Mike Butler: Takapuna deal shabby

A row that has erupted over the sale of a $41.7-million block of prime Auckland waterfront land cheaply to Maori as part of a big treaty deal shows the sort of shabby unintended consequences resulting from a flawed attempt to right alleged historical wrongs.

The New Zealand Herald reported that the 3.2ha Takapuna Head site, used by the New Zealand Navy as an officer training school, is being sold back to Ngati Whatua for $13.8-million - but the iwi has been given freedom to do what it likes with the land.

Mike Butler: Be careful with the constitution

The constitution is not broken, there is no urgency for change, and any change should be done carefully with widespread support, an inquiry to review New Zealand’s existing constitutional arrangements in 2005 concluded. That review is a logical starting point to analyse the current review, which is a a joint initiative of the Maori Party and National.

The 2005 panel, which received 66 submissions and heard from senior jurists and academics, recommended that parliament should designate a select committee to identify and deal with changes with constitutional implications as they arise (page 5)

Richard Epstein: Is Women’s Empowerment a Bureaucratic Imperative?

Times are tough. Both the European Union and the United States are facing stagnant economic growth, high levels of unemployment, excessive debt, and an aging population. I am not alone in urging the European Union and the United States to make major reforms of their labor markets as an essential step toward economic growth. Sadly, serious progress on reform has lagged behind on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet, in at least one respect, the United States is in far better shape than the European Union. I refer to the advancement of women in business, particularly their representation on corporate boards. For the EU, compulsion is the preferred path, while in the United States, to date, voluntary action is the name of the game.

Steve Baron: Internet Piracy

Internet piracy is the downloading or distribution of unauthorised copies of intellectual property such as movies, television, music, games and software programs. It hurts people just like me, as an author, when our intellectual property is basically stolen or given away. When that happens creators don't make any money and are deprived of income. Now in my case that hasn't amounted to much as my books have not hit the best-seller lists yet, but it can mean the loss of a ship load of money for many others.

According to one report, in 2001, software piracy robbed the US economy of 105,803 total jobs, $5.9 billion in total wages, and $1.8 billion in total local, state, and federal income tax revenues. Companies like Microsoft spend a fortune on research and development to create intellectual property. They are quoted as spending $9 billion a year. When businesses spend that much money they expect protection and they expect good returns.

Mike Butler: Bolivian constitution a model for NZ?

Bolivia provides the model for the sort of constitution New Zealand should have, according to Maori studies professor Margaret Mutu, who launched the Independent Constitutional Working Group, a response to a review that stems from the National Party’s confidence and supply agreement with the Maori Party.

Mutu, who works at Auckland University and is chairperson of and treaty settlement negotiator for Far North tribe Ngati Kahu, courted controversy last year when she said the immigration of whites threatens Maori due to alleged supremacist attitudes that whites bring with them.

Ron Smith: Looking at maps of war

For some weeks now an Iranian website has contained a long article detailing the targeting of Israel by Iranian missile forces. (http://www.alef.ir/vdcepw8zwjh8ewi.b9bj.html?142262) The site is administered by a prominent Iranian member of parliament who is also Director of the Iranian Parliamentary Research Centre. His name is Ahmad Tavakkoli. At various earlier times he has held senior governmental positions and is said to be close to the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

The article in question is entitled, ‘The Theological Necessity of the Destruction of Israel’! and apart from a series of detailed maps of Israel, naming specific sites for destruction, it has a substantial commentary on their significance in both Farsi and English. Here is sample which follows the heading, “Israeli people must be annihilated”:

Matt Ridley: The beginning of the end of wind

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

Muriel Newman: Remembering Owen McShane

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Owen over many years, but since establishing the New Zealand Centre for Political Research in 2005, we had a particularly close association. Owen frequently provided expert commentaries for our weekly newsletter and this blog, and was extremely generous with his time, advice, and expertise.

