Anyone out there able to say what is likely to happen to the person (presumably a Police prosecutor somewhere) who made the stupid decision to prosecute the Southland bus driver for "assault" of a kid he stopped from persecuting a girl on his bus.

Is there a formal or informal system that over time ensures that stupid prosecutors get moved to positions that risk less damage to public trust in the Police?

On Kiwiblog's post on this story the Graeme Edgeler and FE Smith have both offered their usual valuable comments.

But the case is so bizarre it cries out for an insider to tell us how such things happen.

What a horrible last vision to take to bed from TV One news - bug eyed Bob Harvey demanding new powers to make people obey his orders to stay away from the beach. "What the hell is going on when people are telling [officials] 'we're doing what we like?'".

What's going on Bob is adults exercising their rights as adults, to choose for themselves whether to take a risk that does not harm others. 'We're doing what we like' is exactly what people in free countries can tell pompous twits.  What justification is there for ordering them away? The only life they risk is their own. As adults they're entitled to eat themselves to death, to drink themselves to death, to ride motor bikes, to climb mountains, to refuse to take their medicine or to reject life-saving operations, to sell their houses and gamble away what they should save for their old age.

Why should Bob Harvey be entitled to stop them choosing to look at a rare freak of nature? If nanny does not want ordinary people to  ignore warnings she should stop crying wolf. From long experience most official warnings are likely to be tremulous twittering.

For months there's been a sign on a pathway near my house warning of closure because of 'serious danger' after part of it slumped. The sign was there so long that the feet tramping up the bank and around the sign made their own fresh track on their way to walk perfectly safely across the narrowed section of pathway above the slip.

As long as the tsunami rubberneckers and surfers accept that the rest of us are not obliged to risk our lives or assets rescuing them (as surfers do anyway), I respect their independence and their contempt for the nannyish bosses who now want to rule us all (in our own good of course).

Besides – there will be times when the warnings are justified. We must leave room for Darwinian selection.

David Farrar's link to my post no 2 on this topic drew my attention to his equally sobering figures posted on 2 February.

But what I'd most like to know from David is whether he's hearing the same kind of government realism I'm detecting, about the (short) long term future of our ETS, at least as it may affect agriculture and forestry.

There are some fascinating dynamics in a situation where an expensive law may, or may not, be suspended or repealed. Could New Zealand's apparent carbon performance get a short term boost as people wait to cut trees till after it goes, or will that be more than countered by those for whom the reduced likelihood of credits from sequestration makes it easier to clear unprofitable post-1990 planting now?

The Press reports that  that Trevor Mallard knew something had to be done to E-Can.

Years ago I heard a senior E-Can official in a tramping hut boasting to his companions of blocking resource consent applications for work on land owned by one of Lady Isaac's companies. She's a Canterbury heroine for philanthropy and conservation and was a finalist for this year's New Zealander of the Year awards.

As I recall he was gloating over the impossibility of the report and recommendation being over-ridden. Apparently it claimed that her property was a vital source of groundwater for Christchurch "and there will be no way for her to disprove it for years". He seemed indifferent to whether the claim was true or false.

I asked why he thought it was such a good idea to block her proposals.

His justification?  "Because she's a fat cat and we're drawing the line on development in Canterbury", or words to that effect. Even under pressing he offered none of the reasons I expected - like preserving environmental asset (apparently the land was mainly ex gravel pits in the airport neighbourhood). It was enough that she was rich and had land on the outskirts of Christchurch and he thought there were more than enough people in Canterbury already.

E-Can had it coming. But usurping local elected government with appointed Commissioners is not a long term answer. What must change is the underlying law that allows Councils to employ and empower legions of planners. The law should not leave room for them to use their bogus expertise to camouflage simple delight in wielding power in support of their ugly prejudices.

The RMA has bred the culture of insolent power revealed in the Hon Wyatt Creech's report.

His recommendation to sack E-Can members is appealing. Democracy can replace them. But the staff may be irredeemable after years of RMA arrogance. Pity it is not them.

PS Lady Isaac's collection of salvaged early buildings cries out to be available as short term accomodation, so people can feel what it would have been like living in our forebears' houses. I'm told the law will not allow it. They'd need too much modification to fit regulations, even though some have come straight from being lived in.

Since the post on this two days ago I've heard that Paul Kelly's pessimism is matched at senior levels here in New Zealand. The chances of the Copenhagen Accord delivering anything are low. There will be effort to put something in its place, but whatever it is, it is unlikely to look much like Kyoto or Copenhagen.

