The Israeli ambassador should butt out. I object to his attempt to circumscribe the freedom of Turkish New Zealanders,. The Israeli New Zealanders were right to draw attention to the issue, but they do not need the law or the government to intervene simply because they have been offended.

Though I do not share the Invercargill Turks’ views on Israel in any degree, I defend them. I defend their right to express their views by shunning citizens of a state they consider to be evil. 

I would not shun an ANC South African despite their government’s support of Mugabe. I would not shun a Sudanese despite Darfur, without evidence of complicity or support for their odious government’s behaviour. I do not shun Moslems despite their religion’s abhorrent attitude to women. To me it is discourteous to shun people. I have not walked in their shoes. I do not know their personal views of the beliefs or conduct that offends me.

If a government agency acted as the Turks did it would be utterly wrong. The state weilds the coercive power of us all. It must be tolerant in a free society. Without proof of involvement in or support of unlawful acts the State certainly should not discriminate against New Zealand citizens simply because they are of a group in which some members have unpopular opinions.

But the vigour of our values (in the long term our freedoms) may depend on the willingness of individuals to be intolerant so long as they do not coerce their fellow citizens. So  I defend the right of any private citizen to shun whoever they want on their own property.

That right to shun can not depend on first establishing exactly what an individual thinks. Most effective social sanctions are class sanctions. They depend on stereotyping. Without stereotyping much essential human action would be paralysed.

I may be hesitant to inflict class punishment for the behaviour of only some of the members of a class. Perhaps at an individual level I might show disgust if I had reason to think they endorsed the detested actions or opinions. But not all of us must be made so squeamish by law.

There are many individual ways to express moral repugnance. Individuals can be obliged to take sides, to say where they stand, and if necessary to wear the costs of unpopular positions. The Springbok tour protesters who told individual rugby fans what they thought of them, who shunned them, were exercising freedom. Freedom is not freedom if we can not do that. Freedom relies on social sanctions as incentives for conduct most of us approve, and as incentives to avoid conduct most of us disapprove. Social sanctions only work if there is a cost to expressing, or supporting, or not denouncing abhorred positions.

Group punishment irrespective of the target’s personal responsibility is exactly what our government is doing to put pressure on the Fijian government. It is the mechanism in some strikes. I defend the right of union members to refuse to unload freight from a state whose aggression they detest, to put pressure on that state’s citizens in turn to put pressure on their state.

Though I do not share the Turks’ views on Israel in any degree, I defend their right to express their views as they have.

No surprises in this story suggesting that open plan offices are bad for health.

I’d like to have found the original research report (in the Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management) but of more interest would be some sceptical research on the social effects of open plan offices.

In my experience instead of the expected extra "buzz" and cooperation a lack of privacy can create a library-like hush in an office, at least where there are not enough extroverts to challenge it.. It takes some insensitivity even for them to ignore the pointedly averted eyes and rigid concentration of ‘cublcle’ neighbours trying to discourage distraction.

I’m in favour of a strong open door  culture, but suspect the open plan is a bridge too far into the territory of the earnest kill-joys. Research could find more belly laughs and warmth where passing through an office doorway gives implicit permission for  joking and gossip. The office may legitimise rowdiness in a way that can’t be reasonable in an open plan area.

Today’s Herald reports the charging of Graeme Burton for trying to kill another prisoner. The man is still so dangerous without one leg that he had four guards for his court appearance.

Every fool involved in letting him out to kill on parole a couple of years ago should hang their heads in fresh shame.

Hopefully they’ll have stronger and more personal reasons for hanging their heads shortly. The Herald has reported on a possible OSH prosecution of officials who let parolees hurt innocent people.

The Secretary of Labour is in charge of the OSH officials who pursue the unhappy individuals caught up in tragic accidents. They’re the heroes prosecuting the Outdoor Pursuits Centre folk for the loss of the school children in a flash flood – an accident clearly not foreseen.

Burton’s evil was foreseen. Yet these OSH heroes have failed to prosecute the decision makers who let Burton loose to kill and injure when they had every right and the duty to keep him serving his life sentence.

