Dr Eric Crampton: The troubling rationale behind liquor levy review

Alcohol policy is always contentious – but let’s start with something that should be uncontroversial:

If the government wants to reduce alcohol-related harm, it should aim for measures that do more good than harm overall.

If a harm-reducing policy stacks up, it does so whether the overall social cost of alcohol is $10 billion, $1 billion, or $100 million.

Dr Eric Crampton: How police alcohol activism risks overstepping the mark

When Guyon Espiner reported on a police estimate of ‘$7.8b harm from booze’, I was curious whether the figure was the old BERL alcohol cost zombie back again from the dead to torment the living.

The BERL number included drinkers’ spending on their own alcohol – not a ‘social cost’ by any reasonable standard. Other costs were counted twice. It was …unsound. Only about a fifth of BERL’s number could count as a social cost by a more standard method.

So, I asked Radio New Zealand for the original documents, hoping to find a source for the figure. No source was cited, but police communications staff later confirmed that the number was BERL’s.

Mike Butler: ‘Maori economy’ underperforms

Financial commentator Bernard Hickey puts his political correctness on show in his article titled “New Zealand's Maori economy: a powerful force in the Kiwi success story” that is posted on the ANZ website.(1) This promotional piece of advertorial writing from Hickey marks a seasonal event, the Maori New Year, by lauding the Waikato-Tainui announcement that they had assets worth $1-billion.

Hickey cites a 2010 study by Business and Economic Research Ltd for the government's Maori department, Te Puni Kokiri, that estimated the asset base of the Maori economy at $36.9-billion, up 18 per cent from 2006.