A TV 3 request for comment on the proposed roll out of a formal warning policy distracted me yesterday into thoughts on the pros and cons of the policy.

Among  the details as the Police explained them to TV 3 are:

“· The offender must be 17 years or over.

· The offence must carry 6 months imprisonment or less.

· Victim considerations must be taken into account.

· Reparation considerations must be taken into account.

· Family violence  and meth possession offending is excluded.

· Over three quarters of all pre-charge warning cases are victimless crimes.

· Offenders are still held to account by arrest, processing at police station and police recording their warning for future reference.

· Allows more time for police to focus on preventing offending and more serious offending.

· Reduces the pressure on the court system.

· A large proportion of offenders for minor offences never re-offend.
· Fewer withdrawals results in improved ratio of successful prosecutions.

· Current delays in the District Court will be significantly reduced.”

My opinion, in summary

The policy is a jug full of excuses for failure.

It seems likely to increase crime, despite the reduction they’ll claim from fewer reported convictions. And not just vandalism and minor anti-social behaviour. The likely cost will be paid in more serious crime. A lesson from countries that have cut serious violent crime is that ending a climate of acquiescence in low level anti-social behaviour works. Targeting trivial offences shows that the law applies everywhere, and has been associated with astonishing reductions in serious crime.

If the warning policy is genuinely confined to trivial infractions, where the courts already avoid significant penalties the new policy may just recognise the revolving door reality. If so there may be little increase in offending. We are already paying the high price of not punishing minor offences promptly and with certainty at the only time when it can be effective, that is at the apprentice stage of a criminal career.

Reduced shame

The new policy could mean less concern by offenders about public identification. Over 17 year olds are usually identified after conviction. Shame is still the biggest sanction against offending in most healthy societies. Under the warning-only policy they will not be convicted.

If the policy sends a new message that the Police don’t care or are too busy to worry about minor offending, it will increase offending over time.  The cases saved from Court could  be paid for many times over in additional cases that must go to court.

A fair comparison may be with the "break off the chase” policy. Once it became known, there appears to have been more willingness to try to escape from Police.

Any policy to reduce crime long term must focus on kids. Once a person has an established pattern of offending there is not much the system can do to cut their offending except lock them up till they reach criminal retirement age – now around 40.

Some stop earlier spontaneously, but sadly there is no proven rehabilitation magic, even if there was all the money people want to spend on “interventions”. Though this policy does not affect kids directly, the message it sends about how offending is perceived will pervade the Police, whether they agree with the policy or not. It reflects the current approach to youth crime. The direction of change should have been the opposite

Background

From my MP period research some countries, the US most notably, have managed to cut serious violent offending very materially, and especially youth violence, while ours is getting worse.

In essence certainty matters most of all. Speed and certainty of punishment are more important than severity. Indeed we could and should have lighter formal punishment for most offending. Reinstating speed, certainty of punishment and shame and its normal social consequences could let us reduce formal penalties.

But when punishment is slow and uncertain it has to be more severe to have any effect at all.

If the population most likely to offend gets conflicting messages and concludes that it is likely to be worth the risk, then crime will keep rising. Great efforts to detect and secure convictions for serious crime, and severe sentences,  could earn NZ nothing more than the notoriety of the worst of all possible outcomes – very high numbers in prison and very high crime rates, with the consequent loss of trust and other costs to the rest of us.

Certainty that crime will not pay must be part of the atmosphere. It can be strengthened in many ways:

a) by a high likelihood of detection (more police);

b) fewer technical defences, and so higher conviction rates;

c) prompt decisions;

d) long sentences; and 

e) the abolition of parole and other chance factors that lead a gambler to think they will duck the price.

It appears that the right atmosphere can also be created and sustained by establishing a law abiding climate (what the literature calls norm observance). Broken Windows policies recognised that people look for cues as to whether they are likely to have to pay a price for misconduct, for failing to comply with “the way things are done around here”.  Graffiti and broken windows and non-enforcement of minor offences give the opposite message (like unpunished littering, casting offensive matter, offensive language, threatening behaviour etc).

The architects of Broken Windows wanted all law to mean what it says. So they urged getting rid of law that was not going to be effectively enforced or punished. The law should be seen to apply and to be enforced, or it should not be law. They chose some apparently trivial offences that could be easily enforced (like law against jay-walking, and begging and littering) to show their seriousness. Others they announced would not be enforced or would be removed.

