So we are to have a 6 month trial of taxis being allowed to use those underused swathes of green road.

Congratulations to the Council for common sense.

Now to allow bicycling as of right on our underused foot paths (but with strict liability on cyclists for collisions with pedestrians). In other words cyclists should acknowledge primary rights to pedestrians.

I do not know what rules govern those lethally quiet mobility scooters, but I hope they are strictly liable for their collisions too.

Prof Philip Joseph’s lecture in Radio New Zealand’s Waitangi debate 2009 series seems not yet to be available on the web.

I’ve gone along to Te Papa occasionally to these lectures, usually to disappointment. This one far exceeded expectation. It crisply demolishes the woolly apologies for retention of the Maori seats. It is beautifully delivered – a model of what the series could be.

Some years ago Mr Laws was the head of our then Legislative Department. As he was born to be.

The Samoan Prime Minister must have a defective sense of humour.

His Minister of Telecommunications has a no doubt worthy but unexceptional Samoan name. Lurking next to the Minister of Telecommunications in the Ministerial list is the Deputy PM and Minister of Commerce, one Misa Telefoni Retzlaff.

How could the PM pass that opportunity?

Richard Fowler, the President of the Wellington District Law Society spent time with officers of the Fiji Law Society last October.

In his column in this month’s Council Brief (the WDLS monthly newspaper) he has described their dilemma (and his). Should they condemn and refuse to cooperate with the Commodore’s government? The following are excerpts:

 "…. Should I be ‘tut-tutting’ in the nicest possible way albeit careful to be ‘only expressing a personal opinion, of course’ and then brace myself for an automatic knee jerk accusation of patronising neo-colonialism? After all, the then (Clark) government’s analysis was simple: the democratically elected government had been ousted at gunpoint and those responsible or participant in the interim government should be treated as pariahs and NZ should have nothing to do with them unless either the Quarase government was allowed to return to office or fresh elections held.

Graeme Edgeler’s thoughtful piece on the prosecution discretion is well worth a read.

Graeme says:

I can see a role for grand juries in New Zealand. I think specifically about the recent death of Halatau Naitoko.

In the ordinary course of events following a shooting death, a ranking police officer will look at all the photos and video from the scene, read all the statements, watch or listen to all the interviews, take legal advice (internal and crown solicitor), and then decide the appropriate charge, taking account of the Solicitor-General’s Prosecution Guidelines.

I can see substantial advantage to removing that final call from the police in cases like this. Place all that evidence before a grand jury, and allow them to accept, reject, or amend the prosecution’s proposed course of action. It is how we used to do it; it is how much of the United States still does.

But his post covers much more including the risks in New Zealand from:

•  last year’s weakening of our double jeopardy rule;
• our lack of a  mechanism for independent public blessing in investigation of official wrong-doing; and
• the changes to our law governing Coroners.

I was particularly interested that last issue. Nobody picked up on my Parliamentary warnings that the new law, by turning Coroners into officials who may be centrally removed as easily as they are appointed, removed the age-old assurance of obvioulsy independent investigation of official responsibility in deaths.

Graeme does not mention another area where grand jury independence could be helpful, in relation to electoral fraud, where our Police are no longer trusted to be immune to political influence.

What powers do Ministers have to direct or govern the performance of public servants in their departments?

I’ve recently had to think about this professionally. Public servant independence from "political interference" is seen as unquestionably good. State sector "reform" has entrenched distinctions between governance and management. Such theories tend to insulate staff from senior bosses in both the public and the private sector

But for every legislated theory there are costs. One cost may be the loss of Westminster conventions of Ministerial responsibility for things that go wrong. To me its loss is not necessarily part of a generalised erosion of political conventions and  standards. It is a rational response to a change in the practical authority of Ministers. 

These things matter.  "Yes Minister" is now the law. Democracy loses when good democratic leaders are legally confined to general nudges and pointed questions to change their departments.

Leadership is generally best demonstrated by practical interventions, where the leader shows exactly how they do something. We correctly pay far more heed to decisions in action than to exhortation. We know that statements are poor indicators of what leaders actually value most. Behaviour in practice shows leaders’ real priorities.

Yet our democratically elected leaders are at least theoretically not permitted to show their real priorities in the practical way that all organisations watch for – in who they promote, and what attracts penalties. 

Perhaps the bias of this error is for the best in government. We want our dopey or sinister leaders strait-jacketed, so we accept as a cost the nobbling of the good ones. Better to frustrate the good leaders in a Cabinet (and we voters who’ve elected them) than to risk giving full reign to the more numerous unsuitable Ministers thrown up by the accidents of democracy.

Unfortunately silly law is driving the same precautionary principle through private sector work-places throughout New Zealand where diminished leadership has everyday costs. Employment law is in conflict with company law.

