Ernst & Young’s review of the Pacific Division makes sorry reading. In the mealy-mouthed way of these things it says poor performance has been tolerated.

A friend who worked there for an unhappy period described it as showing the worst of the "pacific way" – neoptism, incompetence masked by the humble efforts of a few good staff, and a culture that would excuse corruption. It got no better after Mary-Anne Thompson’s departure because the good staff carrying the load of people who were not up to it could not risk being accused of being culturally insensitive.

New Zealand will pay a high price indeed for our cultural sensitivity if it continues to erode our abhorrence of corruption. There should be a far more resolute rejection of the Pacific inheritance that equates power with privilege, instead of service.

I regarded photography during last year’s Wellington Central campaign with a jaundiced eye after early TV3 footage shot up the nose and otherwise in a sick blue colour. I feel for candidates of any hue when journalists apply their skills to demonise instead of to reveal.

Accordingly I was resigned but wary when John Lake began turning up at meeting after meeting. I felt his lens constantly trained on me.  Nevertheless, you should’nt become a candidate if you don’t accept bad photo shots,  I agreed to his request for a studio session wondering whether his props would be horns and a tail.

John was courteous and professional.

So I’m very curious about his photo exhibition "the Candidate, which opens on 5 March at Toi Pōneke Gallery, 61 Abel Smith Street and will run until 27 March.

Business New Zealand has endorsed an important paper detailing successive New Zealand governments’ shameful (and wealth destroying) disdain for property rights.

This is no " ideological burp". Authors Lew Evans and Neil Quigley are heavyweights, often engaged by government. The paper casts in a poor light the work of the Select Committee that rejected Gordon Copeland’s bill to include protection of property rights in the NZ Bill of Rights.

It supports Maori claims to have been wronged over the seabed and foreshore, and other resources. The logic would support the Waitangi Tribunal report upholding claims to Taranaki oil and gas. That recommendation was summarily dismissed by Prime Minister Clark as "not in the national interest" and never publicly discussed again.

Nevertheless the paper curiously makes little of the Treaty’s property rights assurance in Article 2. In 2001 I argued to a NZ Law Conference that Article 2 would become our constitutional guarantee of property rights, when Maori and Pakeha woke up to the fact that we had the same interests in upholding it.

Perhaps Quigley and Evans slide past Article 2 because it  also contains the Crown right of pre-emption of Maori land, of which the authors gravely disapprove.

Many, including myself, have urged that the rationing criteria for healthcare decisions be made transparent and rational, with nationwide ranking of treatment priorities instead of obscuring it behind doctor discretions and little understood waiting list point allocations.

Sharon Crosbie chaired a committee that sat for 18 months (in the early 1990s) before giving up because comprehensive ranking was too hard for New Zealanders. The committee became the National Health Committee and its work did lead to booking systems for elective procedures and more evidence-based guidelines for funding services and decisions about resource allocation. That is not the same thing as transparent ranking for rationing.

The State of Oregon was one of the few states to achieve transparent rationing after years of being blocked at Federal level.

Apparently there was too much fear, from Presidential level down, of the poltical consequences of removing the doctor discretion mystery which gently shrouds the sharp edges of arguments about the comparative moral worth of differently ranked lives (not to mention contentious ‘treatments’ like abortion).

But Oregon persevered.

Now some research sugggests there was something in the opponents’ misgivings.

The explicit criteria have naturally become the target of lobbies. Political correctness is shifting priorities, to elevate treatment of favoured groups over rationing which most citizens might intuitively prefer.

For example:

"the rationing board thinks that stomach surgery to control obesity is more important than surgery to repair injured internal organs ( rank 88), a closed hip fracture ( rank 89), or a hernia showing symptoms of obstruction or strangulation ( rank 176).

Abortions rank 41st, indicating that the state considers using public money for abortions more important than treating an ectopic pregnancy (43), gonococcal infections and other sexually transmitted diseases (56), or an infection or hemorrhage resulting from a miscarriage (68). "

Conditions 5, 6, 7 and 8 in 2009  are respectively drug abuse treatment (in 2002 off the bottom of the list)  tobacco treatment (2002 – 186) contraception management and sterilization (2002 – 93 and 94), and intensive obesity counselling (previously not ranked).