The law requires a request to the Secretary of Labour before a private prosecution  under the relevant provisions of the Health and Safety in Employment Act. It has been sent.

[I’m looking for a convenient way to put documents online without making huge pages in WordPress so things like the letter can be given a link. Any suggestions?]

Radio New Zealand is reporting a Canadian judge’s decision to refer to a native "sentencing circle" the sentence for a drunk father took his two daughters into a blizzard where they froze to death. The judge will determine the sentence but may have regard to the "circle’s" recommendation.

I’ve long thought that it would be more logical to involve our juries in sentencing than in determining guilt and innocence.

Judges should use the jury as a community representative group to test their sentencing inclinations. In appropriate cases (where the convict clearly identifies with a particular sub-group of society, such as an iwi) judges could ask kaumatua or other representatives for guidance.

Judges should of course ask the victims for their views, and step around the odious refinements of the law governing victim impact statements. There have already been high profile cases (e.g. sentencing for the Lois Dear murder) where they judge has judiciously condoned a victim challenge to the existing law, as victims ‘abuse’ the opportunity to read their statements, by making speeches to the court.

Our new Attorney General, Chris Finlayson could rationalise this. He could free judges from the stupidity of the "tariff". It is time to end the waste of legal aid money on footling appeal adjustments to sentences.

In the mood I get into when opening nearly three weeks mail, emails and newspapers nothing missed seems very important, even when it is. So last night it was easy to skim read.

This morning the clear water and sun and sand are already receding and suddenly the news is interesting again, though I’m still glad to have missed several weeks of hissing at Israel. 

I’m not sure whether it is a consolation of being in my fifties instead of my thirties, or a drawback, but it is certainly harder to share the smug certainties of our ‘intellectual’ establishment. Their consensus alone sounds "whoop whoop – pull up, pull up".

Now they have a consensus supporting our Fiji policy. See for example the DomPost editorial of 18 December.

I have too many memories of that kind of consensus being wrong. Often it has been for the same naivety – the belief that leaders claiming to be democrats are heroes, and elimination is only fitting for their opponents who question whether democracy can work in their country. I ‘ve blogged on this complexity before – the ends do not automatically justify the means, but outcomes do matter .

They have not been as noisy in support of George Bush’s war for democracy in Iraq, but  then they’ve always had an excuse for the corruption or suppression of democracy in Islamic countries. Islamic extremists hate Israel, which is the US friend, so one need think no further on who to support in a battle between democratic Israel and the rest.

There was a long ago consensus that Ian Smith’s rule in Rhodesia was monstrous, because "one person one vote" was self-evidently better for everyone. The anointed went into apoplexy over over Muldoon’s penetrating 1981 observation about Mugabe (then demanding that the New Zealand government simply ban sports links with racist regimes). Muldoon excused Mugabe’s indifference to niceties like freedom of association with the comment, “when you’ve been in the jungle for a few years shooting people, it’s a bit difficult to understand”..

The survivors of Mugabe’s millions of victims might see Muldoon as the more perspicacious

Three stories in as many pages of a recent Economist (13 November) reminded me of the left’s repeated failures of judgment. Zimbabwe got a mention. Mugabe is covered in 19 Economist search items since 13 November.

But the others are just as revealing. Daniel Ortega of the Sandinistas enjoyed the worshipful support of H Clark’s generation. Nicaragua was shorthand for US wickedness in supporting the Contras.

Try this for a summary of where Ortega is now:

"In 1990 the Sandinistas agreed to hold free elections, which they lost. But their leader, Daniel Ortega, has returned to power, having won a presidential election in 2006 against a divided opposition. Now, armed with an alliance with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, he seems determined to snuff out Nicaragua’s young democracy.

In the months before municipal elections on November 9th, Mr Ortega’s government manoeuvred to disqualify two opposition parties from the ballot. It sent police to ransack the offices of the country’s leading investigative journalist, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, and those of a women’s group. It is investigating another 15 organisations, including Oxfam, a British aid agency, for money-laundering and “subversion”. Many former Sandinista leaders have split with Mr Ortega, whose approval rating in opinion polls has slumped towards 20%."