The law still describes company directors as the managers. Thankfully the governance theorists have yet to re-write the Companies Act. In insolvency, governance theories will not protect directors who claim they had no mandate to "intervene" or to "usurp management".

Research confirms old wisdoms. Good leaders act intuitively. They lead by consistently upholding their key values in action. We seek out organisations where values are intuitively and continually reinforced. Abuse of power is constrained mainly by followers’ freedom to leave the leader.

But employment law throws sand in these finely balanced mechanisms. The insulation of officials from Ministers is not exactly paralelled in the private sector. But there are similar inhibitions of good leadership in employment law’s holding that corrective interference can be constructive dismissal. An insistence that managers not react without proof of unsuitability or disloyalty, in practice means that lawyers get paid for solemnly second guessing decisions that should be taken swiftly.

An eventual consequence may be that we will refuse to hold directors and managers fully accountable, because we know it would often be unfair. Power without responsibility, and responsibility without power are equally bad. Lawyers are usurping the clarity of both power and responsibility. .

I had to check the Southland Times after today’s ThomsonBrookers Business News Alert on the Southland farmer response to recent parlous wool prices (around $3 per kilo – the lowest for 14 years).

According to ThomsonBrookers the Southlanders are  "stockpiling hundreds of barrels of wool".  Salting it down for the duration no doubt.

The newspaper reassured me that they are still using bales. Does urban NZ know the difference, or was it just spellcheck?

Try this blunt commentary from Iain Martin of the UK Telegraph for a freezing shower.  As Phil Goff issues his daily demands for "solutions" from John Key, I wonder if he is desperately trying to head off a similar judgment from history, on the Clark government of which he was a part.

Martin says

"The country stands on the precipice. We are at risk of utter humiliation, of London becoming a Reykjavik on Thames and Britain going under. Thanks to the arrogance, hubristic strutting and serial incompetence of the Government and a group of bankers, the possibility of national bankruptcy is not unrealistic".

He goes on:

"This catastrophe happened on [Gordon Brown’s] watch, no matter how much he now opportunistically beats up on bankers. He turned on the fountain of cheap money and encouraged the country to swim in it. House prices rose, debt went through the roof and the illusion won elections….

Our money in New Zealand was not cheap, but a fountain of government spending made us think it did not matter if we lived on high priced loans from other people (often poorer than ourselves). Envy taxes on earned income and no tax on house capital gains,  gloating enforcement of land use controls and law-pumped building costs combined to make it silly to invest in anything other than real estate here. So we joined the other Anglo countries with the biggest housing bubbles in the world.

Martin goes on:

The Government’s bail-out of the banks in October with £37 billion of taxpayers’ money was supposed to have "saved the world", according to the PM, but now it is clear that it has not even saved the banks. Our money kept the show on the road for only three months….It is finally dawning on the Government that the liabilities of the British banks grew to be so vast in the boom years that they now eclipse the entire economy. Unfortunately, the Treasury is pledged to honour those
liabilities because it has guaranteed not to let a British bank go down. RBS has liabilities of £1.8 trillion, three times annual UK government spending, against assets of £1.9 trillion."

For any politician there is one terribly tempting solution to this – trash the value of the currency. Formal bankruptcies may be avoided as the creditors lose the spending value of their investment, instead of having it formally written off.

Look out superannuitants and anyone else planning to live on savings or fiat money investments.

Things may be little brighter in Obama’s domain. Yesterday’s Bloomberg report of Nouriel Roubini’s assessment of bank solvency summarises things:

"U.S. financial losses from the credit crisis may reach $3.6 trillion, suggesting the banking system is “effectively insolvent,” said New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who predicted last year’s economic crisis.

“I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.”

We are assuring each other that our banks in New Zealand are insulated. Ahem.

One thing should be made perfectly clear by the politicians rescuing banks anywhere – under capitalism, as a shareholder, when your company can not pay its debts as they fall due you have done your dough  and the company passes into the hands of an agent for the company’s creditors, not for you, unless your creditors agree otherwise. Those carrying the risk of failure thereafter (the creditors) also have the benefit of any upside.

That’s why taking the equity and injecting shareholders funds (the way the BNZ was last rescued nearly 20 years ago) can be a better way to go than to offer wholesale guarantees. Gordon Brown has made sure the UK government at least shares any upside. Why not ours?

Government rescue announcements on those terms should  make it clear that the equity will be sold off when the crisis is over, hopefully under conditions that keep most of it in New Zealand.

Using the opportunity to buy back the farm may cause cries of rage, given that much of the crisis is attributable to bad government policy. And it is even more unfair now that acceptance of government rescue may be forced on institutions simply because their competitors have accepted government guarantees.

But many banks have profited from the  bad policies that created a property boom (and in New Zealand maintained the balance of payments deficit funded by the banks). Taxpayers and creditors now at risk of losing umptillions should at least have the comfort of knowing that they, not bank shareholders, will take any  upside after the rescue works.

