NBR Editor Nevil Gibson ventures some heresy on Fiji, properly noting "My comments about Fiji should not be taken as gospel, given I was there for only a few days"

I'll do the same.

I was In Fiji with the family to celebrate Cathy's birthday at a dive camp. We had tents and huts without air con and only solar lights, but wonderfully relaxing. All four kids and their husbands and partners are scuba divers.

 It was my first time in Fiji for nearly 20 years. Last time I went up to see Dr Timoci Bavadra,  at Viseisei Village shortly after rebels deposed him as PM.

 This time I wasted no time on politics – it was purely to enjoy Cathy's happiness in the uninterrupted company of our adult children, with no cooking or other obligations.

Quite apart from the glorious reef diving I’d forgotten just how hospitable Fijians are – the astonishing missionary achievement that turned the Cannibal Isles into a deeply civilised place (in the real sense of the word civil) despite its poverty.

 It reminded me also of the dismaying absence of discussion in New Zealand of the foreign policy debacle that is just now coming to an end. The Hon Murray McCully was up there the week after us, signalling failure to oust Bainimarama.  From now on our boycott will be a matter of petty pride.

We’ve not brought them to heel, and we’ve forced the Fijians into flogging their fishing and other resources to an eager China, while squandering our reputation for punching above our weight diplomatically. EU and US policy has always respected what they saw as our ability, with Australia, to keep our corner calm and secure. They’ve watched, appalled as the mask slipped in our home patch as we moralised and harangued to no effect and watched ineffectually as the door opened to China.

Finally it is ending. But did you hear any debate on this in Parliament?  Instead Parliament was in paroxysms over the lumpy progress toward saving $24m in the MFAT budget. The opposition was demanding enquiries.

What about an inquiry to discover whether our disastrous Fiji performance speaks of feeble analysis or naive idealism within MFAT that will cost us far more than $24m if it is a capability matter. Hopefully it is all attributable to political over-rides on sound advice, but I fear otherwise.

The UK has tried to learn lessons from the mistakes that took them into the Iraq war. Our Parliament perhaps does not even know our Fiji policy has diminished our strategic position in the Pacific. Yet when trouble strikes, a strategic failure can be the equivalent of billions in wasted spending - certainly more than $24m.

This time in Fiji  I volunteered no political questions. And I draw no firm conclusions from casual holiday conversation. But I  I met no one who wanted the undemocratic chiefly rule back or the demagogic Indian Labour Party. Unprompted, different people told me of their respect for Bainimarama, including an Indian tourist operator, two taxi drivers, two long term expat business people from Europe, several indigenous Fijians, and some Tuvalan Fijians whose told us their parents in 1947 bought an island in Fiji in anticipation of the submersion of Tuvalu.

They like Bainimarama's even-handedness among the races, his hostility to corruption, and the relative efficiency of the military governors in their districts. They respect the obstacles he's faced.

 Of course they'd prefer freedom and functioning democracy, but they can not see a way to it. So in the meantime they are grateful that their dictator is benign.

While NZ was chewing on failure, Bainimarama was in India, meeting their President. Compared with that shouldn't we be asking why it appears we've had no clear objectives, no intelligent self-interest, no practical power to determine outcomes on Fiji, and now no success.

Isn't time for a bi-partisan review of the quality of our foreign policy capacity, both political and official. John Hayes has paid a political price within  National for daring to question the pompous orthdoxy Murray McCully took over from Winston Peters.

We're convinced we punch above our weight in world affairs. Some of us think it is because we can preach to others from a postiion of moral virtue. The Hon Phil Goff should do us that last service of making it politically possible to do a clear-eyed review of what went wrong on Fiji. We'll never get an opposition leader better placed to help the ruling party educate New Zealanders to the realities of our region and our feebleness without the respect of our former allies.

Labour is in a mood for confronting some past errors. It would be cleansing for them to put distance between then and now on foreign affairs.
They should get in before Gerald Hensley's upcoming expose of Lange's deception of the New Zealand public as well as our allies, shows them up for a continuing pattern.

The protesting ratepayers of Kaipara have good reasons to gripe:

• None of them ran up the huge debt that will double their rates over the next several years, and keep multiplying them, it was done for them by their duly elected councillors;
• None of them could stop the budget blow-out on a foolishly lavish sewage scheme, only the officers supervising, and perhaps some councillors would have known enough;.
• Few if any of them would have endorsed the central government drive for such folly, in new requirements and guidelines on water quality and sewage treatment
• Many of them may have voted against the mayor and councillors particularly responsible.

But we all suffer from bad government. There is no court to award protection from such unfairness. There is no cosmic 'Fair Go" or 'Target' to remedy failures of democracy by exposing the idiocy of those responsible.