China's intransigence has killed them. That may have been inevitable. If they had not, India might have done the same, though perhaps with less deliberate offense.

Take a look at this NCPA collection of sobering figures (drawn from the work of a physics professor at UCAL Berkeley) for an explanation.

• China's emissions intensity (CO₂ per dollar of GDP) is five times greater than that of the United States.

President Hu Jintao plans to reduce China's CO₂ emissions per unit of GDP by 4 percent per year for 5 years. If carried on it would reduce China's CO₂ emissions intensity 70 percent by 2040. But even if it works:

• If China cuts its emissions intensity 45% it will still surpass the U.S. in per capita annual CO₂ emissions by 2025.
• Indeed, every 10% cut in U.S. emissions would be negated by one year of China's growth.
• Because China's economy is growing by 10% p.a. a 4% cut in intensity is actually a 6% annual increase in emissions.
• CO₂ emissions are increasing similarly in India and other developing countries – far surpassing rich countries' output.
• Even if China and India's goals are met – and other developing countries make similar cuts- total atmospheric CO₂ would rise from 385 parts per million currently to 700 parts per million by 2080

The leaders of China and India can not risk constraining their growth, even if they were persuaded that they should give higher priority to CO2 emissions.

And the present wealthy countries are nearly all democracies. So our leaders have to persuade us that the costs of lowering emissions are worth incurring. That is failing. No people will vote for self sacrificial gestures made meaningless by neighbours who've given them the fingers.

We'll have to switch to plan C – get used to Climate Change and make the best of it.

In the meantime, if the ETS affects you, assume it will be gone as soon as voters catch up with the new reality. I'm sure the Government will wait to let reality sink in before canning the current law – there's no political mileage in being the one who has to say that last year's religion is dead. It is only safe to knock fervours that are much more passe.

Spare a thought for our officials who have put in the years of diplomatic trying to mitigate our disastrous Rio optimism, working for an offset planting regime, for example. All that effort down the tubes.

And start urging the government not to be silly over the liabilities the country has incurred in the current Kyoto period. As it becomes more clear that there will be no follow-on renewal of Kyoto commitments in 2012, it will look increasingly silly for NZ taxpayers to be funnelling hundreds of $millions to Russian oligarchs with Siberian forests, and other international beneficiaries of our current period deficit in carbon credits.

How soon will we be bold enough to repudiate those debits? Will Bill English's Budget this year recognise an increasing likelihood that we simply won't pay? I think it would be thought unseemly for this year. Next year may not be premature.

Minister Simon Power  is determined to reduce the waste in criminal trials. Criminal lawyers will wail about the  Criminal procedure reforms . There will be quiet judicial venom toward "political ignorance".

Judges and lawyers should instead apologise to us all for the stupidity they've encouraged daily in their courts. They could use their existing powers to start cleaning up their scandalous performance if they want to head off further intervention by Parliament.

There is no excuse for the average time to defended trial blowing out to a year. There is no excuse for the weeks of laborious exploration of insultingly stupid defences, before juries get to apply their common sense. The current trial for the murder of Navtev Singh will do it. The recent trial for Libby Templeman's murder did it. Sophie Elliott's trial was an extreme example. But it is commonplace.

They rub our faces in abusive defences to charges where there is no doubt about who did it, and what they did. The only question is why they did it.

This is not to say that the accused should be deprived of their right to put whatever they wish before the jury in defence. I opposed the law change that removed the defence of provocation because that right is sacred. But there is no reason why, after conviction, they should not pay a very high price for dopey lies not believed by the jury. If the accused knew in advance that there would be a high price for not showing remorse, and for idiotic excuses, their lawyers would tell them in advance. We could expect to see far fewer exploitations of our proper concern to ensure that the innocent are not wrongly convicted.

Politicians are actually very reluctant to undertake justice sector procedural reforms. They usually play with sentences because it is a consitutionally safe way to respond to legitimate public frustration. The sentences for Kiel, Libby's murderer, and when he is convicted, Anitilea Chan Kee, should include thumping bonus years of imprisonment, expressly tied to the insultingly stupid defences they forced the court to endure.

When John Key announced our targets on joining the non-binding Copenhagen Accord he was careful to state conditions that would ensure we are not forced to continue wearing our ETS hair shirt if the rest of the world doesn't abandon lycra.

