigning at election-time will be short-lived: every time a union message is broadcast at election time, it will be viewed by voters for what it is: Labour Party advantage, and yet another reminder of how the Labour Party is writing the rules to suit itself. National’s only recourse, in government, will be to remove the ability of unions to campaign during election time.

And if the Labour Party becomes reliant on its taxpayer-funded base, it will be even more badly damaged by a National Government removing the trough from which Labour can feed.

This kind of selfishness from a party so desperate to stay in power is almost enough to drive a guy to sedition.

Licence to Print Money?

2007-04-04T10:24:00.000+12:00

Have a look at this.

Section 30 of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act 1989 reads:

Reproduction or imitation of currency

(1)No person shall, without the prior consent of the Bank,—

(a)Make, design, engrave, print, or reproduce; or

(b)Use, issue, or publish—

any article or thing resembling a bank note or coin or so nearly resembling or having such a likeness to a bank note or coin as to be likely to be confused with or mistaken for it.

Now look at this.

Did the Labour Party get permission from the Reserve Bank before printing $10 bills?

Apart from the astonishment that the Labour Party appears to have enough money to embark on this kind of expensive self-promotion while it still owes the taxpayer over $800,000, shouldn't somebody investigate whether it is also breaching the Reserve Bank Act?

Direct Action on Section 59

2007-03-27T12:54:00.000+12:00

The liberal hand-wringers have set up this nifty piece of technology that allows New Zealanders to email their MPs with their views on the repeal of Section 59 of the Crimes Act.

For those people who can distinguish between occasional smacking on the one hand, and physical abuse on the other hand; and who believe that the State's first priority should be protecting children from real physical abuse, rather than occasional smacking, I invite you to take the following steps to email all MPs with your opposition to the Bill, using this same website.

To do so, take the following steps:

Visit http://wizard.repealsection59.org.nz/.

Send your message to all 121 MPs.

Create your own email message.

Press "Next".

Fill in the form with your email address, and first and last names.

Click "Next".

Change the Subject Line to "Don't Repeal Section 59".

Paste the following message:

Along with the vast majority of New Zealanders, I strongly disagree with the Green and Labour Parties' moves to repeal Section 59 of the Crimes Act. Far too much of taxpayers' money has been spent so far debating this tedious and trivial issue.

As the law currently stands, parents who beat their children unreasonably are given no protection under Section 59. There is no overwhelming case history of parents who have escaped prosecution, or conviction, for committing violent acts against their children. On the other hand, the State appears to have been unable to prevent far too many parents from inflicting genuine harm on their children.

The repeal of Section 59 does nothing to protect a single New Zealand child from criminal abuse. It is a red herring inspired by social engineers who have run out of ideas in confronting some of the main causes of child abuse: poverty, poor education, poor health outcomes, substance abuse, and intergenerational welfare.

On the other side of the debate, there is genuine concern from many law-abiding, caring, and loving New Zealand parents that a repeal of Section 59 will criminalise an occasional use of reasonable force against children.

There is no public mandate for the legislation. It is dividing New Zealanders, and in particular, their faith in the parliamentary process. I urge you not to support this Bill, and instead to concentrate your efforts on reducing serious harm against New Zealand's most vulnerable children.

While in the long term, a public debate on the benefits of smacking versus other forms of discipline may overwhelmingly result in a preference for non-smacking disciplinary measures, this attempt to criminalise law-abiding and successful parents, for no benefit to the children concerned, strikes of monumental political stupidity.

Deal with the important stuff first.

Kind regards,

Disagreeing with Your Own

2007-03-19T10:45:00.000+12:00

I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with Cactus Kate in principle, but disagreeing on the outcome.

Firstly, I don't think there should be a reasonable force exemption in the crimes act against children. In principle, I don't think there should be any kind of defence against beating a child. I don't see any moral justification for using physical discipline.

I think most rational parents come to the view that consistently smacking an ill-behaved child just doesn't work. Having said that, there are a lot of irrational parents who never reach that conclusion. There are also many parents who beat their children and are offered no protection by section 59 as it is, because the Court simply doesn't interpret their kind of punishment as reasonable.

I agree that it is the State's role to legislate and define what constitutes an assault against another person, irrespective of the relationship between the two people.

Where I disagree, however, is the emphasis that this Government is putting on the issue, and how it has effectively made repealing section 59 the major social priority of this government.

The real harm to children is gross physical violence by parents and others who are often encouraged to breed children they otherwise would not have. If the Government actually cares about violence against children, and the appalling child death rates, it should be placing much greater responsibility on non-performing parents to ensure their children are healthy, educated, fed, properly housed, and physically safe.

An occasional smack does little harm to a child. Again, I agree it has no benefit, but that's another issue. The real harm against children--which Sue Bradford and even the PM are claiming that this Bill somehow addresses--is the failure of the welfare state to make parents responsible for the upbringing of their children.

That is the biggest social lie of this new century. Middle class parents, who feel legislatively marginalised by an occasional smack, rightly feel that the State's attention should be better focussed on ensuring children are protected from serious harm.

Sue Bradford is motivated much more by ideology rather than a genuine desire to protect children. That Labour has succumbed to Bradford's charms, for the sake of protecting its majority in the House, and is alienating vast tracts of middle New Zealand parents who may occasionally smack but otherwise raise their children responsibly, shows just how out of touch they are.

Over time, section 59 should be phased out. But a lot more has to be done to protect the most vulnerable children in society from abuse by irresponsible parents--and the social harms of alcohol and drug abuse, poor educational and health outcomes, and exposure to violent crime--before any repeal of section 59 is needed.

It is nothing short of an absurdity that the Government has made itself the enemy of its own constituency by introducing legislation that protects no children from serious harm, sends a message to moderate parents that they are harming their children, and is overwhelmingly opposed by voters. It's a tiny, inconsequential piece of legislation, which even its promoters say won't be enforced. In short, Bradford's bill achieves nothing of any use, other than pissing people off. To allow a minor party to hijack its legislative plans, and in so doing alienate large numbers of voters, suggests Helen Clark has lost her cunning nose for public opinion, and her ability to massage that opinion around her own agenda.

One Standard For All Socialists

2007-03-15T10:53:00.000+13:00

CYFSWATCH got shut down because some commenters made threats of violence against Green MP Sue Bradford. Bradford shrieked to the Police, claiming that she feared for her personal safety.

Yet over at that paragon of pinko sensibility, Millsy gets his own back. Claiming that the National Party wants to preserve the right to beat people, he ranges across threats of physical violence, racism, and religious hatred:

"The fact of the matter is:IF PARENTS REALLY LOVED THEIR KIDS THEY WOULD STOP HITTING THEM.

The National party are a bunch of violent fuckheads who dont care about a kids right to be free of violence. I think they get off on beating their kids, nothing like bashing a child with an iron bar for spilling the milk to make you feel better. Taito Philip Field is a typical child beating coconut ape who, with his race need to go back up the trees where they belong, and, we need to push violence out of this country RIGHT NOW!

HITTING CHILDREN IS WRONG, and the sooner these coconuts, white trash bogans, scruffy Old-Testamenters and white-middle-class-closet-nazis realise this, the better.

Its time we moved into the 21st Century folks. A new order, where violence is frowned upon.
Posted by millsy : 3/14/2007 10:30:00

But Millsy isn't finished, even after a telling-off from Idiot Savant:

"That fucking Garth George is a fucking wanker, wanting to protect parents who bash their children. I hope one day that someone bashes hime like he bashes his kids. Teach that intolerant bigot a good fucking lesson. People like him need a good thrashing. And that bitch who used the horse whip on her son, thinks she can use violence to coerce her children with the threat of the stick. It probably turns her on, giving her kids a beating.
"New Zealand disgusts me. We seem to be addicted to violence in the home, beating children on a whim.
"Posted by millsy : 3/15/2007 08:54:00 AM "

Long Live Joseph Stalin.

In-Flight Safety

2007-03-08T10:05:00.000+13:00

Occasionally I find that my personal views inhibit my social life. One such instance occurred in a bar in Auckland recently, where I was chatting up a hot Emirates hostess.

The conversation started with my criticism of the in-flight safety announcements.

"Why is smoking in the toilet a fire hazard?" I ask.

"Because the plane could catch fire," she answers, in that vacuous, I-haven't-thought-deeply-about-this-but-that's-what-they-told-me-at-hostess-school kind of way that air hostesses all seem to possess. I have noticed that there is something quite particular about the mentality of flight hostesses, which they share in common with Labour Party MPs: the unrivalled ability to spout platitudinous nonsense. There's no justification for pinko politicians on the public payroll to come up with this rubbish, but at least I can understand why air hostesses are so dumbed down. Day in and day out, they are forced to be polite to often obnoxious passengers, responding to such inane questions as: "Is this chicken or beef?" Or: "What does the non smoking light mean?" In a social context, my experience of air hostesses is that conversation almost exclusively revolves around where they have landed from, and what their next destination is.

But I am not satisfied with this answer. "So smoking in the toilet is a fire hazard, but smoking in the cabin is not?"

"No," she answers. "Smoking in the cabin is also a fire hazard."

"I see," I say. "So how come for forty years smoking in the cabin was allowed, and of all the millions of flights, not one plane ever crashed because a passenger was smoking?"

"I don't know," she responds.

I wasn't trying to ask annoying questions, of course. So I gave her a way out of the argument. "I can understand that the in-flight air conditioning system may not be totally efficient, and non-smoking passengers dislike the smell of cigarette smoke. Wouldn't it be more honest to say that smoking on planes irritates non-smoking passengers, rather than claim that the plane will crash if somebody lights up in the toilet?"

Emirates girl wasn't prepared to concede this point. So I progressed to the issue of lifeboats on planes.

"What is the point of lifeboats on a Boeing 747?" I ask.

"They're in case a plane lands on the water," she says politely. I buy her a drink, because she's hot, and come back to the conversation.

"Are there enough lifeboats for every passenger?"

"Yes, of course," she answers.

"Are they very useful, these lifeboats?"

"Yes, they're a key part of in-flight safety," she says.

"I see." I take a swig of my drink, and then say: "How many planes have ever used these lifeboats?"

She doesn't know what I mean. So I expand on this. "Well, put it this way. You spend ten fucking minutes during take-off telling us where the exits are, and where the lifeboats are, when every passenger airliner that has ever crashed into the water has lost everybody on board."

She wasn't amused by this, but she's still smiling politely.

"We need to put passengers' minds at ease."

I say it isn't helpful to give passengers the inaccurate impression that if a 350 tonne airplane hits the water at 300 miles an hour, the plane will somehow remain intact, and the passengers able to walk off into their lifeboats.

"If a plane's going to crash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nobody's actually going to survive to deploy the lifeboats, are they?" I say.

It is at this point that she starts to feel defensive. Being the not-very-sensitive guy that I am, I don't notice this. It doesn't occur to me that after four years of working for Emirates, she herself has found comfort in the existence of lifeboats. So I continue.

"And what's the point of showing passengers where the fucking exits are? Don't you think, just maybe, that a passenger who does happen to survive a massive plane crash might just jump out of the BIG FUCKING HOLE IN THE PLANE, rather than calmly follow the other passengers along the lights to the designated exit?"

The conversation ended shortly afterwards. Bloody pity, really. Emirates Girl was hot.

Where is CYFS when you need them?

2007-03-01T14:37:00.000+13:00

This nutjob, when she's not spending all her days listening to the radio, instead of out working productively in society, is babysitting.

Who the fuck breaks down in tears when reading Dr Seuss to a baby? And who the fuck leaves such babies in the care of such warped people?

Work for the dole would do her a helluva lot of good.

Pull Finger!

2007-02-28T09:25:00.000+13:00

There are plenty of opportunities for the Nats to sink the spoon into this sordid bunch of sorry socialists. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a loyal National Party member is seeing them miss the boat.

Here we are with the kick off of a $1.5 million rates inquiry, which deliberately misses the key point—and we have not a whisper of protest from National’s Local Government spokesmen John Carter and Mark Blumsky. Well, boys, get off your lazy arses and start doing your fucking jobs.

National’s local government policy, as far as policies go, is a reasonable document--particularly surprising since it was written by Nick Smith, and is two years old. But it misses out on key issues, and is in need of dire reform. It spends far too much time talking about “consulting” with local government, while local government continues to waste increasing amounts of ratepayers’ money at alarming rates. Local Government doesn’t need “consultation”. It is a slimy cesspool of mediocre socialist politicians who hide behind vast layers of bureaucracy to intervene in ordinary ratepayers’ lives. We’ve gone well beyond the time for consultation. What New Zealand needs is a tough minister to go in and take a big fucking axe to the useless fuckers.

National's challenge in Government will be to pick off policy areas that directly send the socialists squealing and send them into disarray. New Zealand voters have no great sympathy towards the unaccountable never-beens that make up local authority “elected” representation. It’s time to sock it to the buggers.

One of the many lessons of Margaret Thatcher’s greatness was her ability to identify the things that whip the pinkos into a lather. Her reformation of local government in the late 80s—local government that at the time had far more responsibilities devolved to them than New Zealand ever had—was, in part, about putting a lid on some of the mindless socialist mess-ups of the time. Where Thatcher failed was that she didn’t clamp down on the socialist-dominated local authorities’ power to spend.

And here lies the great fiasco that is the Government’s inquiry into local government funding. It is a pointless talk-fest that will spend months coming up with different economic models for how to rate and pay for local government services. Who pays, and with what mechanism, doesn’t actually matter.

It’s their bloody spending that is the problem.

Local Government is rotten to its core. The degrees of bureaucracy required to do anything, apparently in the name of democracy, have created a whole new, and vastly expensive, organizational model: the consultocracy. The requirement to consult with the community, and every competing organisational unit, over even the most thoroughly trivial of developments, places colossal burdens on the ratepayer. Special interest groups need to be included in decision-making for no other reason than they will make noise if not included. In a town like Auckland, there are a lot of special interest groups.

The industry that feeds off this system is wasteful in the extreme, with no external pressures or motivations to act efficiently. Take the case in point of a friend of mine, the manager of a major project in the Auckland region. He was appointed last year, and, being new to the Council, had little knowledge about how the Council operated. In his project team were a group of external consultants, who had been hired by his general manager. As part of this project, he was required to put out a tender for consulting advice on a key aspect of the project. He asked his manager whether it was appropriate for him to go to the Council’s internal procurement office to work out the tender process on that advice. His manager told him to use another external consultant to provide that external tendering advice.

Thus when the external consultant gave the wrong advice about how to go about administering a tender process for external consultancy services, the project manager called the procurement office. The correct advice on the tender process for external consultancy services was given within two minutes. Thus the waste of $15,000 on faulty advice by a consultant on internal council processes. The consultant in question continues to be retained by the project manager, on the basis that she has indispensable relationships formed over fifteen years as an external consultant to Council.

Auckland Regional Council’s expenditure remained static for ten years up until 2001. In the last five years, the Council’s spending has doubled. Auckland City Council—again static over the previous period, but up 60% in the last five years. Bay of Plenty Regional Council—up by 150% over the same period. Canterbury Regional Council’s spending is up by 70%. All in all, local authorities spend over $5 billion—about 4% of GDP—on local authority services. That compares with $3.5 billion in 2000, and $2.8 billion way back when Statistics started keeping records in 1993.

All the while, the asset base of local authorities has ballooned in the last six years, as trivial little empire-builders have self-perpetuated an asset portfolio of $44 billion in 2000, to a whopping $80 billion this year.

Not that Auckland City Councillors actually feel the pinch when they pay their rates bills. The socialist-dominated Council is full of middle-class pinkos—with the sole exceptions of Leila Boyle and Bill Christian—who live in million dollar homes.

They are, in sum, a waste of bloody space.

Local Government is a creation of Parliament. It has, of itself, no legal power other than that which Parliament has given it. It is high time that Parliament stopped passing the buck for local authority excesses, and reined them in.

So in the interests of being constructive, here are some proposals that are so sensible Mark Blumsky and John Carter don’t even have to think about, and it will give them respect, gratitude of the public, and the enmity of every card-carrying Labour Party scumbag who seeks a cushy job in local government before joining Aunty Helen’s also-ran caucus.

Take responsibility for the activities of Local Government. Stop passing the buck on wayward, overspending, inept and bloated councils by claiming that’s what local electors want. The degree of apathy by voters in local government is directly related to their frustration that nothing will change the irresponsible habits of empire-building petty politicians.
Cut the number of local authorities from 86 to 6. There’s far too much inter-council squabbling, duplication of services, and electable opportunities for would-be meddlers. With one stroke of the pen, tell them to fuck off.
Restrict each of the local authorities to ten elected representatives, elected by first past the post. At present the most obscure and petty-minded patch-protector gets elected, and reelected, by doing nothing more than promising a couple of neighbours that they will get their pot-holes fixed. It will also have the added effect of forcing some 500 socialists in elected council positions to get a real fucking job.
Tightly define the core responsibilities of local government: water, wastewater, roading, and rubbish collection. All of these services should be tendered out. With just six local authorities, the services will have a critical mass for international best-practice supply of such services. Council’s role will be restricted to selecting the best service supplier.
Reduce non-core responsibilities to no more than ten percent of total expenditure. Force the pinkos to cancel their empire-building pipe dreams that have nothing to do with the infrastructure of the region. Ten percent is more than enough to pay for libraries and parks.
Require councils to reduce staffing levels by 30%. This is easily achievable by restricting the functions of local authorities to core requirements.
Freeze rates for five years. With efficiencies from amalgamation, staff reduction, and a tight focus on core activities, there is no reason not to achieve this.
Local government has no interest in creating competition in infrastructure services, and as the stadium debacle showed, councils are unable to separate their commercial interests from their civic interests. Require councils to sell off port and airport assets. The proceeds of the sales should be returned to individual ratepayers in annual installments over a ten year period. Ratepayers who would otherwise squeal that community assets are being sold and proceeds squandered by councils will be appeased by having the assets directly returned to them.
Remove the building consents and RMA processes from local government. Instead, create one national organisation processing building consents. This will remove the vastly expensive inconsistencies between local authorities. Better yet, commercialise the consents processing entirely, and restrict the activity of a central agency to auditing and standards.
Give the Minister of Local Government the authority to sack any council, and appoint a commissioner to sort out problems. The mere threat of intervention by the Minister will place a degree of restraint on their excesses.

Mark Blumsky, you have expressed frustration that you are unable to achieve anything as a National backbencher. Well, buddy, if you want to distinguish yourself, pull bloody finger and make a name for yourself by reforming one of the biggest fucking rorts in town.

Funding Our Future

2007-02-20T12:18:00.001+13:00

Rob Cameron, one of the architects of the SOE model, has suggested that the ten largest SOEs partially float on the capital markets.

This is a good concept, but it’s not realistic under this government. Frankly, I doubt much that a John Key-led National government would partially list any of the SOEs, let alone the ten largest ones. Selling off state assets is seen as selling off the family silver at the expense of future generations.

State owned enterprises are an historical anomaly. They were set up during the Fourth Labour government to provide commercial structures and governance, in anticipation of privatisation.

State owned enterprises account for about $25 billion on the government’s balance sheet. Some of the largest—Meridian, Mighty River Power, Genesis Energy, and TVNZ, all face significant competition from the private sector.

There is little strategic argument for setting up a company with purely commercial imperatives, and then determining that the government should own those companies. TVNZ’s massive losses in value over the past few years can be attributed, on the one hand, to government interference into board operations, and a blind unwillingness to divest from a commercial entity that faces huge competition and high risk.

Again, we return to the core problem that politicians have: selling off SOEs is commercially sensible, but politically sensitive. It doesn’t matter how silly it is to own multiple competing energy generation companies—or even an airline.

There is another, much better option, which John Key should pursue. And it lies in the Super Fund.

Michael Cullen champions the Super Fund as his own. To be fair, it is one of the few significant economic achievements of this Labour Government. It has some $12 billion in assets, diversified across low and medium-risk investments in New Zealand and offshore. The taxpayer is contributing to its growth at the rate of a couple of billion a year. Its investment performance has been solid.

The Super Fund works because it operates outside of political interference. The super fund managers are professional fund managers. The guardians’ sole interest is in the economic performance of the fund. Even Helen Clark’s recent comments about investments in tobacco companies don’t matter a jot to the Super Fund guardians. And nor should they.

The Super Fund has now reached a size where it is untouchable politically. No politician can raid it to fund short-term, hare-brained schemes, and it is seen by the public as a legitimate means of securing New Zealanders' future. John Key's solution is to make it even harder to touch, and even more secure.

John Key should transfer all state owned enterprises to the Super Fund. This will have an immediate effect on the size of the super fund, into a significant public asset worth some $40 billion. The Super Fund guardians can then decide which of the SOEs to keep, which to partially or wholly divest from, and which to float on the capital markets.

While this will result in a direct reduction in the government's fiscal position--surpluses will be lower as profits from existing SOEs are moved to the Super Fund--it will also remove the need for the Government to make ongoing contributions directly to the Fund. The existence of a moderately-performing $40 billion super fund, earning 7% returns, will create an $80 billion fund over ten years--more than enough to cover the super liability bubble over the next forty years as baby boomers start drawing on it.

The positive effect on the capital markets as at least a dozen attractive, high-performing investments start trading domestically will make the New Zealand sharemarket immediately more viable for New Zealand investors.

There will be other options for establishing SOEs for a National Goverment--the ACC employers' fund is ripe for creation of at least two, and possibly three separate SOEs, with an additional $8 billion in assets that could be transferred to the Super Fund, thereby opening up ACC to private competition and investment.

It’s time to take the ownership of SOEs out of direct political interference, and place them in the actual interests of New Zealanders’ future.

Dear Jeanette Fitzsimons...

2007-02-01T17:38:00.000+13:00

Dear Jeanette Fitzsimons:

I have yet to see anything in the eleven years in which you have been in Parliament, which demonstrates in even the remotest sense, your contribution to New Zealand. I estimate that in real terms, you have earned over $3 million in your private salary, personal allowances, and superannuation (not to mention your very dodgy schemes--such as your Christchurch office which is owned by the Green Party and chartges rent to Parliamentary Services, which you in return use to fund your Green Party election campaigns)--with no net return to the country.

However, now is your chance to have a lucky break. Yes, Jeanette: I realise that you will soon also be entitled to receive National Superannuation, so I give you one lasting legacy to New Zealand.

Put a stop to this stupid bloody food miles junket. I've already heard far too many bloody pseudo-greenies, who are no less socialist than your very red self, proclaim the hazards of "food miles". As even your co-leader accepts, the food miles argument is a complete bloody crock.

So here is your solution. Go on a junket to Britain--if you accompany Judith Tizard you should be able to save on a companion fare--and tell those silly buggers in Britain off. Produce a new standard for food miles. Be the first person, internationally, to come up with an international measure, which actually presents the carbon footprint as it is. Make sure it favours New Zealand for once, rather than Europe.

Hell, we all know that the food miles theory was invented by European trade protectionists anyway, and cottoned onto by your ignorant pinko-greenie ideologues because they've become bored with protesting about other stuff. So go set the record straight. If they're going to be making food miles the new fad, give them some proper bloody information and some standards that favour us. Like, for example, how New Zealand lamb actually consumes less carbon than British lamb.

There's a good lass.

Kind regards,

Insolent Prick

P.S. I note you still get extra resources from the Labour Government in return for propping up those disgusting pinko liberals. Do you think you could please use your influence to see if the repulsive socialists have repaid the money they stole to buy South Island votes, and indeed the election last year?

Spongiformus Tizarditis

2007-02-01T10:16:00.000+13:00

Life is not always easy for the Beehive staffer. Risks of the job include finger-cramps, public humiliation, and quite frequently, bouts of mental retardation. While the cut and thrust of representing relatively competent ministers with actual portfolios, such as David Cunliffe, Annette King, and Phil Goff must have their respective merits, the life of one of the lesser spin doctors must be particularly gruelling.

Take Judith Tizard's office, for example. In seven years of ministerial office, Tizard has never been promoted to Cabinet. She is the first ever Associate Minister for Arts and Culture. Her position of "Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Auckland Issues" provides the excellent ruse to travel with the PM on the latter's domestic and international itinerary.

It's all a bloody shame, really. With Tizard's excellent breeding--her father a deputy prime minister and Finance Minister, who last distinguished himself in 1989, when as Defence Minister, he labelled the recently-deceased Japanese Emperor Hirohito a "war criminal"; and mother a mayor, governor-general, and perhaps most importantly, an entertaining panellist on Beauty and the Beast--it's a shame that so little has become of Judith Tizard.

Judith Tizard is Helen Clark's closest personal friend. While Tizard no longer resides at Premier House (she has obtained a separate taxpayer-funded dwelling in Thorndon), Tizard was Clark's electorate secretary for three years prior to entering Parliament. While working for Clark, Tizard also had the opportunity to finally finish her Bachelor of Arts in History. Of course, it did take eleven years to complete, which probably explains Tizard's immaculate modesty, generosity towards others, and her unwavering commitment to listening to both points of view.

