Ross Meurant: It's Not the Cops it's the Courts

Most mornings now, we wake to read of another ram raid.  We are also confronted with increased shootings and violent crime.   More relevant is, what are the police doing about it? 

Headline this week:  Operation Cobalt: Police issue 15,000 traffic tickets to gang members in disruption tactic. (1)

Issuing traffic infringements in Fendalton, Karori and Remuera won’t reduce crime but definitely it will boost the coffers, for denizens of these sectors do pay their fines, even if it’s only for doing 56 kph in a 50 kph zone.

However, issuing fines to gang members, which will never be paid and has little impact on bandits who ride their chariots irrespective of WOF, registration or legal ownership? Is this the solution to the crime wave?

Oliver Hartwich: Learning from the Truss disaster

Most political careers end in failure, but few politicians fail as spectacularly, or as rapidly, as Liz Truss.

Truss has wrecked more than her own political career since she became British Prime Minister less than two months ago: her personal reputation, her party’s credibility, and the UK’s finances.

The latter is the costliest result of Trussonomics. Rather than borrowing at rates comparable to those enjoyed by Germany or the US, Britain now needs to pay as much as Italy or Greece. That is how markets now perceive Britain’s political risk.

So, what has happened in Britain? And what lessons can New Zealand draw from the Truss disaster?

Point of Order: Two tribes get more Treaty dosh

It’s the Treaty settlement that keeps on giving – or rather, which requires taxpayers to keep on giving. This time Waikato-Tainui and Ngāi Tahu have each received $1.625 million as a negotiated resolution of a range of disputes concerning the relativity mechanism payments made in 2012 and 2017.

The relativity mechanisms were included in the tribes’ 1995 and 1997 Treaty of Waitangi settlements.

The adjustment payments (we are told) have been guided by the awards of previous arbitrations, and have reduced the number of future arbitration hearings required to resolve remaining disputes.

Guy Hatchard: Why Biotechnology Experimentation Has to Be Stopped—it’s Urgent

Researchers at Boston University have created a deadly new strain of Covid—one that kills 80% of animal subjects.

The research was funded by the US government and approved by Anthony Fauci. I don’t need to tell you how risky such experiments are or how stupid.

This is just one biotechnology experiment among thousands currently being carried out around the world that pose similar kinds of risk. Each additional experiment adds to the risk and brings another lab escape a bit closer.

Alistair Boyce: Open Letter to CEO’s and Industry Leaders

Be brave and true in the face of absolute and ideological government

The private sector is facing the biggest assault from central and local government in living history.

It is now a constant that business, on the back of footing the bill directed by the government response to COVID is now to be the instrument of State to front the fight on equality and climate change. The free market led mixed economy that has provided decades of economic expansion and derivative wealth is fast becoming a command economy. This is the antithesis of your role as business leaders fronting competitive organizations driving profit, productivity and economic growth.

Ananish Chaudhuri: Legitimate Grievances Must Be Heard

We shun protesters at our peril

I am not a fan of Brian Tamaki. But one does not need to admire or respect Mr Tamaki to concede that many of those gathered under his banner have legitimate grievances. It is folly to write them off as misguided, racist, homophobic, transphobic or antisemitic. Of course, some of them are. But then all political parties harbour such elements within their ranks.

In many ways, the support for Mr Tamaki mirrors the support for Donald Trump in the United States and this is driven by similar motivations.

Commentators have tended to write this off as a clash of cultures; right-wing values espousing entrenchment of the traditional patriarchy against progressive values arguing for greater inclusivity.

Yes, there is a clash of cultures here, but it is not what most commentators think.

Roger Partridge: Inflation lessons from Switzerland

This week’s third-quarter inflation figure from Statistics NZ underlines what a mess the Minister of Finance and the Reserve Bank have made of monetary policy.

Inflation may have peaked at 7.3%. But talk from Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr late last month that the bank’s ‘tightening cycle was ‘very mature’ was at best premature. Tuesday’s announcement of Q3 inflation at 2.2% suggests inflationary expectations are now deeply embedded.

Brendan O'Neill: Britain is a political wasteland

The Truss premiership was a new low for our democracy.

So Liz Truss is out. After just 44 days her premiership is no more. ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’, she said in parliament yesterday, and now she’s quit. Her premiership deserves to live in ignominy. Not necessarily because her blunders were so spectacular – though many of them were – but because of what this strangled-at-birth stint in Downing Street tells us about British politics more broadly. Which is that it’s a wasteland. An ideological void. A dustbowl of ideas. The lack of even the faintest glimmer of leadership material anywhere in the Westminster circus is horrifying to me. Trussism is but a symptom of a wider malady afflicting our political class.

First, her mistakes. Where to start?

Lindsay Mitchell: Average future years on a benefit increases again

MSD's Annual Report was released yesterday.

From the CEO's forward:

Breaking Views Update: Week of 16.10.22

Saturday October 22, 2022 

News:
Co-governance new reality says Mahuta
The Minister for Local Government, Nanaia Mahuta, says the benefits of the Three Waters proposals will far outweigh any disadvantages.

Ms Mahuta says some of the opposition seemed to be driven not about economics or effectiveness but racist tropes about co-governance.

