Off to the Warriors game tonight after a day NZRL conferring. A few years ago it would have been a smokefilled room over sausage rolls. Now its powerpoint and samosas.

The future’s now in SPARC’s hands. The new constitution has a healthy mistrust of pokie infused democracy, so SPARC nominees will now decide the composition of national and Zone boards. The game can neither select nor sack its reps/governors.

In my view it’s a second best, somewhat risky remedy though now necessary (which is why I voted for it as Chairman of Wellington Rugby League).

National League admin had nothing wrong that would not have been better cured long ago by a few prison sentences.
Another case of the NZ disease – blacken the many and let everyone suffer for lack of enough official honesty and courage to enforce existing law and penalties on the few cheats and bullies.

The effect of mistrust among the leadership engendered by corruption – ticket clippers (as Sir John Anderson called them) was misinterpreted by snobs as working class incompetence. We have a chance to surmount that.

The new SPARC dominated appointment bodies must make a point of shunning anyone who carries even a taint of suspicious association with the crooks, whether it is justified or not.

If a true cleanout does not ensue my District League will rue its vote. We’ve sacrificed a hard won insulation from Auckland on faith in SPARC’s determination to ensure a cleanout, reaffirmed at the meeting.

Parliament set the mid-point for murder sentencing at 17 years. What kind of murderers has Justice Lang come across to reach the view that Karen Aim’s vicious little killer can be free in 12.5 years, in his mid 20s?

What lead the judge to think the public will be safe from Jahche Broughton when he is  free at the age at which Karen Aim was killed by him?

The truth is that judges have been breaching the sentencing law with government connivance since it was passed in 2002. A graph of sentencing would show that there is no normal distribution within the range, which Phil Goff’s Sentencing Act purported to require.

Instead it will look like a ski jump, ending well short of Parliament’s maximum, which the worst offenders in each category are supposed to serve.

The depositions process is on the way out. I was indifferent to its demise, but today’s Herald story causes a rethink. Congratulations to:

• Otara store owner Virender Singh for not knuckling under;
• Defence counsel Greg King, for brilliantly saving Mr Singh from the expense and frustration of a wrong and pointless trial
• JPs Mark Sinclair and Ray Cullen for having the confidence and the common sense to dismiss the charges, saving the justice system, and in particular the idiots from the Police hierarchy or Crown Law office from the prolonged damage they and the system would have suffered from a trial; and 
• Garth McVicar, for organising for Greg King to help Mr Singh. A few more like this and Mr King can still his conscience for all the scumbags he’s been obliged to help with his professional skill.

But brickbats to Jonathon Krebs for the NZ Law Society and John Albertson for the Retailers on Morning Report this morning.

Krebs peddled the establishment line that it is (and should be) legally dangerous to defend yourself. Mr Albertson peddled the line that it could be physically more risky to try to defend yourself or your property.

In Mr Albertson’s defence he may have picked up his lines from NZ Police HQ. They just make them up.

While I was an MP Police pushed the line at a Select Committee that victims who try to defend themselves with weapons are likely to have the weapon turned on them.

I asked the Parliamentary Library to research it. They could find no evidence to support the claim and lots going the other way. A US Bureau of Justice analysis of 6,000,000 case records showed statistically better outcomes for crime victims who tried to defend themselves. Defence with a weapon was still better.

I asked in written Parliamentary questions for the Police to supply the evidence on which they based their advice. They responded that everybody knew it, and it would be too troublesome to look out the evidence and that Victim Support agreed with them.

I asked Victim Support for their reasons. They responded that they had never said anything of the kind, and had no view on the matter. The Police then said that their reference to Victim Support was a mistake.

Sadly, Police HQ are untrustworthy. On these matters Mr Alberson should talk to the seasoned old cops in the front line who will give realistic advice (like the famous – "always warn before you thump an attacker – and remember carefully which came first").