What is harder to explain, however, is this post from one of Tizard's ministerial staffers yesterday. Since Tizard's office is staffed by a rather large number of people--at least seven press secretaries in the last few years--it's not easy tracking down who wrote it. But it deserves special attention. The comment reads:

Office of the Hon Judith Tizard said...
Could you please correct the entry for Judith Tizard as follows:
- IP lists Judith Tizard as "Auckland councilor" [sic]
- Judith served on the Auckland Electric Power Board (1977-1983), and the Auckland Regional Councillor for Panmure (1988-91);
- When Parliament is sitting, Judith resides in ministerial housing in Wellington - not at Premier House;
- Judith is Patron of 11 organisations including the Mt Wellington Women's Bowling Club and the Auckland Brass Band. She is an Honorary member of the Otahuhu & District RSA, and Honorary Vice-President of the Otahuhu & District Highland Pipe Band.

My response was:

Dear office of the hon judith tizard:
No correction necessarily. You have made the correction here. I'm not sure what your point is, precisely, but I can tell you this. We do not yet live in a society where ministerial offices dictate the tone and content of what is said about them.

Now go and do some bloody work. No doubt Ministerial Services pays you a bloody whopping great salary for you to do something somewhat more productive than act as editor of my blog.

The Welfare State

2007-01-31T11:14:00.000+13:00

Back in November, I wrote a post on that other inconvenient truth, and the state of welfare dependency in New Zealand. In light of John Key's State of the Nation speech, I've cherry-picked the key recommendations for serious welfare reform:

Requirement for all long-term unemployed to report to Work and Income at 9am daily to collect their benefit. Get them into the habit of getting out of bed.
Pay a bonus of $2,000 to all women who have been on the DPB for more than two years, to get their tubes tied.
Pay bonuses of $1000 to all fathers of welfare-dependent children to have vasectomies.
Pay bonuses of $500 to WINZ staff for moving a long-term beneficiary from welfare into work. Bonus payable after six months of continuous employment by the beneficiary.
Every child receiving welfare must have their father named on birth certificates.
No welfare entitlements to the father of children living with mothers on the DPB.
Non-custodial fathers must be in paid employment, and must make minimum contributions of $50 per week.
Fathers not permitted to leave New Zealand while children living with a dependent DPB beneficiary.
Children must attend school. Non-attendance would lead to the benefit being cancelled.
All children must receive medical check-ups at least every six months, to check on the nutritional and general health status of the child.
Random alcohol and drug checks of long-term welfare beneficiaries.
No violent offenders permitted to live in the same home as children of welfare beneficiaries.
A maximum six months of entitlement to the unemployment benefit in any five year period, and a maximum of two years’ entitlement to the DPB for any person in their lifetime.
Frequent, random checks of homes of welfare dependent children to assess housing needs and compliance.

"We are not amused!"

2007-01-29T17:25:00.000+13:00

I have a very good relationship with my bank manager. I don’t know how this has come about, since my late-night spend-ups in Auckland bars hardly make me a model of personal fiscal prudence. I’ve even stopped using my bank’s credit and debit cards, and resorted to using cash to pay for my beverage bills. There’s something particularly sobering about having to count out the notes, rather than yelling out my PIN number to the barman when my inebriated eyesight is preventing me from reading the numbers on the EFTPOS keypad.

Despite that, my bank manager and I catch up for lunch every couple of months, whereby he tells me about some of the more dubious financial products on offering, we trade advice on the property market, interest rates, and capital markets generally, and discuss cricket. Somebody in the Bank has made it one of his key performance indicators to keep his customers happy.

In November 2006, Helen Clark was in a spot of bother. So much bother that she called the Government's bank manager.

It happened like this. After weeks of mud-slinging from Labour MPs against National leader Don Brash, in which Labour ministers Trevor Mallard, Pete Hodgson and David Benson-Pope had been spreading rumours of an extra-marital affair among the Press Gallery and in the House, Labour was approaching polling free-fall. Rather than turn on Brash, the public was rightfully blaming Clark for sanctioning bringing MPs private lives into the public debate.

Clark was under intense pressure. Her subsequent allegations—that the National Party was behind rumours surrounding her husband’s sexuality—rumours purportedly spread within law firms, accountancy firms, business groups and golf clubs (!!!), were met with public derision. The PM's public claims that National caucus members were spreading the rumours in the Press Gallery were outright rejected by the very Gallery members who were supposed to have received them.

It all got very heated when a staffer in Helen Clark’s private office received a forwarded email from a friend working at Westpac Bank. The email contained a mock National Party billboard, of the kind the Nats had used during the election campaign. One side of the billboard featured Helen Clark , stating: “My husband thinks I’m sexy!” On the other side was Don Brash, claiming: “Her husband thinks I’m sexy!”.

The staffer printed out the email and showed it to the PM. She went ballistic.

Westpac has a special relationship with the New Zealand Government. Westpac is the Government’s official banker. Every government department, every state owned enterprise, and every government agency banks with Westpac. That represents a very large proportion of the economy.

Ann Sherry chairs the Government’s Growth and Innovation Advisory Board—effectively the PM’s personal ear to the private sector. Helen Clark appointed Sherry to be Chairperson of the Peter Blake Trust. Mark Burton appointed Sherry to the board of the Tourism Research Council. Westpac is the only bank that consistently makes donations to political parties.

None of this is particularly unusual or even slightly surprising. A person of Sherry’s status, with her close relationship to Government, will be appointed to Government boards. It is reasonable to say that nobody outside of Government has as close a relationship to the Prime Minister as Westpac’s CEO.

What was unusual was the Prime Minister’s response to the email forwarded from a Westpac employee to a member of the PM’s private office. Clark didn't get the gag. She called Ann Sherry immediately, and complained. Clark stated that she was deeply offended by it, and she did not think it was appropriate for a person working in the bank to be forwarding such outrageous allegations about her husband.

Sherry responded by saying that she would conduct an investigation, and ensure that the staff member was disciplined.

Westpac’s Chief Information Officer was called in to verify the source of the email, with a clear understanding that the employee would face disciplinary action for forwarding the email on to others.

All Westpac staff received a high-level email repeating email policy to them, while an investigation into staff email use was conducted. It turned into high farce, however, when the CIO reported that not only had he discovered the source of the email that had offended the Prime Minister, but that 181 other employees had received the offending email, and forwarded it on to others both within and outside the organisation. Clearly they saw political humour where the Prime Minister had not. Sherry was asked if she wished to discipline all 182 employees. An embarrassed CEO had to report back to the Prime Minister that no action could be taken without similarly firing a key chunk of Westpac's payroll.

This isn't the first time that the Prime Minister has used her authority, and personal relationships, to bully senior executives into doing as she instructed; but to demand disciplinary action against an employee of a bank that is so entrenched in government business, simply for offending her by passing on an email, is about as outrageous as it gets.

Real New Zealanders

2007-01-26T15:53:00.000+13:00

This is the combined backgrounds of Labour's caucus and party list from the last election; their qualifications for office and their careers prior to entering Parliament. It makes very fascinating reading, and gives a direct lie to tenuous claims by some of the filthy pinko bloggers that the Labour Party is a broad mix of people from everyday New Zealand.

THE CAUCUS

Helen Clark. University lecturer. Member of the Association of University Staff.

Michael Cullen. University lecturer. AUS delegate.

Margaret Wilson. University lecturer. Appointed to Law Commisison by Geoffrey Palmer. Labour Party President. Later professor of law at Waikato. Chair of the Association of University Teachers. Secretary of the Legal Employees Union.

Steve Maharey. Sociology lecturer at Massey "University". AUS delegate.

Parekura Horomia. Public servant. PSA delegate.

Phil Goff. University lecturer. Insurance Workers’ Union organizer.

Annette King. Dental nurse and polytech tutor. Nurses organization delegate.

Trevor Mallard. School teacher. PPTA secretary.

Marian Hobbs. School teacher. PPTA delegate. Admits to being a former communist.

Dover Samuels. Maori Vice President of the Labour Party. Far North District Councillor.

Pete Hodgson. Vet. School teacher. PPTA delegate.

Taito Phillip Field. Promoted as New Zealand’s first Pacific Island MP. Spent seventeen years as a trade union official, most latterly in an executive role with the Service Workers’ Union, assisting the welfare of South Auckland’s most vulnerable, low-income residents. Currently under a police investigation following allegations he received personal benefit as an MP in exchange for assisting certain vulnerable, low-income residents.

Ruth Dyson: Close friend of Helen Clark’s. Former Labour Party president. Worked for Labour Minister of Employment. Active in the CTU. Worked for Fran Wilde on the Homosexual Law Reform Bill.

Mita Ririnui. Previously private secretary to the president of the Ratana Church. Worked for Special Education Services. PSA delegate.

Mark Burton. PSA delegate. Worked for the Department of Social Welfare, and the Palmerston North City Council.

Paul Swain. CTU Research Officer, and Federation of Labour official.

Judith Tizard. Auckland councilor. Electorate Secretary to Helen Clark. PSA member. Helen Clark’s closest personal friend. Resides in Wellington at Premier House. Patron of the Auckland Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual communities.

Chris Carter. School teacher. PPTA delegate. Promoted as Labour’s first openly gay cabinet minister. Key member of Labour’s Rainbow faction.

Winnie Laban. PSA member. Public servant, also working in the voluntary sector.

Rick Barker. National Secretary of the Service Workers’ Union.

Mahara Okeroa. Teacher. PPTA delegate. Worked for Ministry of Education and Te Puni Kokiri, and was a PSA delegate.

David Benson-Pope. PPTA chairman for Otago. Dunedin City Councillor. School teacher.

Jill Pettis. Nurse. Delegate for the Nurses Organisation, and for Finsec.

Ashraf Choudhary. University lecturer. Involved in the Federation of Ethnic Councils. Member of Association of University Staff. Promoted as Labour’s first Muslim MP. President of the Federation of Islamic Associations.

Lianne Dalziel. Legal officer and Secretary for Canterbury Hotel Workers’ Union.

Shane Jones: Worked at the Ministry for Environment, then Maori Fisheries Commission. PSA member.

Dianne Yates: Former teacher. Delegate for the PPTA, and the Association of University Staff. Has issued two press releases in the last two years, and made one public speech.

Mark Gosche: CTU executive member, spent 22 years as a paid union official.

Ann Hartley: Former city councilor. PSA member. Has published no speeches in the last eighteen months, and issued no press releases in the last year.

David Cunliffe: PSA member, former public servant working for MFAT.

Martin Gallagher: School teacher, member of PPTA, Hamilton City Councillor for nine years.

Steve Chadwick: Nurses organization delegate, Rotorua district councilor, and administrator in a public hospital.

Darren Hughes: PSA member, member of VUWSA’s executive. Worked as Judy Keall’s executive assistant before entering Parliament.

Georgina Beyer: Promoted as Labour’s first transsexual MP. No known union activities. Carterton Councillor and mayor.

Maryan Street: Promoted as the first out lesbian woman Labour MP. Began career as a schoolteacher, before becoming full-time official for the PPTA. Worked for the CTU, before becoming a labour relations specialist at Auckland University. Subsequently became employee relations manager for district health boards. Labour Party President.

David Parker: Lawyer. Personally very close to several prominent trade unionists. After sacking Electricity Commissioner Roy Hemmingway for following an independent line, Parker appointed former CTU economist and Cullen political adviser Peter Harris to the job.

Russell Fairbrother: Organiser for the Meat Workers’ Union before becoming a lawyer.

Dave Hereora: Organiser, Service and Foodworkers Union

Lynne Pillay: Organiser for EPMU and the Nurses Organisation.

Moana Mackey: Delegate for the EPMU. University researcher.

Sue Moroney: Worked for Northern Hotel Workers’ Union, then secretary of equine workers’ union. Spent eleven years working for the Nurses’ Organisation. Apart from School Certificate, she also has a certificate in “Labour and Trade Union Studies” from the “University” of Waikato.

Darien Fenton: Vice President of the CTU, National Secretary of the Service and Food Workers’ Union, and Vice President of the Labour Party responsible for union affiliates. Has sought to extend the minimum wage to independent contractors since entering Parliament.

Charles Chauvel: Began his career with the Hotel Workers Union. Worked in industrial and employment law, representing primarily unions, throughout his legal career before entering Parliament. Spent fifteen years working on gay/lesbian issues. President of the Aids Foundation.

NEXT IN LINE:
Lesley Soper: Convener Southland CTY. NZEI Organiser. Appointed deputy chair of Southland DHB by Annette King. Typically, states her qualifications for becoming a Labour MP: “I have done the hard yards, politically and in the union movement.”

Louisa Wall. Of Maori descent. Employed by the Human Rights Commission. Heavily promoted by Labour’s Rainbow Group as an icon. Also a government-appointed board member of SPARC. Member of the PSA.

Su’a William Sio. Samoan chiefly title. Close friend of Taito Phillip Field. Manukau City Councillor. Called on Manukau City to contribute to locked out NDU workers during the Progressive dispute. Formerly a union delegate.

Brendon Burns: Manager, Government Communications Unit, Prime Minister’s Office. Spent the first nine years of his career as a journalist at Radio New Zealand as a parliamentary reporter. PSA member.

Hamish McCracken: FINSEC union organizer. Now a “lecturer” in “politics” at Auckland “University” of Technology.

Denise MacKenzie. Wairarapa school teacher, and organizer for the NZEI union.

Max Purnell. Coromandel farmer. Government appointee to AGMARDT, the Agricultural Marketing Trust. Chairs Labour’s Rural Sector Council.

Wayne Harpur: Invercargill City Councillor. Appointed by Government to Invercargill Airport Ltd. Former trade union organiser.

Leila Boyle. Auckland City Councillor. Tutor at Auckland University. Member of the Association of University Staff. Received significant personal lobbying from Sports Minister Trevor Mallard to cast a pro-waterfront vote last week. Personal Mentor: Judith Tizard.

Dinesh Tailor: Chair of the Auckland Refugee Council, and Federation of Ethnic Communities. Appointed a JP by Phil Goff. Made a QSO in June. Sanctioned with getting out the “ethnic vote”.

Phil Twyford: Electorate secretary to Helen Clark. Previously an organizer with the Hotel Workers Union, and an official at Oxfam. Appointed by Jim Sutton to sit on the ministerial advisory group on trade negotiations, and by Maryan Hobbs to sit on the ministerial advisory group on international development. Served as chair of Labour’s policy council. Creative NZ, via Judith Tizard, appointed Twyford as project director for Book Month.

Jen McCutcheon, PPTA President, having spent seven years as a full-time union organiser. CTU board member. Employed by ERO. Now deputy director of the Correspondence School.

Chris Yoo: President of the New Zealand Korean society. Charged with getting the Korean vote out. Gave a symposium to a large Human Rights Commission gathering on “Human Rights and the Treaty of Waitangi”. Of course.

Michael Wood: Finsec organizer since leaving university. Appointed by Steve Maharey to the council of Manukau Institute of Technology.

Linda Hudson: SWFU member, Whakatane District Councillor.

Stuart Nash: Marketing manager. Appointed to Director of Strategic Developments at A”U”T, with the extraordinary statement by the vice chancellor that “his powerful communication skills, a concern for social justice and desire to lift New Zealand's economic performance have drawn him to the political spheres where he has been a significant member of the Labour Party.”

Tony Milne: Youth Vice President of the Labour Party. Executive assistant to Tim Barnett. Member of the Rainbow group in Labour. PSA member.

David Talbot: Previously staffer to Pete Hodgson and Marian Hobbs. PSA member. Now employed by ESR.

Marilyn Brown: Palmerston North City Councillor. PSA member.

Anjum Rahman. Frequently a keynote speaker at Government-sponsored human rights, social policy, feminist and health gatherings.

Eamon Daly, disability activist. Promoted by Ruth Dyson and others as New Zealand’s first tetraplegic MP, if elected. Human Rights Review Tribunal Member. Biothics Council Member.

Grant Duffy: Former PSA activist, now runs the Department of Labour’s Partnership Resource Centre. The Centre’s role is to promote union bargaining with employers.

Judy Lawley: Full-time Waitakere City Councillor, “because the demands on city councillors are continually increasing with the ever-widening responsibilities”. Lists her key priorities as a city councillor as “Social issues - addressing poverty, good parenting, healthy communities with access to facilities for everyone, alcohol problems, crime, economic development, and education and training.” Doesn’t list roading, sewerage, or city infrastructure once. Former school teacher and PPTA delegate.

Mike Mora. Christchurch City Councillor. Trade unionist.

Erin Ebborn-Gillespie, Christchurch solicitor.

Ai Lian Su. No idea. Never heard of him.

Ghazala Anwar. Pakistani descent. Lecturer in Religious Studies at Canterbury University. Member of Association of University Staff. Specialist in Islamic Studies, and women’s issues in Islam.

Paul Gibson. Disability campaigner. Former president of VUWSA, and the Disabled Persons Assembly.

Kelly-Ann Harvey: Electorate agent to Judith Tizard. Involved in the Landmark Forum. PSA member.

Camille Nakhid. Lecturer in Social Services at A”U”T. Association of University Staff member. Involved with Waitakare City’s Ethnic Community liaison committee. Henderson Community Board member.. University lecturer. Chair of the Association of University Teachers. Secretary of the Legal Employees Union.

Comment Moderation

2006-11-29T14:13:00.000+13:00

Currently I have comments moderation set to "off". Frankly, unlike my nemesis, I can't be stuffed monitoring comments, and don't care what they say anyway.

I do make this point, tho: if you are going to make frequent comments, choose a name for yourself. You don't have to log into blogger, or have a blogger account, but it's bloody confusing for several people posting under the name "Anonymous". I don't mind occasional anonymous comments, but if you're going to frequently post here, distinguish yourself from the other anonymous posters.

State of the Nation(al)

2006-11-29T12:24:00.000+13:00

I admit to a sense of unease on Saturday afternoon, when, nursing the effects of a fairly erratic spell of short-pitched bowling from the opposition, I heard that Gerry Brownlee was going to fight to keep the deputy leadership of the National Party.

John Key put his name into the leadership ring soon after Don Brash’s resignation. English, who has harboured leadership ambitions since entering Parliament in 1990, had good reason to think that he could give it another pitch. With Simon Power, Judith Collins, and Katherine Rich hovering in the background as possible deputies, it had the makings of a long and protracted shit-fight. I was, frankly, appalled to hear Judith Collins publicly commenting on the leadership and deputy leadership contest during the afternoon.

One of the dubious luxuries of the National Party—one of the legacies of Michelle Boag—is that National has a wide group of potential leaders. By contrast, Helen Clark’s leadership has been secure for the last seven years by virtue of the fact there is nobody capable of leading Labour if Clark falls under a bus. Nineteen of Labour’s first twenty list candidates at the last election have trade union backgrounds. Nine of its first eleven list candidates—effectively the face of the party—are former university lecturers or school teachers. One of the remaining ministers, Parekura Horomia, is a former public servant. The only one of Labour’s First XI at the last election with any private sector experience, Dover Samuels, is little more than a token brown face.

Further, Helen Clark cements her claim by hiring, at the taxpayers’ expense, large numbers of comparatively very highly-paid advisers. Heather Simpson easily earns over $300,000 as H1’s chief of staff. One of the advisers in the PM’s office was recently bragging that when he transferred from one government department to the PM’s office, he doubled his salary to $190,000. As the pledge card saga demonstrated, Labour’s campaign strategy was effectively governed by H2.

Helen Clark has had one potential rival in the last seven years in Phil Goff. She has managed to neuter his power by systematically expunging from the party anybody who is not from a union, public service, teaching, or rainbow background. She also holds Goff at bay by making sure he is overseas for two thirds of his time, first as Foreign Minister, and later as Trade Minister.

So here I was on Saturday afternoon, annoyed that Gerry Brownlee, Judith Collins, and Bill English would engage in a public scrap over the deputy leadership. I could foresee that playing out for a couple of weeks, and then finally resolve itself and die down before Brian Connell re-emerged on the scene to plant a particularly large steaming turd on the dining table and reignite a public storm that had nothing to do with getting rid of the filthy socialists.

I was almost prompted to call various current and former party officials and ask them why the fuck we can’t just be like the Labour Party, and have nobody of any talent, other than the Leader, in the team. Or at least shout at the talent reminding them that public squabbles over the deputy leadership do no bloody good.

The deputy leadership is not the precursor to the party leadership. It is not the celebrated second prize in the beauty contest. The great deputy leaders of National’s past may have had ambitions for the top job—but they have all reached the inevitable conclusion that they will never be Prime Minister. Don McKinnon and Wyatt Creech stand out as supportive, loyal lieutenants to Bolger and Shipley respectively who managed to put aside their desires to reside at Premier House. They focused on caucus management and policy development. The deputy needs to engender absolute trust and confidence of the caucus. Geoffrey Palmer was the master of providing legislative detail to the Lange-Douglas leadership of the fourth Labour Government: he didn’t particularly want to be Prime Minister, and failed dismally when he had reached the post. To his credit, Michael Cullen has been an outstanding deputy to Helen Clark. In doing so, however, he has spayed any chance of taking the top job himself.

So turning specifically to the Nats, I’ll take a look at some of the leadership and deputy leadership aspirants, and what they might bring to an ideal National front bench in the future:

John Key. The Golden Boy. The only possible successor. Outstanding speaker, tightly honed political instinct, National could not have manufactured a finer leader if they tried. He pisses Labour off because he is successful. Labour has already snidely referred to him as a multi-millionaire (with Cullen even going so far as to call him a traitor to his working class roots—a peculiar statement for a man who entered the labour movement after attending Christ’s College and then immersing himself in an academic career. Cullen and Clark, of course, are both multi-millionaires in their own rights, after twenty-five years of parliamentary service.). Key’s response—that if all the Labour Party can attack is somebody who aspired to greatness and achieved it, then that shows precisely why they shouldn’t be in Government—was priceless. Key has already brought a sense of optimism and aspiration to the leadership in his first speech. I suspect he will spend a lot of time in low income New Zealand showing how socialism neglects the very vulnerable people it pledges to support. My one piece of advice to him is to be bold. Don’t try and out-smarm Cullen. When the first reaction is to smirk, reach for indignation. Get pissed off at how Labour is ruining this country, while showing how much hope there is if we make a change.

Bill English. Had significant caucus support for the leadership, but just wasn’t cutting it in public. The Herald poll last week, which saw Key with 17% of Auckland voters preference for preferred Prime Minister, was the final nail in English’s coffin. In many ways, English should have inherited the social and economic conservative mantle from Jim Bolger. English has been National’s best performer in the House over the last two years, and his Cabinet experience gives him an unrivalled mastery of political and bureaucratic processes. The 2002 defeat was by no means English’s fault—that was the inevitable consequence of nine years of Government prior, and Bolger’s conservative reluctance to renew the Party. The Nats were never going to recover by 2002; in hindsight—although many of us thought it at the time—English should have left Shipley to take the Party into the 2002 election. Hard for him to accept that he won’t be leader again in the foreseeable future, but a commitment to fronting as deputy leader will put many of his skills to exceptional use. Paired with John Key, with a commitment to supporting him, he will make an outstanding contribution to the next National Cabinet. English will get Finance, and will master it as he has all his portfolios in opposition and government.

Gerry Brownlee has surprised me with how well he has performed as deputy leader. Gerry has done very well in the House, against Cullen’s formidable debating expertise. He has been unreservedly loyal to Don Brash. He has won the respect of caucus. Over time, he has refined his management skills, and is a solid operator. He has shown maturity in stepping aside, and realises that a long term as a government minister beats a short one as deputy leader of the opposition any day of the week. If Gerry keeps State Services, he should focus entirely on making dramatic cuts to the size of the core public service, which has ballooned in the last seven years with no increase in state delivery. Far too many bureaucrats chase their own tails creating unnecessary work for themselves. A 20% reduction in the core state sector would be a bloody good start.

Katherine Rich. Currently Economic Development spokesperson, where the Nats have a mind-boggling twelve associate portfolios in that role. Bloody overkill for a portfolio that has only been established to monitor Labour’s stupendous waste under the guise of “economic development”. The Ministry of Economic Development is a bureaucratic monolith. One of the best early means of achieving economic development is to scrap the department entirely, and force the bureaucrats to find productive employment.

Simon Power. Smart, engaging guy. Has leadership potential in the next ten years. Needs Cabinet experience, but has the abilities to make serious impact. Doing very well in law and order, but there’s not actually much scope for structural reform in that portfolio. Should probably get his teeth stuck into labour, industrial relations, and ACC, where he can make a serious difference.

Judith Collins. Hasn’t performed particularly well in the last year, with some lacklustre presentations at Party gatherings. Very strong personality who doesn’t tolerate bullshit. Can be a bit of a ball-breaker, and made an unfortunate comment about David Benson-Pope in the House earlier in the year. Channeled in the right direction, she should be a power-house in the Party. If she can get her shit together next year, she will be a key part of the dream team at the next election. Collins is a natural reformer, and is doing a lot of good work around minimising welfare dependency. I want to hear her come out and advocate time limits on unemployment, mandatory parenting, drug check, criminal screening, housing, health, and school attendance requirements to provide minimum standards of care for children of long-term beneficiaries, and plans to identify and actively manage at-risk children.