The stunning outcome of the Broken Windows policies was that serious crime responded much more to the perception in the community about the attitudes to lawbreaking generally, and in particular enforcement of routine minor rules, than it did to dedicated campaigns against serious crime.

It appears also that a major part of the effectiveness of substantially increasing penalties for headline offences might come mostly from what it says about the resolve of those in charge of enforcement. If that message is diluted by contrary signs, (like the new “warnings” policy) all Crusher Collins’ severe sentencing rhetoric could be wasted.

The Police should instead be getting agreement with the Judges and Corrections to send a simple consistent and certain message to young people at the recruitment stage of criminal careers. They should deliberately choose indicator offences that are easy to enforce. The consequences should be almost automatic.

The law should be developed with what is known about offenders in mind. Their common differentiating characteristic is that they seek risk and believe they are better gamblers than the rest of us.

With a formal warnings policy they get another message that the law will not affect them. It feeds the belief they they will beat the odds, already fed by name suppression, long process delays, laughable penalties, discharges without conviction, non-punishment of fine non-payments, concurrent sentencing, no consequences for breaches of community work sentences. They all tell the offender that breaking the law is not really a serious matter.

Stuart McCutcheon in today's Herald describes the spade that student politicians will not touch – the stupidity of pouring tertiary education spend into interest free student loans and other student 'welfare' instead of into things that ensure their degrees are worth more.

A continuing slide in the ranking of our universities has been reported in a world survey which controversially bounces Cambridge ahead of Harvard.

With Auckland slipping 7 places to 68th, and only Otago (135th) and Canterbury (189th) remaining in the top 200 (but lower), our kids' qualifications are losing value. That will likely cost students over their working lives far more than they ever gain by being able to party more and work part-time less than their counterparts overseas.

And the problem compounds, as our universities slide so does the revenue they can generate from paying foreign students in the international education market. For Wellington the low ranking of Victoria and Massey should spur our leaders into pushing for an end to the student loan rort.

What about spending some of that political capital you are so carefully hoarding Mr Key (and Mr Joyce) by telling students (and their feckless parents and grandparents) that  the 9 year old election bribe has done enough damage. You've started the conversations that will limit it.

Why not use the earthquake shock to announce an end to the bribe after the next election, and redirect the money into restoring our rankings, at least for those of our universities that are still credible enough to stay in the top 200.

Disclosure of interest – I have four kids with student loans who may not thank me if the interest holiday goes.

I've recently had reason to research some of the law and conventions around Cabinet appointments. There's been plenty of innovation since we adopted MMP. 

We have Ministers who are not part of the Government, Ministers not bound by collective responsibility but no MInisters outside Parliament.

The last is a reflection of what we think as a core element of the Westminster system – that the Executive draws its authority from being the faction in the legislature that has the numbers to call the lawmaking shots. Being able to appoint a Minister who is not an MP is thought of as a characteristic of US style administrations, where the separation of powers divides the executive from the legislature.

The UK PM has just announced the appointment as a MInister of the current Chairman of HSBC. He'll get a seat in the Lords, so strictly he will be a Parliamentarian. Peter Mandelson was the last Minister similarly parachuted into both the Lords and his Ministerial warrant.

But it underscores a flexibility that we do not have in our Constitution.

Section 6 of our Constitution Act 1986 requires that Ministers of the Crown be members of Parliament.

At last – TV 3 is going behind the symptoms and getting to the causes of Canterbury's woes.

Did Mayor Parker engineer the earthquakes?

What a mercy that we're yet spared any Green theory that somehow links our earthquakes to carbon emissions or some other human wickedness of prosperity, and so far no kaumatua telling us its all a message from an upset taniwha.

Not many will be pleased to know that lawyers are among the first back up to speed in Christchurch. Many might prefer our industry to have a permanent crimp in output. But I congratulate my old firm for having its Christchurch branch back up to speed within two days. Stuff has the report:

"Jo Appleyard, a partner with Chapman Tripp said the legal firm had temporarily relocated to the All Seasons hotel in Papanui Road from the PricewaterhouseCoopers tower.