 South Africa’s ANC were similarly worshipped. The same copy of the Economist, explains how "post-apartheid South Africa, once a shining beacon of human rights, is cosying up to nasty regimes around the world". They may have real-politik reasons for sustaining Mugabe in power, but what about this:

"In the UN Security Council, South Africa has voted against imposing sanctions not only on Zimbabwe but also on Myanmar’s military junta (after last year’s crackdown on peaceful protesters) and Iran (for violating nuclear safeguards). It is now leading efforts to suspend the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, for alleged genocide in Darfur.

Its record in the UN Human Rights Council is no better. It has voted to stop monitoring human rights in Uzbekistan, despite widespread torture there, and in Iran, where executions, including those of juvenile offenders, have soared. “Never in my wildest dreams did I believe South Africa would play such a negative role,” says Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group."

To me the journalistic support for the Clark/Peters (and now McCully?) Fiji policy reminds me of that sanctimonious consensus against Ian Smith in Zimbabwe.

We may claim to be simply favouring democracy over a military coup. But life is so much more messy than the theory. We are actually favouring corrupt racists whose ‘democracy’ was perhaps at least as likely to discredit democracy in Fiji as the rule of the Commodore.

Daniel McCaffry referred me to this perspective in the Atlantic from the other end of the debt telescope – from the CEO of China Investment Corporation, which controls around US$200bn and is a major holder of the US$2 trillion of US debt to China.

While his urging of a US troop pull-back may not seem relevant to us, and many of us might endorse his urbane suggestion of more humility from the US, the polite messages are just as apposite to us.

We have spent more than we’ve earned all my working lifetime, between 5 and 8 cents in every dollar we’ve spent over the last few decades. That is around twice the typical balance of payments deficit rate of the US.

We’ve gone from being one of the best educated, most practical, can-do, stoic, modest, crime-safe western peoples in the space of two generations to the opposite end of the western spectrum, yet still we feel qualified to lecture to others who have overtaken us or are doing so. Perhaps we are also about to witness  a shift from being one of the most trusting and trusted western peoples.

Without the economic or military capacity to inspire respect we’re bullying Fiji, thinking that a confident air of moral superiority will do the trick. People who can’t pay their bills can’t pull that trick too often.

When the Chinese, Arabs, Taiwanese and Japanese etc who’ve lent to us work out that the other Anglo countries really do mean to print money rather than let their foolish and vastly overpaid financiers fail, they’ll decide not to take more IOUs from us. Even if we do not intend to trash our currency we’ll be bracketed with the US, UK, and Australia as debtors planning to devalue our IOUs. Indeed our creditors could start with us because we can’t do so much to worry them.

They’ll decide not to roll over the current IOUs. They may instead try to use them to buy our assets. Assets protect from inflation. Theoretically that should appeal as less cataclysmic for us than the debt collectors. And we’ve preached open borders, and globalisation for so long that at the very least they should be able to spend the money they’ve lent to us on assets we’ve said should be in the hands of the highest bidder.

But the people of the Anglo democracies will tell their leaders they’ll be sacked if they let those assets go to such foreigners. Because ownership matters. It confers control. The party stops when you’ve borrowed as much as you can, then sold assets to keep partying, and the new landlords come down to tell you to start working as hard as they do, or else.

What happens when the Chinese, Arabs etc are told they can’t redeem their IOUs except, effectively, for more IOUs likely to be worth less tomorrow.

They stop our credit. They’re justifiably angry. We go to balanced payments cold turkey. It hurts them as well as us, because we stop buying so much from them – but what’s their alternative.

And here living standards suddenly drop to  what we can pay for without borrowing or selling assets.

I suppose the adjustment will be by way of a currency collapse.  

Should the Reserve Bank therefore let the money supply rip, if we’re going to be treated as if it was anyway? They’ll be pilloried if instead they keep money tight and asset prices adjust down.