Sure, central government might rescue Kaipara residents from the costs of their bad choice of leaders, by spreading it over even more people with even less ability to prevent the folly.

But rescuing people from the consequences of their neighbours taking local democracy too lightly, must surely compound the problem. Matamata will be in line for the same. Hamiltonians whose Councillors blew $30m on street racing without apparently even knowing it would love to be relieved of their Claudelands debt.

Auckland and Wellington voters elect green nut-jobs whose affection for trains is a matter of faith.They have faith that central government will gift them their train sets, unfortunately with some historical base. It is now clear that Michael Cullen rescued Toll Holdings and committed us to the waste of billions on our rail without Treasury advice that would have been unwelcome. Judged on the finance company director standard he'd be in jail.

The left/green faith in trains has nothing to do with public transport efficiency – buses are demonstrably better.  Only faith can overcome the overwhelming international evidence that commuter trains justify their vast costs only in dense cities of great size..

Many of the  Kaipara considerations for central government are similar to those facing the Germans who will decide whether Greeks should be rescued from the consequences of decades of electing fools and crooks to lead them.

I predict that the Germans now have little alternative but to show Europe there is no rescue of voters who would elect a gambler like Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras. He promises Greeks that the capitalists can't afford to enforce austerity.

Now they've no choice but to let the smaller country (Greece) go  to stop the democratic rot in Spain, Italy and now France. As long as voters think there is a Father Christmas somewhere, they are rewarded for electing con-men. The soothers of the left who are not liars must feel deep down that somewhere some fat capitalists have a store of wealth that can be looted to avoid having to pay the moral and now financial  bills for  their dishonest welfare state.

We shall see, in Kaipara and Greece. 

Maori TV excelled in last evening's hour long exploration of the complaints about the arrests, charges and the trial.

It was odd that defendants awaiting sentencing were not persuaded by their lawyers out of appearing. What a dilemma they present for the judge, having publicly shown an absence of remorse in the case of the Tuhoe two, and defiance in the case of the Parihaka pair.

It is odd to go through four and a half years without ever explaining why they were practicing with Molotovs in balaclavas, and taking strenuous steps to exclude evidence, up to the Supreme Court suppression, and (by not giving evidence themselves) ensuring that the Court never heard from  the only people there who knew "the whole truth" (they avoided the risk of cross-examination by getting their lawyers to raise their risible excuses) but then start strutting before you are sentenced.

Perhaps they did not ask their lawyers. Perhaps they thought their supporters needed  visible staunchness to help ignore the judge's comments on sentencing next week. They might be in prison after sentencing so would miss their chance to speak on TV.

Whatever the case, it was a triumph for Maori TV. As I expected, Julian Wilcox asked the right questions, though it grated to hear him purport to speak for Maoridom in pursuing Greg O'Connor.

I considered I was there  to speak for New Zealanders. That included the many Maori whose common sense would have been affronted by the ludicrous excuses, and the hyperbole of Pita Sharples and Hone Harawira and other notables castigating the Police and the (then Labour) Government.

I'm sure most observers of the ugly hikoi of bludgers who turned up in Wellington to shout obscenities at the justice system we all depend on, felt sorry for Tuhoe and others who they purported to represent.

But refreshing myself  to appear on TV reminded me of how deplorable has been the performance of the New Zealand legal system in all this.

What a catalogue:

a) the relevant law was badly drafted (as I pointed out when it was being passed);

b) the Solicitor General appears to have noticed the flaws inexcusably late, after warrants had been issued in reliance on it;

c) if the Police alerted media early to make a splash out of the arrests it backfired when  charges failed;

c) the Court's secret sessions and secret orders fertilised conspiracy theories that the Crown was being underhand;

d) If a brave newspaper had not leaked the sinister nature of the plots, the news for four years would have been entirely dominated by inventions of the accused and their supporters;

e) during the four year of skirmishing the official justice culture of secrecy (lack of a mechanism to rebut false claims) made the system look hapless, and potentially sinister;

f) Lenin's "useful idiots" were left un-opposed to turn the affair into a race clash, to the extent that Maori TV found no Maori lawyer  to put the case for the Crown last evening;

g) the Supreme Court persuaded itself that trespassing not shown to have affected any of the relevant landowners, despite a duty to weigh such impropriety against  "the need for an effective and credible system of justice", outweighed the desperate public need to know whether the Police had over-reacted;

I was asked last night by the other panelists what I'd do about the failure of the system to inspire confidence in anyone. I'd not thought that through. They thought there should be a public enquiry. 

The Dickensian delays in getting this case to trial alone would justify a Parliamentary inquiry into the quality of our courts and procedure. Add to that the low quality of judgments as useful statements of the law, to operate as practical guidance to all who live under it, and the continuing failure of anyone with authority in Justice to decalre and end to secrecy in the courts, and one could be tempted to support calls for an inquiry, just to see where the chips might fall.