In short it seems the self inflicted troubles now rank above the shafts of fate as most deserving of the worthy Oregonians’ collective help.

Perhaps it is less disturbing to leave it to the doctors and not to know their criteria.

Eric Crampton has alerted me to the sequel to last months’ reflection on community restorative justice.

Recall that a judge referred an ‘aboriginal canadian’ who drunkenly dragged  his daughters out into a blizzard and left them where they froze to death, to a  native "sentencing circle" .The judge will determine the sentence but may have regard to the "circle’s" recommendation.

Here’s how the "community" handled it – as reported in a National Post editorial yesterday:

"an aboriginal "sentencing circle" convened in Rose Valley, Sask., to deliver recommendations on the fate of Christopher Pauchay, the Yellow Quill band member … did not perform well.

After five hours of maudlin rhetoric, including tearful presentations from Pauchay and the mother of his children, Tracey Jimmy, the circle recommended what The Canadian Press called "a life sentence of spiritual guidance and healing" instead of a prison term – or, in other words, nothing. Only the most naive of observers could possibly be surprised.

The experts, of course, told us before the hearing that Pauchay would not necessarily get off easy….

Pauchay repeatedly violated his bail conditions by getting drunk, and is facing a charge of assaulting his common-law wife some five months after his walk in the snow – shortly after she had given birth to their third child, Miracle. 

The sentencing circle is theoretically intended to help aboriginal Canadians feel "more connected" to an alien justice system that is inherently unfair to them – the dubious proof of this being that they are so likely to run afoul of it, and display recidivism. The main benefit is supposedly provided by confronting the accused with the community that has been affected by his crime. In this case, however, the community itself is nearly as dysfunctional as the criminal; not surprisingly, reports from the Pauchay circle suggest that no one did a very good job of representing the children who died, or for, that matter, the real interests of little Miracle.

Pauchay’s wife complained that her daughter had been taken into provincial care after the assault incident, and that a restraining order forbids her to see Pauchay, a "good man" who is "the only person who can actually feel what I’m feeling." Pauchay, too, decried the state removal of his last surviving daughter, setting a world record for nauseating impudence by whining, "My rights [as a father] didn’t matter."

With their obsessive focus on Pauchay’s feelings and needs, the elders who presided over the circle displayed the same sense that Pauchay has no relevant culpability – that he has done nothing requiring expiation and temporary segregation from the innocent.

Pauchay’s guilt was supposed to be the guiding premise of the meeting, but everyone involved evidently lost the plot. This is why we have all those cold legal abstractions that the bleeding-heart professional penologists hate so much: in order that people might ultimately be judged, not according to the sympathies of friends and relatives, or their ability to exhibit sorrow on cue, but according to the character of their actions. We leave justice in the hands of judges precisely because they are impartial.

 One hopes the judge presiding over this case, who is obliged to consider the recommendations of the circle, will conduct himself accordingly.

Either way, the concept of sentencing circles has been massively discredited.

Sounds to me remarkably like our Family Group Conferencing. But of course no one is allowed to report on such secret "justice" processes in New Zealand, so few know how offensive they can be to the victims.

Not a problem of course for  Mr Pauchey’s victims because they were dead.

Officials supporting the jobs summit could circulate copies of KPMG’s 2008 comparative report on effective corporate tax rates:

According to the KPMG report:

"…the most remarkable result of our 2008 survey is that we have found no country anywhere that has raised its rate since last year. The global average is, once again, down nearly a full point to 25.9 percent with the EU average down to 23.2 percent, the Latin American rate down half a point to 26.6 percent, and the Asia Pacific rate down 0.8 percent to 28.4 percent."

So we are above average for our region and our region has the highest average rates in the world. That is even more troubling when our region includes stagnant Japan at over 40%. The US at 40% is also pulling up averages. 