The 35 Christchurch Chapman Tripp staff had the help of group technical staff hooked into the Wellington and Auckland offices to enable them to continue with normal legal work before an eventual move back to Armagh Street."

What a pity there is so much political and official dithering over getting kids back to school. What could be better for the kids, their parents and laying down patterns of resilience than:

• to get back into a familiar routine as soon as possible. Competence in a routine is comforting. There is more recovery and avoidance of "trauma" when people have tasks they can control than when they have time to wallow in self-pity and to worry about the enormity of what lies ahead.
• kids should see competent adults carrying on unperturbed, overcoming difficulties. 

The decision lies, as it should, with each school individually. Principals and boards will no doubt get advice on safety issues, but I hope they balance the risks of further accidents or disease from school attendance against the counterfactuals – like:

• the risks for many of the kids in homes that will stay unrepaired and probably uninspected for longer than public buildings;
• the hazards they'll explore if they are wandering the city bored and unsupervised;
• the problems for parents trying to re-establish their own working normalcies if they have to look after kids who should be at school;
• the message of passivity and lack of initiative inherent in kids seeing adults stumped by non-problems or lack of central 'permission' to problem solve, when most schools patently have facilities that can be used, even if some parts are deficient. 

I wish there was more evidence of the 'sector' standing up to the central and local government nannies. They revel in issuing orders and "responding" to "helplessness" and "needs". I fear we are getting ever further away from the example we saw in the Thai peoples' immediate back to normal response to the tsunami.

Yes! Yes! Yes! there is nothing to add, nothing to take away from today's perfect Rosemary McLeod column in the Sunday Star Times.

She skewers those who are steadily removing from our cities the light colourful scented plants that evolved in company with bees, those who tell us we must prefer the damp enclosing gloom of native rainforest to the airy understory characteristic of forests that need to drop their leaves to survive winter.

She deplores the official reverence for pohutukawa – and dares to prefer human uses, like a view or drains that stay unblocked, ahead of pohutukawa. 

I love pohutukawa. I've planted and nurtured a number in various places. I'm glad Wellington streets have them. But it is refreshing to see Rosemary's subversive identification of pohutukawa with the oppression of those who have "ethnic spirals tattooed up their arms and loudly deplor[e] all non-native plant species, as if this will make them dinkum tangata whenua instead of just posers."

For true heresy try this:

"The only native plant I've knowingly acquired is a white clematis, just starting to flower, which smells pretty good, too. The plant police haven't made it here yet. They'd love it to be planted in flaxes, the dull kelp of dry land, because "that's what would have been here naturally". Oh yes, and manuka scrub would have been here too, I dare say, and bare, stony earth, and tufty things like upturned scrubbing brushes, and I expect the wind howled overhead, and the seagulls squawked, and the tuatara gamboled and the moa warbled.

But I say it's no bad thing that the country's orchards are just now seas of pink and white blossom, that daffodils and jonquils are sprinting out of the earth, and that magnolias everywhere are magnificent, or that I battle against nature to have something to put in vases. So you can stick your boring flaxes – and especially your nasty pohutukawa – right up your plant police jumpers. I won't be having them".

As I read that I thought of Irene Van Dyk's husband and his contractor, who cleared some manuka and gorse without all the necessary permissions. Van Dyk was fined $15k and the contractor more. Remember that our law is now incapable of stopping a drunk killer driver from accumulating 17 convictions for driving while disqualified, yet it will spend thousands targetting decent people for clearing the scrub on their own land.

Colin James in the DomPost today reminds us that the government agreed with the Maori Party to conduct a constitutional review. Colin says that the terms of reference will be released shortly.

But the article looks as if might have been chopped short by a sub-editor. I took particular note because of the cryptic reference to  ACT in the following: 

"The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and Centre for Public Law are running a conference next week, 10 years after an IPS conference in 2000 which ACT tried to wreck. The IPS is also leading a state sector project on Treaty issues after historical grievances are settled."

I'm curious because I think he is referring to the hui mentioned in my post several months ago. I might have been the only member of the ACT caucus at that hui. I didn't realise I'd left anything like that impression. The conclusion leaves much to follow up.