For a vigorous debate on this freedom look at the 74 (at time of writing) comments on Kiwiblog’s link to my post on the Invercargill cafe Turks’ shunning of Israelis. It is worth also comparing the calibre and tone of the Kiwiblog comments (and ours here) with those of the more left crowd at Tumeke on the same topic.

For the record, my position on this is liberal, not libertariam.

I think that the law’s interventions against racial discrimination may be one of the few justified anti-discrimination measures.  Though race discrimination rules are often evaded, and they have incited all kinds of special interest groups to secure for themselves similar victim status, the benfits of anti-race discrimination law probably still far exceed those costs.

Race hatred is an easily roused evil genie. Once unbottled it takes generations to rebottle. Pogroms are hugely expensive to the haters and the hated. The law may act as a collective creed statement that we need precisely because the sin is so tempting to so many.

But to me there is no real sense in which Israeli in New Zealand is a ‘race’ for such purposes.  Though history shouts caution, I do not know anybody who would now discrimate against New Zealanders of Jewish heritage, even if they were hostile to Israelis.

Indeed I think our Government’s actions against a Fijian schoolboy are more sinister than the Turkish cafe owners’ actions. The government is weilding the police powers of the state against a boy who can have had no part in the mischeif they are trying to attack. That has far more potential as a precedent for abuse than a couple of private citizens who have hurt their own business.

While property rights are important, my concern about denials of the right not to associate owes little to property rights. As I tried to explain I am more concerned about prosecuting non-associating because of  what it does to powerful ‘speech". Shunning people of whom we privately disapprove is all that many less articulate people will ever be able to do to show what they want to discourage. For example, that is how pornographers and bad employers and fathers who abandon their children and wives, and bullies were normally discouraged before we started handing over all social control powers to the state.

Nor do I consider that a right to discriminate trumps all. There are businesses that must not discriminate – where they in effect have monopoly powers.

There is no reason to think that the would-be cafe patrons could not easily find another food outlet.

But there are many occupations where that would not be the case. So, for example, I support the common law position on ‘common carriers’. They should take all safe freight. A postman surrenders his or her right to discriminate in what they deliver. Perhaps schools in areas where there is no alternative are properly obliged to take all comers (though they should retain the right to exclude those who damage the education of others).

My worry is that we have now extended our gratitude for legal reinforcement of our resolution to eschew race discrimination, into a childish hostility to "discrimination" of all kinds. We’ve turned ‘discrimination’ into a useless slogan word. Until two decades ago it neatly described an essential mechanism of free civilization,.  Continuous and routine discrimination of good from bad, of the best from the mediocre, of the dirty and the feckless from the clean and reliable, is an essential social underpinning of reciprocity (call it considerate behaviour and civility or respect).

Sure, the defenders of the new law say that is still permitted, but it must not be based on stereotypes. Well that is the theory of the law. But law in practice is another thing altogether. Anti-discrimination law sends judgements underground. The clever avoid the costs.

I saw the apotheosis of discrimination as the modern evil deity six years ago, when the Human Rights Commission formally appeared before my Select Committee (considering the Clean Slate Bill) to urge an amendment to make it illegal to discriminate against people on the grounds of their criminal record. The looked confused (or was that contemptuous) when I asked why they thought it was an advance of human freedom to restrict to the state alone any power for people to take into account in their decisions on who they associate with the best possible empirical evidence of propensity to hurt and to steal and to abuse trust.

If cities were listed Wellington’s shares would have been as jolted as Infratil’s by the news of Lloyd’s leukaemia.

His selfless patronage of music, other arts, childrens’ and elite sport is well known. though the spread and scale of his passionate interests may never be fully appreciated. 

Less well understood is what Wellington would be like if Infratil had not remained headquartered here as other head offices went, or if he had not helped to prevent the NZX being sold to Australia. Wellington retains a leavening of non-state patrons. Its international reputation as a vibrant place to live, and a centre for the arts, theatre survives because artists do not yet have to deal with a monolithic establishment..

The quality of our public service is sustained partly because there are still Wellingtonians who know how wealth is made. Public and private sector  people meet and challenge each others’ assumptions.

Lloyd shares the common business resentment of wilfully ignorant political decision-making. He knows the frustration of dealing with people who neither know nor care how what determines our competitive wealth as a nation, but  have firm plans for spreading it around their circles. Yet he has not disdained politics and headed to Auckland, or further afield.

Instead, he has thrown himself into being a positive force for Wellington and New Zealand. His flag campaign may have seemed quixotic, but he has learned much from it. It has been renewed because he understands the power of symbols and vision.

Many people will want to show they’re thinking of him. They’ll be willling him to beat this illness. 

I suspect that practical public support for some of his visions for New Zealand would be far more heartening to him than a kind message.