Of the 106 countries surveyed, only The United Arab Emirates (55 percent), Kuwait (55 percent), and Japan (40.69 percent) impose a higher corporate tax rate than the combined rate of 40 percent in the U.S"

The Auditor General has confirmed what  justice sector insiders already knew – conditions of parole were routinely not enforced  Those insiders have been complicit in the callous political lie that public safety was held paramount  in the system.

The A-G’s report is surprisingly blunt.

"We chose 100 offender case files [..including ] 52 offenders considered to pose a high risk to the public.

"In most of those 100 case files, the Department had not followed one or more of its own sentence management requirements. Five of the requirements that my staff checked are the most important, in my view, for keeping the public safe, and one or more of these five requirements had not been followed in most of the 100 cases. There were several cases, some of which I have included in my report, where the Department had not completed important sentence management requirements at each stage of an offender’s parole, and we concluded that the Department was not managing these cases adequately"

It has long been open to any of the insiders in the parole scandal to get the same information straight from worried probation officers and prison officers. A number of the latter tried to blow the whistle, including a group in Christchurch by way of submission to my Select Committee on the Parole Bill. It fell on deaf Labour/Green ears.

The justice anointed, including Ministers and the Parole Board, have prefered the Nuremberg excuse – "not my job to know or care whether our conditions  mean anything, I just let them out because that’s the system". 

Safe in their cafes, leafy suburbs and security access offices the anointed fume about the "populism" of Sensible Sentencing and the rudeness of its criticisms of parole, while thousands of innocent people have suffered thefts, robberies, injury, rapes and death that would not have occurred without parole.

This is the same justice system that imposes criminal OSH liability on unfortunate ordinary employers. They are condemned for letting colleagues face unlikely or rare but still conceivable risks. The guilty parties in the justice system on the other hand knew as a matter of certainty that they were exposing helpless people to harm.

I’m looking forward to the Secretary of Labour’s response to my question, whether they are going to prosecute people in the justice establishment for Graeme Burton’s victims. It is due this week. 

How will officials distinguish the culpability of those whove collaborated to maintain a broken parole system, from the responsibility of the the West Coast miner they prosecuted, who was sharing the same risk as the mate who died?  

Here’s an extract from the 18 December 2008 NZPA report on that case, where the High Court doubled the fine imposed to $20,000, and ordered additional reparation of $25,000 to go to the widow of miner Robert McGowan who was killed during a flood.:

"In its decision released today, the court said a "substantial uplift" in existing levels of fines was needed to reflect the seriousness of workplace accidents, the need for deterrence, the effects of inflation and an increase in the maximum fines set in 2003.

The court noted that higher levels of fines might be required in cases of extremely high culpability."

I’ve now seen the NZ Herald coverage of the Anderson report yesterday and by Peter Jessup this morning.

This morning’s commentary implies that things were running smoothly before 2006, under the chairmanship of Selwyn Pearson.

"From 2001-06 the NZRL, under the direction of Gerald Ryan and then Selwyn Person, lost $133,000, which was a write-off of loans to districts that remained unpaid."

 In 2007 the deficit was $1.708 million.

In fact the huge write-off was largely recognition of losses created on earlier watches. It is completely unfair to blame Andrew Chalmers simply because he ensured the accounts recognised earlier disasters.

I’m surprised by one line from Jessup – "Sir John had found no criminality in the financial dealings."

I suspect that reads too much into a reply to a question. The Review team briefing of our District League left no doubt about what they thought, but the Review team is focussed on the future. It is the job of Police and other prosecutors to go into history looking for criminality, not a team writing a blueprint for next time.

Jessup’s report quite fairly goes on:

"But the Sparc report mentions a culture of "clipping the ticket" at most levels from the top down and found that parties involved with the NZRL and their associates were involved in transactions regarding property or supply of goods with potential for significant personal gain."

 That’s usually criminal.

Rugby League is a magnificent gladiatorial spectacle. The Kiwi game breeds and cultivates heroes. League clubs can be important networking  focii of communities that need more such schools of leadership.

But the game has been also the prey of crooks (and allies who chose the path of least resistance) attracted by pokie money. That money rightly comes to League as a way to recirculate it back to the communities from which it is extracted.

