Faced with a choice of films this week I was surprised by a friend’s flat rejection of Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Bruno. He wasn’t interested in snobs laughing at ordinary peoples’ good manners.

He hadn’t seen Toby Young’s review in the Spectator, but his suspicion were supported by it.   "Funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest" – makes it not a must see for me.

Curiously I have yet to hear the view of any friend who has seen it.

Am I the only one sick of seeing "smart’ added to the mundane descriptions of  otherwise flimsy devices, schemes and rules.

I know, I know, it can be just a shorthand way of saying they have chips and computer driven interactivity with the owner or the environment.

But the word has also been appropriated by the Emperors who want to slide stuff past us hoping that no one will dare question something called ‘smart’ becaue it must be soo fashionable.

For ‘smart’ you can often substitute unproven, over-complicated, bad value for money or even fraudulent.

Smartmeters, smart-cars – OK. ,

Smart-phones, smart-pay systems, smart cards – Possibly.

But smart tariffs, smart accounts, and smart growth – Smart-arse.

This morning I was delayed walking to work around Wellington waterfront at the bridge by the Boatshed.

A small seal was lazily barrel-rolling its way under the bridge into the lagoon. A couple of families watched entranced, and one young Chinese tourist asked me if it was an eel.

A hundred yards further on, the tuis now living in Frank Kitts park were singing their usual choking song. They’re just opposite the rocks where the little blue penguins come ashore to screech and scrap unseen as I walk home the other way after dusk.

They’re also only 50m from the Len Lye water whirler fountain, around which a stingray can be seen cruising some evenings and mornings (though come to think of it, I have not seen him/her since I saw one being hauled in on a hand line a month or so ago).

Whatever else has happened to the environment, Wellington harbour is cleaner and more beautiful and apparently full of life than at any time since I arrived here nearly 40 years ago.  

Bernard Madoff has a ‘prison consultant’ to help on where he should serve his 150 year sentence.

It is not clear from the report (thanks Nikki Pender for the link) whether the consultant has a direct influence on the outcome, or just helps counsel to know where to ask for, and where not.

What an inspiration for New Zealand. Why leave the private sector to profit when the state could run the service itself? Presumably insiders know better than anyone which prisons are the shockers, and which are not. Perhaps the advisory service could be offered by the prison unions. There are two, so there’d be healthy competition.

Judith Collins could cut the process short by auctioning placements. That could defray new prison building costs.

Prisoners can influence where they go now. They can get to a Maori immersion unit by acquiring a deep interest in culture, or a faith-based unit by a conversion experience, to to Te Piriti by expressing willingness to undergo sex predator therapy.

Perhaps if Minister Collins’ department moves fast enough prisoners with means could order and pay for the container of their choice now. When they leave it could bear a plaque with their name, like family pews in some old churches, and Embassy Theatre seats.

It could be moved as the sponsor advances his criminal career. There could be a hitch though when the prison/parole/court cycle rreaches its zenith –  the most serious prison, Paremoremo, is not set up for containers.

Nevertheless, caring fathers could still provide for their sons and even mokopuna, with a family container reserved against the day. 

Here’s the heresy foreshadowed last week.

I’m inclining toward the need for a new publicly funded agency to remedy failure in the marketplace of ideas.

I say inclining, because it would unavoidably legitimise something I detest – taxpayer funded partisan public propganda on political issues. The Families Commission is currently at it. Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro seemed to do little else.

My worry is that our debate depends on adversarial dynamics. We assume that various sides of issues will get an airing because parties need to debate anything supported by competitors to maintain their separate identities, and to stay in front of their supporters. That assumption is now dead wrong.

Democratic debate is  shrivelled by political professionalism. Most politicians are  either professionals, or their mouths are controlled by professionals. Many have never had other interests or jobs. They’re steeped in the rules of political management.

So they’re too professional to touch ‘toxic’ issues. Adversarial processes of democracy do not ensure that unpalatable hard choice issues are thoroughly debated.  Things we would rather not think about are left untouched, for fear of taint.

