I’m looking forward to an intellectual property presentation this evening. Specialist law firm AJ Parks will lead discussion at the Law and Economics Association of NZ on the Major Events Management Act 2007.

The Bill has been notorious for its prohibition of  “ambush marketing”. In the original form the Bill would have even banned the Westpac Rescue helicopter from going near the venue, because of its logos.

Less attention has been paid to the ban on a secondary market in tickets. Sections 25 and 26 make “ticket scalping” illegal.

There’s resentment the world over at “unscrupulous sellers fleecing fans“.  Thus spake the front page of of a Dubai newspaper I was reading a fortnight ago, about the Dubai Rugby Sevens at the end of this month. Tickets issued at dhs 225 are being auctioned for dhs 450.  Justin Timberlake fans were suffering similarly.

It went on – “It’s not good for the artist to see there’s money unaccounted for, it’s not good for the organisers who have spent a lot of money to see it disappearing into the hands of scavengers, and its not good for the audience – who will be disappointed if more tickets are officially released later“.

I suspect that the opposite is true. Restrictions on the free sale of any property usually cut its value to any owner.  After the All Black debacle in France, Kiwis who could not bear to watch the sad final had the consolation of selling their tickets. That flexibility would underpin initial prices in future World Cups. It is worth paying more if your downside is covered. If resale is forbidden how will the Poms and French and others we want here in 4 years  cover their risk that the final could be between teams that bore them?

If the Act’s resale prohibition sticks, the initial issue price might need to be lower, to compensate buyers for being unable to salvage anything should they be unable to attend.

In reality the resale prohibition is unlikely to work. It will just make the market less transparent but more profitable for the touts. The go-between’s risk will be reflected in the margin between the secondary seller’s and buyer’s prices.

This part of the Bill is an own-goal, unless the Rugby Union have a cunning plan to profit from a monopoly control of resales. To maximise the initial price the Rugby Union should announce early that they will consent to approved resales, and offer a resale facility.

Audrey Young’s NZ Herald coverage of the Electoral Finance Bill has almost single-handedly saved our fourth estate from appearing complicit in Labour/NZ First’s astonishing attack on democracy’s most important freedom. She should be an example to the ignorami generally populating political journalism.  They probably regard her instead as a curious relic of ‘old style’ journalism, for obsession and thinking the facts are more important than her ‘personality’ opinion.

Laidlaw’s Radio NZ Sunday Pravda session a week ago was revealing in this regard. It discussed research confirming the left bias of journalists. All interviewees were insiders. They smugly dismissed the bias as unimportant. Not one of them saw the connnection with the Electoral Finance Bill’s measures to ban campaigns that might compete with media insider preferences.

Labour’s confidence in the left bias among journalists prompts their law to shut down privately funded election speech. When ordinary citizens can’t pay for communication with other citizens, the agenda is controlled by the gatekeepers in the media. They decide who and what gets covered in ‘unpaid’ news reporting.

Labour believes the PC media consensus will favour them, even if National gain power (and thus control of government funded advertising, which will be exempt from the new gag).

Today’s Herald editorial cements their claim to leadership of the serious media.

I can’t really say “I told you so” because I did not pick up in the Bill the precise idiocies that have so embarrassed the government, but I did warn the government of the pitiful quality in what they passed. I gained the call for seven speeches during the committee stages of that bill. It is unusual for an MP to speak more than a couple of times on a Bill in the Committee stage, though MPs in smaller parties can get more time per member.

 Warnings in other stages included : “I do worry about the poorly defined terms in the Terrorism Suppression Act. We have to remember that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

“Unfortunately this legislation is typical of the sort of law we get from Mr Phil Goff. This is absolutely typical of the stuff that comes out after he has made a vein-popping speech about a mischief or an evil. Then we get technically poorly drafted stuff, without regard for the unintended consequences. In this case, the legislation is open to misuse. This is a “trust us” law. If we look at what the Government is actually doing about countering terrorism, we see that it is a paper change. That is hypocrisy. It takes us, in some areas, in the wrong direction”.

I voted with Keith Locke on some of the clauses, for reasons different from his, because the drafting was so abysmal.

I’m not surprised by the DomPost front page on hospital cynicism and chaotic management. I’ve had recent exposure to some professionally glum medics.

I gave the after-dinner speech to the Auckland Medico-Legal Association last Friday. I obliged the President by being deliberately provocative, urging the medics to assert some bottom line behaviour standards against patients who are needlessly dirty, insulting, ungrateful, aggressive, queue jumping etc. I suggested that they make examples of some of the worst of such people (of course excluding emergencies, psychiatric cases and others who can not help themselves) by sending them to the back of any queue, or refusing to treat until they fulfil their side of the social responsibility contract.

This was prompted by accounts of ACC claim figures and Aus statistics showing that caregivers, who should be revered for their willingness to put their lives into helping others, have among the highest rates of injury from assault.

I’d taken some trouble to check the various formal ethical statements, and swotted up on Hippocrates’ position. Last month I visited an Institute on the Greek island of Kos which promotes his philosophy in medicine.