Last night’s Back Benches appearance was a blast from the past, and not only for me. It was a first time for both Sir Roger Douglas and Michael Cullen, but  Roger was positioned right under his caricature puppet from the days when he transformed New Zealand’s prospects. I doubt whether many there even noticed.

The partisan bawling saddens me, because it encourages in turn a style of bellowing point scoring that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

A Ministerial staffer observed that only the sorry NZ education establishment could produce an audience so full of ignorami, rude to a leader recognised as one of the best finance ministers in the world in the 20th century, influential far beyond New Zealand. The man who rescued us from a trajectory to the economic status of Uruguay or Argentina was given less courtesy than the man who paid the Aussies a billion dollars for a worthless railway, and produced pre-election accounts that omitted the inconvenient details of ACC’s growing shortfalls.

I’ve admired Cullen’s political skill and intelligence. I thought the Cullen fund was a master-stroke, neatly sequestering $2billion per year of projected surpluses away from the spending eyes of his economically illiterate Cabinet colleagues.

Margaret Wilson and Helen Clark gave him a terrible hand to play when he had to rescue them from their seabed and foreshore debacle. The opening position meant he could only minimise damage, but he did a superb job over a long time, on top of all his other work. The pity is that it was not in defence of property rights, instead of further damaging them.

But last night reminded us of his lack of intellectual integrity. I always found it shocking in the House when such a fine intellect simply made things up .

He would interject with allegations of dishonesty. I suppose he thinks they’re just permissable nonsense. They said more about the gymnastics he had to perform to defend things like the student loan bribe. A man who probably thought he was going to politics to help the workers, ended up channelling taxes to the classes most likely to become privileged.

Last night he knew he was misrepresenting government policy (to allow trading the 4th week of holiday for an extra week’s wages on top of the holiday pay) but did not care. He knows that regulation is among the causes of the US subprime crash and our current depression, but that bad regulation is more to blame than absence of regulation, but demanded more regulation. 

The Labour appointment of Jim Bolger to Kiwibank was a political coup, but at least they could trust Bolger. I wish the same could be said about Michael Cullen, given the rumours that National is thinking of putting him in charge of an SOE.

[My participation in the programme was unplanned. I turned up with Cathy to enjoy the spectacle, with a team from a Young Nats BBQ. Chester Borrows could not leave the House, so I was called from the throng to stand in as an "almost National MP". I was sorely tempted to announce a raft of spontaneous policy.]

 My respect for Gary McCormick increased during his Panel session yesterday with Jim Mora, after he confided his doubts about his earlier campaigning with Philip Alpers against firearm ownership.

The Panel ended up wondering what should be done to restore the right of old people, women, indeed anyone weaker than the hunks of meat who may threaten them, to defend themselves with anything more than the feeble hands and protests.

I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about exactly that issue (use the search function on this blogsite with "self defence") but I  did not have time to outline some of the solutions I’ve worked on.

The Crimes Act protects our ancient rights to defend ourselves, albeit muddled by 1980s changes that removed the defence of provocation. The Arms Act 1983, however, gives the Police a chance to subvert the intent of the Crimes Act.

There is a Bill to amend the Arms Act in the current Parliament’s backlog. I prepared amendments to the amendment bill, to include  the Crimes Act defences in the Arms Act. They await a Select Committee report back.

Those particular suggestions flowed from the case of Northland farmer Paul McIntyre. He was acquitted on a Crimes Act charge after shooting at a group brazenly stealing his quad bike after he’d warned them, but the same reasoning would not work in relation to Arms Act charges. 

The  disgraceful insensitivity of the greedies taking bonuses from businesses rescued by taxpayers is driving some  US and Australian political responses.

Both encouraging seppuku and restoring shareholder control seem sensible to me, though the Aussie proposals would better focussed on director responsibility..

Simon Power should be reconsidering our law now, before some unfolding outrage here sparks a populist frenzy for similar changes. I’m surprised it did not develop after revelation that the Strategic Finance CEO was maintaining his salary after their moratorium was approved.