Events in the US and Australia are making it more likely that we'll be back into the lycra. Australia's ETS is looking increasingly unlikely, according to The Australian's Paul Kelly, as interest in cap and trade vanishes in the US.

Our conditions were:

• a global agreement that sets the world on a pathway to limit global temperature rises of not more than 2°C
• comparable efforts by other countries
• actions by advanced and major emitting developing countries fully commensurate with their respective capabilities.
• effective rules governing land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF)
• full recourse to a broad and efficient international carbon market .

Plenty of room there to justify our Government deciding not to pay the carbon credit kings (like Russion oligarchs with Siberian forests) for not meeting targets after 2012.

Unless our ETS is used as a naked tax, if the government is off the hook they should dump or suspend the ETS for so long as there is no international obligation. So, for example, forest owners worried about not being able to change their land use, or being forced to replant uneconomic ground to avoid (currently) $25k per ha carbon cost, should hold off till 2013. Then do it in a hurry.

There's a good chance of suspension. At the least, if the world is dallying reaching a binding agreement, the government should suspend the ETS.  A rush to deforest then may simply accelerate conversion that would occur anyway but at great cost to our government (and land users). For such land it is in NZ's interests to change while the world is dithering. It will not be a net adverse cost to the environment unless it is land that would have remained permanent forest under the regime eventually adopted.

(Thanks Dan  McCaffery for the Paul Kelly link)

I doubt that we could ever get the virulent depths of animosity toward Australia reported by the Telegraph from the Greek Parliament now that Germany is balking at letting the Greeks continue their spree on other peoples' (EU) credit.

But the Telegraph piece should be carefully considered by those who think that joining Australia would lock them into subsidising our profligacy for good.

It could just mean we get crucified on a currency of iron ore.

Time for a really determined review of the law so that trusts can not be misused by crooks to keep the spoils of  their dishonesty.

Today's NBR report on Mrs Hotchin's court performance reminded me, though Mr Hotchins may yet be found not guilty for his role in Nathan's Finance. Whatever the Hotchins' virtues or lack of them, the report does not make happy reading.

The review should be commissioned from a lawyer with a genuine love for these wonderful creations of the common law system, perhaps working with someone with a passionate hatred of the kinds of scumbags who give the corporate world a bad name. I keep meaning to complete a proposal for the Minister of Commerce. It would be worthwhile work.

Self-dealing (related party transactions) is the Achilles heel of limited liability capitalism. When looted assets are siphoned into trusts, public outrage is fully justified.

So the law needs more effective tools to protect honest uses of trusts from the hostility to trusts that will someday flower into a populist measure that could knacker them.

There are long traditions of  throwing baby out with the bathwater, in disgust. Dishonest uses of trusts engender disgust. Time to make it more risky and expensive to abuse the trust vehicle, saving it for its proper purposes.

I'm curious about the New Zealand experience and project referrred to in this week's Economist.

"In one culture clash, Nathan Torkington, an open-source consultant, helped New Zealand’s government assemble sets of data. After a meeting with a minister, he sent a summary of what he learned to members of his mailing list and he was gratefully accosted by subordinates of the minister who said they found out a lot about their boss."

I see nothing on Nathan's blog to identify it. Has it been widely reported in our geek  world and I've missed it?

Nathan gets the last words in the article:

"But whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them. As Mr Torkington admits, failing to grasp this point led to disappointing results in New Zealand. In his enthusiasm for technology, he failed to think much about who would use the data he was posting, and why. A wad of facts was dumped in cyberspace, with no instructions or incentives to find good ways of using them. There they sit, unread by any machine. Even the geekiest types can be nonplussed when they are presented with data but no purpose.'

What is this about?

[Wednesday - Thanks John Waugh for the link to Nathan's recent summary]

[Later - and to Bernard Darnton for this reference to a consolidating government website]

For those who enquired, yes of course Marae's Great Debate had a studio audience hand-picked to deliver the range of opinions you saw. Shane Taurima's notes identified everyone in their place as "for" or "against" "with a few "neutrals". So the voting at the end was a charade. I think we actually managed to move some to our side.

I do not complain of the charade. They chose the audience well. They gave voice to people who have for years been gagged by the consensus of the media anointed over what may, or may not, get coverage in this area. But it would have been too much to expect them to pick an audience likely to deliver a verdict against the fake Treaty. It is too soon in the pendulum's swing for anything like that. Nor, I suspect, would it yet be representative of citizen opinion.