The problem might be recent or Anglo-Saxon or Western culture specific. The Kos Institute representative found it hard to grasp the issue. I think to her only mad people would repay good with evil, even in an A & E department.

My Friday audience response, overall, was resistance. Sure, it might have been my poor delivery, but no one spoke up, or came up afterwards, to explore the ideas, or to think of variants that might address the problem. All the comments that did not minimise the specific problem, raised obstacles to any change. Most of the doctors felt they can control such behaviours. It is probably nurses who are more powerless.

What struck me was general air of discouragement. It must be wearing to work in a spiritless atmosphere – hating management but being cynical about all solutions.

Over some very pleasant drinks afterwards I was told that hospital productivity had probably dropped 20% as many medical professionals had given up going the extra mile to cover for system deficiencies.

They told me that older practitioners still did it, because that was how they were trained, but it was a value that was dying as the generations turned over.

 What a contrast with the can-do optimism at the Hi-Tech awards dinner I attended as Jenny Morel’s guest the next evening. The technology people are having fun. They’re risk-takers, and they’re fun to be around.

Bill English’s speech to them was short and sweet, telling them that the rest of the community had to recapture their delight in welcoming risk.

Sadly I found myself wanting to cheer the survey (reported in the Herald) showing an increase from 31.1% in 2003 to 35.8%, in the number of 15 to 45 year olds who’d smoked at least once in the last year.

I dislike smoking intensely, though I envy the subversive little cells which share the vice, meeting covertly in carparks, doorways and perhaps more secret places. Their cells transcend social class, and they get the best gossip first.

The report speculates that the increase may be “backlash” against nannying government. From observation that seems to be the reason for high levels of youth smoking in rule-suffocated northern Europe. If rebellion is the reason here, I’m heartened.

H Clark’s threats to end personal access to fireworks  would be enough to send me to internet recipes for scary explosives if I were at secondary school.

As in so many other areas the anointed want to inflict collective punishments because their ideology has made punishment for actual offenders laughable, and of little deterrent value. Firework bullies and idiots inflict injury and loss on innocent third parties. They know there is a tiny risk that the ‘justice’ system will ever make them pay a meaningful price.

Rather than restore the rules we had a generation ago when such vandalism, arson and thuggery was rare, the nannies restrict the freedoms of all of us. The innocent meekly comply. The others will laugh, and find new tools for creating misery.

Is young smoking a sign of a fight back? Sad that they damage themselves, instead of getting at the nannies politically.

The Spectator suggests that David Cameron is being radical in a surprising direction. He is signalling a resumption of Blair’s soon stalled effort to implement Wisconsin style welfare reforms. They’ve been copied in various ways across the US, with stunning success – to the furious chagrin of the welfare industry academics.

If Cameron carries on as indicated he must have decided that the tolerance of the UK middle voters to the welfare scandal has at last worn out. Given the apparent parallels in the paths John Key and Cameron must trace, dare we hope for a similar exception to blandness here?

In my opinion welfare reform need not be scary to middle voters, provided it targets clear bludgers, not people who can not help themselves.

Similarly, a criminal justice reform along the lines of President Clinton’s 1996 triumph should be as saleable as Clinton made it.

How dare Telstra Clear sell their new “Big Back Yard” product when they can’t even service existing clients?

After around 3 hours on the phone my home PC is back on line, after nearly a month swithched off. Inexplicably the DNS  had spontaneously morphed to another number, or Paradise changed its requirements, if I correctly understand the helpful technician who cracked the problem. It was at the end of 1.5 hrs of me fiddling with the modem and router and various settings, under phone directions.

Poor guy. I could hardly bring myself to talk civilly. My first attempt to get thru to Telstra Clear last Wednesday ended when I hung up after more than 40 minutes of music and intermittent reassurances that a “technician would be with me as soon as possible”

Next attempt was aborted on the warning that the delay would be 73 minutes.

Next morning it was 61 minutes.

Today the delay warning at 11-22am  said 2 minutes. A technician replaced the music at 11-37 am. He would not believe that I’d started my first contact attempt at around 10-34am and had a similar 15 minutes of postponements before the first technician contact, despite the warning telling me to expect a delay of only 3 minutes.

Turkish communication service was eye-opening. It perhaps illustrates the “leap frog” theory that technology will advantage poorer countries without a big legacy investment in ‘steam technology’. Internet access in Turkey was far better than anything we found in Greece. Enquiries to the mobile provider were instantly directed to competent English speakers.

Every hotel we stayed in had fast free wi-fi. Many had a separate service for each floor. These were not international chain hotels. They were little family owned affairs, 2-3 star, the biggest having no more than a couple of dozen rooms.

It seems that Capital + Merchant Finance may at last have dropped their advertising reliance on Lloyds good name. It was astonishing that Lloyds let it go on so long, however technically justified or correct the words might have been.

A month ago Jenni McManus in the Sunday Star Times reported (C5) on what persuaded some unfortunates to sink their savings into Bridgecorp. Bridgecorp material referred to Lloyds’ insurance of loan principal. She explained that the Lloyds “arrangement was highly conditional and applied to only 19 of Bridgecorp’s 69 major loans”.