I’d start by repealing section 161 of our Companies Act 1993 and reinstating the simple previous law that required a shareholder vote to authorise director remuneration. The longstanding older law was consistent with the principle that the directors were the stewards for the owners, not the servants of the company. Accordingly the owners should decide what their stewards deserved for their stewardship.

The stewards in turn are then free to decide what the company’s employees should get.

Section 161 allows directors to set their own pay and retirement benefits, subject to being "satisfied that to do so is fair to the company", certifying to that opinion and entering the particulars in the interests register.

These procedures are more cumbersome than the old requirement for the topic to be addressed in the annual shareholder resolutions. Worse, like most procedural ‘safeguards’ they breed cynicism. Who knows what is "fair to the company".

The proxy for fairness is "what everyone else does". Worse it feeds a ratchet mechanism, because the conscientious need back-covering evidence of "what everybody else does". They commission expensive market research.

Naturally the market survey reports a range.

Only losers want to be below average in anything, and most people believe they are above average in both talent and deserts – so of course they decide it is fair to put themselves in at least the second quartile. If they want to show ambition for the company and themselves they’ll put themselves in the top quartile.

Lo and behold, the next time their figures get included in market survey, those in the newly lower quartiles have fallen behind. The cycle has a built in ratchet because it is self referential.

This leads to the second necessary reform – repeal mandatory reporting of executive pay over $100k and replace it with specific power for shareholders to demand that information.

The trouble with mandatory reporting is that it too feeds the ratchet. Setting a prospective executive’s pay has ceased to be a balancing of what he or she is likely to be worth to your business, against what they can get elsewhere, and what someone else nearly as good would cost you.

Instead it is a public statement about your business. Do you want to be judged as placing your business in the lower quartiles of comparable businesses, in quality of people, ability to pay, and ambition? No? Then ensure that your salary levels are pitched in the upper quartiles.

That in turn feeds the ratchet in the next Hay remuneration survey.

We may need to look no further than mandatory public disclosure for an explanation of the huge growth in the gap between shop floor worker and CEO From long term average multiples of around 10x, it has blown out to more than 30x in a number of surveys, but not in Asia, where the old "secrecy" has largely survived.

The dramatic blow-out roughly coincides with those silly law changes in the 1980s and 1990s.  

After months of procrastination I’ve had a close look at section 92A, and the industry code that the government hopes will blunt its teeth.

The new law upholds copyright holders’ property rights. It is fair enough, as far as it goes.

But it does only half the job. It can be cured simply. I’m sure the cure must have been publicly identified because it is so orthodox. But so far I have not seen reference to the cure in any commentary.

The industry code is not the cure. It looks useful, but no lawyer with respect for the rule of law would suggest that a private code of procedure is the cure for a law that is incomplete and licenses abuse. As drafted it may be suitable for the ISP professionals, but it is too cumbersome for customers to master.

The code would probably be unnecessary if the section 92A regime was completed.

Completion of the regime requires only an equivalent and balancing protection for the ISP and the customer’s property rights. That is straightforward – compensate the customer whose ISP is obliged to interfere without adequate reason, and compensate the ISP for any reasonable costs of investigating copyright claims that prove to be unjustified. The compensation rules can be clear enough and tough enough to discourage most if not all abuses of the new copyrightholders’ rights.

The unjustified copyright claimant should have to pay both the ISP and the customer .  The compensation should include a deemed cost of time, any reasonable legal or other costs of deciding who was in the right, the costs of reinstatement of deleted material, and a deterrent award if needed to deter unjustified attacks on material that may have little commercial value (and accordingly low compensation value).

Because the normal court system has become hopeless at enforcing remedies (other than in huge commercial disputes) the system may need a copyright claimant to post a bond for a pre-estimated cost of compensation, and perhaps a quick and dirty simplified adjudication system.

The copyright claimant should have parallel rights to recover its full costs where a customer or ISP have unreasonably resisted a justified claim.