Much more significant is the Government's solid and respectful work to marginalise those who can only wield power in a climate of permanent "them and us" division.

John Key's speech is worth a careful read. With his sunny disposition John looks to the future, to our joined prospects, insisting on a near term end to the navel gazing and recrimination. Not for him Hana O'Regan's joyful contemplation of hundreds of years of national "conversations" about 'the Treaty" (i.e. about race privileges in law and our constitution).

It is superbly pitched to put the Treaty right where it belongs after completion of the current round of settlements -  as an honoured part of our history, but not constitutional millstone. 

Without any grounds for offence to a reasonable person, it gives not a skerrick of comfort to those for whom the Treaty (the fake one) is the ticket to a front seat in a permanent negotiation over race privileges. The bogus partnership gets no mention. The spurious principles are left where they should have always been left – in the imaginations of the unhappy judges obliged to invent something to flesh out the politicians' weasel references to them.

The pictures of John enjoying Pita Sharples' company, after his decisiveness over flying the tino rangatiratanga flag, and his resourcing of the settlement process with a high calibre team under Chris Finlayson (including two former Labour Ministers) are the substance behind the sizzle. It is hard for racists to demonize a man who is so patently not racist.

I just hope they do not take the  offers of "co-managements" or symbolic guardianships from the settlement process to the seabed and foreshore area. They could become the lever for the next generation's claims. Though they may seem cheap now they will be ued in the long game as acknowledgments of the legitimacy of claims that in fact have nothing in law to justify them.

And the next generation will want genuine property rights, not the smoky imitation represented by the power to veto and to frustrate and to demand consultation (instead of genuine property  rights of exclusive use, enjoyment and disposition).

The Hon Eddie Jury's report on the Seabed and Foreshore was legal fluff, interesting mainly in its clear understanding that the existing common law and the Treaty were no adequate foundations for Maori to get what they ask for. Dury's foundation is instead a nebulous permanent privilege of indigenaity.

So telling Aucklanders to get used to co-managment of the volcanic maunga is fine. Just do not extend that to the 5000km of coastline, where the interests of us all demand an ownership and governance structure that does not pitch Maori into perpetually demanding ransom payments for any change of use, as the only way to extract value from what is "vested" in them.
 

TV One's Marae programme is showing this debate organised for Waitangi Day. They tell me they had difficulty assembling the Panel, as well as the audience. The topic is too career risky. I did not know who was my team-mate till I turned up in the studio.

Here are the notes I tried to pare down to the two minutes permitted for the opening.

"The real Treaty, the one signed 170 years ago was an asset to all New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha. It was way ahead of its time.  The parties were hugely unequal. The British had only just abolished slavery. Maori of course had not. But it promised all equality before the law.

 Now we live with each other, shop, play, work,fight in the armed services together and most of all, have children together. I celebrate that. You know we’re so intermingled that Labour  had to change the electoral law thirty years ago to say you are Maori if you want to be. If the law had stayed the same as Canada and other countries the race seats would have disappeared because there were no longer enough people who weren’t more Pakeha than Maori.

That real Treaty could still be an asset to us all, as I’ll explain, if Maori insisted on genuine respect for it. Instead a small elite is sharing the spoils of propounding a fake treaty. They've abandoned the real Treaty. With their pakeha mates they've sold their own people and the rest of us all down the racist road of perpetual political jostling for power.

In the 1980s a fake treaty was invented, a so called “living document”, a “partnership”  with principles that can mean whatever ambitious judges and politicians (including tribal politicians) want them to mean.

The fake Treaty divides and complicates and funds distinctions and claims to difference when the real Treaty’s clear words meant the opposite.

The real Treaty  support settlements for historical frauds abetted by the Crown. Because Maori were promised to be treated as British subjects, with the then almost unique benefit of the rule of law. Their property rights were over-ridden in breache of the real Treaty. And I’m excited to see the good stewardship of some of the huge assets they’ve established. The generosity of spirit in some of the settlements, on both sides, is a tonic.

But the  Treaty industry has moved to other targets, to permanent privilege and separatism, to demanding race seats in Auckland City Council government, reserved shares in aquaculture, in the air waves, in the benefits of using our native plants and animals, in language. They want separatism in different courts in  a separate welfare system, in separate health provision, in prison and sentencing programmes.

The contemporary claims are rorts. They are dangerous to our democracy, and our ethics.