The article properly identifies Rodney Hide's current contributions to constitutional evolution, in local government, on regulatory restraint, and on the racism in the DRIP (Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples).  I've no doubt he will be influential standing up both for property rights and against race privilege as the Marine and Coastal Area Bill is released.

Every so often I get sucked back into reading 'climate change' arguments. I bought Gareth Morgan's book as a patriotic duty – when an intelligent New Zealander pays for me to get an objective account then I owe it to him to see what he thought.

Since then I've left the stuff pretty much alone. Unless you're prepared to learn the science, you'll usually be in the hands of the talented and persuasive folk whose articles you last read.

I'm sure there is a human influence on climate. I do not know whether it outweighs natural cycles. I do not know whether getting warmer is good or bad overall, though I rather like the world I know so I start with a preference against change. I do know that the richer we are the more scope we have to adopt technologies that minimise damage to the physical world without sacrificing things that no democratic leader will be able to persuade us to sacrifice.

The risks may justify sensible preventative measures. They are almost certain not to be the hair shirt policies on which the world is planning to waste $trillions. Our ETS  is possibly one of those, though it may be the least we can do under political constraints without incurring the geopolitical costs of simply repudiating the obligations we signed up to many years ago.

A friend recently sucked me back into this by sending what she considered to be a challenging web article. I could not open it. Instead of taking that as a piece of good luck, foolishly I sent her a short optimistic piece by Matt Ridley from the Huffington Post. She responded with a Monbiot article. I've followed up on some of the latter's links.  Then I came across a 2 July Telegraph piece by Bjorn Lomborg.

Cathy and I spent a happy couple of days escorting Bjorn Lomborg to dive the Poor Knights and white water raft during a New Zealand visit. I prefer his company to that of the gloomy Green party priests who deal with their personal demons by trying to inflict the modern equivalent of ecclesiastical rule on us all.

Lomborg believes that climate change is a risk. He urges precautions. But he wants them to be intelligent.

His Telegraph article reports on Copenhagen Consensus Centre research into the costs and benefits of current European energy policy:

"Using the conventional estimate that one ton of carbon dioxide is likely to cause about $7 (£4.50) of damage, [researcher Richard Tol] found that the total benefit of the EU policy was just £5.7 billion. In other words, every euro spent is likely to generate just three cents' worth of benefits. [Lomborg's] research shows that by the end of this century, the EU's approach will reduce temperature rises by approximately 0.05C – almost too small to measure."

That's my fill of climate change argument for this year. I do not want any more:

a)  because none of it can be conclusive to a layperson;

b)  because the physical world I know best is so much better and healthier than when I was young so my personal experience fits better with Ridley's optimism;

c)  because I prefer optimism to pessimism. It is less wearing. Optimists are more fun to have around. When there is uncertainty about which is most merited, why not choose the one that is more pleasant?

d)  because there is nothing I can do in my personal use of resources that will make a blind bit of difference to the physical world even if the pessimists are right, whereas

e)  there is much that I can do about the social world that might have some practical influence for good as well as equip us with more wealth with which to play our part in improving the physical world when the time comes.

Over the next few days we'll hear much on Sir Ron's contribution. I'll listen with none of  the reservations one often has about eulogies for people you know from working with them and for them, in strife and in success.

When I opposed the abolition of knighthoods and celebrated their restoration it was Ron I thought of as the embodiment of our version of nobility. It was him I had in mind when arguing that having a title that elevated some of us as models for all, was worth it despite knowing that some undeserving imposters would also benefit.

I do not recall a client who was more worth working for, or more fun to dine with, or more magnanimous in success or more decent in adversity.

Receiving a Yellow Page fax scam this morning prompted me to check out Internet NZ's new orb service. It is for online crime and the NetSafe providers probably see fax scams as belonging to the steam age.

I hoped that Orb might offer a download of a simple one button click to send off a spam message to Orb. Apparently not yet.

The Yellow Page scam has agreement in the fine print to pay to a UK company $159 per month for two years, payable yearly in advance. The fine print allows for the resulting debt to be assigned. I imagine it will be assigned to some NZ company that will then set about formal enforcement proceedings, but will agree to drop the enforcement for a compromise sum.

It will be interesting to see what scumbag lawyer (if any) will work for the perpetrators of this scam. Perhaps they will use experienced debt collectors without lawyer assistance.