If they or the government do print money nominal asset values may hold up and savers will be the losers. Two decades of religious inflation fighting gone for nought as another generation learn not to save.

Are these speculations wild? Do economists include these among the plausible scenarios? Why is there so little scenario posing in MSM?

Winston Peters didn’t make a spectacular early mess as ‘Foreign Minister’, then won over the apprehensive Foreign Affairies by largely following their briefs and capped that by establishing a helpful relationship with the US.

But the media pendulum swung too far. They over-compensated for their doubts with uncritical reporting in that sphere.

The media faithfully reported his and Clark’s hostility to Bainimarama as an unavoidable and principled stand.

Principled it may have been, but it was and is incompetent. Whatever their motives the outcome of  setting up sanctions and ultimata from which they could not climb back is much less influence for us, and less likelihood of protecting our back yard as a zone of peace.

Bainimarama is less racist than what he replaced. He is probably less corrupt. But most importantly, he is clearly in power. A basic principle of international relations is realism. The de facto ruler is the ruler.so we ‘eat that’ unless we have the power and the nerve to topple that ruler.

Bainimarama is more democratic than the Chinese we’ve been cuddling up to, more rational than Mbeki and his fellow ex terrorists we’ve failed to denounce, and more capable than the regimes we are spending millions propping up in East Timor and Solomon Islands.

When compared with how we’ve treated other regimes we hold our noses with, our Fiji policy is bullying hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy might be justifiable if it was also pragmatic and unavoidable, but the result is a shambles. Ask any of New Zealand’s formerly Fijian Indian population, who have been following it closely. 

We are displaying our incompetence to the worried US and Australia, Even the EU are baffled at our naivety as we drive Fiji unwillingly toward China.

China must be astonished by our bumbling as their once remote dream of getting naval port facilities in the middle of the South Pacific becomes more tangible by the day.

For how long will our pathetic forces be able to help our small island neighbours enforce their fisheries zones if there is a real and hostile naval presence in Fiji, sheltering pirate fishing fleets?

Murray McCully, please abandon the Peters/Clark folly.

Update – for discussion see Kiwiblog’s post today on the topic

Maiden speeches are revealing, so I’ve been waiting for the Parliamentary website to post them. I can not find even the advances for them.

Grant’s notes are accessible from his blog post. It is consistent with his campaign – awesomely ‘on message’.

"a vision for a modern, inclusive New Zealand, where we equip our people with the skills and knowledge to succeed in an ever globalising world. A New Zealand where we celebrate and promote diversity, and where we truly are our brother and sister’s keepers, and ensure that every one of us can achieve our potential"

I’m sure I’ll be forgiven a link to Kiwiblog’s caption contest on the DomPost photo of the event.

I liked best no 27 – tknorriss – "When I pull with my right hand, look to the right…."

In  January  I mentioned the law that pushed US banks into lending to uncreditworthy borrowers.

Since then received wisdom in US liberal circles has held it that free market greed is the culprit for their woes.

So an Op Ed piece in the New York Times on 11 December, by a Manhattan Institute researcher (Howard Husock) is a welcome sign of balance intruding.

"There’s little doubt that the rating agencies helped inflate the housing bubble. But when we round up all the culprits, we shouldn’t ignore the regulators and affordable-housing advocates who pushed lenders to make loans in low-income neighborhoods for reasons other than the only one that makes sense: likely repayment."

The details are compelling:

"…under the past two administrations the Department of Housing and Urban Development pushed the secondary mortgage market to buy loans based on criteria other than the creditworthiness of borrowers. These affordable-housing goals became more demanding over time. By 2005, HUD required that 45 percent of all the loans bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be loans to borrowers with low and moderate incomes. HUD required further that Fannie and Freddie buy 32 percent of the loans in their portfolios from people in central cities and other underserved areas and that 22 percent of the loans they buy be to “very low income families or families living in low-income neighborhoods.”

And the conclusion:

"One cannot say with any certainty whether the more important cause of the current housing crisis was affordable-housing mandates or the actions of investment banks and ratings agencies. There can be no doubt, however, that both contributed"