Most dangerous to us all, Maori and Pakeha are the double standards – the tacit permission given by cowardly pakeha to double standards. Like non-enforcement of basic law against vandals and thieves occupying and traching public and private buildings. Like dithering for days before demanding answers to questions about the  Kahui twin's terrible deaths. Like tolerance of corruption, out of “cultural sensitivity”.

The appointments not on merit – of token people of whom the best we can hope is that they will ber passengers and not get in the way.

The degradation of low expectations, the special tutoring that gives the exam answers out to a group the day before the exam. Even if that story is not true, the belief that it could happen is damaging to our university self respect and expectations of standards. How will we keeping up with our diligent neighbours in Asia when we quietly know our own rhetoric about excellence is bullshit.

None of that is what the real Treaty promised. It offered the opposite, as the Young Maori leaders of the people's renaissance stated so clearly – Te Rangi Hiroa, Sir Tui Carroll, Sir Apirana Ngata.

The real outcome of the fake Treaty is what the book the Bottom Billion identifies as the worst gift to the poor, the message that  politics is the way to wealth and power, get assets by ordering your neighbours to give it up,  not from making things others want to buy, not from education and work and savings.

 Smart Maori kids realise how easily  suckered are guilt ridden Pakeha.. But they’re tempted into the wrong game. They’ve traded the simple clear classical property rights of the Treaty for political power, co-guardianships and rights to veto or hold out for ransom money. Maori have accepted rights to be negative, to force their neighbours to pretend respect to get permissions. But they’ve lost the real power, to the full exclusive and undisturbed possession and use of their land.

They accept the pretended respect for custom by holding trials with marae protocol, but accept that as a substitute for genuine cultural respect. Our stupid law of name suppression and secrecy and laws about recompense would have been dumped if there was genuine respect for the commonsense of Maori tradition. Criminal law was based around public and family shame – whakaama. How can that survive in the face of the “leave it to us” secrecy of the justice and welfare insiders.

I want Maori to be more assertive of traditional values. I want them to stand up against the nanny lawyers in defence of courage, being contemptuous of systems that accept pathetic excuses for hurting others. What about defending muru, and utu?

 The real Treaty  focussed on what we would share for the future. As Hobson said 170 years ago, “he iwi tahi tatou” now we are one people. He summarised the real Treaty. That was inconvenient to those who want a lever to power without having to persuade, so it has been supplanted. It is not good for New Zealand.

But there is much to celebrate. Though they will not say it publicly, I find that serious scholars and people in authority no longer defend the fake Treaty. They admit that it is an invention, that it has no historical legitimacy. They justify it instead on the grounds of necessity – to get "conversation" and other dopey excuses.

The fake Treaty is now worshipped mainly by people who have not read the real one, and they are often well meaning. But for them politics is supreme. They just need an excuse to legitimise putting a race filter over everything, making it the primary stereotype from which to colour other relationships. They want people to engage from primary identities governed by a collective character. They are upset when stereotypes are confused. They want conversations simplified into two sides,  Maori and Pakeha. They want the consequent opportunities to claim representative authority.

They abhor the complexities of our multiple individual roles and identities, of occupation, income, wealth (class), religion, artistic taste, liesure interests, family status (parent, child etc)

And I am hopeful. I honour Marae programme's courage in putting together a programme with such a politically incorrect moot. It is a sign that the real Treaty is making  comeback, after three decades of perversion at the hands of the political class.

It can be restored as a wonderful inheritance, pretty much spent, but a reminder of a noble ideal.

Is the Pope's defence of religious freedom, against the cultural imperialism and intolerance of the British Labour Party a very significant event.? Has Rome finally decided to accept what Martin Luther kicked off, the separation of church and state, with the state leaving matters of controversial morality to the citizen and his god or his conscience?

Er no, though I still applaud the Pope's intervention and where his arguments are taking the church.

Catholicism has been glad to use state power, and in many places a role as the established church, to oppress competitor faiths, and to use the State's coercive powers to enforce their own morality.

Essentially the Church has been with the left in supporting the State right to direct its citizens' private lives according to the preferences and prejudices of the anointed with their hands on the levers of power. They only differ on what official morality should prescribe. Official Catholic statements were in line with other mainstream churches, for example, in supporting our recent anti-smacking law change.

Of course the intimate experience of the two recent non-Italian popes with communism and nazism has led to serious thinking about freedom of conscience and religion. They've defended the Church vigorously against tyrannies.

