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.

Geof Shirtcliffe's piece in today's Herald may attract little more attention than the self sacrificing (self mutilating?) Principle 7 it describes. He wonders who in our Government is standing up for a hard-headed national interest analysis in the face of enthusiasm to look good to "our neighbours".

And great also to see Andrew Harmos, Chairman of the NZX asserting in Monday's Herald his determination to maintain control of the NZX here. And to see the reasons expressed so unapologetically.

All power to your arm Andrew, but for practical steps to build independent prosperity in our capital markets we'll need also much more determined attention to ensuring that our law is more simple and sensible than overseas. We've got to be more honest more speedy and less costly than overseas to counter the crushing advantages of size. We need less law enforced faster, cheaper, and with more certainty.

We also need courage enough among the leaders of the financial industry to denounce follies like most of the last 3 year's reforms to ape overseas markets.

I'm thinking in particular of the Financial Advisor regime slowly descending to stifle free debate on matters financial.

I'm reminded how easily folly gains momentum by the political willingness to change the law to look more like elsewhere in defensive first reaction to criticism of our company registration system (following revelation of the 'Lord' Taylor gun running structures). See for example today's DomPost editorial (which I would link to if I could find it).

What about something more simple like enforcing the law we have, for example the law requiring residential addresses on the register for company officers. From published accounts it seems that was broken. What about some prosecutions?

Great to hear that John Key has announced this law change. I'll pore over the detail later but congratulate National and Judith Collins for this sensible morphing of the successful Californian policy to a condition more suitable for New Zealand.

Of course the devil is all in the detail. I studied US experience closely before promoting three strikes and its the max as election policy in 2005.

I just hope it does not discredit criminal law reform through timid detail. Certainty of consequence is the secret to lowering crime rates, not severity of consequence. The detail must not let judges and Corrections interfere. It  must be clear to every recidivist offender that nothing will avert the specifiedconsequence of his third serious offence, not dopey excuses, or heart wrenching appeals to a soggy Parole Board, or even running out of money for prisons.

This announcement reminds me of the huge US success in cutting crime. Unwelcome as it may be to our defeatist criminologists the US is a wonderful source of experiments in crime control.

See the Wall Street Journal for a fascinating recent refutation of the usual handwringing about the link between poverty, recession, unemployment and crime.

What takes more than 10 second’s thought for a Minister for Bludgers facing Harris family type sickness benefit bludging?
Why should the Dept not test them using its own doctors. After all that is the solution Justice Minister Simon Power is applying when faced with an inability to trust lawyers on public money.
And why should there be hesitation about time limits for the dole. At least for the able bodied. Why would it take time to think about making them re-apply once a year. What about every week – with their evidence of having looked hard for work and having worked diligently at every job they got.

Otherwise they should get only food stamps and a voucher for a bed.