Steve Baron: NZ not confronting the Important Issues

Just as inflation was the scourge of the 70's and 80's, income inequality (the gap between
the rich and the poor) has become the scourge of today. A famous Kiwi once said that New
Zealanders would not understand a fiscal deficit if they tripped over it in the street and perhaps they do not understand much about income inequality either, or how it effects them—but they should. It is an issue that past and present governments have been ignoring—probably because they are not sure how to fix the problem.

'Income inequality' are two words that quickly spurt with enthusiasm from the mouth of most devout socialists. Even though I consider myself a capitalist (with a social conscience), these two words have been concerning me also.

Mike Butler: Special deal for Scottish NZers?

Scottish culture continues as a distinct subculture within New Zealand. It is largely invisible, but bagpipes, kilts, sporrans and dirks come out of the cupboard for weddings, funerals, and at highland games. At the risk of being abused as a Scottish New Zealander basher, I wondered how it would be if clan chiefs got a special deal from the government, and people of Scottish descent were paid cash for grievances, get rights to first refusal on government property, and have to be consulted if the government was to do anything. Here is how it would look:

Scottish New Zealanders would have a special status because they were here first.

Karl du Fresne: Asserting the right to feel offended

What a furious reaction my fellow Dominion Post columnist Rosemary McLeod provoked with her recent column about transgender people. (Boy, I hope I’ve got the nomenclature right here. Terminology is such a minefield these days – get something even slightly wrong and you’re likely to wake up to the chanting of a noisy picket line at your gate.)

In McLeod’s case, 50 people calling themselves “Queer Avengers” protested outside the Dominion Post offices claiming the paper was guilty of something called transphobia. The Stuff website was bombarded with angry comments, including demands for the columnist’s dismissal and accusations of “hate speech” – a coded term for anything that upsets the over-sensitive.

Richard Epstein: The Austerity Morass

A close look at the economic woes at home and abroad raises this unedifying question: who has proved more inept at handling the current economic crisis, the European Union or the United States? To Paul Krugman, this question has an easy answer: The Europeans for their maddening insistence on fiscal austerity when large government expenditures and credit infusions are needed to prop up a sagging economy. With fiendish glee, Krugman denounces the EU’s austerity measures as “pain without gain.”

The spending cuts of the EU nations, Krugman argues, have shrunk their economies, without offering any prospect of generating long-term growth. The Europeans, it seems, have emulated the worst of President Herbert Hoover’s skinflint budgets that helped prolong the Great Depression. The United States, which this time around has been more liberal with the purse, has suffered far less damage than the EU, which shunned Keynesian prescriptions.

Owen McShane: Why so much Dissent?

There is a wave of dissent spreading throughout the Western World in response to the failed experiment in central planning at the local and regional level of Government. For some reason we have suffered decades of top-down local planning in spite of the total failure of central planning in economies as diverse as the Soviet Empire, Maoist China, and North Korea.

This wave has now become a flood and is attracting attention in all quarters. During the property boom, triggered by the planners’ excessive regulation of land markets, and powered by the speculative bubble and lending, the rapid inflation in land prices allowed the planners to fund their excessive interventions and compliance costs, and of course their own salaries and fees, because the “speculators” and developers could absorb the costs.

Ron Smith: North Korea comes in from the cold?

It is just about twenty years now since the present leader’s grandfather (Kim Il Sung) participated in just such a process, as has now been announced, for North Korea. North Korea (more properly known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korean, DPRK) has apparently offered to suspend various nuclear activities, and allow the return of IAEA inspectors, in return for aid. Kim Il Sung died before what became known as the Agreed Framework was signed in 1994, so that the North Korean leader responsible for the commitments entailed, was the second in the Kim dynasty, Kim Jong-Il (father of the present leader, Kim Jong-Un).

In the original agreement, the focus of the international community was on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, based on the production of weapon’s grade plutonium in a reactor at Yongbyon. North Korea pledged to cease this production, to not reprocess spent fuel from the plant, and to cease its development of nuclear weapons. In return for this, North Korea was to receive energy resources, specifically fuel oil, and, in the longer term, help to build up a civilian nuclear power capability. The 1994 Agreed Framework was widely supported, including (financially) by New Zealand.