Capital + Merchant Finance’s use of its Lloyds arrangements has morphed. It was prominent on their advertising until very recently. Page 9 of  last year’s prospectus gave detail of the cover. I could not work out from it exactly how the insurance for the company became an assurance of payment to debenture investors. The conditions of the insurance seemed tight (it would not pay more than $20m in any year, it covered a maximum of $3.5m of any loan, and only certain loans were covered).

The key question to me was what proportion of the loans fell outside the conditions. Perhaps it was stated and I missed it.

If I was thinking of putting money into Capital + Merchant (which I was not) I’d be wanting to know more about this Lloyds cover – and if I were from Lloyds I’d be checking to make sure that my name was not offering more comfort to investors than it should.

The law is strict on the use of ‘experts’ statements in prospectuses. Experts must consent to the form and content of their statement, and ensure the statements are not misleading.

Lloyds may not be an “expert” for this purpose, but if I had been Lloyds’ local eyes and ears, reputation concerns would have prompted a suggestion to Lloyds to make very sure they were comfortable about the advertising!

How does Rodney keep his face straight as he deplores Mallard’s punch, and urges H Clark to show that “all violence is unacceptable”.

When I knew him his private language was full of violent idiom. He was always going to “smash” people. When he had dealt to them they were to be “dead”. 

Were his tights too tight? Is dancing anti-testosterone therapy. Because Rodney knows the current penchant for denunciation of violence, without discrimination on circumstance or intent, is pure hypocrisy. Even to our moral relativists in power violence is frequently “acceptable” (an earlier generation would have asked whether it was “justified”).

Our security and peace, domestically and internationally, depend on violence or the ability to do violence along with demonstrated readiness. There is no other purpose for the billion dollars per year we spend on our military.   Policing depends on willingness to use force. The only novel element in our current hypocritical consensus is the view that only the state should be permitted violence.

During the long golden years  of extraordinarily low crime rates in this country (which our forebears and those of us lucky enough to be growing up then thought normal) it would have been preposterous for the state to claim that monopoly.

Courts confronted with a punch up automatically asked “who started it?”, or “who was in the wrong?” The law and custom respected the knowledge that bullies would proliferate if others could not respond to their provocation. No one would have imagined a politician seriously suggesting that aggression could be dealt with lawfully only by the Police. There was a shrewd appreciation that there could never be enough Police for that task if ordinary people were not ’empowered’.

Books, films, comics and playground ethics reflected the shared duty to preserve civility. The necessity to distinguish between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ honoured the  willingness of ordinary people to take their own steps to ensure that arrogance or thuggery or foul abuse did not pay.

The opposition should highlight the hypocrisy in H Clark’s position, but not by endorsing the stupidity of her credo. They’ve replaced the age old judicial question – “who is in the right” with an inquiry that needs no judge (a blind computer could do the job)  -“Was force used – did the defendant have a state licence to use force? If not – no excuses”.

An inspirational government would authorise and instruct judges to use judgment again. Justice would ask why the fight happened, not just whether it happened.

Staying in Dubai with NZ friends inevitably leads to talk about NZ’s future. Can the NZ way of life withstand the competition with the people being honed in these frenetic new capitals of commerce? Is that competition avoidable?

Workers arrive by the planeload from India, the Philippines, Pakistan, China. As an employer pointed out in a local paper “how could I want to go back to [Europe] to run a business when here I can work with people who turn up every day, on time, who do not get drunk, who try to do anything I ask them to do, who do not want to make me responsible for their feelings or health, who ask only that I pay them the market rate, and teach them how to do what I do”.

So many of our kids are being misled into thinking that the world will value them for being able to sing and dance and cook for visitors, for being proud of their culture and in touch with their feelings, for being strong and good at sport.

The wage differentials here show what the world actually values enough to pay for. It is not muscles or culture. As always it is what is scarce. The labourers on the buildings that go up a floor a week, get between 700 to 1000 dhs per month for up to 12 hours per day 6 days per week.  That is around NZ$250. They can pay 200 dhs for some floor space and 200 for food for the month.

Dinner for 3 at a local chain restaurant for everyday middle class dining cost us 300 dhs last night. The retaurant was packed with people of all hues. Only Emiratis seemed rare.

Just down the road a building labourer protest to get their 700 dhs per month increased to 1000 turned into a small riot two nights ago. The protesters are now on planes back home, banned forever from returning.

A graduate tour guide with good English gets say 2000 dhs per month, and lives in a better room (still shared) and pays say 700 including food.

A legal secretary with Arabic gets around 15,000 to 20,000 dhs per month. The bosses with scarce legal, accounting, engineering skills get between 5 and 20 times that.

So the labourer in 40C heat may get less than 1/100th of a common skilled income and less than  1/10th of a secretarial income.

I hope that one day responsibility will be sheeted home to those who have steered our education system into allowing up to a quarter of our kids to leave school functionally illiterate. They have an open world monthly value equivalent to the price of a few meals and taxi fares, and space on a floor with scores of others.

 Many will never have the dignity of being paid voluntarily by their fellow humans more than a fraction of the value of what they consume, in services, let alone food, clothing and shelter.