It will not happen.  I cannot see a way to guarantee that it would not merely further damage the legal system, with no assurance of improvement.  There is no lawyer in Parliament with the legal mana to ensure quality in such a proceeding. Such a process should engage inspiring counsel to formulate and ask the hard questions, the way the best Senate enquiries do. If we could identify a quorum of thinkers such as those who engineered our ACC reform it might be worth the risk.

I can't see any such critical mass. We will not get solutions as radical as those that  finally reformed the system Dickens railed against. Lets work instead on the slow work of defending what is good against the justified but ill-directed outrage of citizens.
We have to hope for minor reforms until there are enough new people to take a constructive chain saw to the scaly accretions that drag our courts into such a mire.

I'm looking forward to Native Affairs this evening. Julian Wilcox will test the reasonableness of Tuhoe demands for apologies from the Police. I think the Police should not risk being thought to buckle to such conditions as the price of a 'normalised' relationship. It is doubtful that it is sensible to dignify with attention the purported leadership of a group so far from offering inspiring and constructive role models to its members.

I've agreed to be on his panel. I cannot complain about an establishment lack of spine in standing up for the colour-blind and even-handed rule of law, if I decline when asked to put the constitutional position.

I've generally found  Maori broadcasting to be more open-minded (though pithy) in discussing legal issues,  than MSM's PC brigade so memorably tagged by Winston Peters as 'sickly white liberals'.

Part of that is time. Maori broadcasters tend to take as long as it needs to explore a topic, so even if you're invited along to be whitey the foil, you still get enough time to put your case.

Frank McLaughlin is to become a Deputy Secretary of Justice.

Who's he, and so what?

Frank is a partner in Chapman Tripp, and one of the best lawyers I've had the privilege to work with (and because he is younger than me, to help train).

Partners in the top three law firms (of which Chapman Tripp is one) may have been earning as much as $1m per year. So why would Frank leave for an agency that has not carried much intellectual clout since the reform years of the 1960s and 1970s?

Justice should be one of the control departments, like Treasury, setting standards for analytical rigour that discipline other agencies – burning out wishful thinking and lack of principle and developments dangerous to the rule of law. Instead it has promoted many developments that have made our law more uncertain. 

Sadly, our separation of powers sees judges and lawyers without leadership, without inspiration and without influence sufficient to defend our legal inheritance. The monstrous discretions throughout the Financial Markets Conduct Bill are a case in point. 

I believe Frank is becoming a public servant to serve the public. He will head up the Ministry’s policy division and be a member of its senior management team. 

Some top professionals reach Frank's stage and take to yachts, or new wives, or holidays in Tuscany, or art investment. Others become directors. Frank is heading in a more ascetic direction. I hope he finds it as absorbing and worthwhile as I found Parliament.

In the US it is common for top people to move between business, academia, senior bureacracy, politics and regulatory agencies. The moves fertilise each sector with the wide experience ofr outside appointees. The regulatory limb of that practise has been facilitated by the spoils system of appointments, under which thousands of positions are open to change after each administration change.

I do not favour the spoils system, but I think New Zealand has been the poorer for having so little cross-fertilisation. Academia in particular suffers here from being seen as a berth for too many people with limited alternatives.

That is not Frank's problem. He was on Chapman Tripp's board. As the senior lawyer for many of its significant clients, including Meridian, NZX, AMP Capital, Treasury, MED, Fonterra and Telecom/Chorus he's put in huge hours for many years.

He's always had an interest in complex reform processes though they are rarely remunerative for firms. He was a Labour Party activist when I first knew him, having been NZUSA President after his student days. Part of his value in reform projects has been because of his intuitive appreciation of the public sector perspective, and his knowledge of Government processes. Frank’s work has included:

·         taking over from me the Dairy Board's instructions in the establishment of Fonterra  and advising on various of its international joint ventures;

·         acting for NZX on its transformation from a statutory body to a company;

·         advising the Kingdom of Tonga on a wide range of law reform, policy and legal matters;

·         advising Telecom on the Government’s ultra-fast broadband scheme;

·         acting for Treasury on the restructuring and sale of AMI Insurance.

He was a member of the Financial Markets Authority Establishment Board in 2010. I've wondered whether his absence from the FMA was because of his principled criticisms of the awful Financial Advisor regime. Frank oversaw the secretariat to the Webb Task Force on the reform of financial intermediaries which generated the momentum for the Financial Advisor law, but cannot be held responsible for it.

This morning The Nation asked where my political friends and supporters will direct their  votes and hopes and energies if ACT is a lost channel. With a dirigiste National forced to pander to the middle swing voters it must disappoint many of its supporters. And it knows that it needs a respectable and reliable coalition partner (or two) for the next election and beyond.