Insiders know that  most swing voters are marginal voters. Most marginal voters know hardly anything about public affairs. They’re not interested. Whether they vote is almost accidental. They do not listen to arguments because they know so little or they find them upsetting. They feel that people should be nicer to each other. They turn off from people who argue ‘endlessly’ on things scarcely understood.

And it is those voters who make the difference, not the people who care passionately.

As advertisers know well, products sell and develop brand loyalty on image or aura. Consistency is needed to strengthen a good aura. And being associated with bad news and unpleasant issues is bad for the aura. Truth and importance come nowhere ranked against the need to avoid association with unpleasantness or uncertainty.

So we get large areas of important public discourse where politicians of every stripe will simply not be found.

The Broadcasting Act tells radio and television to worship balance. So it is hard for them to cover issues if their official Punch n Judy characters have ducked behind the curtain. Though they can say that one side or the other has declined to participate, there is none of the conflict tension they need if they can’t find spokespeople even to frame an issue.

Politicians have created specialist agencies to do some of that. It is probably an element in the enthusiasm for the creation of a New Zealand arm of Australia’s highly regarded Productivity Commission. Things that contribute to low productivity are often sacred cows, and asking whether those cows should go to the works is rarely palatable.

Maybe a need for unpalatable comment was behind some support for the creation of the Families Commission and the Children’s Commissioner. If so the capture of those bodies by the dreary anointed is a warning.

An Office of Devil’s Advocacy could need a very robust constitution to preserve it from its mealy-mouthed enemies.

From time to time I’ll list issues that would profit from frank and unpopular advocacy.

My post last Thursday promised a heresy the next day. My apologies to those disappointed to find nothing since then.

I”d expected to do it by Blackberry, but that link was inserting different fonts and print sizes at random, and I’ve been away from a PC.

The heresy will follow, but I must mention an email National Radio’s Jim Mora received but did not read to his Thursday afternoon listeners last Thursday – I think because he is a gentleman and always respectful to his Panel, at least on air.

That was the first time I’ve been face to face in his Auckland studio.  My usual experience, sitting alone in a darkened Wellington studio responding to voices in your headphones was left to fellow guest Richard Griffin.

I enjoy Richard’s company but had no idea he was the other Panel guest till I turned up at the Auckland studio.

It may have been a good thing that we were not together in Wellington. Jim might have lost control. We can both talk without stopping, and despite friendship Richard and I can always find things on which to disagree.  Occasionally he has to bow to the memory of his father, a left wing activist. I think Richard’s father might have been one of those rare beasts in New Zealand – a card carrying Communist.

That would have interested at least one listener. As best I can remember her email went along the following lines

"So your guests are Stephen Franks and Richard Griffin. Was Genghis Khan otherwise engaged"

Teasing out our leftist temptations might have been a more interesting topic than our confused references to Bach’s establishment of ‘equal temperament’ that took up the first quarter of the Panel’s hour .

I want small government. But I want a new government agency.

In my view the last unequivocally great agency to be created was the Office of the Ombudsmen.

Since then its been a steep downhill slide. We got a Commerce Commission, Commissioner for the Environment, Telecommunications Commissioner, Electricity Commission, Securities Commission, Retirement Commissioner, Human Rights Commission, Privacy Commissioner,  Children’s Commissioner and Families Commission (listed in order of value to man and beast).

I could be persuaded that some of them should exist as specialised investigation and enforcement agencies (like the Serious Fraud Office) but many of their functions would be better performed by the courts applying law of general application. And some of them never would be missed – indeed we’d all benefit if the bossy people attracted to them were obliged to find more useful work. 

The trouble with Commissions is that they tempt Parliament to breach the rule of law. Some Commissions make up law as they go so that we can not know the law in advance. They get wide discretionary powers to make codes and allow exemptions. Often their rules are outrageously vague. If they applied equally to all (another requirement of the rule of law) anyone could enforce them. Instead Parliament allows these low quality laws to be applied only by their pet Commissioners. The theory is that making it up unpredictably is OK in the hands of their well meaning anointed (like themselves)  Commissioners.

But of course power corrupts, and busybodies showing their superior virtue by thinking up new rules for the good of others can be as oppressive as any tyrant.

So why do I want a new offical body?

I’ll explain tomorrow.

On a quick run through the report it is very much as expected.