These are not novel or radical ideas. They were the basic principles of British freedom for centuries. Leave people free to do what they wish, but if they wrongly harm others they’ll have to pay. Deterrent damages can even up the incentives where necessary to deter coldblooded deliberate harm.

Freedom plus liability is specially valuable for evolving circumstances where the lawmaker can’t predict how a prescription might warp future conduct. For example, the strict liability of the law of nuisance allowed freedom to change land uses, as long as it did not harm your neighbours. Unfortunately the RMA has ‘bonsai-ed’ our law of nuisance.

The fact that I could not find any proposal for such an orthodox fix to section 92A may indicate insufficient search patience. But it could be another symptom of our legal establishment’s willing ignorance of the procedural principles that balanced our inherited freedom with responsibility.

Too often reforming lawyers and politicians would much rather draft detailed prohibitions than balance the incentives, then leave discretions with the people involved, weighing the costs and benefits of their actions.

It is odd to hear the moral superiority in our chatterers’ commentary on Obama’s reversal of the ban on Federal funding of stem cell research. Clearly they detest "superstition" triumphing over science.

I’m glad the ban has been reversed, though I think that not spending a fervent minority’s tax money on something they believe to be wicked can be a legitimate compromise, as long as the research itself is not banned.

But our smug commentators should think for a while about what our GE science is suffering at the hands of superstitious Greens.

And was it not just last week that a windfarm was barred, on public land (and even private land of willing owners) out of "respect’ for Maori superstition. The reports did not say why the areas concerned were sacred – so perhaps I’m being unfair if the Maori objections were really just aesthetic, dressed up as spiritual. But the court adopted the spiritual language.

Superstition’s interferences in New Zealand do not just stop at denying Government funding. Our religious police ban private conduct, which George Bush did not.

The decision to reinstate titular honours is a sign of John Key’s confidence. During the election the party was determined not to allow Labour to paint it as fuddy-duddy Establishment.

Now John Key  has established public trust in his humanity he can reverse doctrinaire left changes like the abolition of titles.

I wonder whether any of the Labour notables who’ve disparaged "imperial honours" but honoured themselves with post-colonial orders that now convert back into Knight and Dame-hoods, will have the grace to decline John Key’s generous invitation? I trust Margaret Wilson will not convert hers.

Some people have been relieved of the temptation. The Order of New Zealand people are not included in the offer. So the "20 greatest living New Zealanders" (which in 2005 just happened to include 7 former Labour politicians)  will not get the choice. Will that please Jonathan Hunt? He was part of the Labour government in 1987 which created that order as a non-titular honour (explicitly to move away from our colonial past).

I suspect Republican JIm Bolger ONZ will be relieved not to be tempted.

A Canterbury University economist’s study based on the 2005 New Zealand Election Survey supports the  intuitive conviction that the left get advantage from state funds spent on getting out the vote.  Uninterested low quality votes favour Labour, but not the Greens.

The evidence is set out at length in Eric Crampton’s working paper just posted on SSRN.  In party political terms the effect is summarised as follows: 

When they get to the polls, the ignorant are significantly more likely to support the Labour Party (4% increase in predicted probability for a standard deviation increase in ignorance) and significantly less likely to support the Green party (1% decrease in predicted probability) and United Future (0.5% decrease in predicted probability).

Understanding economics strongly predicted supporting National in 2005, which comes as little surprise: the National Party leader was former Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. A standard deviation increase in our “economic thinking” index correlates with a 5.7% increased probability of voting National, a 1.5% decreased probability of voting NZ First, and a slight decrease in the probability of voting United Future and Maori.

The abstract concludes:

Political ignorance is not unbiased: rather, it strongly predicts policy and political party preferences after correcting for the demographic correlates of ignorance. Moreover, membership in the kinds of organizations held to allow the ignorant to overcome their deficiencies fails to improve outcomes. Voter ignorance remains a very serious problem

Update – Eric Crampton has a blog post for the study at http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/