But a careful look at what the Pope said in Britain says he is not there yet on freedom of conscience and belief. He urged his clergy and flock to

"maintain long-standing British traditions of freedom of expression and honest exchange of opinion".

Note that he did not say that he believed in the transcendence of those values himself. Nor does his church necessarily.

Still it was good to see the backdown of Harridan Harman.

Will Chai Feldblum, Obama's version of Harridan be led to a similar recantation? Matt of mandm blogs on the tensions in Feldblum's ideology.

c.

I'm not surprised by the left's enthusiasm for new property taxes.  "Soak the rich" is enough policy analysis for them – whether or not it hurts the poor more than the rich.

Catherine Harris in the DomPost last weekend put some of the landlord's case. But it would not persuade anyone driven by righteous joy in punishing the moneyed classes, and it did not explore the possible effect on tenants.

With my self taught economics I've been puzzling the apparent lack of public concern about what will happen to rents if and when the alleged taxpreference or subsidy for ownership of rental housing is removed. 

As I understand things when we subsidise suppliers we usually get more of their product than market demand alone would produce. Supply is artificially high and prices to consumers are artificially low.

So why would rental housing be any different?

Yet I've seen plenty of confident assertion that assumes the property market is different – somehow prices are driven to unsustainable levels by the artificial demand created by tax preference. I could perhaps buy that in relation to property for which there is finite supply, say for the best locations. But why should it apply to property generally, when there are hundreds of developers, and thousands of builders just waiting for the signals to produce more housing, and more rental housing in particular if there are landlords to buy them for more than they cost to build?

Business journalists have uncritically reproduced the theory that changing the tax treatment of property investment will steer New Zealanders toward more "productive" investment. Not so many have added the second leg – that as a consequence property prices will fall to become more affordable, but that seems to underlie much of the political enthusiam for the Tax Working Group's focus on property.

But will prices fall, at least in the rental market, if rent already provide a return that is better than bank interest rates? If more people need to rent, and the supply falls over time, as it might if it is correct that landlording has had a subsidy which will go, will rents not rise?

I think our 'unaffordability' of housing (it now takes over 6 times the average wage vs the 3 times that was the previous long run average) has nothing to do with tax preference. Indeed it may have been masked by it. Instead the problem is strictly the result of the mad RMA and the panicky regulatory reaction to leaky homes, which together have doubled the cost of new building.

Why is the left not panicking over the coming housing shortage?

Watch today for Goff to start pulling his party back towards mainstream New Zealanders. His speech is billed as including criticism of welfare bludgers (of course not in those words).

Gloat at  the discomfort of those in Labour who prosper only by exploiting diverse minority victimhoods, and only because they've mangaged to drive off, eject or terrify and marginalise any who do not sing along with them. Enjoy the in-party turmoil over the next year while it is uncertain whether it it too late for Goff to recapture the machine from those people.

See the inevitable media interpretations of Goff's positioning as populist desperation. They'll refuse to accept that it reflects a principled and intellectually coherent return to common sense (if that is what he announces), because they're uncomfortable outside their consensus territory defined by the political correctness of the Clark years.

But wait for their surprise at the rebound in regard for Goff and Labour if and when it is clear that Goff will prevail.

I think he will.

Goff will have to work hard. But he'll be assisted by the hunger for power and lack of deeply held principle among the junior players in his party. Even Grant Robertson, who seems to have thought he was leading his party's grass roots rejection of Goff's distancing of Labour from the Treaty industry, swung quickly into line when it became plain that Goff was prepared to appeal over the heads of his apparatchiks to the residually loyal Labour ordinary voters. They've always been worried about the racism in Labour's fostering of separatism.

For left wing legitimacy Goff can go further back, to better traditions and authority than the sickly academics around him. Labour's role in entrenching in New Zealand inherited privilege defined by race, despite the UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination, was always a shameful departure from the egalitarian principles that gave early Labour its moral force. Labour's elimination of any considerations of conduct or personal responsibility in welfare entitlements was a betrayal of the values of the people who established the welfare state. They were fiercely critical of those who suggested that it would encourage fecklessness. Entitlement depended on good behaviour, and it was meant only for those who could not help themselves.

Goff will not spend too much capital trying to wrest back Maori racist votes from their natural home, the Maori Party. He showed that in his equanimity over the Ratana reverses. He'll now be more free to woo the other ethnic votes anyway, of people who've always been worried about Labour's inability to respond to their fears of Maori radicals and criminals, and of race privileges generally.