Tony Ryall. Needs to focus on the massive waste in public health. Has performed very well in the House, landing serious hits against Hodgson. Needs to formulate a plan to get rid of at least half of the health bureaucracy, rationalisation of public health services, and reframe public expectations as to what the public health system can deliver. This is the major inconvenient truth of Government: Labour has always recognized that public health spending is limited, but refuses to say so publicly. The outrageous consequence—that health expenditure has risen more than fifty percent as a proportion of GDP in the last seven years—with no increase in health outcomes, has led to massive waste in public health. Ryall needs to front the public education campaign. Many public expectations of what the public health system can provide have never actually been provided, and are not ever affordable. Unless Government has the balls to clearly articulate what it can deliver in public health, and focuses on what it can deliver, the taxpayer will continue to flush vast sums of money on health activities that achieve no result.

Don Brash. Would be a bloody shame to see this guy go completely. The only serious portfolio left for him where he can make a major difference, is education, vacated by English. Brash has the ability to pick through the crap and deliver strong, sound policy here. The public education sector has also enlarged to unsustainable levels in the last seven years, to the extent that young school-leavers are encouraged to become journalists and professional photographers, only to find there is no work for them at the end of the process. Brash has the unrivalled authority to set clear standards in the tertiary education system, and weed out the politically correct shite that passes itself off for university teaching. With Brash applying himself to the tertiary education sector, he can hand over to Allan Peachey the task of setting standards in the compulsory school sector.

Nicky Hager is right! Give that boy a gong!

2006-11-24T15:50:00.000+13:00

Nicky Hager's publication of Don Brash's private emails is evidence of very shocking actions, indeed.

Don Brash's email collection includes what Scoop has termed the "smoking gun". The email clearly shows that a couple of Exclusive Brethren members were at a breakfast function attended by 300 other people, at which Don Brash and John Key were present. That should be a shock to us all. It clearly undermines democracy to think that the Exclusive Brethren can eat breakfast with non-members of their church.

The email also clearly demonstrates that the Exclusive Brethren sent an email. I am mortified that they use this technology.

The email further shows that some members of the church don't like the Labour Party, and that they wanted to help to get rid of it. I think we should pass laws making it illegal to work against the Labour Government.

The email shows that the Brethren planned a pro-Brash campaign. It is utterly disgraceful that the Brethren subsequently changed tack, and actually created an anti-Green campaign instead.

Clearly the socialists, including Labour Cabinet Ministers and Labour officials had no involvement in union-organised anti-National campaigns that swallowed up vast amounts of union funding during the election. We know that there was no discussion between Government and Unions with regards to the unions' active campaign, because that oh-so-balanced chappie, Nicky Hager, hasn't published a book about union-Labour Party collusion

Step on up, John!

2006-11-23T14:54:00.000+13:00

Your turn now, buddy.

Time to kick some socialist arse.

The pinkos shat their pants when Don Brash became leader three years ago. John Key's imminent elevation will fast-track the demise of the Labour Party.

As we all know, the Labour Party doesn't have any internal politicking or machinations; every member is squeaky-clean, there is no conniving, no manipulation, no special interest groups, no fringe organisations with any influence over the Labour Party, no large donors making anonymous or "arms-length" transactions, no special dealing...

You pinkos must wake up every morning with a constant sense of wonder as to how moral and proper your democratic party organisation is.

Don Brash is a very good man, who brought National to the brink of a historic win in 2005. If Labour hadn't corruptly misappropriated public funds to outspend everybody else in the election campaign, Don Brash would be Prime Minister right now. He has more personal integrity in one strand of his combover than every Labour caucus member who has served as an MP in the last twenty years.

Fascinating how the Labour Party can dish the worst kind of political smear in recent history against a man they consistently had confidence in to run the New Zealand economy for 14 years, and the most you pinkos can do is gloat about doing him in.

I'm not surprised that Don Brash is quitting politics. The Labour Party carried out an act of political assassination using the filthiest tactics.

I'm reminded how Muldoon's personal destruction of both Colin Moyle and Bill Rowling directly led to the election of David Lange to Parliament, and the leadership respectively.

Bring on John Key. Fuckers.

IP's Greatest Hits Volume II

2006-11-21T14:39:00.000+13:00

Personal communications can be pretty damning affairs. They become even more so with the power of email, and the subsequent inability to control distribution of the information.

In recent times, I have emailed friends and associates making suggestions which, if they became public, could ruin my future political career. In light of this, I make the following confessions:

I am currently having a bet with Wellington friends on the exact date of Fidel Castro’s death. How it works is, every person in the group pledges a dollar for every day that Castro survives his terminal cancer. When the Cuban monster finally does shuffle off his mortal coil, we will have an exceptionally long lunch with the proceeds of the pool. The prize pool has now exceeded the $500 limit set by the gambling commission. Technically, we are now in breach of New Zealand gambling legislation.
I emailed an American friend last month with an invitation to tactically nuke Castro’s funeral. In attendance will be all sorts of international socialists, tyrants, and miscellaneous shit-stirrers: Venezuela’s Chavez, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Britain’s Gordon Brown and George Galloway, France’s Segolene Royal, Canada’s Bill Graham, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Norway’s Tarja Halonen, along with the despotic leaders of half of Africa’s failed states. It will basically be a world forum for filthy pinkos, of which only Hillary Clinton and Russell Brown, who’s too cheap to pay his own airfare, will be excluded. One tactical nuke over Havana would achieve an enormous amount of international good.
As a solution to global warming, I have advocated to Chinese and Indian friends, a surprise nuking of China and India. My argument is that the world has twice its sustainable world population; Europe is declining in population, and there are plenty of Chinese and Indians on the planet outside of China and India, and that since Africa is dying of AIDS anyway, getting rid of India and China will promote global harmony on an ecologically sustainable basis.
I have emailed Arab friends suggesting that nuking the middle east will resolve conflict there. Egypt is fairly stable, and I don’t want to get rid of Israel, because Israeli girls are hot, so it is, on reflection, better to use chemical weapons or neutron bomb technology on the Middle East, excluding Israel and Egypt.
I have offered financial and/or alcoholic rewards to people willing to shoot the following persons, in no particular order:
Trevor Mallard
Pete Hodgson
Michael Cullen
Judith Tizard
Brian Connell again
Jeanette Fitzsimons
Nick Smith
My Boss
Winston Peters
Nicky Hager
Brian Rudman
Mike Williams
Steve Maharey
Oliver Driver
David Benson-Pope
I have also offered inducements to other people to stab, punch, or poke-in-the-eye a broad range of bloggers and commentators.
I have speculated to friends and associates who do not sponsor me for movember, that there is a direct link between their tight-fistedness and a higher chances that they will develop prostate cancer.
I have emailed hot chicks with specific instructions on how to dump their boyfriends. When I was in the third form, I bribed a skinny kid to vote me Class Captain with a cream donut. I won the election by one vote.
I have emailed our HR person with suggested reviews of our corporate hiring policy, including discriminating against socialists, vegetarians, and cat-lovers.

In the interests of political transparency, it is now vital for Helen Clark and Nicky Hager to release all her private emails, which will similarly disclose her criminal activities.

Now this is cool...

2006-11-20T17:34:00.000+13:00

Just bloody do it!

That New Collossus

2006-11-15T15:23:00.000+13:00

I’ll put it on record that I detest that cretin Trevor Mallard. As Minister of State Services, he has presided over the ballooning of the state sector. As Minister of Education, he has made New Zealand’s compulsory education sector a place of public ridicule. As Minister of Economic Development, he watches over massive slush funds to mediocre socialist cronies who can’t otherwise foot it in free enterprise, so that he can proclaim some kind of perceived wisdom of “economic transformation”. It’s a catch-phrase that has excited some of the Labour Party focus groups, but there’s not really any substance to it.

Yet I am a fair-minded person. In the sport portfolio, Mallard, in no small way aided by the fortunes of economic prosperity and ballooning government surpluses, has pushed a lot of money into sport. The results have been mixed, at best. But he has come up with our money, and got the photo opportunities. Politically, he’s been very effective.

And now we get to this stadium thing.

In 1995, as a Wellingtonian, I was edgy, at best, about Mayor Fran Wilde’s plan for the Wellington Stadium. The original cost, of $70 million, was just never likely to be contained. I really didn’t like the idea of a rugby stadium being promoted as multi-purpose—the pitch requirements for a rugby stadium, where the closely-packed spectators need to be close to the action in a ninety-minute game, are very different from a five-day test match, where the spectators lounge about for seven hours, enjoying the sun and the atmosphere, and fleeting moments of cricketing brilliance. A test cricket ground really needs to be much larger than a rugby ground: the Basin Reserve is still the finest cricket ground in the country, and even early on, nobody was silly enough to promote the proposed Cake Tin as a test cricket venue.

Those reservations aside, the Wellington Stadium is that city’s greatest asset. Sure, more people flow through Te Papa’s doors, but only the Stadium creates that intense, booze-fuelled entertainment atmosphere that makes Wellington the place to be on a Super 14 night, and will carry the bar and restaurant trade through for the subsequent few days.

Let’s look at the issues. If we assume that New Zealand needs a national stadium, the only choices are Eden Park or the Waterfront. North Harbour and Western Springs simply aren’t on the table, and they never will be.

Location. Eden Park is not a spectacular venue. I happen to live nearby, and I make sure that I’m either out of town or at the game when a big match is on. Even a half-filled Eden Park causes a traffic nightmare for the whole day. It’s a relatively minor sacrifice on the scheme of things, and is pretty much confined to Mt Eden and Kingsland residents, but it’s fair to say it’s not ideal to have a national stadium in a prime suburban area. Wellington has shown that an inner-city stadium close to public transport infrastructure is far superior to Athletic Park for rugby.

Tradition. Eden Park has been the prime rugby venue in New Zealand for eighty years. Many historic rugby games have been played there. That’s all true. The same was said of Athletic Park in 1995. Athletic Park was a dedicated rugby venue; Eden Park has never been. Despite all the nostalgia, Eden Park suffers because it has to accommodate the needs of cricket; it does neither particularly well. Eden Park has one nice façade; unless you’ve got a decent corporate box, chances are you will be uncomfortable at the Park.

Timing. Trevor Mallard is rail-roading the issue through without adequate public consultation. That’s a valid criticism. He absolutely is rail-roading it through, and he’s hijacked the process with a degree of shamelessness that only Mallard could manage. To be fair to him, tho’, the real question is what further public consultation would achieve. Already with two weeks of talks, Auckland City Council has shown that it can’t achieve consensus on anything. The Auckland region has had years to come up with decent and sound plan for Auckland roading, and is still found wanting. Mallard doesn’t have the backing of Auckland rugby or the Council; the former have a major vested interest in Eden Park; the latter are too bloody stupid to grasp the torch at the right end.

Economic and Construction Risks. Cost of construction at the Waterfront will be substantially more than at Eden Park. This is one of the critical issues. Mallard says the Waterfront option will cost taxpayers $500 million; it will probably be twice that.

Economic Viability. Mallard is promoting the Waterfront Stadium as a key part of Labour’s “economic transformation” agenda. Frankly, that argument is hogwash. Even at the most conservative cost estimate of half a billion dollars, the Waterfront Stadium would need to be run to capacity every week for the whole year to be make an economic return. That simply isn’t going to happen. Having said that, ploughing $300 million into Eden Park won’t extract any economic return, either. Stadiums as a whole simply aren’t economic investments. Nor, for that matter, is public transport. There are so-called externalities: the Auckland Viaduct has delivered “atmospheric” gains to Auckland far above the cost of construction, but there’s nothing to say that the Waterfront Stadium will transform the Ports area in a similar way. It is clear that Eden Park delivers minimal externalities to Kingsland, and that there is very little entertainment infrastructure around Wellington’s Stadium, almost seven years after opening. Typically, spectators head off to Courtenay Place after a game. It is likely that after a game at the Waterfront, crowds will head over to the Viaduct.

Feasibility of Construction. Critics claim that the Waterfront Stadium can never be built on time. Similar critics made similar claims about preparedness of Stadium Australia for the Olympics, and, for that matter, the ability of every Olympic host to be ready for the Games. While costs have always ballooned, every Olympic venue has always been ready when Games have opened. There is always a mad rush at the end, but when a national spirit is harnessed to achieve a national goal, it can be achieved.

Don Brash has reasonably floated the risks associated with the project. It is the biggest public works development since Think Big. It is potentially a political nightmare. What is clear is that the only way the Waterfront can be achieved is if somebody with Mallard’s skills rams the concept through, and if very clear risk mitigation measures are put in place. Fletcher Construction have been handed the Stadium on a plate. It’s Mallard’s job to hold them to account. It is the first visionary step from a Labour Minister in seven years. The Waterfront option will be hideously expensive for the taxpayer. But it really is the only option for a truly National Stadium.

It took the force of personality of Fran Wilde to pull together Wellington over six years; we don't have that time now. If Mallard can pull it off, I might even choose not to spit on him next time I see him. Just bloody well do it, and make sure you do it bloody well.

The Other Inconvenient Truth

2006-11-01T23:40:00.000+13:00

When I was a member of Victoria University’s Academic Board, I had the particular experience of sitting next to Religious Studies Professor Paul Morris at Board meetings. He had the very typically academic capacity to coherently use such words as “exegetic”, “detraditionalisation”, and spoke of “ethical moods”. He had the admirable scholastic ability to talk at length on any subject, and make simple topics sound very complex indeed. He would lean forward and gesticulate, as if making a very profound statement, and then say: “On the other hand…”, and completely contradict himself. Academics adored him for his little knowing smirks, at weighty analyses without conclusions, to assure them that if they had followed his unnecessarily verbose and complex reasoning, they too were worthy. In short, he was a pain in the bloody arse.

Morris has since graduated to becoming the prototypical ring-in on ethical and religious issues. Hence, when the Labour Party needed somebody to lecture them on the Exclusive Brethren at their conference, they called in Professor Morris. Morris gave them what they wanted: the Exclusive Brethren are evil, they do strange things, and according to Morris, they aren’t even Christians. Christians, the learned Morris believes, are closely attuned to Socialism.

Paul Morris offers his opinion on everything, whether invited or not. That celebrated bastion of intellectual credibility, the Marsden Fund, paid Morris a very healthy sum so that the Religious Studies specialist could write a very esteemed work on the New Right in New Zealand from 1984-1999. Morris, who has no qualifications in economics or political science, has top billing for the book on VUW’s Religious Studies website, above an evidently much less religiously relevant text published by the department, a directory of “Interfaith and Ecumenical Activity in New Zealand”.

But I digress. Morris’ seminar at Labour’s Conference prefaced the announcement of a Christian wing within the Labour Party. Putting aside her devout atheism and her refusal to acknowledge the importance of Christianity to large tracts of New Zealand society, Helen Clark has embraced the concept. Clearly now that Labour is dredging the polling abyss at 36% of the vote, there might just be electoral advantage in presenting itself as the morally compassionate party.

It is hard to refute Morris’ view, that the redistribution of wealth in society is something that Jesus would have favoured. After all, Christ did speak at length about the plight of the impoverished and disadvantaged. But it is another step entirely to draw the conclusion that welfare dependency is compassionate.

Yet Paul Morris' world view doesn't actually extend beyond the ivory rises of Kelburn Parade in Wellington.

A relative of mine got involved with a chick from Wellington’s most disadvantaged suburb of Cannons’ Creek. If you haven’t heard of Cannons’ Creek, it’s in Porirua East. People in Porirua West invent all sorts of new names for their comparatively prosperous lifestyles, just to distinguish themselves from the perennial misery of Cannons’ Creek. Outside of South Auckland, Cannons’ Creek has the worst educational achievement, the worst standards of housing and healthcare, the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, and violent and petty crime in the country. Pick any negative social statistic, and Cannons’ Creek rates alongside Otahuhu, Otara and Mangere.

Bear with me here, because it gets a little bit complicated. This relative of mine, and his partner, were the caregivers of her nephew and niece for a year. They were aged eleven and nine. They had different fathers, but the same mother. The mother had three further children to a third father, who was living with her while receiving the unemployment benefit and dealing marijuana, but took to beating the bejeezus out of his two defacto step-children. The father then impregnated the mother’s best friend, and while that best friend was pregnant, took care of the youngest baby so that she could receive the DPB until she gave birth. He then had three further children by the first mother. The mother then required that her two eldest children, in the care of their aunt and my relative, be returned to her when she realised that not having them had an impact on her benefit.

This woman has had eight children by three different fathers, none of whom are named on the children’s birth certificates. The children are subjected to domestic violence, are rarely present at school, live in third-world housing conditions, and receive little nutritional encouragement.

They do, however, have plenty of family around them. Six of their mothers’ siblings live in the same street, in a row of state houses. Of the seven adults, not one of them has achieved any formal educational qualification. They have over sixty first cousins. Not one of their parents’ generation has ever held a full-time job. Of the four living generations of that family in that Cannons Creek street, not one of them has ever been exposed to paid employment. This fourth generation of welfare-dependent children may well be born with the same genetic opportunities as a child from Khandallah or Remuera, but forty years’ of welfare dependency means that these children will grow up without knowing anybody who works, let alone takes full responsibility for their personal actions.

The precise numbers of hard-core, welfare-dependent New Zealanders is still relatively small. The Kahui families are not the norm. They comprise less than two percent of the population. Yet they contribute massively disproportionately to New Zealand’s negative social statistics: 95% of New Zealand’s violent offenders are aged between 15-25. 95% of those offenders are welfare-dependent, with substance abuse, poor housing, no educational achievement, short life expectancy, poor health standards and poor nutrition all being common themes. They tend to most often victimise each other. But not always.

The social cost is astronomical. Encouraging small clusters of the most socially disadvantaged New Zealanders to continue to see welfare dependency as their only life option is anything but compassionate. It is not the children’s fault that they were born into deprivation. It is frankly not their parents’ fault that the socialist state has told them, and their parents before them, that their welfare-based lifestyle choices are morally neutral. After forty years of a so-called benevolent welfare state, the options for the least advantaged in New Zealand have become singular.

Putting aside Labour’s electoral need for a societal underdog, creating a culture of envy towards those who prosper and do actually have lifestyle options, it’s hard to see how anybody can alleviate extreme poverty by advocating further welfare dependency. It simply doesn’t make moral sense to encourage people who cannot afford to have their present children to have more children. It doesn’t make moral sense to remove people from the economic consequences of their personal decisions. It makes even less moral sense to do that when the personal decision involves the creation of another human being who will inevitably be born into social misery.

Liberals don’t like the idea of society making moral decisions on behalf of people, yet liberal socialists advocate taking economic responsibility away from those who are welfare-dependent. The only practical solution, as I see it, is far greater intervention in the lives of the most socially destitute, to ensure that poverty shrinks, rather than grows.

But let’s get to specifics. What would help end the cycle of welfare dependency in New Zealand among the hard-core Kahuis of South Auckland and Cannons Creek? Here are a few steps, to be applied to the most vulnerable families:

Every child receiving welfare must have their father named on their birth certificates. Liberal socialists will shriek such all sorts of hysterical things about mothers being raped, but you can’t set public policy around very rare events.
No welfare entitlements to the father of children living with mothers on the DPB.
Fathers not entitled to leave New Zealand while children living with a dependent DPB beneficiary.
Requirement that all children must attend school. Non-attendance would lead to the benefit being cancelled.
All children must receive medical check-ups at least every six months, to check on the nutritional and general health status of the child.
Random alcohol and drug checks of welfare parents.
No violent offenders permitted to live in the same home as children.
A maximum six months of entitlement to the unemployment benefit in any five year period, and a maximum of two years’ entitlement to the DPB for any person in their lifetime.
Frequent, random checks of homes of welfare dependent children.

The economic costs of those steps would be very high in the short term. The social cost of not doing it is even higher, now and in the long term. It’s the compassionate thing to do.

Pay it Back NOW!

2006-10-16T10:22:00.000+13:00

With Labour’s announcement that it will repay the $800,000 of public money it spent on last year’s election, it’s worth examining Labour’s claim to be poor.

The Labour Party is the most asset-rich of all registered political parties. It uses the income from over $6 million in property assets to fund election activity.

The New Zealand Labour Party is an unincorporated society. As such, it is not required to report its finances, and is not subject to the audit requirements of incorporated societies and limited liability companies. It is generally understood that in a non-election year, Labour’s annual budget of $1.5 million is funded primarily from income from property assets, subscriptions from affiliated unions, and a core membership of around 5,000 members.

The downside of being an unincorporated society is that the New Zealand Labour Party is not permitted to hold property. Instead, property is owned by a selection of private trusts and incorporated societies that receive beneficial tax status, and hold that property on behalf of the New Zealand Labour Party.

A selection of Labour’s property assets includes:
Dannevirke Labour $15,700
Greymouth Labour Branch $40,000
Labour Properties Inc $4,800,000***
NZ Labour Party Clubrooms Inc $140,000
Picton Branch $11,000
Thames Branch $83,000
Dunedin South $770,000

Labour’s wealth outstrips National’s asset base by a factor of 10-1. National’s only property asset—a floor of Willbank House in Willis Street—is valued at around $700,000. Labour’s claims to be poor simply don’t stack up. It begs the question why a party with such a large property portfolio needs ten months to repay misappropriated spending from last election.

Helen Clark is asking Labour’s core supporters to front up and take responsibility for this. The answer to Labour is simple: if Labour’s caucus, who are responsible for the over-spend, can’t front up with the cash immediately, then Labour should mortgage or sell some of its massive property portfolio.

***UPDATE: I used some conservative estimate of the value of the portfolio in Labour Properties Incorporated, pending valuation reports which I have now received for each of the eleven properties owned by Labour Properties Incorporated.

As of this afternoon, I now have a full break-down of rating valuations for all the properties in Labour Properties, with the exception of one. The numbers are:
Fraser Body House $4,000,000
7 Fulton Crescent $330,000
1/332 Massey Road $416,000
300 Great North Road $470,000
Palmerston North $203,000
Domain Avenue $105,000
4 Regent Road Dunedin $440,000
203 Warrant Street North$223,000
651 Ferry Road ChCh $130,000
1 Pharazyn Street $240,000
Total $6,557,000

A *very* conservative estimate of the Takapuna property--prime commercial real estate on the North Shore--is $2 million. All up, Labour's assets are much closer to $10 million.

Remembering Waterloo...

2006-10-13T11:37:00.000+13:00

I am not a person who begs or offers compromise. There is no such thing as half-sin. I admit that I can be occasionally dogmatic. Occasionally, some might say that I take an unreasonably intractable stance. I loathe socialists. I dislike liberals. I hold the entire Labour Party in contempt. There’s just far too much tolerance for the kind of dishonest, incompetent shits who will preside over $25 billion in fiscal surpluses over the last three years and look you in the eye and say there has been no money for tax cuts.

Fuckers. That’s what they are. There is no room for justification for that kind of dogmatic incompetence that is starving the New Zealand economy of productive growth.

Labour is now wriggling and writhing with anything but contrition for stealing $800k of taxpayer’s money to outspend everybody else during the election campaign. Their hastily-compiled thebigwhiparound will show them just how much support they have lost from their own voters. Labour has fewer than 5,000 members—less than a quarter of National’s membership. Political parties generally find it notoriously difficult to fund-raise outside an election year at the best of times. Labour has no financial reserves: they spent their entire war chest at the last election, and dipped into public funds to outspend everybody else, because they didn’t have any cash of their own left. Labour is very lucky that the Auditor-General did not have the power to require parties to pay back the overspending: if they had, Labour would be looking down the barrel of insolvency as a political party.

Labour is now in Government due to the choices of 22,753 voters who swung to Labour instead of National. That’s less than 1% of the vote. Labour also misused some $800,000 of public funds to outspend everybody else during the election campaign by the same amount. It is all very well for slimy pinko activists to say that the pledge card had little effect on the result—except that Labour’s own strategists claimed before the election that its pledge card was the key plank of Labour’s campaign. It’s also clear that Labour’s massive publicly-funded electioneering—which amounted to a 40% publicity boost over National, particularly in the critical last few days of the campaign—must have had some effect. Just how effective it was can be disputed, but the effect of Labour’s taxpayer-funded spend-up has put the 2005 election result as a whole in doubt.

Ordinary Labour members aren’t going to cough up $200 each to fund the corrupt actions of Labour’s caucus. Labour’s leadership is in a state of delusion if it believes that Labour’s members will front up with cash.

Of course, Helen Clark and Mike Williams need to put up the pretense of exploring all avenues possible before hitting up Labour’s own caucus for the balance of what it owes. $20,000 per MP will hit them hard in the pocket, and will cause serious rumblings within caucus. That won’t be soothed by Labour’s slide in the polls, and the prospect that many sitting MPs will be turfed out will make them even more anxious and unhappy.

