My absence

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, I am in the process of buying and moving into my first house, so time is tight! Between yelling at the solicitor and trying to cram my things into altogether too small boxes, I just can't find time to blog. Hopefully I should have some time on Sunday.

It never did me any harm....

This week's award for moral panic goes to....the opponents of the anti-smacking bill. Many of the bill's opponents give the distinct impression of not even having read it!

Apparently once this bill is made law, our jails will be overflowing with parents thrown into chokey for whacking their kids. As the Select Committee report notes, parents could also technically be prosecuted for kidnapping when they send kids to their bedroom, yet amazingly, this doesnt seem to happen! I cannot imagine the police prosecuting a parent for smacking their child on the backside. As it is, police use their discretion in deciding who to charge. The only concern in my mind is that police might use that discretion to prosecute people against whom they have a particular grudge. It is always concerning when police have wide powers of interpretation over the law, but it is worth remembering that this is possibly unavoidable in such a fraught area.

In any case, the Select Committe report includes a recommendation which would allow parents to use reasonable force in the "normal daily care" of a child. I would expect juries to use such a clause to acquit a parent who lightly smacked a child. Incidentally, the Select Committee also recommended an amendment which would clearly allow physical force used to protect the child, or another person (if the child is about to touch a hot surface, for instance).

Frankly, I think the current situation, in which parents can hit their kids with lumps of wood and other foreign objects, is despicable. Personally, I would rather that parents did not hit their kids. However, this may not always be realistic, and we do not want to see good parents in the dock because o a light smack. This bill is a pretty good compromise I think.

Take a look at Michael's post about billboards. These things are just such an ugly intrusion, and the "free and easy with the facts" campaign run in support of them is further reason to get rid of the damn things!

Religion and politics.

There have been a few bloggings recently which have looked at the intersection of religious and political questions. Michael posted on progressive Christianity, while Span posted on sexual politics and religion.

Personally, I am not religious. I have never seen any reason to believe in the existence of god, at least in the specific forms the major religions claim. Further, I think religion does a lot of harm to good political discourse, and is not helpful in constructing a decent moral code. This post has two main points; to say that it is not possible to be a liberal and a proper Christian, and to say that religion is basically incompatible with pluralistic politics. I am not arguing for a return to conservative Christianity! I am arguing that religion ought to be left out of politics, and preferably disposed of altogether. I have chosen to post about Christianity and politics, mainly because I know more about Christianity than other religions, and to keep the size of this post manageable. I do not think Christianity is any “worse” than other religions in terms of its tolerance or compatibility with politics.

Michael’s post outlined an argument for progressive Christianity. He is absolutely right that this is something which has been sorely lacking from Christian politics in this country. If I had to choose a form of religious politics, progressive Christianity would be it. However, there are a number of problems even with this form of religious politics. While progressive Christianity obviously serves to emphasise the progressive aspects of the religion, it cannot totally downplay the fact that there are many regressive aspects of Christianity. It is still hard to deny that Christianity is not a liberal faith. The Bible still contains views on homosexuality, the death penalty and myriad other things which are violently at odds with those of liberals. Basically I think progressive Christians soft-pedal or ignore the illiberal aspects of their faith. While this is absolutely admirable, and certainly results in a much better form of Christianity from a liberal stand-point, it doesn’t gel at all with traditional Christianity as derived from the Bible (especially the Old Testament). People often focus on the New Testament as part of this change in emphasis. This might help to make Christianity more warm and fuzzy, but it isn’t really honest. The Old Testament is just as much “God’s Word”, and can’t be ignored just because it is inconvenient.

It seems to me, that to be a liberal Christian, you have to ignore an awful lot of the supposed word of god. If you have to ignore so much of his word, it doesn’t speak of a traditional Christianity. In fact, I think that if someone ignores that much of the Bible, and of traditional church practice, it essentially means one has created a new religion, based on liberal politics. This is fine if that is what you want to do, but it seems to me you might as well just own up to being a committed liberal and leave the religious aspect out.

Religion and plurality:
Religion is about dogmatic certainties. People have faith in the revealed certainties of their creator. This is totally at odds with the reality of politics, which is that differing groups and people make compromises with one another. If two different groups have conflicting religious beliefs, they can’t reconcile them without setting religion aside. If you believe God has told you to do A, how could you possibly do C, or agree to do B as a compromise? This suggests two things to me, First, religious people of necessity set their faith aside when acting politically, and second, that it would be better for all concerned if religion were punted out of politics altogether.