Eddie Jury J has had another opporunity to set out his idealised reconstruction of Maori ‘law’ and his mystical conception of a nation state governed by the anointed from two races in eternal cultural competition and practical negotiation with each other over the application of power.

He of course recognises that the Court of Appeal’s Ngati Apa view of the the common law rights Maori inherited with the British law they signed up to under the Treaty would never get Maori a fraction of what his mystical view would offer. So he invents a new set of customary rights which have apparently been under subterranean evolution for 160 years.

He also recognises that even the most naive pakeha politicians and commentators will sense that there is little future for a country engrossed in endless hui over the scope of rights inherited by ethnicity.

So he wraps it all in mystifying abstraction and says lets set out on ‘conversation’.

What else did the government expect when they accepted the Maori Party request for such a partisan inquiry.

It’s a bit rich that Randerson J, who has in place a suppression order prohibiting us all from learning the names and details of two men on trial for theft of the Waiouru Museum medals, will now decide whether John Campbell and his TV 3 colleaugues can be forced to disclose their sources.

Judges who think the principle of open justice means open only to the insiders will now perhaps tell another profession that secrecy is not permitted to them, even if it means less likelihood of uncovering dirty deeds in the future.

I do not know the reasons for the court secrecy in this case. The courts offer good-sounding reasons for suppression. But if it is because a suspected wrongdoer or his family might suffer odium by being identified even if acquitted, they are  depriving us all of two essential elements that underpin our willingness to live by the rules, and to trust in external justice.

First –  the right to make up our own minds  how we regard and treat others, whether or not their wrong-doing is proven beyond reasonable doubt.  Not guilty only means not proven. It does not mean the accused did not do it. The law admits as much by allowing a civil trial for damages on the balance-of-probabilities standard. There should be a high threshhold before the State can exercise its coercive power. But civil non-coercive society is possible only when reputation matters. Reputation is founded on the infinite range of information that a person generates by their conduct, most of which would never be relevant to a court of law, nor admissable.

Secondly, suppression diminishes trust in the integrity of justice. "Leave it to us – we know best" might have worked when our crime rates were very low. It appeared that the system did know best. But when the system is patently failing, and soft-in-the-head judges are seen to do silly things repeatedly (for example the serial excusing of Kuariki’s breaches of parole) the need for open justice becomes more acute, if only to reassure us that the rest of the process is not as stupid.

Good to see Heather Roy on the news of yet another student union fraud repeating her unequivocal call for VSM.

The Young Nats official response is also promising.

"Student associations are essentially able to get away with making poor decisions and having poor processes in place like no other union in New Zealand – simply because they do not have the accountability that they would have under voluntary membership”

The latest  report confirms that  reason for the prevalence of fraud.

"The association’s annual revenue is about $500,000. This was being held in trust until recently because it had failed to complete its 2007 and 2008 audited accounts. Marra [the association Manager] said CPSA had a 2 per cent voter turnout this year, which was higher than in the past, but still "pathetic"."

Why would sensible Polytech students racking up debts to qualify for a job take student politics seriously (other than those who like to spend others’ money and boss them around). These organisations can’t hold institutional memory, they have little or no natural constituency. Like unions around the world they are ripe for corruption because of a cultural history of bullying and there being too few with a sufficient stake to incur the costs of monitoring office-holders’ fiduciary fidelity (and risking the bullying). Decent students have better things to do with their time than associate with many of the types drawn to student politics.

I should know. I was one of those so drawn.

The story from Christchurch lists a number of recent frauds. To that list I could add another just as large, reported to me with supporting papers which satisfied me of fraud, but which the Hamilton Police simply would not investigate. The embarrassed institutional management wanted to leave it alone, it was complicated, involved ‘cultural issues’, and so to the Police was of ‘low priority’.

As Minister of Consumer Affairs and an Associate in Education perhaps Heather Roy will  be able to get action. National’s constitution promises freedom and the liberal side of its history is overdue for ascendacy.

Compulsory student union membership is an unjust tax to feed political activists. They are natural enemies of freedom. Their causes would starve if they had to get donations for their propaganda. It is overdue for National to put a stake through the heart of their power in tertiary education.