The three options for Labour are:

Limit third-party funding of attack campaigns. Big consequences on freedom of speech, this is Labour’s Exclusive Brethren cause. Labour thinks it’s harming National, allegedly on the basis of Exclusive Brethren political activities in the last election. The National Party doesn’t need the Exclusive Brethren. They were a pain in the arse last election, and an embarrassment to National because of their political naivety. The EBs spent fairly large amounts of cash last election, with no positive return to National. Really, banning the Exclusive Brethren from campaigning is a blessing for Don Brash.What also occurred during the campaign was massive amounts of spending and activity by trade unions supporting the Labour Party by attacking National. They will also be covered by this clause, and limited in their campaigning.
Limit anonymous donations to political parties. Labour is convinced it’s onto a winner here, despite the fact that Labour has received more in anonymous and corporate donations than National in all but one of the last seven years. Labour will also taunt National with the prospect of lowering the threshold for declaration of anonymous donations, from $10,000 to $500. That action is likely to publicly disclose the identities of more than 1,000 National Party members. There is no public policy reason for this. Labour’s sole purpose is to allow Labour Party retribution against individual National Party members who do no more than express their democratic right to support a political party that isn’t Labour. Except the political landscape has changed since the last election. For far too long the socialists have done their utmost to effectively communally outlaw any non-PC agenda. Just weeks ago, Pete Hodgson issued eight press releases in seven days calling on Don Brash to resign. His sole argument was that Don Brash doesn’t share Labour Party values. In an hysterical flurry of interviews that shrieked of Labour’s desperate last gasp towards totalitarianism, Hodgson proclaimed: “It is a fact that Don Brash cannot be Prime Minister. He must go. [Because we say so.]” Labour has now put itself in the position of having no chance of winning the next election. There will be no retribution from Helen Clark if somebody chooses to give $1,000 to National. My response to National members is go ahead and give all you like to the National Party. Do it publicly. Stand up and be counted. Don’t cower at Helen Clark’s threats of bullying.
Public funding of political parties. Labour is already appealing to members to fund last year’s election. Their only means of evening the playing field, as they see it, is to penalize National by as much as possible, and provide for public funds for themselves. Voters will not support Labour’s argument for state funding: they may have done so before the overspending fiasco, but not now. Even Donna Awatere Huata, who faced the consequences of misappropriating Pipi Foundation resources for her private benefit, turned down a bonus payment from Pipi. Helen Clark is showing just how shameless she is by proposing a public funding bonus for taking taxpayer’s money she wasn’t entitled to.

There is nothing that Labour can now do to prevent a massive hemorrhaging of voter support between now and the next election. Labour is careening towards a long period in opposition. As with National from 1998 onwards, Labour has to start thinking about first principles, renewal, new leadership, and revival. The sooner it starts acting on it—and it can only do so while it is not desperately trying to hold onto the Government benches they obtained illegitimately—the sooner Labour will become a political force again.

National, on the other hand, has become the defacto Government-in-exile. Don Brash has to continue acting as the Prime Minister in waiting, with only the next election and a massive endorsement from a public sick and tired of Labour’s ineptitude, incompetence, socialist mind-control and corruption, standing between New Zealand voters and responsible government.

My advice to Labour is to do whatever you like to punish the National Party for Labour’s own disgraceful lying, cheating, and theft. Whatever vindictive actions you take now, you will not succeed in cheating voters out of responsible Government next time. Change the rules to make it easier for you steal money again, and the public will thump you harder at the polls.

My advice to Don Brash is to start talking about his first acts as Prime Minister, once voters have turfed out this torrid, awful government. Announce that his first move will be to cut any proposed state funding of political parties, and get parliamentary noses out of public troughs. Whatever Labour do to feather their own nests, Don Brash will reverse. Don Brash’s rules—no public funding of promotion of any parliamentary activities in the three months prior to an election—will eliminate electioneering rorts from Labour happening again. A full commission of inquiry by an independent and respected High Court judge, examining all of the allegations of misdeeds by all political parties and their associates, will take the self-serving interests of MPs out of their hands, and do much more to restore credibility in New Zealand’s parliamentary democracy.

I expect in the next week or so, Don Brash and Judy Kirk will announce an important National fundraising campaign to prepare National for the next election. They believe it will be sooner, rather than later. Unlike Labour supporters, aggrieved at being asked to pay for Labour MPs' wrongdoings, National supporters will be paying for a genuine cause of change.

Farewell, Walter...

2006-09-29T12:08:00.000+12:00

Walter Hadlee has played his last innings. A creditable player at a time when New Zealand couldn't compete internationally, he was a dogged leader who brought together the likes of Bert Sutcliffe, John Reid, Martin Donnelly, Jack Cowie, and the much under-rated Merv Wallace. As with all the cricketers of his age, a seven year hole in Hadlee's time at the crease was attributable to World War II. Hadlee went on to become Chairman of New Zealand cricket: his gutsy character brought him into conflict with that other most dominant and bloody-minded cricketing personality of the 1970's, Glenn Maitland Turner.

Walter was an odd character. It takes a certain kind of obsessive mind to play test cricket. It takes an even more compulsive personality to captain his country; to breed three international cricketers is simply insane.

For the last sixty years Walter has been the grand old man of New Zealand cricket. His favourite party trick was based on his fanatical devotion to numbers and statistics. At a cocktail party, he would ask somebody their age and birthday. Within an instant, he would say: "Ah, you were born on a Tuesday."

Walter will now be debating Inzy's suspension with St Peter, and telling God what day He was born. Farewell, old chap.

The Life (And Death) Of Brian

2006-09-27T16:35:00.000+12:00

Every political party has its clever people. They live and breathe the game of politics far more than policy itself. There was once a time in the National Party when a tiny group of activists were individually referred to, in private, as the “Nth most EVIL person in the National Party”. There were about four of them in total. They played poker, stayed up all night at Party conferences brokering information, and argued the future of right wing politics.

They existed as a de facto group of Young Turks, arguing for change in a tired old party that was destined for a long walk in the wilderness until they reformed their Old Guard. It was a strange assortment of Wellington-based folk: they loathed Winston and his coalition, and believed that after nine years of selling the same team to the public, the public would bite them back. 1999, and 2002, proved exactly that.

The Labour Party has had its cabals: their internal and external factional powerbrokers will plot and plan its future even when the going is good. Helen Clark, Pete Hodgson, Trevor Mallard, Steve Maharey, Phil Goff, and David Benson-Pope have no great policy framework for the country. They simply enjoy the thrill of wielding and trading political power. Their unity is contingent on their ability to read the political tea-leaves and stay ahead in the polls. When they fail in that respect, they disintegrate. It’s now a matter of survival for them, since they have become Labour’s Old Guard. It is tired and reactionary. As Helen Clark comes under fire for strategic mis-steps, her only instinct is to fight back as viciously as her instincts can.

The atmosphere at the Ellerslie Racecourse on election night, September 17, 2005, was electrifying. Don Brash, the rookie MP who had become rookie National leader in his first term, had managed to double National’s vote at the polls. There were well over 1,000 supporters present. In the space of a year, Brash had rebuilt the National Party from near annihilation to within a whisker of the Government benches. He had rebranded the Party, and in his wake, had brought forth a whole new battalion of MPs.

Twenty-three of National’s current MPs are new faces. They owe their places in Parliament directly to the brand that Don Brash took to the country last year. That, coupled with the overwhelming support he got for taking the leadership on before the election, make his personal support in caucus very strong.

Brash’s leadership position isn’t set in stone. It is dependent on his ability to keep National in the lead. But with an eight point difference, and gaining, between National and Labour, only an absolute moron would suggest that National dumps Brash. Bill English and John Key may have leadership ambitions: but both know that they are far better placed to inherit the Prime Ministership when Brash chooses to step down, than to cause squabbles in the Party that prevent either of them becoming Cabinet ministers after the next election.

It is now a statement of political fact that only a complete moron, or a Labour Party supporter, would advocate Don Brash relinquishing the leadership of the Party when he has Helen Clark, and the Labour Party, so clearly spread on the racks. To their credit, the Labour Party is saying precisely that. Not content with losing the battle over their misuse of taxpayer’s funds on the pledge card, and finding that their strategy of personal smear against Don Brash made them less popular with the public, they are simply calling for his head.

In the last week, Labour’s Pete Hodgson has issued no less than nine press releases calling for him to resign. It seems slightly bizarre that Hodgson, who is also Minister of Health, has had nothing health-related to talk about at the same time that Helen Clark vows off attack-politics. It is the equivalent of parliamentary stalking from Hodgson, and a strange kind of obsessive-compulsive behaviour from a man whose only strategic contribution to Labour in the last few weeks has been a strategic collapse of Labour’s support base.

Labour wants Brash’s leadership to become the issue. They need him to go if they have any chance of sneaking through another election. It’s understandable that they would target him. Yet they have become so blatantly obsessed with him that whatever they say from this point forward can only cement his leadership. Helen Clark’s government has become so untrustworthy that the more Labour attacks Brash, the more the public want him as Prime Minister.

National’s caucus, with one glaring exception, has been impeccably disciplined in recent weeks. They maintained a clear focus of attack on Labour’s corruption, and did not hold back from that clear focus when Labour started a dirty war. They did not retaliate on Labour’s terms. They maintained their dignity when Labour dragged National’s leader through the mud, and refused to speculate on Labour-driven spin on Brash’s leadership.

Labour has continued to lie and obfuscate, to its own detriment. Whereas once political commentators admired a Prime Minister who could stand up and openly claim that she had had conversations with Gallery journalists confirming various rumours, now the Gallery journalists are not prepared to go along with her spin. Kevin Brady, the Auditor-General, has made it clear that he will not accept untruths told about him, for the sake of the Prime Minister’s political expediency. That brilliant gall, which allowed Helen Clark to spin her way out of any controversy, is failing her. Her spin has lost any subtlety. Voters simply do not trust her.

Which brings me to Brian Connell. The Rakaia MP has studied Helen Clark over the past four years, and has formed the impression that he too is worth of a large office on the ninth floor. Except Connell has never understood subtlety. When a lone MP makes a dig at a party leader, it is wise to have other MPs supporting him. Connell hasn’t. The preposterous spectacle of the Labour Party egging Connell on, suggesting that Connell is a symptom of some gaping faction within the National Party, has ridiculed the mid-Canterbury MP. After writing his own political eulogy, by leaking discussions of a caucus meeting to the Independent’s Tim Donohue, Connell has finished his career himself.

Connell claims not to have been the leak after the caucus meeting. Instead, when the Independent story broke, Connell responded to media inquiries, saying that he was not the leak, but that since the information had been leaked, he was free to comment on it. That, of itself, constituted an act of shit-stirring that is unacceptable for a member of a political party. If Connell had said absolutely nothing to the general media after the original leak, it is possible he could have avoided sanction from the Party. That he chose to speak publicly confirming the caucus discussion demonstrates a baffling degree of political stupidity expected of Judith Tizard and her ilk. It’s not befitting of a National Party MP.

Connell is, of course, technically telling the truth about the caucus leak. Connell did not speak to Tim Donohue after the caucus meeting. Except two facts are crucial, and have not yet come to light. Firstly, Donohue, who is very close to Brian Connell, was able to quote events at the caucus meeting word-for-word. Secondly, Connell has refused to release his cellphone records on the day of the caucus meeting to the Whip’s office. Don Brash, and the National Caucus, have considerable reason to believe that during the caucus meeting, Connell’s cellphone was on, and open in a call to Tim Donohue. Connell didn’t have to comment to Donohue: he had the discussion verbatim anyway.

That act of sabotage by an MP has no place in the National Party. Brian Connell doesn’t represent any kind of tradition of “Young Turks” in any political movement, except the Labour Party.

They’re welcome to have him. With Taito Phillip Field on the way out, they may well need him.

The VRWC

2006-09-25T10:20:00.000+12:00

Seems that there is a vast right wing conspiracy, after all.

He/she has published a song, Pay It Back.

I didn't know the Exclusive Brethren could sing so badly.

Bauble-Watch

2006-09-13T20:57:00.000+12:00

Sometimes it's nice to get another reassurance that our Rt Hon Minister of Foreign Affairs is doing his best to protect the taxpayer's interest in state assets. Consider this confidence-inspiring response to a question in the House, concerning a Close Up programme the night before:

R Doug Woolerton: Did Television New Zealand accurately portray the interest that the Minister has taken in this case?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Absolutely no. Television New Zealand last night completely misrepresented my letter to Mr Robinson’s family. [...]

R Doug Woolerton: Why does the Minister believe that Close Up’s report is so at odds with other reports that he has received?
[....]
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Most of the reports on this matter are from reputable and highly professional Government agencies. The other report is a desperate attempt, with baseless tabloid journalism by a failing news organisation and its washed-up head of news, Bill Ralston, to win back the hundreds of thousands of viewers who are deserting Television New Zealand in droves. If this is the best that Mr Ralston has to offer the viewing public of New Zealand, it is little wonder that those who care about accurate news coverage that puts the facts before the egos of journalists are crying for his head.

Sinister Elements: Pete's Story

2006-09-05T23:02:00.000+12:00

A close friend of mine (for the purposes of this post, I shall call him “Pete”) works for a large consulting firm. Pete has a nice home in an exclusive Auckland suburb. He and his wife drive new model European cars. He plays golf on Friday afternoons. He earns well over $500,000 a year. He has little interest in politics.

Pete guy lives a privileged lifestyle. He has done exceptionally well over the last seven years. Although the economy has been pretty good, and he has property investments that have funded his retirement twenty years before he is entitled to superannuation, he owes much of his success to Helen Clark, Michael Cullen, Trevor Mallard, Annette King, and Steve Maharey. Between them, these five Ministers have presided over the fastest growth in the State Sector that New Zealand has seen since 1935.

It is difficult for those who live outside Wellington to comprehend just how enormous this public sector growth has been. The ballooning of the state is the direct reason why 62 of New Zealand’s 100 largest employers are in the state sector.

This development has been very beneficial to certain business interests who have been smart enough to engage with Wellington politicians and bureaucrats. Pete is at the centre of one of these business interests. Like all good businessmen, he goes where the money is. And the amount of cash flowing out of government departments on very large-scale, multi-multi-million dollar projects, is astronomical. The State is spending seventeen billion dollars more today than it is six years ago. Pete’s very happy with how this Labour Government has helped his business.

Pete lunches and socialises with Cabinet ministers and senior officials on a regular basis. He is not the biggest biller of services to Government by any stretch, but his firm will probably provide $10 million in services to various government departments in the next financial year. There are some players in Pete’s industry that will bill an individual government department several times more than that on a single project.

Pete is a sensible guy. He gets good personal financial advice. He’s not a genuine high-net-wealth individual, but he’s getting there. Pete has structured his income through various legal devices so that he is paying tax on only $60,000 a year, and the rest of his income is attributed to loss-qualifying companies. Pete pays a net 6% income tax.

Pete doesn’t stand to gain from tax cuts under a National Government. He’s paying bugger-all tax as it is. His company is rolling in cash, based on services he’s selling to Government clients that have no commercial sense. They don’t know what they’re buying. Government doesn’t care what it’s buying. It has the money, so it must spend. And they’re buying from Pete and many other Petes in Wellington.

Just over a year ago, things changed for Pete. He understood that it’s sort-of fun for a while increasing margins to government clients who don’t care what they’re buying, and making large sums of money in the process: Pete became involved with a project working with people in another company that was charging even more outrageous amounts to Government departments that cared even less what they were buying. Project schedules were over-run, service levels on the project weren’t achieved, and project costs snowballed. The Government client paid the bills, and nobody on the project—the external firms, nor the department’s internal managers, the public servants—were held accountable.

Pete’s outrage at the waste and over-indulgence in the public sector that was making him so much dosh drove him to loathe the current government, and how it was blowing away titanic sums of money for no effect. The issue for him was no longer personal business gain, but core belief. Pete was not a political guy. He could talk to politicians and bureaucrats, and sell them ideas, but he kept out of politics. He didn’t particularly have a great affection for the National Party, but he could see how Labour was destroying New Zealand.

Pete’s decision to donate to the National Party didn’t come lightly. He did so very cautiously. He did it anonymously, without ever having met any National candidate or official. It wasn’t an astronomical sum, but enough for it to be declared. On election day I asked him if he wanted to come to an election-night party; he declined because it didn’t interest him, but wished us luck all the same.

This guy has never met a National Party official. Don Brash has never heard of Pete. Nor has any senior National Party official. And if Pete has it his way, they never will know that he was the source of a donation inspired by his anger and outrage at Labour’s excess in the public sector.

But that wasn’t the only reason Pete wanted to remain anonymous. Just as Pete, and countless another anonymous donors in 2005 donated to Don Brash’s National Party because they were disgusted with the thought of three more years of Labour’s squandering of opportunity, Pete wanted to remain anonymous out of fear. Just as Labour Ministers are now inventing fictitious insurance backers of the National Party, Pete knew the consequences of Labour Ministers knowing of his donation.

The Labour Party is vindictive. There was never going to be a guarantee that if he made a contribution to the National Party, that National would win the election. And Pete and his wife still have to make a living, whether or not Labour is in power. Pete knew that would have been a whole lot harder if his name had ended up on a National Party donors’ list.

History has shown Labour’s motivation to target people it does not like. The public sector's tentacles are very long, and Labour has tamed them reach in every corner that serves its interest. It is these sinister elements drive people to make anonymous donations. Those elements are the fear of reprisals by the Labour Government to a known anti-Labour supporter.

I don’t personally approve of anonymous donations to political parties. If the culture of fear has become so great—and Labour has shown that it will do anything to remain in power, even steal an election with taxpayer funds—then in my mind that shows even more reason why we should stand up and be counted. Far more people need to have the courage to stand up to Labour and say that we will not support graft, vote-buying, and corruption. The more people who are prepared to put their names to their support for National, the easier it will be for others to join us.

And the sooner we do that, the sooner we will be rid of this corrupt gang of political hooligans.

Field of Dreams

2006-09-04T22:13:00.000+12:00

Pondering the outstanding cast from Labour’s South Auckland constituency, it’s easy to see why Mangere voters can do without Taito Philip Field for six months while they work out whether he’s a crook or not. Labour's stand-ins in South Auckland will do an outstanding job during Field's absence.

The reason is that Labour has an unparalleled cabal of brilliant and hard-working group of MPs in the Auckland region, who never balk at the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and put in a top performance for the team.

The MP for Mangere may have been banned from his constituency office, and from Parliament, while he sits at home on full pay (including electorate MP allowances) pondering the refurbishment of his seven residential properties and the general management of TP Field Developments Limited. Field does so in the knowledge that neighbouring Labour constituency MPs will be doing their best to represent the good people of Mangere on Field’s behalf.

George Hawkins, the former diligent and hard-working Minister who inspired so many, sits to Mangere’s South East, in Manurewa. Hawkins’ much-publicised mastery of his Police portfolio mean that crime will be a thing of the past once the Police have finished their investigation into the sitting Member.

Ross Robertson, the prolific and internationally-celebrated MP for Manukau East, is parked right next door to Field’s electorate. Robertson’s rapid rise through the Labour Party ranks over the last eighteen years to the dizzying heights of Assistant Speaker in the current Parliament mean that Field’s constituents will get a good hearing in the House.

Further to the North, Mangere’s constituents will have the resources of the admired and formidable Judith Tizard, MP for Auckland Central. Tizard, as the long-standing Minister for the National Archives and the National Library, will serve the reading interests of Mangere’s 18,000 speakers of Samoan and Tongan with aplomb.

Mangere is a General Electorate seat. Only one of the two Maori seats bordering Mangere is held by a Labour MP: Nanaia Mahuta in the Tainui seat is established in Wellington circles for her energy and vitality as a Minister outside Cabinet. Mahuta is also the Minister of Customs. Since Customs offices are often situated in close proximity to immigration offices, Mahuta is well qualified to represent Mangere’s constituents on immigration issues.

Yet no single Labour constituency MP in the area can fully replace Field's ingenuity for novel parliamentary methods. List MP Ann Hartley, although rejected by Northcote voters, is a one-time manager of the Child Abuse Prevention Society. She will be able to put her theories to good test, and eliminate child abuse from the Mangere electorate over the next six months.

Finally, List MP Darien Fenton, the especially telegenic former Vice President of the CTU, lives in the electorate. Fenton worked closely with Field in the Service Workers' Union, where they were organisers together. Fenton will be able to demonstrate a similar degree of compassion and concern for Mangere's least fortunate citizens as Field has managed over the last nine years.

Voters in Mangere can rest assured that for the next six months, their parliamentary interests are well-served by Labour’s Auckland team.

A La Recherche du Temps Urdu (In Remembrance of Things Urdu)

2006-08-28T16:29:00.000+12:00

Cricket is a mystical game. It has its own traditions, culture, and history, which cannot be explained to the layperson. As for the rules of play, they are as ancient and as numinous as the cricket Gods themselves.

How possibly could a North American begin to comprehend the hallowed willow: that unforgiving mini-beast that requires loving application of linseed, and gently knocked in, so that it will last for just twenty-two matches, of which half will be rained out? How to enlighten the non-cricketer on the importance of the knocking-mallet: that if the willow hasn’t been treated before it strikes leather, the bat will shatter; that if knocked too heavily, the instrument will lose its spring and be forever dull and useless?

I have played a lot of cricket. At any one time, I would have three bats, each knocked to different degrees, which I would use depending on the playing conditions and my attitude to the game at hand. Each bat would last three seasons. They only lasted because I rotated them, and treated them and prepared them immaculately pre-season. For a non-cricketer to pick them up, they may have seemed heavy. For me, they were a finely-balanced extension of my left arm, prepared by me. I knew exactly what style of play was necessary for each bat. Nobody else was permitted to even pick them up. For a player to even suggest that was the equivalent of a novice violinist asking Nigel Kennedy to lend him his Stradivarius for practice.

There is one exception to my batting toolkit. It is a Duncan Fearnley Magnum, oversize, which is not a finely-tuned instrument. It is not an extension of my left arm. It is the batting equivalent of a clown shoe. If my Slazenger V800 was a high precision rifle with a laser-guided scope, then my Magnum is a daisy-cutter. If any other batsman can pick it up, let alone apply the back-lift when a cricket ball is bearing down at ninety miles an hour, they are welcome to do so. I would only ever use it near the end of the innings when I have out-concentrated the bowlers, and started spraying deliveries onto the pitch. As long as I put the bat within a few light years of the ball, the latter would find itself somewhere on the pavilion roof.

Thus cricket is a fanatical game that attracts fanatical people.

Cricket journalism is also a unique art. Because cricket writers have so many hours during a test match to compose their thoughts on a game in which nothing often happens, the quality of their output reaches poetic levels unseen in the mainstream media. Consider this from Amit Varma, two years ago, on a Test match between Australia and India. Varma achieves something that few mainstream journalists manage to convey: to place you inside the thrills and spills of a game that you regret not having watched. Jeremy Clarkson could have been a cricket commentator. Lord Denning, if he hadn’t opted for that oh-so-fleeting of judicial careers, could have done likewise. What Varma shows, in what may seem especially moronic to the non-cricketer, is that the game is even more sublime because there was no result.

After my third game in post-school cricket, I was called to give evidence to a Wellington cricket disciplinary hearing brought against my fellow opener. He had scored a few runs, and played and missed a ball outside his off stump. The ball brushed his pad on the way through to the keeper, and the keeper and the slip cordon appealed for a caught behind. The batsman, as was his habit, ignored the appeal and trudged off to square leg in his psychological preparation for the next delivery. He didn’t see the bowling umpire raise his finger, and was shocked when he heard the fielding team cheer that they had taken his wicket.

It was a bad umpiring decision. The umpire later stated that he didn’t think the batsman had hit the ball, but thought he was walking, so granted the appeal. But what happened in the next few moments was crucial: in the milliseconds of release of frustration at a bad decision, the batsman gave what the umpire called an “evil” look. The player shook his head as he walked past the square-leg umpire, chanting quietly: “No, no, no, NO!” I could just make out what he said.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whether he was saying this to himself, for his own lapse in concentration in snicking the ball, or genuine frustration with the umpire. The player was stood down for six weeks for voicing dissent.

Because cricket is an intensely mental contest played over very long periods of time, cricket journalists are less well-disposed to cover rapidly-changing events over short interludes. The treatment of Darrell Hair in his decision, on the fourth day of the Fourth Test between England and Pakistan, to call off the match, has spread headlines well beyond the cricketing world, but in the process has lacked the critical analysis that makes cricket such an exquisite game.

Law 42 of the Laws of Cricket specifically covers the issue of ball-tampering. A player is allowed to clean the ball and polish it, but not change the condition of the ball. The umpire is the sole judge of whether ball-tampering has occurred, and has various sanctions he can apply. One of those sanctions is awarding five runs to the batting team and changing the ball.

Darrell Hair judged, rightly or wrongly, that the Pakistani team had deliberately changed the condition of the ball, well beyond merely polishing or cleaning it. England was awarded five penalty runs. In the scope of an individual match, that sanction is far less severe than a bad decision on a dismissal.

What happened next strikes at the very heart of the game of cricket, and the bystander struggles to comprehend it without considering the unique personalities of Pakistani captain Inzamam Ul-Huq, and umpire Darrell Hair.

In nearly a hundred and thirty years of international test cricket, only ten players in history have scored more test runs than Inzy. Only nine players in history have scored more test hundreds. As important statistics are in the culture of cricket, that still gives only a poor perspective on Inzy’s greatness.

Much has been written on Inzy’s laziness at the stumps, his lack of fitness, his curious blend of brutality, and paradoxically, his subtlety and lightness of touch as a batsman. A far more telling statistic is one that cannot be measured by immense accumulations of runs and test averages. That is that of even the greatest players in the modern game, Inzy is practically unrivalled in his capacity to turn good deliveries into average ones, and average deliveries into poor ones.

Inzy, like Sachin and Adam Gilcrist, are virtually impossible to bowl to. Their creative genius is such that even the finest masters of consistent rhythm and swing will find balls on a good line, and a good length, dispatched to the boundary. They do so not through sheer fluke, but all the time. This trio has a capacity to regularly manufacture shots that should not even exist within human capability.