I suspect he'll be quietly satisfied if the usual welfare industry spokepeople are appalled by today's speech.

Bill Brien will be remembered as an inspiring spirit., the archetypical good publican that most of us will meet only in fiction.

Every town, every Club. every society needs a Bill as an example of generosity.

Wellington has been lucky to have him.

Francie, we've all shared it and we'll all share your sadness.

Last month I celebrated a professional success for my firm, among other things, in a post headed "Good Things Happening". We'd obliged Mayor Laws to withdraw his Bill to confiscate Wanganui Port.

The dashboard page for the blog revealed that a critical comment from "Wangas" came from the same web address as some email correspondence my clients had received from the Mayor. I took the liberty of responding to him by name and thought little more of the incident, assuming that Wangas was a well known pen name for the Peron of Wanganui.

It seemed a little odd, but perhaps, I thought, Wanganui people are accustomed to him referring to himself by title – their pet name for their own town. After all, other Lords commonly talk of themselves in the third person. Though he did not do it as far as I know, Lord Cooke of Thorndon could have expected to be referred to simply as "Thorndon" in the House of Lords.

I like Laws' punchiness. I delight in the grief he causes to the anointed, with his political incorrectness, even while I deplore his indifference to deception and the damage he is doing to property rights. I respect his courage even while I feel sorry for Wanganui people who will have to pick up the tab for his damage to their interests in the Port matter on which my help has been sought..

But what a laugh to think that the populist Sun King has to publish his own voter odes. He has to be the tumultuous support for his own popularity.  Now the Fairfax media have discovered that he is embarrassed enough at having to erect his own literary statues to make the fundamental error of denying that it is him at the keyboard.

He is a master of media management. Whether it is him typing blog comments in vintage Laws language, or his poor employee, or his wife, the only way out when caught like this is insouciance. 

Instead he's shown that being caught hurts. Perhaps he is exhibiting the truth of the old saying remembered by lawyers in trouble – "the lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client". Presumably its the same in the world of media managers.

He should have called us for advice. 

A family movie trip enjoyed by the four of us. I could happily go again just to soak in the images. 

It's a must see for Wellingtonians. See what all those people are doing out there in Miramar and Seatoun, eulogised in yesterday's DomPost. We sat through all the credits delighted that talent so close had the world beating a path to our door.

The DomPost also explained how they've protected Wellington from recession. Apparently they've added "$100m plus economic benefit to Wellington" with "1500 plus people [having] worked on Avatar in New Zealand".

This morning (24 January ) I find that all New Zealanders have a financial interest. Matt Nippert in the Herald reports that James Cameron got a $45m NZ taxpayer subsidy:

"Asked in December why New Zealand was chosen as the film's production location, Avatar producer Jon Landau said: "To be honest, we went for the tax credit."

So go also to see what you've got for $45m of our taxes (or  the $200m per week we are borrowing from China and the Arabs). I wonder whether the tax collected from the people working here on the film does pay for the grant after taking account of the other costs government incurs for them (along with other taxpayers). Is Wellington's gain New Zealand's loss? Untangling the net effect of such subsidies is notoriously hard. I hope someone is doing it, and taking into account the temptations it creates to throw grant money into structures that do not deliver as Avatar has.

The Herald also covered this week the Auditor General's report on the ARC's disastrous spending on a David Beckham soccer match. It's a warning. Wellington City Council goes in for these civic bread and circus bids in a big way, apparently successfully. I hope they're cherishing their Midas, because politically sponsored competitive bids to promotors are high risk stuff.

But go to Avatar soon. The film will not keep, for intelligent adults. I suspect it will earn nearly all of its revenue this year and next. There will be little interest after the next great Weta digital animation. Except perhaps for Russell Norman. He'll be delighted as teachers show it in schools, adding to our kids' soaking in intelligence-free politics ("Yes Rangi there is a father Christmas, and Sophie, Mr Burns does live in the Beehive")

Avatar will  be long studied by film nuts, but as a way point for the progress of digital creation.

It will not keep because those incredible talents are applied to a story line of such awful pap that to future audiences for whom such digital creation is commonplace, there will be too little to compensate for sitting through the stereotypes, the moralising, the childish noble savage drivel.

I'm with Spectator reviewer James Delingpole who recommends forgetting Cameron's preaching. Just enjoy the art

O to get here the simple intelligence of the US Supreme Court (or at least its majority opinion).