Now there is a chance that the crooks will be sidelined permanently, and League’s administration can improve to match the quality of the game.

The Review team led by Sir John Anderson has produced a characteristically forthright report. It does not pull its punches about corruption, though surprisingly the Stuff report does not find those jabs. Sir John and Sue Suckling, who presented the report to the District Leagues, were even more direct in person.  

Some of my Wellington District League colleagues have been waiting for that vindication for years. Thank you Sir John.

The recommendations are designed to make it harder for the corrupt to determine who controls the game.

The current Board should not be tarred with this brush, just because they have to resign to enable the new structure. I think Ray Haffendon has done well, with dignity under fire.

The problems would never have got so far if the Department of Internal Affairs had excised more of the crooks with timely prosecutions. Instead some of the targets of their prosecutions seem to have chosen by the DIA for the crooks.

League is a reminder of why there must be zero tolerance for corruption. Even small amounts of it, when seen to succeed, corrode trust comprehensively.

We should accept no excuses. In League as I’ve observed things the  corruption has not been "tribal" nor organised on ethnic lines, but people accustomed to the use of power to prefer kin may have had less resistance to it.

It is not the New Zealand way, and now League has a chance to hold its head up for longer than the weeks after a World Cup game.

Phil Goff’ was carping again last evening that John Key is failing to pretend to be an economic Messiah. Goff wants grand packages while John is "dripfeeding" careful measures. 

John and Bill English may be doing just what behavioural economists would recommend.

The vast packages announced by the panicking ‘left"  leaders in the UK, Australia and the USA may defeat their own purpose. We the people know that things must be desperately serious, when politicians who would normally argue endlessly over a few billion, are prepared to throw all caution to the wind, and hunt for ways to spend trillions. Too many of us will think to ourselves, "I’m glad they’re going to prime the pumps and persuade all the idiots who’ve already been spending too much to spend even more but if things are that desperate I’ll just sit this one out, and spend nothing (seeing as how what they are doing confirms that everything must be catastrophic). That way at least my family will have something left when the others are destitute".

In other words the scale of the government responses is reinforcing depression sentiment. And renewed spending confidence is what the packages are all about.

John and Bill’s cautious "steady as she goes’ seems to be just what the doctor ordered, maintaining our improbably blithe mood as the rest of the world goes into a self-reinforcing spiral of depression. I’d been putting the mood down to summer in the sun, but perhaps it is also attributable to good leadership. Long may it last, whatever the source.

Even more promising for our futures would be for John and Bill to pick up Roger Douglas’ challenge at the traditional Orewa venue, to end middle class welfare dependency. It is an important speech, likely to be the first of a number I’m sure.

 Whale Oil’s usual cynicism is absent from his eyewitness report of the speech.

DPF’s analysis notes a key problem the speech does not address.

There are fish hooks though. The Centre for Independent Studies had a seminar on this a couple of years ago, and the challenge is how do you cope with people wanting to move from one option to another. Should the decision you make at 18 be unchangeable throughout your life? But if you let people change, they might take the low tax option when healthy, and then when older the high tax option.

The other challenge is what if someone has gone for the low tax option and pledged to look after their only health and retirement costs – yet they lose their savings. As a society do you let them die because they can’t pay for their health care?

Sir Roger has an answer I’m sure, but this time he does not offer it. 

In earlier times Sir Roger has been less coy. He would have bluntly made sure people provided for their old age and could not renege, by compulsory saving or insurance. They would still have a choice of providers, and choice around the qualities of service, but they would be compelled to make provision, just as he would have made superannuation saving compulsory.

Curious that the speech, at least in its written form, leaves that element unexplored.

I’d like to see compulsion debated seriously between Bill English and Sir Roger. Commentators never noticed (because they pigeon-holed Roger and Bill in their "extreme free market" and "centrist" roles respectively) that they seemed to hold strong views on a touchstone compulsion matter that made a nonsense of that pigeon-holing.

Roger’s the centrist on that issue. And so am I.