Some will say that they simply see the ball much earlier than their peers. Others will suggest that they have much faster reaction times. But they will all be wrong. The reason that Inzy is so great as a batsman is the same reason Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong are so phenomenal. They quite simply defy the laws of physics.

Secondly, Pakistan and the subcontinent in general, do not share the same values around the Spirit of The Game. This is a culture clash of seismic proportions in world cricket. It is why the Board of Control for Cricket in India sets the world tour programme. It is why Shoaib Akhtar is allowed to bowl with a “hyper-extensive arm”, rather than simply “chucking”. It is why Sachin Tendulkar carries demi-God status. Cricket is a religion in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. It is because of their faith that they are prepared to cheat at all costs to win.

So when Inzy instructed the Pakistani cricket team to remain in the dressing room in protest at Darrell Hair’s ball-tampering decision, rather than resuming play, Inzy was issuing a direct challenge to the Spirit of Cricket that governs the responsibility of cricket captains, the requirement for fair play, and general player conduct. As unparalleled as Inzy is as a player, he assumed the power to undermine the most important cricket law of all: the supremacy of the umpire.

That is no small challenge on Inzy’s part. It is effectively the worst possible act that can be committed by a cricket captain. If the disgraceful underarm bowling incident 1981 sparked a re-emphasis on fair play, then Inzy’s action should not go unpunished. He was not merely pushing the boundaries of interpretation of cricket rules. He was drawing a big red line through the rule book.

There is no sanction available for Inzy’s decision not to take the field. The reason there is no sanction is because the idea is so incomprehensible to the spirit of cricket that nobody thought of creating a sanction for it.

Until, that is, Darrell Hair was faced with the prospect of inventing a new sanction that does not exist in the rules. Given the extent of Inzy’s offence, ending play and awarding the match to England was proportionate. In addition, Inzy should have been hung, drawn and quartered by the ICC.

The subsequent actions by sub-continental commentators and cricketers, to make the issue about evidence of ball-tampering, rather than Inzy’s behaviour, deliberately miss the point. In fact, they attempt to divert attention from Inzy's assault on the rules of cricket.

Darrell Hair’s decision to award five runs to England was allowed for in the rules. Even if wrong, that was his decision. It was a legitimate decision for him to make.

Yet instead of cooling down and accepting punishment for his refusal to take the field, Inzy came out all-guns blazing after the Fourth test. Pakistan threatened to boycott further one-dayers in England if Inzy was found guilty of ball-tampering. Again, the issue wasn’t whether he changed the condition of the ball: it was his refusal to accept Hair’s instruction to take the field. The following day, India sided with Pakistan, announcing they would join other sub-continent nations in refusing to play in a game that Hair officiated in.

Realistically, that slashed Hair’s potential umpiring commitments in half. He could not umpire in games involving Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or his own country of Australia. That confined Hair's umpiring commitments to test matches between New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies. It was an untenable position for Hair. He had faced an impossible, unprecedented scenario in the Fourth Test, and made use of the only sanction he thought available to him, and half of world cricket was ganging up on him. There was no way he could reasonably continue as a member of cricket’s elite umpiring panel.

That confluence of events led to Hair suggesting his resignation, on condition of a private settlement with ICC taking into account Hair’s potential earnings as a professional umpire over the next few years. It was an invitation for the ICC to make him redundant, given that the sub-continent had pre-empted his redundancy. That request was no different to a senior executive resigning from a board due to circumstances that make their jobs untenable.

So what did Malcolm Speed, ICC Chief Executive do in return? He leaked Hair’s offer, putting him out to dry. In one of the most disgraceful acts in the history of cricket administration, Speed shifted focus away from Inzy’s misconduct, as an easy way of getting rid of burying the issue of sub-continental rewriting of the spirit of cricket.

Thank you, Malcolm Speed. You have answered the key question facing world cricket today. You have given us certainty. In the process, you have knifed your own country-man. Ball-tampering, chucking, threats to withdraw tours when a player doesn’t get his way, and disrespecting umpires on the field, have all been legitimized by your conduct towards Hair.

Thanks to Inzamam Ul-Haq, and Speed’s effective endorsement of his behaviour by assassinating Hair, the Spirit of Cricket no longer exists.

RIP: Peter Dunne (1954-2006)

2006-08-25T16:07:00.000+12:00

Peter Dunne was a pragmatic and decent guy. Always a little pompous, fronting a one-man party for so many years, if you could look past the preposterous things he would do with his hair, you knew he was generally moving in the right direction. He believed in the fundamentals of an open, prosperous economy. He supported the Reserve Bank Act, the Public Finance Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and the principles of open government and clean democracy.

Economically, Dunne was always pretty dry. He left the Labour Party in 1994 because it become a little too dominated by pinkos and liberals, and was constantly apologizing for any of the works of Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble. When Dunne left Labour, it looked as if Labour would even rescind the key tenets of orthodox economics. Dunne couldn’t quite bring himself to join the National Party, but by 1996, for all intents and purposes, he was one of us.

Hence in 1996, National made him a Cabinet Minister, and chose not to stand a candidate against him in Ohariu-Belmont. Dunne won the seat in a landslide, and National pulled its second highest party vote in the country in that seat. This confirmed, he was one of us.

Peter Dunne being Peter Dunne, he spat the dummy in 1996 when Winston beat him to the chase for a ministerial seat. Dunne seethed and writhed and got very cranky. For many of us in the National Party who didn’t like Winston, we kinda agreed with him. He was still one of us.

Even in 1999, when Peter Dunne supported the Labour Government, many of us saw his point. Labour hadn’t changed back the clock of history between 1999-2002; it had acted reasonably competently, wasn’t by that stage accumulating massive surpluses or wasting too much money, and didn’t seem to be doing too much harm. Labour didn’t need Dunne’s support in 1999; if he could get a few baubles flung his way, then good on him. He was still almost one of us.

Peter Dunne was always somebody with principle and integrity. He strove to do what he thought was best. He was never lily-white, but as politicians go, he was a nice enough bloke. Sensible was his mantra. It was never a particularly sexy idea, but in a vacuum of political ideas, it won the worm in 2002. Fuming and blustering like a spoilt child when he didn’t get his way, he could be. But most of the time, reasonable.

In the annals of New Zealand political history, Peter Dunne’s chapter will not be very prominent. He was never a flash-in-the-pan; more of a slowly-simmering custard about to curdle if placed under too much heat. Worked well with something more substantial. Dependable, if cooked under the right conditions.

So it is, after twenty-two years of almost-distinguished parliamentary life, that we can stop and give thanks to the political career of Peter Dunne. Peter, wherever you are, buddy, you didn’t achieve much, but you meant well.

Because, dear reader, now that Peter Dunne has become just another lame apologist for Helen Clark’s corrupt and outlandish junta, he has gone full circle. He has tattooed himself to Helen Clark’s breast, always to be associated with her sleaze and contempt for the taxpayer. For a Labour Minister of Revenue, that would be dishonourable. To be propping up a disgraced Prime Minister who will do anything to retain power--even buy an election, and an ailing Finance Minister, is the ultimate act of self-immolation. In Peter Dunne, the one man who has staked his political career on his independence and ability to walk when things get a little too shabby, that is unforgiveable.

Rest in Peace, Peter Dunne. Your political career is over.

Why Labour Won't Pay It Back

2006-08-16T12:22:00.000+12:00

The Auditor-General’s report into unlawful spending of parliamentary services funding is not restricted to Labour’s use of the pledge card. The A-G identified widespread use by Labour and other members of parliamentary services funding for electioneering purposes—the bill for Labour alone is well over a million dollars. The Greens, Act, United Future, and NZFirst are all in the hole as well. National got off relatively lightly—ten grand was very, very small by comparison.

We haven’t yet seen the A-G’s report. It’s the report that the Prime Minister doesn’t want the public to see. Why? Because it discloses that Labour’s misuse of taxpayer funds during the last campaign is more than twice the cost of the pledge card.

It’s a separate legal point as to whether the Auditor-General is even required to publish its report. Scrutiny of Parliamentary Services is not covered by the Official Information Act. Labour and other Parties could block to stall the release of the report as long as possible, if at all.

It does give a lie to Labour’s current spin that nobody knew the rules. Every party knew the rules around applying parliamentary services funding for electioneering purposes. In the final three weeks of the campaign, Labour was desperate. It was trailing in the polls, and prepared to play dirty for the sake of buying office. It had no money left of its own that it could legally spend. So its answer? To bring in the unions to spend up large on Labour’s behalf. Its second solution? To bully Parliamentary Services to allow it to use parliamentary services funding for electioneering, in the clear expectation that nobody would notice it after the fact.

No party is lily-white in the application of parliamentary services funding for electioneering. National slipped up to the tune of ten grand. In the mayhem and chaos of an election campaign, it is perhaps conceivable that in the last ninety days, individual MPs of a political party might send communication to voters which constitutes electioneering during their normal duties. It is conceivable that the value of that communication might be $20,000. In the Nat's case, their misspend was $10,000, which they have repaid.

If the rules (which the Labour Party set after the previous election) were so unclear, how is it that one party in particular mis-used its funding to such a preposterous degree, and National did not?

The short answer is that Labour expected to spend its funding for parliamentary services, entirely for electioneering purposes, with impunity.

The longer answer is that Labour spent more than half a million dollars more on electioneering, using parliamentary services funding, over and above the cost of the pledge card. That constitutes a cynical and deliberate attempt to rort the taxpayer to pay for its own campaign. The Labour Party’s premise was that if it was going to lose the last election, it might as well go out with a bang. No reasonable, objective opinion—and the opinions of the Auditor-General, the Solicitor-General, the Chief Electoral Officer, and the Secretary of Justice are generally pretty reasonable and objective—could see it otherwise. Labour abused its parliamentary services funding, in a concerted effort to win the campaign. That, dear reader, is the very definition of corruption.

Why are smaller parties so keen to protect Labour over this? Partly because they will support Labour at any cost. They don't want an election. They don't have the campaigning funds to fight another one, and they know they're dog-tucker even if they had the funding. Partly also because they don’t have funds of their own to repay what they misspent during the campaign. Partly because Labour has dangled the carrot of public funding of their parties for them. That’s a red-herring in terms of Labour’s culpability in the last election, but a critical bribe for smaller parties, for whom lack of fundraising is one of their major organisational problems. Smaller parties are even less able to reimburse Parliamentary Services for its misallocation than Labour is for its mammoth $1 million sham.

There are moments in a government's lifetime that signal its irreversible decline. I can well recall some of the unfortunate activities and decisions of some National ministers in the last two years of Government that suggested that power had gone to their heads. They pissed voters off. That arrogance directly contributed to the voter-shock that the Nats experienced in 1999 and 2002.

But for all its failings in its dying years, the Bolger-Shipley transition from 1996-1999 was not corrupt or venal. They did not feather their own nests. They actually believed that they were making a positive contribution. They made mistakes driven by arrogance.

If Helen Clark was more focussed on staying in touch with her voters, and Cullen not unwell at present, then neither of them would have allowed this tragic situation to exist. Labour have set a new standard for third-term governments, with unrivalled arrogance, hypocrisy, sleaze, filth, self-serving corruption, and absolute contempt for taxpayer and voter alike.

Voters have become used to the Judith Tizard factor in politics: somebody so loony, so contemptuous of the voters who elect her, so distant from reality that she will spout of any old nonsense as a justification for her government's actions. For such acts of inadvertent self-ridicule, Helen Clark rewards her with all the baubles of Ministry. In isolation, she is easy to ignore. Yet what the misuse of parliamentary services funding has shown is that the entire Labour Party has remodelled themselves in Judith Tizard's image. Collectively, by not repaying the money back, by attempting to "validate" their unlawful actions, by buying smaller party support and spinning the discussion into "democracy funding", we now have a Labour caucus full of Judith Tizards. It is a Government that has set itself up for inadvertent self-ridicule every day that it continues to exist in defiance of normal standards of political behaviour.

Voters no longer believe in Helen Clark or the Labour Party. And they've brought it all upon themselves.

Fears and Loathings

2006-07-13T13:35:00.000+12:00

My friend just bought a puppy. Ever since I heard that he bought that dog, I’ve been terrified that the dog might develop psychological problems and get larger and bite the postman.

Another friend recently stole a small goat, and placed it among his sheep. I lie awake at night fearful that the goat will think it’s a sheep, and start fucking the other sheep. Even worse, I fear that the goat, being a satanic symbol, may well be Lucifer’s spawn, and impregnate a whole new breed of evil goat-sheep.

Another friend just bought a new fridge. Studies have shown that cannibals are most likely to store human remains in old fridges, rather than new fridges. My friend has not told me what he has done with his old fridge, so I now assume that I am next on his list of people to chop up and boil on his NEW STOVE!

Yes, people. These are genuine fears.

The Big Smack-Down

2006-06-20T19:04:00.000+12:00

Watch the pinko liberals come out again and raise the canard of Section 59 of the Crimes Act, linking it to the deaths of innocent children.

As one commie wag claims, “physical violence is a continuum”; that a smack is half-way to a punch, that a punch is half-way to a beating, and that a beating is half-way to death of a child.

Interesting theory from the childless few who pontificate about child-rearing of the masses. In their happy-clappy world, rugby, boxing, and martial arts would be outlawed, as being just a little bit too mean. Violence in movies should be banned, too. People can’t control their ideas, see. They aren’t capable of distinguishing right and wrong. If I see Arnie machine-gunning a tribe of bad guys, I will feel justified in going out and buying the biggest Stinger that a Russian black-market can afford.

But it’s a view that is deeply divorced from reality. Children don’t die when a parent gives an hysterical child a quick smack. I wasn’t seriously harmed when a cranky teacher threw me in a gorse bush. Even Jeremy Clarkson, that bastion of English civility, wasn’t damaged when he was hit in the face by a lemon pie.

There are degrees of violence. Some of them are so minor that to make an issue of them makes the recipient seem like a pansy. Case in point: I am frequently slapped in the face by chicks. Often by fat chicks. I’m not sure why this seems to happen so often, but what kind of wowser would I be to call the police and make a formal complaint? Other times, physical violence is downright entertaining. Recently, I was outside a bar when a guy slapped me. I was fairly surprised by this, so I say to him, as he’s about to run off: “Why are you slapping me like a girl? That’s not even a girl-slap! Come back and do it properly!” But he’d run off by then, and I couldn’t contain myself from the comedy of the situation.

Other times physical violence is reasonable or necessary in the circumstances. Jerry Collins on the rugby field is such a star because when he makes a tackle, the other player takes so much longer to get up afterwards. Jerry is superb to watch. When he’s drunk himself senseless after a game, he’s fairly intimidating, and it’s not wise to stand near him, but on the pitch he’s simply awesome.

Yet those situations are a long way removed from a serious physical beating against a child.

One young child I know frequently gets smacked. It is the discipline of first resort to his parents. I have observed that the child is generally very badly behaved. This frustrates his parents no end. They have never given the child a real beating. It doesn’t take somebody of supreme intelligence to conclude that smacking that child so frequently destroys any shock value in an occasional smack. Is that child in danger of being hit so hard that he suffers serious injury? Of course not. Should his parents consider other forms of discipline that are more effective? Absolutely.

Smacking children is not bad because it may lead to long-term physical harm. It’s not even bad. It is simply neutral, if applied too often. A child learns to put up with the sudden pain. The shock value disappears. When I was a child, had I been given the choice of receiving the wooden spoon or being deprived of the morning cartoons for a week when I misbehaved, I would have taken the wooden spoon every time, knowing that it’s much easier, as a child, to get punishment over with quickly, than to have to face the consequences of my behaviour.

There is a degree of obsessiveness from both sides of the smacking debate: those who ludicrously proclaim that smacking is the only form of discipline that works (when it clearly isn’t), and from the liberals that smacking leads to the deaths of children (when it clearly doesn’t).

Parents need to be empowered with choices. They need to take responsibility for raising their children. They need to have discretion as to how they exercise discipline, and choose the ones that work.

Smacking a child does not denote that a parent wishes to harm a child. If used very rarely, the shock value alone can be useful. But it isn’t a particularly effective tool, especially when used repeatedly. Most parents who take responsibility for their children’s upbringing come to this view, without the interference of a nanny-state imposing ideological positions on parenting.

The occasional smackers are not the cause of society’s social ills. They are a little misdirected, and in most cases probably realise when they have given their children a smack, that they have done so out of their own anger, rather than an intention to correct a child’s behaviour, and feel guilty for not being able to control their own frustration. They certainly don’t need do-gooding politicians telling them they are criminal as well.

What is far more criminal is a social system that encourages a certain group in society to have children that they cannot afford to feed, house, or clothe. Any welfare system that rewards those who cannot take responsibility for themselves to pretend to take responsibility for helpless children, will lead to major social dysfunction.

It is no coincidence that almost all of the young children who have been murdered by caregivers have grown up in dysfunctional homes. The prevalence of welfare, poverty, crime, substance abuse, and poor health is a much greater indicator of serious harm against children than any specific, albeit slightly misguided child-discipline techniques by otherwise lawful middle-class.

So if the Labour Government cares for the safety of children, they will discourage, rather than reward, people to have children that they cannot afford to raise.

The New Crusaders

2006-05-01T13:28:00.000+12:00

Recently, my HK-based nemesis Cactus Kate put up a list of her favourite journalists. I don’t know what’s going on in that girl’s head since she started writing for Fairfax, but that assortment of pinko sops is not my idea of a good read. Helen Bain? Temperamental cow. Chris Trotter? Socialist! That other blogging pinko? Nothing more to be said. Shame on CK for appeasing them with mild praise.

Following this post, there was much commentary over at kiwiblog as to what constitutes a journalist. Some carnally self-sufficient cretin objected that a paid writer practicing as a lawyer in an overseas jurisdiction should be allowed to make any judgement on the quality of New Zealand journalists.

Subsequent to that, again at kiwiblog, DPF highlighted the mini-war of words being fought between Ian Wishart and Fran O’Sullivan. I made a comment to the effect that Wishart is a clown, and that I’d back Fran’s serious writing any day of the week. That public address guy then pitched in, quoting and supporting something I had written, attacking Wishart. Shocked and appalled at this recent development, I should clarify my view of Wishart’s work.

There are few quality journalists in this country. The reasons for this escape me. There is certainly no shortage of journalism graduates emerging from tertiary institutions—in fact, there is a vast oversupply of budding Woodwards and Bernsteins. Despite occasional strikes by one of the Labour Party’s funding channels, journalists are pretty well paid. Sure, they do not earn as much as international counterparts, but they’re not paid on performance here, either. Of course, there isn’t a great degree of competition in the New Zealand media marketplace, which doesn’t help, but that alone doesn’t account for media-ocrity.

I am not one of those right-wingers who suggests that New Zealand journalists, as a whole, are captured by liberalism and socialism. I don’t believe that at journalism school, aspiring reporters are put through an ideological washing machine, and emerge as card-carrying advocates for Helengrad. There may well be a washing machine, but that’s no excuse for journalists to capitulate on their personal values and give in to the communists.

And that is the key point. Every person has a degree of bias. The role of a journalist, like that of a judge, is to make an honest appraisal of the facts of a case, and draw conclusions accordingly. The journalist sets out with a relatively open mind. There are rules around what evidence is admissible, with respect to treating subjects fairly, aiming to get a balance of testimony, and making judgements at the end.

Those judgements will inevitably be enriched by bias. That bias makes the reading interesting. Nobody wants to ingest a strict diet of facts without judgement. That’s the difference between Barry Soper and Colin James: the former lists off the facts and draws banal conclusions that are of no value to anybody, whereas the latter lucidly analyses the facts, to the benefit of the reader.

Most New Zealand journalists do not have considerable outward bias. They simply do not draw conclusions. Again, I’m not sure why this is. They might come up with the excuse that they are cynical--but they are presumably not so cynical as to not vote. I believe that they're simply lazy. It would also explain why, for much of the last six years, they consume, without question, the spin that comes from the Prime Minister’s office. Comparatively, the Government’s spin machine has overwhelming resources, designed purely to influence the Press Gallery. The Government’s message is all that most press gallery reporters get. A lazy reporter can get by, quite comfortably, simply recycling the government message.

Of course, there are New Zealand journalists with considerable socialist bias. Chris Trotter is one. Finlay McDonald is another. Oliver Driver—not a journalist, but prominent in the media, is particularly extreme.

On the conservative side, the pickings are much more slim. I’m struggling to think of a single New Zealand journalist with considerable right-wing bias. I suspect that Rob Hosking leans to the right, but that suspicion probably has more to do with him being a GC, and since I loathe all socialists, he must not be one. But enough of syllogisms.

The outcome is that without serious right-wing journalists in New Zealand, with a smattering of left-wingers, and an under-resourced, mediocre core of writers who are dominated by a liberal, socialist establishment, there is very little effective balance in the New Zealand media.

That is why, in theory, Ian Wishart’s Investigate is a good thing. It is useful to have a right-wing journal that critically examines New Zealand government and society, and draws conclusions albeit with a mostly right-wing bias. It gives readers choice. If you want to read about how the world is run by conservative old men who oppress women and minorities through their manipulation of truth, read The Listener. It’s mostly staffed my middle-class, liberal white men with small penises and guilt complexes, and happens to be owned by conservative old men who apparently don’t have any problem with publishing liberal clap-trap, but that’s another story.

Likewise, if you want to read about life from a conservative perspective, Investigate should offer that.

Except it doesn’t. In the Benson-Pope affair, Ian Wishart overstepped the line. He didn’t go seeking the facts. He started with a conclusion, and chose the facts to support the conclusion. That is no longer playing the role of judge-inquisitor. That is stepping down to a role of prosecutor, without regard for the facts. In Benson-Pope’s case, a reasonable conclusion may have been that Benson-Pope was a bully. He probably intimidated his students. Many students disliked him. He probably engaged in the kind of behaviour that would no longer be acceptable in today’s classroom. Sure, it’s appalling that somebody of Benson-Pope’s dubious character should be in Cabinet. Benson-Pope almost certainly misled the House when he stated that he knew of no other complaints against him as a teacher. That would have been a reasonable judgement. But the evidence does not support Wishart’s claims that Benson-Pope was lecherous or a pervert.

Likewise, when Wishart did an exposé on Helen Clark, he went way too far. It would have been reasonable to conclude that Aunty Helen has held a long-term ambition to change New Zealand society. It would have been equally reasonable, from a conservative perspective, to conclude that the Labour Party has spun its way through office, manipulating the media while it makes subtle changes to social policy that fit its outlook on the world, through stealth. That is a fair belief. While it’s amusing to ascribe dubious evidence that the Prime Minister is a closet lesbian with major psychological problems stemming from her alleged confusion over her sexuality, that’s also pretty nutty. Ian Wishart must be out of his tree if thinks that’s a rational argument. It’s not. The conservative reality is that Helen Clark has a liberal agenda because she’s a liberal socialist. Any other speculation from loungechair psychobabblers damages the serious message of serious journalism.

There is nothing wrong with taking on the crusader’s role. I consider myself a right-wing crusader. David Farrar does an excellent job as the pre-eminent right-wing blogging prosecutor in New Zealand. Jordan Carter does a reasonable job as the Labour Party’s defence lawyer on-line. Chris Trotter, a pinko of long-standing, manages to mix the crusader’s role with providing what is often very clever and compelling analysis. But unlike Ian Wishart, none of them put up the pretense of being balanced or neutral. They honestly say: “This is my perspective. Here is the evidence that supports that perspective.”

The only redeeming quality in Wishart’s campaign is that it’s not a socialist campaign. As a campaigner, he is very effective. He’s had one very successful government scalp so far, and a major contribution to the public humiliation of two other ministers. But let’s not kid ourselves that he’s out to seek the truth. He’s there to present his argument. The reader should judge his argument accordingly.

Public Address is also a de facto extension of the government spin machine. They are (mostly) socialists, and crusaders for the filthy garbage that will ruin this country if they continue in government (again, my bias showing through). Keith Ng and Damian Christie are fair and amusing respectively. But that's only a small part of that site. If Public Address also puts up the pretense of being neutral and balanced—or make claims about being serious journalists, as opposed to crusaders for their cause—then they are being dishonest with everybody.

Then again, unlike Public Address, Investigate's heart is in the right place, even if its crusades are sometimes a little extreme, obsessive, and crazy.

The blogosphere has a reasonable balance of socialist and right-wing crusaders. New Zealand media is short on journalists with a right-wing bias (who have a harder job, given the government-controlled flow of information, and have much better career options outside journalism, given that right-wingers are professionally overwhelmingly more talented than socialists). But what we don't need is crusaders masquerading as serious journalists. The Left has enough of those already.

Introspection

2006-04-28T14:37:00.000+12:00

A few weeks ago, I made a flippant remark to an old political mate, seeking his advice on my suitability for parliamentary representation. His initial response was diplomatic: “Don’t think it would be right for you,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Because you lack tact, sensitivity, modesty and discretion.”

“They’re completely overrated,” I counter. I then come up with a brilliant argument, if I may say so myself, giving lucid examples of successful MPs in the current House, who either lack tact, sensitivity, modesty or discretion.

He says: “Yes, but they’ve each got one of those qualities.” He then comes up with a vague theory about how successful elected officials are polite to prospective voters, whereas my behaviour is often considered rude.