Their decision this week did no more than say that the first amendment to their constitution means exactly what it says. It talks about freedom of speech, not the freedom of speakers – you cannot abridge rights of free political speech just because you do not like some kinds of speakers who want to participate (this case struck down gags on companies being able to contribute to political debate).

It reminds me that we await an Electoral Finance Reform Bill. The Government's proposal paper suggested complicated controls on "parallel campaigning" (i.e. people other than political parties campaigning on what they think the issues are and who should be elected). The draft Bill must be getting close.

David Farrar was quickly on to this week's Supreme Court decision. The reasoning supports his October submission at least as it objected to controls on parallel campaigning.

Please lets have in the awaited Bill a similarly penetrating simplicity to replace the complicated "balance" our anointed want to supervise. They provide no evidence for their imagined ills of genuine freedom to participate in (and to fund) election debate.

Some will genuinely fear that our democracy could be overwhelmed by the spending of foreigners with subversive intent, or rich people. But I'm satisfied from my time on the Justice and Electoral Select Committee that most of the support for ever tighter rules on campaign finance was out of resentment at the thought that uncouth outsiders could disrupt the ritual dance of the established parties and their unscripted collusion with the political media heavyweights.

Labour and Green hostility to electoral free speech and work for more finance restrictions were designed to make taxpayer funding inevitable. Labour has lost its power to attract voluntary donations. The Greens hate the way markets work to let "the irreligious" give practical effect to their preferences.

For other political parties the attraction of tight rules, and the lack of interest in evidence on how they work or are likely to work in practice, seemed to flow from an intuitive insider's wish to:

a)  avoid facing the cut and thrust of immediate response knocking debate in political advertising (spending limits mean our campaigners can not afford to depart from their pre-planned campaigns, and tit for tat ads work best on electronic media, from which most of our electoral free speech is banned);

b) allow the insiders to decide what issues will run in the election tournament, because outsiders can never match the insiders' command of media attention;

c) maintain the advantages for the experts of the established parties who know the routes through the regulatory thickets

d) ignore the incentives for cheating none-the-less. They assume they will be too smart to be caught, despite campaign finance scandals all over the world which validate cynicism about the honesty of politics and politicians. Over time I found that those who spoke most loudly about 'restoring confidence and keeping money out of politics etc' were the least honest;

The main practical difference between political campaigns here and in the more vibrant democracy of the US seems to me to be the power of our media gatekeepers who decide who, and what causes, will get public attention. In the US the candidates and those who love them or hate them can at least ensure oxygen to an issue of interest to ordinary people, whether the media and party elite like it or not.

In New Zealand elections there can be large areas of national concern that are by consensus 'off limits'. Without Winston Peters' ability to force the media to cover taboo topics, we may have more of them.

It was good to see Minister Simon Power's awareness of the superb performance of our Companies Office in his announcement of enquiry into the possibility that NZ companies might require a NZ resident director.

There may be some sound reason to insist that all NZ companies have a director resident here, but if so it has not emerged as an issue in my nearly 30 years of law practice. I've never come across a situation where the benefit from that requirement could not be secured equally well by simplifying address for service of document requirements and telling the Courts to go ahead without any response from a defendant who fails to respond to messages to the official address for service.

Compliance will establish a lucrative new market niche for nominee directors.

Maybe I have not come across enough crooks.

I have certainly faced the frustrations of the regimes that do require a resident director, and develop suitably costly mechanisms to circumvent the presumed intention of the rule, so as to allow innocuous business to continue.

There are many ordinary business reasons to have a company overseas, in Australia, for example, without having an Australian director. A New Zealander may spend more time in Australia yet not be resident there, than an Australian based director who spends much of his time in Monaco and Las Vegas

Residency and citizenship stuff often makes weird law. A few years ago Harry Duynhoven fell foul of our crude law on eleigibility to be an MP when he sought to preserve or gain his qualification to go back to Holland as of right. Labour forced through a retrospective law to save his seat.

Our OIA, for example does not allow a foreigner to use the Act. The similar provisions of the Local Government Official Information and Meeting Act do allow foreigners access.

Is this for national security concerns? It might have been easier to make them a specific exception to the obligation to disclose. There is an express exception for disclosure that would prejudice substantial economic interests of New Zealand.

But I look forward to the cost/benefit analysis of complicating our admirable company registration requirements. I bet they do not compare the proposal with the costs and benefits of enforcing the law we have.