Many loyal members, committed to National's principles of freedom and personal responsibility, will be able to hold their noses and cast real-politik votes for National despite its apostasy, as the least worst option, but that will not be enough to liberate their enthusiasm and their contributions. A more pure idealism is essential to harness that energy.

Shelley Nahr for The Nation overcame my better judgment and persuaded me to go to Auckland this morning to discuss that brief. And to my relief Duncan Garner stuck to it. I cannot tell whether it was entertaining because the topic is too interesting for me to be objective, but  think he did an excellent job in getting balanced comment from Rodney Hide, Colin Craig of the Conservative Party and of course, me.

Right to the end  I waited for Duncan to abandon the brief and subject me, or us, to what John Campbell did to John Key last evening. Campbell traded on Key's endless courtesy with dopey questions in pursuit of an absurd conspiracy theory. Even if his theory had been correct, it would be a yawn, except to those for whom anti-Americanism is mother's milk.

And why do I say that this instalment of The Nation "gives way to the right". Because it added momentum to that part of the right occupied by Colin Craig's Conservatives. Colin announced his availability for an Epsom by-election.

And because Rachel Smalley did such a good job in eliciting views from Colin James and then Wellington's 'son of Roger Kerr' – the New Zealand Initiative's new director, polymath German/Brit/Aus think tank whiz  Oliver Hartwich, without the sneer that John Campbell seems unable to avoid in interviews with people from the other side of his bi-polar world.

I said in Jim Mora's show on National Radio this afternoon that Wellington's  Moa Point sewage treatment plant uses the energy equivalent of 6000 barrels of oil per day. A producer raised his eyebrows and later asked if I meant litre, or gallons. 

I've now lost confidence in my memory. I recall the engineer telling the story, and his reference to barrels. But he may have given the 6000 figure as an equivalent.  I must follow up to get the right figure.

The current operators, United Water, should be able to clarify on Monday, if no one else does before that.  The process captures the solids for landfill disposal, and treats the remaining liquid with UV light before it is discharged to Cook Strait. It is energy intensive, but cannot possibly use 6000 barrels of oil equivalent.

A month ago I predicted a win for the Hon Judith Collins in her law-suit over the claim that she or her office had leaked ACC information.

Catching up on several week's papers I thought of how sick Messrs Mallard & Co must have felt on seeing Phil Kitchin's latest report on the ACC/Pullar affair.  Their source might seem a less reliable witness for pleading justification in light of at least one misleading ACC internal report.  Phil is such a good journalist I read his report as a fair indication of ACC scrum twisting. Where there is some there is usually more.

Trevor Mallard could be getting advice right now to settle this, even if it involves a complete and abject apology and withdrawal. I hope the Minister makes them pay all her costs, plus some, to cover the risk she took, plus some more against RNZ for its low-grade coverage of the Mallard allegations without balancing comment.

Great to see Mayor Celia reported without mockery in this DomPost report, saying her new electric assisted bicycle is "about saving that time and looking slightly more cool".

I love the way she's sticks it to the superior types embarassed by having someone "representing them", whose committment to her values goes as far as biking when in fact it's uncool, and despite the blandishments of a chauffered car.

Sue Moroney MP and the Labour Party must be over the moon. Her Bill to extend paid parental leave has had more publicity already than they could have dreamed.

It has no show of passing without Government support, as she would know, yet it has been reported widely as if it could proceed over the objections of the Government.  Without that spurious possibility it would have had no newsworthiness.

Standing Orders are clear. A money bill (which would commit government money) can be vetoed by the Minister of Finance.

"The House will not pass a bill, amendment or motion that the government certifies it does not concur in because, in its view, the bill, amendment or motion would have more than a minor impact on the government’s fiscal aggregates if it became law"

The Bill is, nevertheless the kind of measure that works politically, even if it is bad for the economy, and bad for the women of child bearing age who become more susceptible to the covert discrimination by which employers protect themselves from unequally shared social costs. The accumulation of such feel-good measures has transformed Western democracies over two generations from world economic powerhouses to parasites on the energy and capital forming sacrifice of poorer people.

Greece is just the most obvious case. It is a poster example of what happens when cynical politicians pander to a nation of greedy, dishonest, whining bludgers. The honest toilers pay the price along with those who've ruined them.

What a pity Labour has not put up a bill to reform something they campaigned on last election, where the embarrrassment of the financial veto would mean more politically. They could, for example, lodge bills to push out the pension age, or to impose capital gains tax. If they got a majority to support those, consider the political impact of forcing the government to exercise the veto to protect John Key from doing what he has already admitted to be the right thing for the economy.