“Fuck ‘em,” I say. “I’m far more fucking polite to those people than they fucking deserve.”

My faults do not trouble me, since they are so few, and so minor (which makes it a pointless exercise, really, given that everybody I associate with agrees that I am the least fallible person they know, and humility does not come easily to me, but for the sake of this story I will continue in this vein).

But I suppose that it is also true that I am not well known for possessing an abundance of compassion. I don’t see this as a major fault, because I don’t think it’s important. Human history is not compassionate. God offers few favours. Nature doesn’t often just give people a break. For many people, reality sucks.

Reality sucks for them. Most people lead shitty lives. They have mediocre aspirations—if they have any at all. They have shitty jobs. Their spouses are fat and/or ugly, their jobs are meaningless, their children stuff their faces with lard in front of the playstation rather than becoming successful sports fanatics, and to top it off, they’re born stupid.

My life, by contrast, is excellent. I am currently engaged to three different, and very hot chicks. I will replace each of them before I have to front up the cost of engagement rings, let alone the wedding ceremonies. I am involved in productive and well-paid (albeit highly-taxed) employment. I don’t need to worry about where the party is happening on any given evening, because I know that where I go, the party comes with me. And to top it off, I was born with a brilliance of charm and intellect that, to be quite honest, nobody else I have ever met has been able to match.

So I figure, therefore, that if God wanted to add compassion to my many gifts, He would have done so. He chose not to. My lot is not to reason why. And to be brutally clear about this, I don’t think my life would be any more interesting if I was some limp-wristed pansy hand-wringing liberal who cared about stupid people who are too indolent to take responsibility for their own lives first. Rather, that degree of compassion would diminish my sense of being.

Not far from my office in Queen Street, I frequently witness those who have played the worst of what could have been a good hand in life. They sit idly on the pavement, often dozing, with a hat or cardboard box, and a sign, giving passers-by some clue as to the misery of their lives, with the expectation that a stranger will offer them compassion.

Fucking beggars, is what they are. There are perhaps a dozen of them in Auckland city. Most of them have been on the streets for a couple of years at least—which only proves that their lives are not so dire. But nobody does anything about them. At best a large proportion of the swarms of office-workers ignore them. Some of them clearly donate money to them.

Should I feel sad about their plight? Well, I don’t think so. Actually, they piss me off. They often piss me off to the extent that I have frequently stopped to harangue them for messing up the central city. Many of them know who I am by now—after repeated scowls at them for trying to make their shitty lives my problem—they’ve learned not to stop me for spare change.

A few months ago, I popped over to Domino’s Pizza to pick up a feed for my team. One of these bums was camped outside Domino’s Pizza. He was dozing in the sun. He had a sign informing all who bothered to read that he had no money, and needed money for food. I also observed that he was, from a purely medical perspective, chronically obese.

“Hey, buddy!” I say, very loudly, as close to his ear as I dare approach without infecting my nostrils with his stench. He stirs to a state of partial awareness. He takes a moment to adjust his glue/drug/booze-addled eyes, and looks up at me. But he doesn’t say anything. So I say:

“Did you write that sign yourself, did you?”

He nods.

I say: “That’s very good work. Really, it is. Presumably, if you can write, you can also read, right?”

He nods again.

“Stand up,” I say gently. “I’ll show you something that will really help you out. Don’t worry, I’m not walking you anywhere. Stand up.”

So he stands up. I point to a sign on the window behind him. Remember, this is a pizza store. For a guy who’s supposedly hungry, a pizza store is worth looking at. But the sign—no big words that are difficult for somebody smart enough to write his own sign—reads: “WORK AVAILABLE HERE: IMMEDIATE START.”

“There you go, buddy. You’re hungry? Work in a pizza store! You need money? Minimum wage, you get four hundred bucks a week, and people thinking you’re doing them a favour by making them pizzas! It’s a perfect opportunity! You’ll even be able to afford to take a shower once a week!”

Bum mumbles something vague and shuffles off. I go in and pick up my pizzas, relieved that there’s now no chance of me stumbling over him on the way out. The pizza guy looks grateful that I’ve moved him on.

About a month later, I saw another bum with a sign. This was an innovator, as far as bums go. His sign read: “Please give me money so I can buy food for me and my dog.” And to prove his point, he had a small mongrel on a rope. I don’t know what the protocols are in the bum industry—for all I know, there could be another bum who owns the dog and rents it out to other bums, so that they can get the benefit of not just bum-donors, but animal welfare types as well.

So I stop. I say to him: “Is that really your dog?”

He nods. Bums tend to nod. They don’t talk much, unless the words are random streams of semi-consciousness.

“Why did you get yourself a dog if you can’t afford to feed it?”

Bum shrugs.

I say: “You must be pretty hungry, right?”

Bum nods. I’m diplomatic at this point, even though he thinks that the fact that I’m talking to him indicates that I’m going to dip into my pocket and bathe him with coins.

But I don’t. I say: “Here’s an answer to both your problems. If you’re that fucking hungry, then eat your fucking dog!”

I don’t know if either of these guys learned anything from their discussions with me. I like to think that I was doing them a favour, by offering them an opportunity to solve their problems, as well as the potential added advantage that the Queen Street walkers would be saved the inconvenience of having to see these human eyesores. What they certainly do not learn from the bleeding hearts who toss them spare change is to take responsibility for themselves. I don’t know what kind of other state support they’re getting—frankly that’s not my problem. The Government confiscates massive amounts of my earnings already, purportedly to look after society’s least fortunate.

No fucking liberal socialist is going to succeed in making me feel guilty for their failure to encourage people to take responsibility for themselves.

The Truth About Cats And Dogs And HR People

2006-04-26T23:16:00.000+12:00

Cats bad. Dogs tolerable if they live outside and bite burglars. HR People are mindless leeches.

I don’t get along with human resources people as a rule. Their job in any organization is to set the kind of intra-office regulations that I find meaningless.

Typical correspondence consists of the following:

HR Person: “I notice that you were on annual leave for three days two months ago. Please put in a leave form, and in future, please file a form in advance of taking annual leave, and have your manager approve it in advance.”

IP: “No.”

HR Person: “Those are the company regulations. Why can you not follow them?”

IP: “Because it’s not my fucking job to fill in forms. If you want me to be associated with one of your stupid forms, then you fill the fucking thing in, and send it to my secretary for her to sign on my behalf.”

HR Person: “That is not company policy.”

IP: “I don’t give a fuck. And because you’re irritating me, I’m not claiming any annual leave on those days at all. As far as I am concerned, I was working.”

HR Person: “How were you working?”

IP: “I spent a couple of hours each day talking to fucking clients, to make enough money for the firm so that we can employ stupid nobodies to annoy me. And I’m going to claim a day in lieu for Good Friday, when I spent an hour on the phone to a client who was too busy making money for his business to notice that it was Good Friday. Fill in the form for it and have my secretary sign it on my behalf.”

I am not suggesting that a good HR function is beyond the realm of any corporate possibility. The ideal HR person will spend all their time inducting new employees, and making existing employees feel happy about the workplace they are in. In the case of my workplace, a truly effective HR person would ensure that all new employees have signed a waiver, removing their ability to use standard legal means to complain against me for miscellaneous abuses to their fundamental human rights that working in the same building as me necessarily involves. They should be told, during the interview process: “If IP does not like you, he will use your gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious belief, and/or state of physical disability as an excuse to discriminate against you. He is not actually discriminating against you on those grounds. He just does not like you.”

Now that would be a useful induction.

An effective HR person would organise parties and booze-ups, to make people feel better about the place in which they work.

An effective HR person would also understand that the purpose of recording misdemeanours at parties and booze-ups is not to punish an employee for the bad behaviour. Discipline is not the HR person’s job. Discipline, in a highly performing work environment, is unnecessary. Punishment for bad behaviour misses the point. Due to a slight anomaly (i.e., the Employment Relations Act 2000), bad behaviour is only used as an excuse to get rid of an employee who is not performing.

Not that I am suggesting that these ideal HR people actually exist. I'm not saying, either, that they don't exist. There may be, in some dark corner of Mogadishu, an errant HR person who is not following the rules, and has somehow understood their true purpose in life: to serve the organisation and people that they work for. I just haven't met such a person.

I was reminded recently of the banality of HR people when I attended a barbecue. The barbecue was a boozy affair. A friend and I had done the honours by spit-roasting a whole lamb over a twelve-hour period, stuffed with turkeys, chickens, and tuis. For extra drama, we wired a pig’s head to the lamb’s neck. To true Roman toga effect, we carved, with the aid of a tomahawk, to raucous applause. Even a visiting vegan was entranced by the spectacle of removing the back fillet, to the extent that I was just moments away from getting him to eat some before I was distracted by more interesting company.

The company in question consisted of a pair of busty wenches who had been at another theme party, and happened upon ours. I never got their ages—twenty-two, perhaps. Not very bright. Worked in hospitality. And they were an hospitable pair.

Until, sometime later in the evening, as I was passing by the bedroom window on my way back from urinating on the lemon tree in the garden, I observed peripherally, as I tend to when I’m drunk, the two hot busty wenches were removing their garters. With their teeth. I yelled out to random party goers: “Hey! The two hot busty wenches are also hot busty lesbos! Excellent!” Two of the more adventurous males in the gathering clamoured to take a closer look. They claimed afterwards to have seen nothing at all. Subsequently, I claimed that they were a pair of myopic liars.

I do not personally recall why I had been banned from this property for more than a year, but drawing everybody’s attention to the busty wenches, at full volume, reminded the tenants of the property why I had been banned on the previous occasion.

But there was still more to come. I was mixing and mingling, and talking at people, and drinking alcohol in unsafe quantities, when I quite suddenly picked up a vibe in my near audience. This particular audience consisted of the two hot, busty wenches, one of the tenants of the property, and two guys I’d never seen before. I turned to the two guys, and said:

“So, which of you two guys is the homo?”

They stared at me blankly, but uncomfortably.

I said: “Come on. One of you guys is a homo, right?”

A number of people in the immediate, and not-so-immediate vicinity, stopped talking. A few people glared at me. I became vaguely aware that I may have said something unseemly. From behind me, a voice said:

“I take great offence at that!”

I turned around. Some miscellaneous ginga chick—a vegetarian who didn’t approve of killing animals, let alone stuffing them inside larger animals and spit-roasting them—was upset. I also witnessed that she was considerably overweight. I wondered, internally, just how somebody who doesn’t eat animal fat can become overweight to that extent. So I say: “At what?”

“Those are my friends.”

“Good for you to have two friends,” I answer with a degree of gallantry and valour that she neither appreciated nor deserved, but in any other situation might have put me into war medal contention. “Why are you offended?”

“Because I’m one, too.”

“A what?” I ask.

“A homo! And it’s not respectful to use that word.” She’s already got the kind of hectoring pitch that only chicks who are too repulsive to get any, can manage.

“No you’re not,” I respond. “Only guys can be homos. I wasn’t accusing both of them. I was only suggesting that one of the two of them is. You’re a chick. You can’t be a homo. You might be a lesbo, tho’. I’ve got nothing wrong with lesbos. I think lesbos are excellent. Especially if they’re hot part-timers.”

I flick another perve at the two hot, busty wenches to emphasise my point.

“What have you got against gay people?” she asks, not wanting to give up the fight.

I sigh, a little tired of her already. “Look, I don’t have anything against homos. God does. And they will fry in hell for their sins. Not my problem. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with you, either.”

“We’re the same!” she says, lamely.

“No you’re not. You’re a lesbo, one of those guys is a homo. Good on both of you. But you’ve got nothing in common with each other. You get licky-licky with girls, he gets it on with guys. As far as gender preferences go, you’re about as mutually exclusive as it gets. I didn’t offend you. You’re just naturally cranky. Have a piece of lamb. It will calm you down.”

Despite my appeals for peace, the overweight ginga lesbo starts getting more cranky. Pretty unreasonable behaviour on her part, all in all. But she can’t voice her frustration. I have won the argument. The two hot, busty chicks are looking at me as if they are less lesbo than I had previously alleged. I am enjoying their attention. Even the two guys, one of whom I had accused of being camp, are both on my side.

And then a bolt of understanding hit me. “Wait a moment,” I say. “Let me guess. You voted Labour at the last election, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” the cranky butch ginga answers.

“And you work for a living, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says.

“And the kind of work you do… I’m going to go out on a limb, here… but do you, by any chance, work in human resources?”

I almost pissed myself with her final confirmation. They cannot even stop themselves from regulating how people think and talk when they're not being paid for it.

Sing Bravo Bravo!

2006-04-24T00:49:00.000+12:00

The road to Napier is paved with good intentions.

So I said to myself, as I veered haphazardly along State Highway Two—a misnomer if there ever was one. I passed a couple of optimistic traffic police on the side of a highway that had no stretches long enough to achieve the speed limit, and made my way into earthquake country.

There is not a lot to say about Napier as a town. The best view can be had from Bluff Hill, looking out to the sea, and away from the semi-urban centre. The Napier folk celebrate the fact that they have one of the largest collections of art deco architecture in the world. There’s a good reason for this. Art deco is fucking ugly. No other city in the world has seen fit to replicate it. Where it has existed, sensible town planners have permitted wide scale demolition. The fact Napier has art deco architecture at all is a historical accident. After the 1931 quake, the authorities simply took a fad that was already running out of time, and applied it on a wider scale to citizens who were still too shell-shocked to realise what was happening to them. If the upheaval had taken place in 1985, the entire town would resemble a set from That 70’s Show.

I blame Susan Wood for my journey. Last week she did an interview with some random dolphin-trainer from Napier’s Marineland, who was at pains to explain how grief-stricken everybody was about the death of one of Marineland’s last two remaining dolphins, despite the creature living to twice its natural age. According to the trainer, even the seals were sad. "I’ve worked here since leaving school," she says. "This is all I know how to do."

I don’t like cat-people on a good day. This chick was the ultimate cat-person. Cat-people do not have lives of any consequence. They fuss and preen over stupid animals that are far removed from their single useful purpose: to catch mice. This trainer had just applied her catness to small marine mammals. She’d set her whole life around the care of two ageing dolphins, in a country that no longer allows the incarceration of new dolphins. So a visit to Marineland had to be funny.
Kelly is the one remaining dolphin at the unnatural age of 36. It refused to spin when instructed, played dead when it was supposed to jump, showed its tail when it was told to bare its teeth, and generally seemed to be incapable of carrying out even the dumbest tricks. Even its species type—the common dolphin—seemed lame. Kelly should have been bottle-nosed. It should have been able to pop the top off my beer with its nose. Then people would flock to Marineland, and even Chris Carter would pay money to allow them to keep more dolphins in captivity.

I don’t object to dolphins being held in a confined space. And to be fair, Marineland has some pretty confined spaces. The seal enclosures—which contains some albino-like North American species of seal—are smaller than some hotel baths I’ve lounged in. If it’s good enough for a german shepherd to be kept as a pet, why not a fur seal, which is basically a dog with flippers? And if seals can be held, why not dolphins? And if dolphins are allowed, why not whales?

Which gets me to whales. I don’t understand why whales are amazing creatures.

They are not great just because somebody wrote a book about one of them, and called the book Moby Dick. More books have been written about Al Gore than have been written about whales named Moby Dick. That alone does not make whales great.

Nor are they great because they are more intelligent than other species. I once had a dog that barked on command. I have not seen a whale that can bark on demand. Dogs have a profound sense of smell. Whales don’t. Dogs can fetch on land and in water. Do I need to go on with this analogy?

Whales have an international commission established—the International Whaling Commission, no less, to manage whale stocks for hunting purposes. Sure, a bunch of greenie weirdoes from New Zealand and other countries have jumped up and down and hijacked the purpose of the commission to attempt to ban whaling altogether—no wonder, really, that countries like Norway and Japan go out on their own.

Whales are not universally endangered as a species. Pilot whales are in abundance. There’s about a million of them floating about, doing their whaley thing. Some of them beach themselves and give rise to great works of literature, such as Whale Rider. Where would Witi Ihimaera be without whale beachings? But I digress. The Japanese could comfortably hunt and chomp through 30,000 pilot whales a year without negatively affecting pilot whale populations. The Norwegians could eat the steaks of 1200 humpbacks a year without depleting existing stock. There’s even ample numbers of Blue Whales—over 10,000, to allow the IWC to start breeding and farming them.

Because, as we know, no species of animal that has ever been commercially farmed, has ever become extinct.

Yes, many species of whales are very big. Many of them are also no larger than dolphins. The dwarf sperm whale, for example, is smaller than a bottle-nose. The big whales are really just the fat chicks of the oceans. They're fun to harrass and lam/harpoon, but unless they're on the menu, what use are they?

So by supporting the moratorium on whaling, what we are really doing is giving in to the morbidly obese people of the world, who want to justify their over-indulgence on the greatness of the whale species. It’s a sham, and I’ve seen through it.

There is only one solution to protecting whales from extinction, and saving the heart-land of the Hawke’s Bay. Napier would be a far more interesting town, and Marineland a far more visited attraction, if they farmed whales in their pools.

The Great Arts Debate

2005-12-20T16:42:00.000+13:00

Unlike a certain SAR-based blogger, I do appreciate the arts. This is understandable, since I'm a very cultured chap. I believe strongly that there is much to learn from the musical, operatic, literary, and visual greats.

What I object to, however, is the Government forcing me to pay for a bunch of lazy no-hopers to claim creativity without any hope of practising it. The Arts for the Dole Scheme is one of the most garbled failures, and most insidious symbols of government largesse. When the Government pays actors and painters to sit at home doing nothing, then they sit at home and do nothing.

Creativity, as I was telling an old-time professional actor friend of mine, stems from desire and personal necessity. As I was buying him lunch a few months ago, he was praising Aunty Helen for everything she has done for Aotearoa/New Zealand’s cultural movement. He then claimed that he was not interested in making money. He argued that he was not good at making money. He proposed that making money is just not good for society.

To wit, I responded: “Which of the great civilisations of history have ever contributed to world culture, except through economic dominance?”

“What?” he asked.

“Simple. Every great civilisation has created great cultural artefacts, by virtue of the fact that individuals have supported and patronised a great artist and encouraged that artist to be creative and productive, or else an artist has doggedly chosen to pursue a career by having that inner hunger—supported by nobody except their own determination to succeed. There is no other way to cultural success.”

“What about talent?” he countered.

”Yes, they’ve all had talent. But the successful artists have all worked their arses off to get there. They’ve had to understand their market. They battle on no matter what.”

Government-funded actor suggests that so much art would be lost if it wasn’t state-sponsored. I answer with: “Like what? That theatrical bullshit you come up with that nobody watches?”

Actor is hurt. I say to him: “Look, don’t take this personally. But the reason why your work is such utter shite is that you’re not hungry enough. You’re content with mediocrity. You don’t have to listen to your audience, or respond to what they want. You just do it anyway, because the State gives you a big whallop of cash for you to sit on your arse, so that it can feel good and pretentious about contributing my money to your idleness.”

Case in point is the TVNZ charter. For the last several years, the Government has paid TVNZ a special subsidy to promote New Zealand content on television. The result: outgoing CEO Ian Fraser says that New Zealand content is under threat, that there has been no noticeable increase in content capacity, that there has been no increased audience demand for local television, television revenue is falling, and, in a nutshell, TVNZ has simply absorbed the subsidy into its baselines. Money is thrown at New Zealand culture with no long-term positive effect. It is spent, simply because it is there, on mediocre television that nobody wants to watch.

This morning, I was walking past the Civic Centre. A cohort of skateboarders were doing funky things with their skateboards, outside one of Auckland’s premier cultural attractions. I stopped and chatted with them. “So what do you guys do?” I ask.

“We’re artists,” they answer.

Riiiiiight.

Meanwhile, the Herald reports this morning that a family of buskers—extremely talented, albeit not particularly attractive young musicians—have been given a different treatment from local and government authorities. The story goes like this: two pianist ingénues, aged 14 and 20, have been slaving their guts out for the last six months, providing musical entertainment on Queen Street, playing some of the most difficult Rachmaninov and Chopin pieces, among many others in their repertoire, in order to raise money to send their gifted sister to ballet school in England.

The Sheffield family are not on the dole. They do not ride skateboards. They simply sit and ply their trade. And they do it exceptionally well. Their audience appreciates them. They show their appreciation by contributing directly to them.

I suspect that the Sheffield brothers do very well from their busking. A few months ago, I offered one of them a couple of hundred dollars to play at a client function we were holding in our boardroom for a couple of hours. He declined, on the basis that he would make more money playing the piano in rush hour.

Yet both the Council and the Police have tried several times to move these kids on. Why? Because they’re not state-sponsored. Aunty Helen—the great arts champion—does not support those who actually have a connection with their audience, and who tirelessly strive to make the most of their talent.

Instead, she’d much rather pay a group of skateboarders to claim creative merit outside the Civic Centre.

Stalin tried to silence Shostakovich, because he wouldn't follow the state-sanctioned cultural regime. The Sheffield brothers have Shostakovich--and very credibly so--in their repertoire. The Minister for Arts and Culture, and the Associate Minister for Auckland, who merrily swan their way through any media opportunity at chardonnay-swilling cultural gatherings, could do much to encourage the Sheffield brothers to continue to play for Auckland city-dwellers.

And then they might actually achieve something for Auckland's arts scene. And it won't cost a single taxpayer dollar.

On Blogging Bitchfights...

2005-12-15T12:04:00.000+13:00

Can there be anything quite as inane in the blogosphere, than two individuals from separate multi-contributor blogs, who engage in a war, and actually mean it?

Normally I side with the good folk at The Whig. After all, they're good people... Blair is an erudite figure of insolence, who deserves to live the good life. All he needs is for one of us to sit him down and teach him how to make money, and he can deserve all the fruits of success that his attitude affords him.

The Aboutowners have few redeeming features. They are, in total, a group of smarmy, snarky, limp-wristed pinkos with some particularly dire views on the world. Which is why they will have lives of failure, lest they smarten up sometime soon.

And as much as I dislike admitting it, most of the Aboutowners play fair. Xavier had a go at me recently, in what was a light-hearted and spirited dig. Didn't think it was his best work, but it was not vindictive and nasty.

Tristan is a whole different species. Again, admittedly, his standard of behaviour is not confined to the Left. There are some equally psychotic types throughout the spectrum. One particular female blogger has been recently subjected to behaviour that is no less than that of a deeply disturbed and pathetic mind.

The Aboutowners have distanced themselves from Tristan's behaviour, effectively by saying that they are not going to buy into Tristan's silly little games with Graham over at The Whig. Graham, that behaviour is beneath you. Make the most of having a hot new chick writing for you--that alone is sufficient to drive traffic to The Whig. And forget about Tristan. The little shit isn't worth the waste of ammunition.

War Stories From The Education Front

2005-12-07T20:37:00.000+13:00

My standard-three teacher was one of the most peculiar adults I ever knew. He was a great raconteur: comical, passionate, eccentric, and had a great love for physical activity. Like many men in the teaching profession at that stage, he was also senile, and had an explosive temper.

This teacher had several party-tricks. One was to launch into a tangential stream of war stories. He had been at war in the Pacific: I suspect his battle-scars were more psychological than physical. He didn’t quite understand the appropriateness of telling grisly tales of shooting Japs, or Japs accidentally shooting themselves while chasing him through the jungle on Guadalcanal, or throwing hand grenades at passing Japs, or knifing Japs… or any story, for that matter, which resulted in an Imperial Soldier being ferried home in a casket. Three or four times a day—from a maths lesson, to reading an approved school story—he would provide yet another Japanese war story.

In the second week of classes, his young pupils became aware of just how crazy he was: we had already heard his stories recycled, and were just becoming more preposterous each time. On this occasion, as he was reading some innocuous approved story to us, he went off on a tangent again. At this moment, he portrayed himself as a Jap-grenading Charles Upham. He then turned to the class, and said: “And do you know what happened next?”

One of the other kids, Jason—not particularly bright, as it turned out—called out: “What, Mr Snufflupigus turned up?”

It was a great burn. Sufficient for all the kids to erupt into the kind of shrill laughter that nine-year-olds can manage. The teacher exploded. He walked straight through several rows of desks, knocking over the kids who were seated, and grabbed this troublesome child by the neck. He picked Jason up by his throat, with one arm, and lifted him out of his seat. The teacher then carried him, by the gullet, across the classroom, and outside the door. A few of us followed, just to see what would happen next. The teacher then physically threw Jason several metres, over the path, and into a convenient gorse bush.

It was an astonishing act of random violence against a child. It happened several other times during that year—I got “gorsed”, although the teacher had the good grace to carry me by my shirt and trousers.

As children, we did not consider these to be horrific incidents. Getting “gorsed” was not extremely painful. It was certainly pretty humiliating, but I also recall thinking that it was preferable to getting caned.

Casting a modern eye against historical events is dangerous. My standard three teacher was not an outlandish exception. Physical violence against children was as normal at school as it was in many homes. It was certainly not a universal trait among male teachers, but it was not an uncommon one.

Which is why I don’t consider David Benson-Pope’s alleged tennis ball incident to be particularly surprising. Nor, for the standards of the time, in the early 1980s, was that behaviour from some male teachers, extremely outlandish. Such incidents occurred frequently, by well-meaning, but psychologically disturbed people who were unable to function in society. The classroom was the ideal workplace for them: other adults didn't have to deal with their eccentricities, and they had a secure, reasonably well-paid job with little accountability, for life. We can thank the education unions for that, but that is another story.