Mike Butler: Sir Douglas' role questioned

Bitter investors want convicted former Lombard director Sir Douglas Graham, a National Party man, stripped of his knighthood while Labour leader David Shearer argues that since the honour was for treaty settlements, it should remain untouched. Therefore, what was the beleaguered knight’s role in treaty work?

Sir Douglas was convicted, on February 24, along with former-Justice Minister Bill Jeffries (Labour) and two other men, of making false statements to investors in his capacity as a director of Lombard finance. He faces up to five years imprisonment and a fine of $300,000.

Karl du Fresne: Maori objections cancel exhibition

There are probably several good reasons why Lower Hutt’s Dowse Art Museum shouldn’t host an exhibition by a Mexican artist in which bubbles, partly made from water previously used to wash dead bodies, are blown from the ceiling into a silent room.

The first and most obvious is that it isn’t art, at least as most people understand the term. The second is that it’s grotesque and ghoulish. But as a believer in freedom of expression, I’m obliged to support the Dowse’s right to stage pointless exhibitions that are likely to appeal only to people wearing black clothing and funny-looking spectacles.

Owen McShane: Who do we Think we Are?

James Belich’s remarkable book “Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World” (2009) certainly challenged the conventional version of the early settlement of New Zealand. We had grown used to being labeled “colonizers” extending the powers and reach of the British Imperial Empire. But Belich declared New Zealand was nobody’s “colony” but was settled by people determined to create a new world – a world of their own design and choosing. My father’s Irish forebears settled here in the late 1830s. My mother’s Welsh forebears arrived in the early 1900s. Both my parents were atheists and Fabian Socialists. I never heard either of them suggest their families were here to promote the interests of the Brittish Imperial Empire.

Frank Newman: Regulatory controls for local councils

This week Greece was given a 130 billion Euro lifeline by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The main purpose of the bailout was to retain intact the membership of the European Community, but few believe it will save the Greece in the long-run. Most predict a third bail out in a couple of year’s time.

The day the European talks were concluded, talks began in Whangarei to “merge” the tiny Kaipara District Council (KDC) with the Whangarei District Council (WDC). I mention this because there are some pretty interesting parallels between Greece and Kaipara. Both are heavily and hopelessly indebted, and both are looking to others to bail them out of problems of their own making.

Joanna Moss: How A Financial Crisis Might Turn Into Much Needed Reforms

The financial blow-out in the Family Court could be a blessing in disguise if the crisis is put to good use in terms of understanding the wider system and bringing in much needed reform. The Family Court is the court that most New Zealanders have contact with either directly or indirectly. It plays an important role in defining what courts are like and how they operate and also in upholding the rule of law. For these two reasons alone we need it to work well let alone considerations of the children and the family as the building block of society.

But let’s take a step back and look into why this crisis happened before we can look at the much needed reforms. Previous Minister of Justice Simon Power ordered the review when it became obvious that the costs had gone up 63% over the period 2004/2010 and the number of cases had remained roughly static. The figures showed clearly that cases were taking longer to resolve and that the Care of Children Act was the chief culprit.

Mike Butler: Holmes column firestorm burns

I have visited Waitangi Day on several occasions – never a Waitangi Day. I visited the treaty house since it is public property but not the marae since it is private. The people on the marae surely can carry on any way they please, since it is private property. If they wish to argue politics and abuse government policy, they are not alone. The problem occurs when vehement racial abuse is recorded by television news and beamed into households throughout New Zealand. Viewers can either agree with what they see, ignore it as having nothing to do with them, or get angry.

It seems that after years of ignoring it, Paul Holmes got angry and exercised his constitutional right of freedom of speech and poured his heart out in the NZ Herald on Saturday, February 11. This is what he wrote:

Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.