TV One Poll

The treatment of these polls to me really does illustrate the utter lameness of political reporting in NZ. The focus on the preferred Prime Minister result is quite baffling. We do not have a system in which we vote directly for the PM, so to attribute any direct significance to the result just seems quite bizarre. It may have some indirect significance, in terms of the impact on party votes, but that is really uncertain.

In general the poll is probably reasonably good news for Labour. Although the Nats have a seven point lead, the trend is for the gap to close, and Colmar Brunton polls always overstate the Nats and understate Labour. At the last election they gave the Nats a six point lead. It seems likely that the two main parties are roughly equal now. The difference of course, is that Labour have a sizeable coalition partner, and are coming off the edn of a very bad year.

Why is it that different polls seem to consistently show certain biases? I don't know much about statistics, but I would be very interested to know why it is that tv3's polls always overstates Labour's support, and vice-versa in tv one polls.

And it just gets better!

Ok, I know Taylor had a fair bit of luck, but what an awesome batting display! Even MacMillan got runs, although he did also manage to get caught twice on consecutive balls. Anyway, it seems that our batting may be starting to come right, and not before time.

Sucks to be Australia

They may not have fielded a full strength team, and it may show poor grace to gloat, and Vincent may have had some chances, but I'm not going to let that rain on my parade!

It was good to see Fleming get more runs, even though he looked pretty patchy at times. It's also good to see Vincent's form continue. So many cricketers seem like arrogant and generally unpleasant characters, whereas Vincent emits a certain earnets keen-ness which makes me want him to do well!

All in all, let's enjoy the victories while they last!

Don't let the door hit you on the way out

So, at last the day I am sure the PM has been waiting for has arrived. Field has done something that gives a plausible excuse for expelling him. As serious as the allegations of corruption were, without any real proof, they did not provide a sound basis for his removal from the party.

The interesting questions are what Field will do, and what affect this change in the balance of power will have. I can't see Field resigning and forcing a by-election, unfortunately. I think his sense of self preservation is too strong for him to take that risk. Presumably he will spend the next year and a half either planning a life after parliament, or firming up his support base in Mangere. I would expect him to lose fairly easily at the next election, as long as Labour select a credible PI candidate to replace him.

As for the balance of power, I cannot see any massive changes, National would still need the support of either the Maori Party or the Greens to win a no-confidence vote. I just can't see that happening. It may just make it that little bit harder for Labour to get legislation through, but they are still in fundamentally the same position of needing to secure support from the minor parties on a case-by-case basis.

As such, I think this is a very positive move. Labour has gotten rid of an ongoing nuisance, at little immediate cost. Field was frankly an offence to a party which stands for the underprivileged, as Field stood accused of exploiting just those people. Of course the allegations were unproven, but they was not exactly refuted convincingly. In my view, he ought to have been drummed out sooner on some pretext or other. Still, all's well that ends well!

Cow politics

This is an oldie but a goodie. It is an internet forward, but i have made a number of additions.

SOCIALISM: You have 2 cows, so you give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk. You are forced to sing a song thanking the state for taking the cows.

FASCISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk. You are forced to sing a song about the superiority of your country's cows.

NAZISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM: You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then files the milk away while it investigates writing a comprehensive set of milk quality procedures, and setting up a task force to investigate the health and safety implications of milking...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. The cows are tended by slaves. You get your cronies in parliament to ban goat's milk. You sell the cows and the slaves and retire on the income.

SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION: You have two cows.You sell one, and send the other to Indonesia, while forcing it to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows.You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank,then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION: You have two cows.You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION: You have two cows.You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide. The farm hands work 16 hours a day, and many of them commit suicide.

A KOREAN CORPORATION: You have three hundred cows all living in a 5m square apartment. There are two hundred people tending the cows. The people doing the actual work are women and "guest workers". All the men are standing around spitting and drinking soju, while proclaiming the superiority of korean cows, even though their cows were imported from the USA few weeks ago.

A GERMAN CORPORATION: You have two cows.You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves. You founded the farm based on the profits of Nazism, but you prefer to keep that quiet.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows.You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows because you're sobering up and open another bottle of vodka. When you sober up you discover that the President’s mafia-linked goons have taken the cows.

A SWISS CORPORATION: You have 5,000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINA CORPORATION: You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows. You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION: You have two cows. Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION: Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb you and invade your country.You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy....

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION: You have two cows.Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION: You have two cows. You charge “fart tax” on your two cows and have a 4-1 ratio of sheep/person.

AN IRISH CORPORATION. You have two cows...or is it three? What does it matter? Aren't you well off to have even one?

A WELSH CORPORATION: You have two cows. The one on the left looks very attractive.