The long-term effects of my standard three teacher’s actions are non-existent. At a recent school reunion, we looked back fondly on the crazy old guy, who is long since dead. He didn't actually cause any physical injuries, other than a couple of bruises, a few scratches, and some wounded pride. He did teach us that in the world there are some quite fucked-up people. I wouldn't go so far as to call that teacher character-building, but it would be a massive misrepresentation to suggest that he harmed people considerably.

Likewise, David Benson-Pope’s alleged victims will not carry any psychological scars for his alleged sadistic treatment of them in 1982. Physical intimidation and violence by some teachers was not extraordinary.

I don’t blame Benson-Pope for his alleged bullying of defenceless children over twenty years ago. What is disturbing, however, is that a guy with his downright merciless and inhumane tendencies, is in a position of high moral and political authority today. Benson-Pope ascribes to a certain social agenda: he is a bully, and does not have any regard for using callous tactics to get what he wants done.

Nor does Benson-Pope take responsibility for his alleged brutality. His disregard for the sincerity of the complainants, and his constantly changing story, suggest that he has only ever seen the issue as a political fight. He sees it as perfectly legitimate to use his considerable resources, and media machine, to attack his alleged victims. After having selectively leaked parts of the Police Report, he is now attempting to shift the blame for that onto his press secretary. Classic symptoms of a man of supreme desperation, in denial.

Benson-Pope’s alleged actions in 1982 were hardly defensible, if true. But they are understandable in the context of the time.

Benson-Pope could have dealt with the whole issue by meeting his alleged victims in person, and in private, and sitting through with them, and listening to what they believed occurred in 1982. He could have apologised to them for his intimidating behaviour. And they would have forgiven him.

Instead, through his initial denials—and a ferocity of denial that convinced many that he certainly had the combative personality to inflict physical harm, his constant attacks on his accusers, his refusal to face questions with ridiculous excuses for not showing up, and his recent about-turn with protests that he simply no longer remembers what happened—he has destroyed his own political career. He has chosen to avoid a court of law, and in the process, has been convicted by a court of public opinion.

But at least in his senility, the PPTA will welcome him back to the classroom, where he can regale his pupils with political war stories.

Solution to Cricket Hooliganism: Number 1939

2005-12-05T15:14:00.000+13:00

I am New Zealand cricket's number one fan. I will never allow an ill word to be said about any of the players, coaches, support staff, or administration, past, present, and future. Cricket is the game of the Gods, and all those who play and spectate are worthy of a place in Heaven. Even the non-Catholics.

Which is why I am surprised at recent reports of ill-mannered behaviour at Eden Park on Saturday.

There is a simple solution to New Zealand Cricket's crowd control problems. It is not in enforcing tighter security. It is not in serving all the booze in plastic cups, or reducing alcohol consumption at the ground.

Cricket crowds do not behave badly. There are no cricket hooligans. There are merely supportive supporters, who are doing their best to even the playing field. The answer to New Zealand cricket's crowd control problems lies among the players themselves:

STOP PLAYING LIKE A BUNCH OF FUCKING GIRLS, AND THEN THE CROWD WON'T HAVE TO HELP YOU!

Peter Beats Winston To The Punch

2005-12-02T09:42:00.000+13:00

In one of the big surprises of the peculiar coalition arrangements this term, Peter Dunne is rattling his sabre.

It's unusual only in the sense that all the commentators expected Winston to lose his rag at Aunty Helen first. Apart from throwing a hissy-fit at international and domestic media and calling for a warming of relations with the United States, which Helen Clark would rather be kept on ice, Winston has been relatively well-behaved. He hasn't engaged in any alcohol-fuelled late-night brawling with taxi drivers since becoming a Minister Outside Cabinet. He hasn't been filmed staggering out of a Chogm meeting, haranguing foreigners. He hasn't even made defamatory remarks about a political opponent. All in all, Winston has kept his head down, and has deserved Helen's feint praise by performing "pretty well".

One of the features of the coalition agreement that Peter Dunne has signed with the Labour Party is that the doctrine of collective responsibility applies only to the ministerial portfolio that Dunne holds. Dunne is the Minister of Revenue. He is bound by the will of the whole Cabinet on revenue matters. He cannot speak out against, or seek to undermine, any policy area relating to the revenue portfolio. Otherwise, he faces instant dismissal.

So what, then, of Dunne's recent encouragement to National's campaign to ditch the Carbon Tax proposal? The Carbon Tax is government policy. It was agreed to, collectively, by the last Labour Government. Helen Clark has signalled a review of it, but it still remains a key policy feature of this Labour-led Government, until such time as the Government acts on any recommendations to ditch it.

The Carbon Tax is a revenue proposal, which will add a further $360 million to Government coffers. Dunne is actively seeking to undermine a revenue proposal. He is breaching the collective responsibility he holds with respect to the revenue portfolio. If any other minister in her Government had acted in a similar fashion, Helen would have sacked that Minister.

Dunne is supposed to be the straight guy. He's the one who is supposed to engage with officials on arcane aspects of revenue policy, and get his jiffy out of their equally arcane responses. Dunne is the geek. He's not the troublemaker. But strange times call for strange actions, and even the most boring of men can rise to the occasion and start a shit-fight.

How much longer will this ridiculous farce continue?

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Another Commie Activist Hates America!

2005-12-02T08:22:00.000+13:00

In yet another piece of selective evidence-gathering, Russell Brown is trumpeting former US Attorney-General and "peace activist" Ramsey Clark's attempt to join Saddam Hussein's defence team as a sign that the US-led war in Iraq is immoral and wrong.

It is true that Ramsey Clark is making a bid to defend Saddam. But that isn't a surprise.

Ramsey Clark was briefly Attorney-General under Lyndon Johnson, for a year in 1967. His appointment, and tenure, was hardly distinguished by any measure. It is widely considered that Clark's initial appointment was intended to unseat Clark's father from the Supreme Court, which duly occurred.

Since his fleeting post, Ramsey Clark has distinguished himself only among the sordid company that he keeps. Clark defended David Koresh, who went on to murder 85 of his fellow Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, in 1993. Clark defended Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord who led his country into civil war. Clark defended Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,a Rwandan warlord, and one of the key architects of genocide in that country. In the mid-80s, Clark acted for the PLO, defending their claim against the family of Leon Klinghoffer, whom the PLO murdered during their takeover of the Achille Lauro. In the former Yugoslavia, Ramsey Clark was particularly active: he was a key member of the defense team for both Slobodan Milosevic, and Radovan Karadzic.

Russell Brown would like to assert that Clark's move is another coup against the War. No, it's not, Russell. It shows precisely what the anti-American motives of the anti-War activists are. With Ramsey Clark on Saddam's team, if I were George W, I'd be delighted. If Hitler had escaped from the bunker, Ramsey Clark would have been the first to line up to act for him at the Nuremberg Trials. If Stalin had faced the music over the atrocities he inflicted on his own people, then Ramsey Clark would have been his Senior Counsel.

Ramsey Clark's client list is a who's who of the most notorious war criminals and bludgeoneers of the twentieth century. The only thing they have in common, apart from the crimes against humanity that they have perpetrated, is their hatred at the United States for holding them to account.

Peace activist my arse!

Taxing To The Hilt: The Failed Socialist Experiment

2005-11-23T23:15:00.000+13:00

The great mistake that Socialists make about the world is that individuals behaviour does not change by altering the tax system. This is their justification for not cutting taxes when tax cuts are affordable: that they refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that tax changes influence individual economic activities, which have a massive cumulative effect on the overall economy.

The most startling case in point is the current state of the property market. The principal reason that that the Auckland residential property market has been running so hot over the last few years has nothing to do with sound macroeconomics; even the most basic economist will tell you that housing is not a productive investment. It does not, of itself, create wealth. But it is a sensible individual choice, based in large part to the peculiarities of the tax system that Michael Cullen governs.

The reality is that while it is nonsensical that investment property attracts so much individual investment, compared to productive assets, it is very sensible at the individual level. The reason it makes sense is that for small, individual investors, capital gains on investment properties are not taxed.

Personal income is taxed. At sixty thousand dollars, an investor is paying twice the marginal tax than somebody earning thirty-eight thousand dollars a year. The Socialist mantra claims, for some reason, that this is a fair arrangement. The individual taxpayer, who is by no means wealthy, but is striving hard to earn sixty thousand a year, does not feel that same degree of fairness. Unfairness soon leads to resentment. And resentment leads to people looking at ways of behaving differently.

There are various, widely-known mechanisms and financial products in the market to deliver tax-free capital gains to off-set personal income tax. And there are many individual investors—principally those who are earning over $60,000 per year—who are taking advantage of their legal entitlements.

Gone are the days when investment in residential property was a time-consuming affair, associated with the pitfalls of finding a good tenant to a property. There are several companies in the market that provide an end-to-end property investment service, from development of the property, financing, provision of legal advice, valuation of the property, tenancy and maintenance management, and guarantees of rental returns. An ordinary investor can enter the residential property market, having expended no greater energy than he would if he had simply gone down to the bank and made a deposit.

These are not the rich fat cats of society. This is not a scandal of winebox proportions. This is not a story of a handful of high net-worth individuals exploiting cunningly-devised, and little-known tax legislation, to rip the tax base of a few million dollars here and there. Rather, it is a matter of ordinary, mum-and-dad investors making the use of basic investment vehicles to reduce their tax liabilities, to the tune of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars a year. They are not even small business owners who can take advantage of this situation, but ordinary, average, middle-income salary and wage earners.

The average income for a university-educated, full-time worker in paid employment is morme than $60,000 per year. In Auckland, that person earns more. Consequently, there is a massive market for property-based financial products that are designed to reduce tax.

The property market in New Zealand is effectively a state-sanctioned, and profitable grand pyramid scheme. Demand for residential property investment, propelled by high marginal tax rates, is largely immune to incremental interest rate rises, as the higher the finance cost of a property, the greater that property losses can be attributed against personal income tax. High marginal tax rates at low threshholds, through the property market, have created a degree of structural inflation.

Michael Cullen argues that reducing tax across the board has inflationary effects. Roger Kerr has written extensively on this, pointing out that in an open, competitive, trading economy, the effect of increasing the money supply is less inflationary than in a protected market. The reason for this is that the price of most goods and services in New Zealand is directly related to international commodity prices: New Zealand is too small a market to effect an increase in international commodity prices.

And what Cullen's argument doesn't address is that high marginal tax rates are a key component in both structural inflation, and high interest rates: housing investment is normally financed by fixed-term interest rates that are immune to increases in the Reserve Bank's OCR. House price inflation, driven by increased demand for investment property, to off-set personal income tax, is the key player in the structural inflationary mix.

This, of course, constitutes on its own, a massive potential threat to the tax base. It is guided, for no other reason, than that individual investors feel resentful towards the Government for the amount of money they are paying in tax, for little service.

The result is four-fold: that the Socialists’ attempt to punish the well-off doesn’t actually work, that the tax base is reduced, and that economic activity is distorted: that individuals will cumulatively invest in non-productive assets, rather than productive businesses. Further, low-income New Zealanders are priced out of owning their own homes, as structural inflation locks them out.

That is entirely the situation in the New Zealand economy today.

The Reserve Bank has responded that it is looking at the arrangements of Loss Attributing Qualifying Companies. Again, these are not intricate devices reserved only for the very wealthy who can afford complex legal advice; they can be set up by any one of many mortgage-brokers in New Zealand. They are the prime instrument for reducing an individual’s tax liability. These products are easily accessible, and inexpensive to set up.

Tens of thousands of LAQCs function to fuel and maintain the value of the property market. The effect of any changes to the tax system relating to LAQCs would have an immediate and catastrophic effect on the Auckland housing market, in particular. The consequence of that is a potential threat to the banking system as a whole. But before the Socialists suggest that such a correction would be a good thing, consider this: the working capital of most small businesses in New Zealand is financed by equity in residential property. Start pinging the housing market, and small companies--and therefore jobs--go down the drain.

The only means to safely amend this situation is not to look at a capital gains tax on property. Capital gains have come about because of the distortionary nature of the tax system, which is driving investors into property ahead of other asset classes.

A far more practical approach to encourage investors to move into productive assets is to reduce high marginal tax rates. It’s not something Michael Cullen would like to tell his voters—who believe that middle-income New Zealanders are actually being punished for working hard and earning more. The reality for many of them is that the punishment doesn’t exist. Instead, the tax system fuels higher housing prices, making it unaffordable for low-income New Zealanders to live in places like Auckland and Wellington. Yet again, the Socialist formula cheats low-income New Zealanders who aren’t paying sufficient tax to benefit from tax write-offs in order to leverage them into the property market.

By reducing marginal tax rates and increasing the threshholds to which those rates apply, the Government would remove this perverse incentive to over-invest in the property market. Residential property would still be a viable investment option, but it would no longer be the only investment option for many New Zealanders. House prices would rise at a slower rate, and the structural inflation, and higher interest rates to attempt to counter those price rises, would disappear.

This morning I was having breakfast with a mate, who earns around a hundred grand a year. He’s not wealthy, except in the eyes of the non-working poor, but he is comfortable. I asked him about his property investments. He responded that he had none. I said to him: “Are you fucking mad? Why not?”

He answers: “Because I’m not sure about where the market’s at, right now.”

So I give him a three-minute spiel around the fact the Auckland property market has doubled in value, every seven years, for the last hundred years. That a very simply-devised mechanism would provide him with an additional income stream of twenty thousand dollars a year, plus capital gains over the medium-term.

By the time we got to our second coffee, I had made a call to another mate to see him at lunchtime. By dinner this evening, my breakfast companion was the proud investor in two residential properties, and Dr Cullen was some twenty thousand dollars a year poorer.

New Zealanders don’t have to go off-shore to pay lower taxes. They can do that right here. Of course, it doesn’t make our economy as a whole more robust, and low-income New Zealanders don’t share in that wealth—but that is the necessary consequence of Socialism and rampant taxation.

The Labour Government has slowly, but surely, created this situation due to their dogmatic insistence that it is right and fair to punish middle-income New Zealanders. Over the last six years wage rises have pushed middle New Zealand into high marginal tax brackets. This has encouraged New Zealanders to seek alternative investment options to reduce that tax liability.

Comments Policy

2005-11-23T11:51:00.000+13:00

I take a fairly liberal approach to comments on this blog. Consistent with my basic philosophy that I don’t care what others think, nor do I particularly care how others express themselves here. Readers of the comments section will often see something from a pinko commie, who, through their own volition, has decided to both read what I have written here, and be offended by it. That’s their choice.

Of all the comments this blog has received, I have only ever deleted one comment, due to the defamatory content about another right-wing blogger. Mere criticism, or opposing debate, no matter how shoddy, is not, in my view, a reason to delete a comment. I’ll even take insults directed at me, straight on the chin: generally they are so weak and pathetic that it’s less trouble to ignore them than go through the process of deleting a comment.

(As an aside, I have also deleted spam, but that is no longer a problem since I installed the word verification feature here.)

Some blogs do not have comments features. Russell Brown is notorious for this: he actively writes a tirade of socialist nonsense, yet doesn’t give his readers the opportunity to respond. That’s his choice. It’s a hypocritical choice when he then spends half his days filling up the comments sections of other right-wing bloggers. I might have thought that it would be more sensible for him to grow some testicles and install a comments feature on his blog, if he wanted to have public discussion of his stupid thinking, but again, that’s his choice.

It does perplex me, however, when a left-winger sets up a blog, makes up an inflammatory post about a right-winger, and then deletes the comment that the right-winger makes in response. Such is the case with About Town this morning.

This morning, Xavier did a post disputing the appropriateness of my blog title. It was reasonably well-written and witty. I commented along the lines of: “Don’t you commie fuckers realize that I’m not actually offended by the idea that you’ve got nothing better to do than sling shit?”

And what do you know? Xavier deleted his original post, disabling that comment. He then reposted the same article. As if my response didn't exist, which is relatively deceitful in the general scheme of debate.

But for the record: no, I’m not offended by those pinko tantrums. Nor am I surprised that the About Towners are sufficiently dishonest as to delete a post they’ve made, simply to disable a comment I’ve made in response.

Hager: The Right Killed Rod Donald

2005-11-22T12:41:00.000+13:00

I haven’t blogged at all on Rod Donald’s death. I have said to some that I detested everything that he stood for, and to suddenly claim some sudden grief at his passing would be hypocritical and self-centred.

I have said before that the most dangerous movement in New Zealand right now is the Green Party, and their duplicitous, envious approach to prosperity and wealth-creation in this country. They are not an environmental movement: they are a socialist brand that tries to hide its real agenda behind the caring, sharing, friendly face of conservation and protection of resources. To that end, I had no respect for what Rod Donald stood for.

Green Party members are the absolute dregs of society: anarchists, Marxists, and greedy little pinkos who want the State to capture yet more of the prosperity that individuals create. They will not be content until they have turned New Zealand back to a nirvanic ice age. When Rod Donald died, they were quite happy to manipulate the occasion so that everybody would feel a little happier about a key member of the Green movement.

But now some of them have come back out of their cages, and unhappy with the amount of glory they received, want just a little more, by politicising Donald’s death even further.

In this morning’s Herald, Nicky Hager is reported as criticizing the hypocrisy of Donald’s lifetime enemies, who praised Donald’s achievements in death. Here I don’t expect to have it both ways—people are free to mourn whomever one chooses, but I didn’t feel comfortable mourning him. I didn’t know Donald well, and didn’t have much to do with him personally. Nor did I want to. Yet Hager would have been the first to cry foul if Helen Clark, Don Brash, or Winston Peters had remained silent on Donald’s death.

But here is the clincher. At the memorial service for Donald in Wellington yesterday, Hager lands another new conspiracy: that the Right were responsible for Donald’s death. At the service, Hager said:

“He said Mr Donald had to endure taunts of "nutty" and "loony" designed to marginalise him and what he stood for. "I'm sure those years of personal attacks and put-downs were a constant strain that took their toll."

Wrong, Nicky. Rod Donald was a nut. People who told him so were just stating facts. You too are a loon. If you’re going to jump into the political arena and throw smear at others because of their ideas—as Rod Donald did, and you have always done, then you can expect people to bite back.

The reality is that the Green movement in New Zealand has not received anything like the exposure it deserves. The soft image of the Green Party—led by Jeanette and Rod—masked the fringe lunacy of ending all further electricity generation, doubling petrol taxes, having Nandor promoting cannabis use outside secondary schools, releasing violent offenders from prisons, make roading construction prohibitive, slashing defence expenditure, and the minimization of private property rights. In short, the very claims that the Exclusive Brethren made during the election campaign, which, despite the Greens’ ire and rage, were largely accurate. Yet did the media focus on the actual claims the EB’s made? No. They focused on the messenger.

That was a classic Rod Donald tactic. To shift attention away from the shoddiness and undesirability of its own policy platforms, and instead create a culture of envy against those who work to create economic prosperity. They are inherently manipulators of truth. They fight the game hard. And for all the contempt I had for Rod Donald, he was pretty good at withstanding the attacks that he got. But he didn’t get attacked nearly as often as he deserved.

But it’s a nice try, Nicky. You should write a book about it. There’s definitely a conspiracy story in there somewhere.

It is, of course, part of an attempt to lionise Rod Donald: he is no longer able to actively strategise for them, but those who are left behind can use his memory to manipulate and carry on the sordid Green agenda. It is a disgraceful claim from Hager, but somehow one that Donald probably would have approved, if only because he, more than anybody else of the Left, lived by the principle that the end justifies the means.

Public Sector Excess Award: MSD

2005-11-18T06:57:00.000+13:00

This morning I went looking for the Ministry of Social Development's briefing to the Incoming Government, following media reports that the MSD has now taken upon itself to be the Government's principal adviser--not on welfare issues--but on public health issues as well. I was curious as to how it came about that the MSD had taken on such a role.

So I visit the site. I look at media releases. And what do I find?

Nothing about the Ministry's briefing to the incoming government, I'm afraid. Well, it is there, but it's not displayed through the normal information channels. I might have thought that as a key policy adviser, that their PR person might have made it a high priority.

But apparently the MSD's public relations person has other priorities.

Or should I say, the MSD's PR machine. Because it is a frigging huge machine.

That is The Ministry of Social Development has three Wellington-based public relations advisers. Fair enough, I think. It's a big Government department. Three people is precisely triple as existed in 1999, even under the self-promoting extremes of Christine Rankin.

But I hadn't quite hit the mark, chaps and chapettes. Because in addition to the three media advisers based in Wellington, the Ministry of Social Development has ELEVEN regional public relations lackeys on their payroll. Fourteen spin-nurses lactating from the public breast. This is supposedly part of the high-value government expenditure that is more important than your tax cut.

Don't believe me? Then have a look here. Count them. Better still, if you, like me, run out of fingers at ten, I've listed them here.

Bronwyn Saunders Chief Media Advisor

Jane Mortlock Media Advisor

Northland Clare Blackburn

Auckland Aidan Richards

Auckland Amelia Cairns

Waikato Irving Young

Bay Of Plenty Julie Hill

Taranaki Gail Bennett

East Coast Calvin Robinson

Central Jacqui Ferrel

Wellington Mel Collier

Nelson Jill Harris

Canterbury Amanda Cook

Southern Juliet Smith

Yes. That makes fourteen of them. To give you an insight, that is three times larger than the DominionPost's entire full-time political contingent in the Press Gallery. From one government department.

And what kind of self-congratulatory trash do they put out? Apart from the grand total of fifteen press releases that the entire PR team has issued in the last year, have a look at this Pulitzer-winning piece: a newsletter about how some people were hired through Work and Income to station the tills in a supermarket, and a particularly scintillating gem about a Work and Income Case Manager who "teaches paper-making and card-making and how to make photo frames."

This is what your taxes are paying for. Oh, and if you were looking for the MSD's briefing, it's here. They do mention that the Government needs to "consider new pricing and tax initiatives around tobacco and alcohol". The numbers they use to justify it--that eighteen percent of all deaths in New Zealand are caused by tobacco smoking--aren't supported by the Ministry of Health--the Government's delegated principal public health adviser. MoH puts the same death rate at seventeen percent. A minor quibble, but MoH doesn't mention tax changes to reduce tobacco or alcohol consumption. Nor does Treasury or the IRD--the Government's principal tax policy advisers.

So what precisely is the MSD playing at? It really does sound rather like a stalking-horse for filling Government coffers even higher, presumably because the MSD needs the funds to ensure that some currently unemployed people in Northland get jobs working as PR advisers for the Ministry.

Fuck You, John O'Neill!

2005-11-18T05:50:00.000+13:00

Yes, the ultimate comeback.

Despite the bleary-eyed cranks who thought we couldn't pull it off, and with Auntie Helen competing against Nelson Mandela in the first round, we've won the hosting rights for the Cup in 2011!

I never thought that the Cup was unaffordable to New Zealand in future years--but despite the vast odds, and all the depressive cocksuckers who thought we couldn't bring it here, it's ours.

All we have to do is win the frigging thing in 2007, and keep it here in 2011.

The Albino Affair

2005-11-10T15:44:00.000+13:00

Not so long ago, I was passing through Wellington for a weekend. While there, Adam*, an old university mate, suggested that I make an appearance for his cricket team.

Being the obliging guy that I am, I agreed. After all, I was free, single, and enjoyed the lads’ reputation for consuming copious quantities of alcohol before, during, and after a cricket match. To make it all the more worthwhile, there was an All Black game on that night, which was Adam’s ideal excuse for holding a gathering at his place.

The cricket was not memorable. It was the kind of blustery, arse-awful late-Summer day that only Wellington can turn on, leaving the players cranky, wind-burnt and with no result. Ideal for drinking beer.

I had not played for Adam’s team before. We were playing against a Sri Lankan eleven. The Sri Lankan players had learned their sense of sportsmanship from the Sri Lankan national side. Unfortunately for them, they had learned their cricketing prowess from the pre-Aravinda days of the Sri Lankan game.

The Sri Lankans were woeful that day. Being a competitive young whippersnapper, while they were batting and I was standing in the outfield, I broached the subject of their talent.

“How is it that you guys are so keen about cricket, yet you’re so fucking useless?”

At first, they reacted with the light, dulcet tones of the sort of performers who are used to sledging at high-level, cut-throat sport. They laughed.

I was in an obnoxious mood. There were six of them, and one of me. I wasn’t about to be laughed off. Still, I remained diplomatic and calm, while I devised my next strategy.

The Sri Lankans lost three wickets in seven balls. I had observed that the new batsmen were taking an inordinate amount of time to come out to the crease. The previous batsman had taken six minutes to go out to bat, after the previous batsman had left the field.

“Are you guys just completely fucking disorganized, or are you deliberately taking your fucking time?” I asked again, providing two conciliatory answers for them to choose.

From that point, a considerable argument resulted, in which I accused them of deliberately prolonging their padding-up in the hope that it would rain, and the match would be called off. I subtly advised them that they were a bunch of cheating, objectionable, pathetic duck eggs who didn’t deserve being on the same field as me.

Before a full-on rumble could commence, it started to rain. As I wandered back to my team-mates, I harangued them for not giving the Sri Lankans the same kind of grief that I had given them. One of them quietly, and quite feebly, informed me that they didn’t have anybody on their team who spoke to the opposition like that.