Mike Hosking: Far too many fall down conspiracy rabbit holes

Back to the Pfizer "scandal" and the "revelation" that Pfizer admitted it never tested its vaccine to work out whether it stopped transmission of Covid.

Like virtually all of these sorts of breathless revelations, the real story is not as simple as it seems. But in simple teams, what is claimed didn't happen. It is not the scandal those who think it is, want it to be.

Karl du Fresne: What history tells us about long-distance passenger trains

My Sydney-domiciled friend and former colleague Robin Bromby, a lifetime railways enthusiast, co-founder of Rails magazine and author of New Zealand Railways: Their Life and Times, sent the following comment on my post about the Restore Passenger Rail fantasists:

Here’s something that the Restore Passenger Rail mob might not like to hear: the body mainly responsible for the demise of passenger trains (and railcars) over the length and breadth of New Zealand was — wait for it — New Zealand Railways (NZR) itself, and that process began almost 100 years ago. It favoured buses for moving people! New Zealanders didn’t much like trains either: since the 1920s, whenever they had an alternative option to trains for travel, they took it. And this applied both to long distance trains and suburban commuter services.

Cam Slater: Misleading Is the Nice Word for Lying

Jacinda Ardern famously said during the 2017 election campaign that she believed that a person could have a career in politics without telling lies. That was, of course, a lie. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. Since then she’s lied and lied and lied. She has been busted lying again, which the paid shills and propagandists in the New Zealand media coyly call “misleading”, when they really should have said lying.

John Porter: We Get the Government We Deserve

Today I’m suggesting it is time we quit complaining about Ardern’s incompetent government.

Why? Because we voted them in! And the old adage “We get the government we deserve” is very true, especially in this case!

That adage is attributed to one Joseph de Maistre, a French philosopher who strongly believed that monarchy was a divinely-sanctioned institution and the only stable form of government.

What he actually said was, “In a democracy, the people end up with the government and leaders they deserve.”

Chris Trotter: The Two Vladimirs.

TWO VLADIMIRS, facing each other across a century of time: joined and separated by the Russian nation. Two Vladimirs – Lenin and Putin – around whose understanding of and aspirations for Russia the whole world has, reluctantly, been forced to circle. Two Vladimirs and their contradictory visions of Russia’s meaning dictating the fate of humankind. Two Vladimirs, more alike than either man would willingly admit.

THE FIRST VLADIMIR, Lenin, saw Russia’s potential. Not, simply, as an empire ripe for revolution in ways that the British and German Empires were not, but as a gigantic Petri dish in which something new and immensely powerful could be cultured.

Eric Crampton: Testing the national interest

If years of arguing about supermarkets and supermarket policy have taught us anything, it’s that allowing another supermarket chain to enter the New Zealand market is in the national interest.

So why won’t the government tell the Overseas Investment Office?

Point of Order: War means change

More than most things, you don’t control war. It controls you.

Something about having to commit your life and treasure to a cause, concentrates the mind. Particularly when the cause is run by other people. Established relationships and certainties go to one side, until the immediate problems of survival on reasonable terms are solved.

We’re reminded of this by the latest Russian announcements (carefully curated and dissected by the admirable Institute for the Study of War) preparing for the possibility of the abandonment of Kherson in south-western Ukraine, retreat behind the Dnieper river (sorry folks, wars can’t defeat geography) and the destruction of the river’s dams to obstruct the Ukrainian army’s advance.

Karl du Fresne: More desperate floundering at Stuff

Is Stuff stuffed? That’s a question that will inevitably be asked after the announcement of a restructuring that a rival media outlet predicts will result in savage cuts to staff numbers in the company’s provincial newsrooms.

According to RNZ, the Manawatu Standard, Nelson Mail and Timaru Herald will have their newsroom numbers cut from seven reporters to three. Two other Stuff titles, the Taranaki Daily News and Southland Times, would keep four reporters each.

The New Zealand Herald’s account of the pending changes isn’t quite so bleak. It reports merely that “positions are under review in several regions where [Stuff] has a presence”. But anyone familiar with the loaded phrase “positions are under review” knows it almost never results in a good outcome.

Lindsay Mitchell: September benefit stats released - big jump in Supported Living Payment

The Supported Living Payment (SLP) replaced the Invalid's benefit. Officially:

Supported Living Payment is for people who have, or care for someone with, a health condition, injury or disability that limits their ability to work.

Please note the graph's Y axis is not zeroed in order to show the increase more clearly.

Peter Dunne: Labour’s self-congratulatory smugness being replaced by anxiety, anger, and desperation

There was a clear air of self-satisfied smugness within the Labour Party when Dr Gaurav Sharma was expelled from its Caucus. A stroppy young MP had been firmly dealt with and his political career destroyed because he had dared challenge the veracity of the Prime Minister on how Labour dealt with internal staffing issues. Most people probably saw him as a self-centred troublemaker, not suited to the rough and tumble of politics, who by virtue of his Caucus expulsion would be despatched to political oblivion at the next election. And that would be the end of the story.

At best, Sharma was considered by Labour and the commentariat as no more than a generally minor irritant, who, once starved of media attention, would become a nonentity. However, his calculated resignation to force a by-election in his Hamilton West seat before the end of the year will have changed that perception. The short-term irritant has now become a major problem that cannot be brushed aside and ignored. One way or another, Sharma has derailed Labour's short-term political recovery agenda.