Mortgage tax

Dr Cullen has floated a possible surcharge on fixed rate mortgages. I concede that something ought to be done about NZ's bias towards residential investment, and that this proposal is something. However, I do not believe that this is the right something. I have three grounds for this: craven self-interest, realpolitik, and economic advisability.

Craven self-interest: I just bought house, and i really can't afford to pay any more than I already am.

Realpolitik: I think any measure that is going to have a big impact on house prices, or mortgage payments is potentially political suicide, and would need an across the spectrum agreement.

Economic advisability: This measure seems likely to impact disproportionately on those with large mortgages and relatively low incomes. It will tend to be a greater disincentive to those who have not yet gotten into the housing market, not those who already have substantial investment in the sector.

That is, it is likely to do most damage to first home buyers. People who already have high equity will probably be less seriously affected. Their mortgages will represent less of a proportionate drain on their income. For those with investment properties, much of their mortgages will be paid by rent in any case. They can also write some of their losses off against tax.

In fact this measure might force more people to rent for longer, thus exacerbating the divide between the haves and have nots as far as housing is concerned.

If Cullen wants to discourage investment in the over heated housing market, that is all very well, but it should target people who are investing, not people who are buying a first home, which is more likely to be for predominantly lifestyle and personal, rather than economic reasons.

The point I am trying to make is that we ought to be discouraging over-investment, not family home ownership. If Cullen wants genuinely to discourage investment in residential propoerty, he should look at a capital gains tax on second houses.

In her Majesty's Service

Over the last few weeks there have been a few of the periodic public service scandals, especially surrounding Corrections and CYPFS. I used to work in the public service, so I have always been interested in attitudes to the civil service, and whether the civil service really is less efficient and less competent than the private sector.

There is certainly inefficiency in the public service. As long as you don’t actually wedgie the CEO, you probably wont be fired. This hardly gives an incentive to bust a gut. However, on the whole I doubt the public service has less talent or drive than most parts of the private sector. There are certainly more than a few wastes of oxygen in both, but I think the public sector also has plenty of very talented and driven people.

I tend to think that the public service gets the sharp end of the stick in a number of ways.

Firstly, the public service has to do all the difficult things that aren’t profitable, and which the private sector doesn’t want to do. Incarcerating violent criminals; deciding who is a valuable immigrant and not a fraudster or worse; deciding whether a child abuse allegation is a mere fabrication or an urgent warning. All these things are tricky, especially without the benefit of hindsight. When private sector firms get involved in these things, I doubt they are any less inclined to stuffs ups (Chubb’s prisoner transport record is a fine example). This also means that when a government department is involved in something that goes wrong, it tends to be something that will make a juicy story on Close Up.

Further, often whatever departments do, they will cop it in the neck. If CYPFS remove a child from its parents’ care, they are suddenly ogres ripping families apart. If they ignore a warning, and leave a family together, they will be blamed if somethings goes wrong. If immigration tightens entry controls, the left brand them xenophobic. If they relax controls, the right brand them bleeding heart liberals. I always had a particular theory about this. It always seemed to me that people in NZ are somewhat suspicious of immigrants as a group, so it is easy to make mileage with anti-immigration rhetoric. However, when shown the story of an individual immigrant, kiwis will be much more kind hearted. This leads to a lot of strange and contradictory attitudes to immigration.

Other problems for the civil service are created by our political system. The opposition are constantly on the look out for slip ups. In practice, that makes civil servants fairly risk averse. Often the first imperative in government is a negative one: to avoid messing up, and ending up getting chewed out by the boss, or worse, the minister. Now I am not saying the opposition should not be vigilant, but it does create certain perverse incentives.

Also, the Privacy Act means that even when a person goes public with their supposed tale of woe at the hands of some civil servant, the department in question is effectiviely unable to defend itself, even against attacks as vicious as a Dave Dobbyn music video.

If any of the assorted civil servants out there want to comment, I would be interested to hear what you have to say, but remember to be careful, you wouldnt want to breach your code of conduct!

Update: I heard a story yesterday which i think illustrates my point nicely. A friend who works for a major NZ retail chain had taken part in designing a catalogue for the company. it was part of the way through printing when the CEO decided he didnt like the colours. So, they stopped printing, redesigned it, and rep-printed the catalgoue. $75,000 of catalogues had already been printed. If a public sector entity had done something comparable, there would have been an uproar, but because this was a private sector firm, noone even hears about it. Now, obviously public money has levels of accountability that private money doesn't. That is inevitable. However, I think this shows that the private sector is not necessarily more efficient than the public sector, it is just less accountable.