“Then you’re a pack of limp-wristed cocksuckers too!” I notified him.

Slightly annoyed, and moderately wind-burnt, I consoled myself by drinking more beer. I returned to Adam’s house, and drank more beer, and assisted him and his flatmates in preparing for the party. By “assisted”, I mean that I shouted at him a few more times about the state of his cricket team, and reported to him that I would discount him as a friend if he had not ensured that any hot chicks turned up to please me.

The party began civilly. It was a particularly genteel affair. I was assigned to the barbecue. Adam astonished and amazed several guests by pouring methylated spirits directly onto the burning coals, and by not setting fire to himself. I was quite liberal with the bourbon and continued to make what I thought were amusing references to other people about swapping one of my shots of bourbon for one of their shots of coke. To emphasise just how drunk I was becoming, my punchline would invariably be: “Hmmm. That sounds like a fair trade to me!”

Adam’s large deck was the perfect venue for a wrestle. For some reason, nobody else was particularly keen on wrestling. So I picked the biggest, strongest, and most athletic guy at the party and tackled him. Reluctantly, he started wrestling back. Gasps and cries shot out into the night, when I annoyed the biggest, strongest, and most athletic guy so much that he inevitably picked me up and threw me some distance off the deck, and down on top of a small tree.

I agreed that that was a satisfactory riposte to my behaviour, and decided not to continue wrestling. Instead, I wandered inside, and spotted another old friend, Nick, on the other side of the room. I drank a couple of drinks that didn’t belong to me, and shouted out: “Hey, Nick!”

Nick turned. So did everybody else.

“What?” Nick asked.

“Catch this!” I replied.

Now, I should tell you, dear reader, that I am an avid reader of the Bible. And that moment, I understood just how Moses felt when the Red Sea parted through Moses’ faith, and faith alone. And like the Red Sea, the entire gathering separated in two, leaving a perfect corridor between myself and Nick.

So I started to run. I gathered some speed before, having finished the running stage of my challenge, I started to jump.

That evening, Nick, who has never been particularly keen to catch a cricket ball, did take the catch. He caught me. He had no choice but to catch me. At first he was stunned. Then, having taken my weight in his arms, his legs told him that his body was not designed to withstand such a force. So he teetered. And he began to fall.

But before he fell, I jumped off him. Nick crashed through a wooden chair, shattering it to pieces. Nick accused me of breaking the chair. I answered that I hadn’t touched the fucking chair, and that he was to blame. Before a fist-fight broke out, we agreed that it was best to settle the dispute by drinking more alcohol.

At this juncture, given that I had made myself persona non grata among at least one of Adam’s flatmates, for no other reason than that I was close to Nick when he smashed through her favourite chair, I opted to retire to the deck with my bottle of bourbon.

When I reached my spot, I made a point of pissing on the lemon tree that I had fallen through during my wrestle, telling anybody who happened to be near me that urine, being very acidic, is highly “nutrientious to citrus trees”. Some wag claimed that there was no such word as “nutrientious”. I told him he was a fucking dick.

I have found that some of clearest thoughts that I have ever had have occurred during urination. Perhaps it is the lack of concentration involved once I have unzipped my pants and flopped it out; I go into auto-pilot, and reach a zen-like state. This cleansing of the bladder and mind revealed to me that on the other corner of the deck were a very blond, pale guy, and a very hot chick.

Having completed my ablutions, I asked Adam who the chick was “with the Albino”. Adam answered that he didn’t know who the chick was, but that she had come with Daniel, who was a friend and work colleague of one of Adam’s flatmates. The same flatmate who was already dark at me because Nick had broken her favourite chair.

“It’s okay, mate. I’ll be polite,” I slur.

So off I wander, and by the time I reached the end of the deck, Daniel had gone off to use the actual toilet, and I was left alone with the hot chick. I started chatting her up. Delicately. Subtly. “So you came here with the Albino, did you?”

She giggles. I offer her bourbon. Classy-like. From the bottle. She obliges. We talk more, I get her laughing. The Albino returns, but being the socially inept drop-kick that he is, he’s too scared to join the conversation, despite my loud references to “Albinos” that everybody else on the deck hears, but he ignores.

Now, I’ve never understood this about Albinos. I’ve found that if I mention “Germany” loudly, among groups of Germans, that they pick up the cue to come and talk to me. If I say “America” near some Americans, they see it as an invitation to chat about America. But I can report that in my experience, saying the word “Albino” at volume, near a guy with very blond hair, does not provoke the same degree of hospitality.

Assuming that Daniel the Albino is not a very cheerful, happy-go-lucky bloke, and that the hot chick doesn’t know anybody else at the party, the last thing I want is for her to be left on her own and bored. So I keep her talking. She seems to be entertained. We’re getting along well. And she’s very hot.

So, pretty rapidly, events tend to collide with each other, and we are in somebody’s car, while I give instructions that we are heading into town. The Albino is not traveling in the same vehicle. We arrive on Courtenay Place, and in that dare-devil way that lads do when it’s not such a dare-devil thing to do, we jump out of the moving vehicle. I say this is hardly dare-devil, as traffic moves very slowly late on a Saturday night.

And there we are in a karaoke bar. I go and gate-crash somebody else’s song, get the bartender to pour some more drinks, and start dancing with the hot chick. All simultaneously. We’re dancing pretty close, and she’s enjoying herself, and a few of the others from the party start arriving.

The Albino walks in, dead sober, and cranky that his girlfriend has her tongue in my mouth. And what does he do? Yes indeed. He gives her the stare.

The stare might work on a chick who is sober, or who when drunk has a conscience. This chick didn’t have sobriety, or a sense that she cared about the Albino.

But it was at this stage that I made my one fatal mistake of the evening. Until that time, I had survived an attempt to brawl with the Sri Lankan Cricket Team, wrestled a much larger person, imbibed far more alcohol than was humanly safe, broken furniture, sung ridiculously loud songs without destroying my voice, and had not yet been stabbed by the Albino, whose girlfriend, while not having technically stolen her, was certainly borrowing her without his permission.

Because what I did then was turn my back on him. Later, when I digested the events that I remembered of the previous evening, I reflected that I had learned a crucial lesson about animal behaviour: humankind has evolved to a state of culture and civilization such that we often forget just how vicious animals can get when they have the opportunity. They don’t think of pride, of humiliation, or even their own extinction when cornered. Such animals will throw everything, no matter how dirty, into a fight. It is their instinct.

And Albinos possess that same animal instinct.

I am not saying that a fight ensued, because it didn’t. Nor am I alleging that anything specifically untoward occurred at that point. What I will say is that when we returned to our table, the hot chick took a few swigs of her drink, and promptly rested her head on the table to sleep. Albino did not look surprised in the least.

If I had known as much as I do now, about the fine art of criminal forensics—since accidentally viewing an episode of CSI Miami recently—then I might have had evidential cause to suspect that the Albino had deliberately spiked his girlfriend’s drink in order to drag her away. In fact, I did not see him spike the drink. I did not keep a sample of it for testing.

I just suspected that was the case.

Which is why I am always suspicious of Albinos. They can never be trusted not to fight really really dirty when the crucial moment arrives.

*Not his real name.

Spare A Thought For These Impoverished Pinkos...

2005-11-04T09:18:00.000+13:00

There’s been some comment on Russell Brown’s new union, The Association Of Talentless Herald Columnists, and some of the tactics they have used to address their pay dispute. Cathy Odgers has blogged on it--but from now on I am making no further reference to Cathy on my blog. Except for this.

My dispute with Cathy goes back some time. The essence of it is that she is an ideas-stealing bitch. She plagiarises my writing subject constantly. Her writing style is merely a slightly chickified version of my own.

Case in point: this morning I was being taxied to the airport. It was 4:30am, and I had nothing else to do for the hour-long journey. So I was browsing the internet on my cellphone.

My phone is not a particularly sophisticated creature. I use it merely to send and receive calls. But I’d worked out how to browse the interwebby thing, and caught up with Cathy’s blog. That’s when I read this story.

Now, the thing is with my phone is that only a limited number of characters can appear on the screen. So Cathy’s blog takes up 178 pages on the phone. Her Gang Of 14 piece extends to fourteen pages, excluding comments--a nice display of collaboration between herself and Nokia, if there ever were one. The upshot of it was that I could only read a paragraph of her writing at a time, and then wait a few seconds before the next page came up.

So I worked my way down, and had time to think between pages. At one point, I am thinking: “Ah, but there’s no excuse for Colin James to be a party of that bunch of whingeing, socialist losers.” And what is Cathy’s next line, once it finally comes up on my phone? Yes, folks: “I expected more from Colin James but there you go.”

See? The cow STOLE MY FRIGGING THOUGHT, YET AGAIN! CURSES!

That irritates me because as one strives to be original in this world, it often feels like I have uncovered the proverbial barrel of monkeys that are throwing random letters around, and somehow composing the entire works of William Shakespeare. In this case, I am the bard, and Cathy is the barrel. But I digress. It means that being the literary type, and having uncovered somebody who is revealing my thoughts before I get to express them, I have to outsmart those frigging monkeys.

So I’m coming up here with a few perspectives that Cathy missed out. As I write this, it is 2:30am in Hong Kong, and there’s no way she can amend her post in time to throw me the banana skins on this one.

I agree with Cathy that the Herald has the commercial right to do whatever it likes with its columnists’ work. I concur that this is essentially a pay dispute. But I go further with these points.

For a group of professional writers who compose valid arguments for a living, their complaint is really pretty shoddy. They throw in a range of inconsistent issues: concern about readers’ access to their work, concern that the Herald will lose out commercially in advertising revenue; concern that they weren’t consulted on a commercial decision made by the Herald; concern that readers will not buy the print edition anymore. They way the open letter is pitched, these are the chief gripes that the columnists have.

But that is patently dishonest on their part. If their problems were about readers’ access to their work, how does paying them more mitigate that concern? Are they actually saying that their views can be bought for a price? And if so, doesn’t that make an absolute sham of them expressing their opinions, if those opinions are a tradeable commodity (i.e. if they will shut up about the Herald‘s charging mechanism in exchange for more money, doesn‘t that suggest that every other view they express up for sale as well?).

Next the columnists crank about the cost of the on-line premium access. On the one hand they complain that the on-line readership has fallen off, and that their much-vaunted reader “feedback” has disappeared. Then they argue later that they see that the premium content strategy is likely to “cannibalise the print edition”, due to the substantial savings that readers will have by purchasing an annual on-line subscription. Well, dear columnists, which of the two is it? Those two points are entirely inconsistent with each other. If anything, what you have established is that you are incapable of making judgements on commercial decisions by media companies. While some of your arguments are coherent of their own, put together, they don’t make sense. If you were all running the Herald, you would never be able to form an opinion on anything!

Next we get to the substance of the complaint. That they’re not being paid enough. This is a curious mechanism for a bunch of Socialists: what they have done here is attempt to enter into collective pay negotiations. One of the features of the Employment Relations Act is that only registered unions are permitted to bargain collectively. And correct me if I’m wrong here, but the last time I looked, Russell Brown is not a registered union. He's not even an incorporated society.

The EMPU does have a large cabal of journalists among its membership, but they are clearly not a party to this pay dispute. For one, the columnists’ open letter slags off journalists and reveals to the public that the middle-class, liberal moralising that comes from the socialist media is not based on any degree of poverty on the journalists’ part.

So what we are seeing is a group of pinkos slagging off other pinkos, and in doing so undermining the purpose of the pinko Employment Relations Act by attempting to bargain collectively without the authority to do so.

Next we see the columnists attempt a comparison of what they earn versus feature writers. As Cathy has pointed out, a lot more effort goes into writing a feature than an opinion piece--feature writers interview subjects, get a range of views on a subject, and seek to report the whole story based on a range of facts. Columnists have no requirement to be objective. They don’t interview; they just write what is in their heads. So too did John Manukia--but that‘s a different subject.

But the main difference between a columnist and a feature writer is that one is a full-time employee, while the other is a person of standing or interest in the community who has a range of opinions on different issues. They have full-time employment elsewhere. Kerre Woodham, for example, is a well-paid talkback host. Bryan Gaynor is an economist. Tapu Misa is a freelance journalist--by choice, she does not wish to be tied to a single media company. So too is music writer Graham Reid. Through the Herald, they are given an additional forum to express the points of view that they form in their daily lives.

It is not a primary occupation. It is a bonus, which all the columnists involved benefit from in their non-columnist lives through the extra profile they receive from the Herald.

Finally, the complaint seeks to blame the Herald for the columnists’ own naivety. They confess their ignorance of copyright law, by signing it away to the Herald. Well, boo-friggity-hoo. You ignorant tossers entered into a commercial agreement with a company, and you want public sympathy for your stupidity? Cry me a frigging river!

As the monkey-barrel has pointed out, these are not star columnists. People do not read the Herald so that they can catch up on a Kerre Woodham column. They might read her column because it happens to appear in the Herald, but she doesn’t have any commercial pull of her own. And there is no shortage of interesting and qualified freelance writers who could replace them.

Compare the gang of 14--who are so individually insignificant that they feel their only means of addressing their pay dispute is to act collectively, with this guy. The Sun and the Daily Mail are currently in a legal wrangle over the employment of star columnist Richard Littlejohn, who was poached by the Mail for £ 1.2 million.

Bet Richard Littlejohn didn’t think of acting collectively for better pay.

Stuart Boag For Rakaia!

2005-11-03T09:11:00.000+13:00

Come on out from under that bushel, Stu, and make a stand for the Rakaia seat.

Now is your time!

Why I Blog...

2005-11-02T21:59:00.000+13:00

An esteemed historian I used to know well, and for whom I had great respect, once told me about his philosophy on writing. To him, the written word has the power to condemn, to sanctify, to define and refine, to illuminate and obfuscate, to make light of the most tragic, or to sadden the most fantastic. Writing immortalises what the spoken tongue often forgets. But that is only part of it; the same can be said of any professional writer’s philosophy. What was most important to him was not the power of writing itself, but the connection that the writer had with his intended audience. For this particular scribe, he didn’t care for literary criticism. He didn’t concern himself with pundits or reviews. He never sought fame or acclaim for his work. Because he knew his audience.

To him, his text was the one tangible asset that he could transfer to his future generations, in the knowledge that none of his children could squander his legacy. He wrote for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, about an age that he lived, and through his words, even if never published, his afterbears would have that perpetual knowledge that printed matter possessed. They were the only readers he cared about.

When Joe Stein published his first novel, Primary Colors, he also had an audience in mind. The sensation his work created, based on Bill Clinton’s campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 1992, was as much based around the fact that he wrote under the pseudonym Anonymous, than for the quality of the novel or the subject matter. Of course, it was a passable novel, nicely written, witty, clever, but not brilliant. It sold well because readers wanted to know who Anonymous was. Joe Klein, a Time political correspondent who had followed Clinton’s up-and-down campaign, knew this readership well. It was the perfect gimmick.

It was an equally intriguing gimmick that Simon Carr played out when he authored The Spin: A Novel Of New Zealand Politics, in 1996. The novel didn’t have quite the scale of Klein’s effort, but Carr knew his mischief would create a mini-storm in the Capital. Knowing his readership, it didn’t actually matter that the events and interludes that Carr described occurred three years earlier, when he was part of Jim Bolger’s campaign. What mattered was that he had successfully started a fury in Wellington as to the authorship of the book. At the time, various pundits were pointing the finger at Michael Wall, Bill Ralston, Richard Griffin, and Barry Soper. Some of them didn’t even deny it—so keen were they to be part of the mystery. Even Linda Clark associated herself with the novel by threatening to sue the publisher for defamation. It was heady stuff, and Simon mostly got away with it.

Which brings me to myself. I write under a pseudonym for the precise reason that I know my intended audience intimately. My audience knows me. That intended readership is amused, frustrated, delighted, annoyed, irritated, angered, and charmed by what I write. Not always completely satisfied with what I come up with, but sometimes surprised, and even when my audience knows if I have composed in a state of inebriation, that audience forgives me. After all, both Dylan Thomas and Byron did their best work in that state.

My “dear reader”, to whom I am writing, is myself. This is, after all, an online journal. I do not write to piss off others or annoy them, or to seek glory or retribution. Frankly, I couldn’t care less if nobody visited my blog. As my by-line states, I don’t actually care what you think. This writing is about me, and my thoughts, and my immortality.

That aside, there has been some discussion about the identity of Insolent Prick. That conjecture tends to come from pinko liberals who are offended by what I write, yet still come and visit in order to be offended. That amuses me. And still I don’t care.

Visitors to my blog do have a function. I have been writing opinions for clients, and providing professional advice, for several years. Writing is a discipline. My blog is my principal means of maintaining that discipline. If I’m absent for a couple of weeks, comments from readers for me to get back to writing something are helpful. But they’re not the reason I write.

The events I describe in my blog are not fictional accounts. They are my interpretations on actual events to which I am a party. Often events I describe possess an element of symbolism. I will occasionally exaggerate to make a point, or change the series of events, or alter slightly immaterial facts. But the substance of what I write, and the opinions I express, are strictly correct. If I do make changes at any point, that is to protect the other people involved. I don't use my own real name here, and unless I'm discussing a political viewpoint on a public figure, it isn't appropriate for me to disclose the actual names of others in my stories.

So, having explained that I am the subject of this blog, and the sole intended audience of it, other readers are still welcome to browse and make comments. But those people are merely bystanders. I do not set out to offend those bystanders, but they should realise that they are reading what is, for all intents and purposes, my journal. These are my inner thoughts. I don't have access to other readers' journals--and realistically, I don't care to read them. They don't interest me. And I'm too vain to stay interested more than even momentarily.

So the bystanders have a choice to be here. I would not ask others to censor their thoughts or ideas in their own journals, and those who are offended are free to censor themselves out of my blog.

Another New Series: PC-Watch!

2005-10-27T21:12:00.000+13:00

One of the most absurd claims made by the liberal Left is that political correctness is a non-existent idea, developed by the Right as an easy, general smear, rather a coherent thought process. The Intellectual Left, in that pompous way that only they can manage, define what the Right call PC as merely good policy.

I don’t subscribe to Wayne Mapp’s reported description of political correctness as just the means of a minority to enforce its will on the majority. That is certainly the effect, as the majority do not subscribe to the politically correct agenda. But it’s not the key point. It is really the process by which a group of people aim to shut down discussion and debate by labeling certain viewpoints as taboo. It is no less harmful just because the majority happen to oppose the liberal PC agenda.

It is therefore not PC for a man to claim that he believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen. It might be his perspective. But in many parts of society—particularly the Wellington liberal set—any man who expresses that view will be shouted down and silenced. The smacking debate, in which the liberals would like to make criminals of parents who use even moderate physical force in disciplining their children by lumping them alongside violent offenders—is a classic example. A person who questions the entitlement of a perfectly able person to live a lifetime on a benefit without any compulsion to work, is considered by many liberals to be a fascist. A woman who declares that her belief is that homosexuality is wrong and sinful is threatened with a human rights complaint, merely for expressing that belief. Questioning the level of arts funding in the Capital is likely to trigger a storm of protest from the chardonnay-swilling, “freethinking” Labour voters, with cries of philistinism.

The PC agenda is a liberal agenda. It attempts to control how people think, and their right to express their thoughts, by both restricting the language of debate, and what is acceptable to debate. It makes clearly liberal assumptions about what is acceptable, and does not brook argument of those assumptions.

There is an easy test for the existence of political correctness in any dialogue: if in a group discussion, a single person contests the assumptions of the debate, and that person is shouted down, then political correctness has won. When there is no opportunity to argue the language of debate, there can be only one answer, and debate itself is futile. PC “values” do not protect the dissenting voice: they make value judgements about which voice should be heard, and aim to silence all other dissenting voices.

Defenders of politically correct strategies deny that it exists in the public sector. That is a nonsense. Taking up the challenge to cite specific examples, as Wayne Mapp is planning to do, I will assist him by highlighting each week one of the many public sector PC excesses.

The great irony, of course, is that the result of the PC agenda is publicly quite visible. It is just seldom documented. So Helen Clark is feted at the New Zealand music awards, and lauded by both audience and presenters, while Don Brash’s arrival is jeered and booed by all. And that is seen as acceptable behaviour. Business is bad, Government is good. Rich people are evil, poor people—but not so poor as to not be able to afford the glad rags on display at the Music awards—good. Economic success is wrong, whereas a life of welfare is ideal. Why? Because Helen is a curry-chomping, socialist, gay-friendly icon, whereas Don Brash is a middle-aged male who wants to question the key assumptions that the Liberal Left hold about New Zealand society.

The PC agenda is most pervasive in the delivery of social services. PC behaviour is not necessarily found in the press releases, the ministerial speeches, or even departmental brochures or briefing papers, where it can be readily exposed and ridiculed. Rather, it is deep in the culture of the organization that key liberal assumptions are made about debatable issues, for no other reason than to further advance the liberal grip in the public sector.

But on with this week’s example. Because as much as the PC brigade attempt to conceal their motives, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find evidence of how they think, and more alarmingly, how they want everybody else to think. Take this example:

“It is essential that a Ministry of Health person has an understanding of Mäori issues. This includes an awareness of traditional and contemporary Mäori and Iwi structures, key Mäori concepts, an awareness of legislation, Treaty of Waitangi issues and policy affecting the key areas of work.”

This statement appears in a job description for a certain position at the Ministry of Health. Let’s break it down.

An understanding of Mäori issues. Right. What does that mean? What constitutes that understanding? Who defines it? Who judges how valid that understanding is? Who determines whether that understanding is right or wrong?

An awareness of traditional and contemporary Mäori and Iwi structures. Why? If there exists a programme whereby services are delivered through contemporary Maori structures, why is it necessary to be aware of traditional structures that existed in 1840, but are now non-existent? How does that assist in the delivery of health services?

“Key Mäori concepts.” Okay. But what are they? Who decides what those key Mäori concepts are? Is there a set list, set down somewhere, that establishes those Mäori concepts in stone? Are those key concepts not open to debate? Are they unchanging, and concrete? And if so, how can the Treaty of Waitangi be a living document, as so many liberal academics and bureaucrats describe it, if key Mäori concepts are so definite?

And the job description in question is for a financial analyst. It is no less than a key requirement for the employee to fulfill. Yes, folks, at the Ministry of Health, a cost accountant, preparing budget forecasts and financial data models, is required by the Ministry of Health to be indoctrinated in its inalienable version of what constitutes “Maori issues”. It doesn't matter how good a financial analyst a person is; if they do not subscribe to the Ministry's liberal view of Maori issues, they do not make the grade.

The Sow Returns

2005-10-27T15:20:00.000+13:00

Man-Hater extraordinnaire, and full-time cranky old moo-moo has re-enabled public access to her blog. She's also set up a list of house rules, which although I don't object to a blog owner setting her own protocol, she somewhat misses the point.

Ruthie slammed another blog-writer by selectively quoting something that the other blogger wrote, without referencing, linking, or attributing that quote to the author. She made baseless, ridiculous claims about the blogger that had no reference even to the quoted part, let alone the entire context of the offending post. And then, once she'd received a good flogging for her silliness, she shut down debate on her blog.

So welcome back, Ruth. There just aren't enough silly people in the world already. It's a delight to have you back, making a mockery of lucid thinking everywhere your head travels. I look forward to more sowisms from you.

Ministerial Dickhead Of The Week: Part One

2005-10-26T20:51:00.000+13:00

This is a new feature I’ve added for the exclusive reading pleasure of Insolent Prick followers. Every week I am going to randomly select one of the many stupid statements issued by Government Ministers, and coin that person Ministerial Dickhead of the Week. Judgement will be tough and severe, and no further correspondence will be entered into, with respect to the results. For those Ministers who feature frequently in this section, I will not be accepting their votes against other Ministers.

Alas, this week I have assembled a range of absurd press releases by Government Ministers, and I inadvertently withdrew two statements from the pile. So many stupid words were uttered by the Government that I struggled to separate them all from each other. So this week, I announce that the Ministerial Dickhead Of The Week is…

A DEAD HEAT!

In first place, we have Steve Maharey, who challenges Wayne Mapp to explain his portfolio title of National’s Spokesman for the Eradication of Political Correctness. Maharey notes that Mapp has a “light portfolio load”, and wants National to justify what else he is doing. This from a Government that has five Ministers outside Cabinet with no direct portfolio responsibilities, and two Cabinet Ministers with the negligible roles, respectively, of Building Issues and Statistics, and Customs and Youth Affairs.

Really, Mr Maharey. With the current state of the education system, and the fact that you’re new to your role, aren’t there more important things for you to be talking about?

And tied for first place, we have Jim Anderton.* Jim Anderton criticizes National for placing Agriculture so low among its spokesmanships (number ten). This, despite the fact that with the departure of Jim Sutton, Labour will have no farmers in Cabinet, whereas National has nine farmers in its top twenty.

Oh, and Mr Anderton: isn’t it YOUR government that has placed Foreign Affairs outside of the Cabinet, and by Winston’s reckoning, outside of the GOVERNMENT?

Haven't you fuckers got anything better to do? Like come to grips with your new portfolios?

*Hard to predict these things, but I suspect he is likely to feature often as Ministerial Dickhead Of The Week.