A really good photo show of the Aro Valley Candidates’ Meeting from Wellington photographer Matthew Plummer:

Last night’s Aro valley meeting was a pleasure. It was superbly organised. The Chair (Bryan Crump) was well chosen, and there was a persistent current of good humour outlasting nastiness. There may be relief in my pleasure because all of us candidates know in advance that our only required role is to be the target of audience wit.

Witty they were but I think that for this meeting there was more interest than previously in the policy tensions between parties. I’ve had a look back at my rumination on the meeting before the last election. Apart from feeling that it was a nadir for Marian Hobbs who is deservedly well liked, the comparison shows this year’s meeting as much more informative as well as amusing.

I speculate two explanations.

First the finance meltdown may have focussed minds on who may be governing in uncertain times, and they suspect that ideology may not a comprehensive guide to what to do at the moment.

Secondly, many on the left have lost some of their moral smugness as they’ve discovered their heroes involved in electoral corruption, cynical suppression of free speech and an obvious desperation for power whatever the price in the embrace with a lying NZ First leader.

DimPost’s reportage gives some of the flavour.

I was a little surprised that Robertson’s team again tried with three "questions" to smear me as anti-gay. Gay friends had warned me that Robertson thought it was working well for him but this is the fourth meeting in which they’ve tried it. I was glad when the meeting gave me extra time to outline what was actually in the civil union legislation, and why I voted against it despite being in favour of  the Law Commission proposal based on a Danish precedent, and despite a long-standing position against the criminalisation of homosexuality when that was much more controversial.

I think he’s wrong about this issue.  Wellingtonians want to know about what we can respectively offer Wellington and how we will champion the city. I get the same concerns from gay and others alike. I can not think of a single law or policy proposal that has been raised in my ten weeks of knocking on doors where it would have occurred to me or the people at the door to draw a gay/non-gay distinction.

I wish someone in the audience had called on Grant to explain exactly what gay friendly policies he thinks are at risk or what he would promote if he gained power, when he has been at such pains to make this an election issue.

 While the wind outside was spreading debris down the streets last week , National’s Rongotai candidate Chris Finlayson and I were in a Miramar magician’s cave, a factory haven of order. This year its 37 factory staff will make  over 450,000 sophisticated switches for industrial circuits, mostly on automated machines in-house designed and  built . 

The machines nod, whirl and swing like military ballet dancers stamping and cutting placing components into products, then automatically testing them.

The factory is part of Kraus and Naimer’s worldwide business. For the New Zealand company the NZ market is only around 15% of revenue.   Much of the rest comes from sales in Asia. An 11 person NZ technical sales team grows sales here in dairy, forestry, IT power supplies and new eco friendly power generation. 

I was keen to find out how a factory survives in Wellington making such sophisticated export products, how they build automated equipment for assembly lines, and how they export to China, in the face of the general opinion that Chinese factories crush all competition.

Kraus and Naimer are not "secretive" but they rarely speak to the media. Bruce Robb the manager for this area of the world is a long-time friend, so the visit was a rare chance to hear how Wellington factory workers can remain competitive with the Asian workers who are displacing so many workers elsewhere. 

The  Miramar factory is very alert to competition.  The main issue with their Chinese exports is not price, but counterfeiting, including of packaging labeled “made in New Zealand”. China no longer has a major advantage in raw materials cost. High technology here means that China’s very cheap labour is not a complete killer.

It seems that there is no magic technology or protection. Indeed they rarely patent stuff they develop now.

Instead they simply rely on constant improvement in every aspect of their business. They do not carry stock. Switches are manufactured to order, often overnight,  and despatched precisely on time for a remarkable 96% of orders.

The staff know what they and everyone else is doing. They are cross-trained with an average term of service of 17 years. 

The trick is just to get better all the time at everything that can be improved, and being focused on what customers need.

Invigorating!

I do not have much time to spend on this blog most days, and I prefer to leave even offensive comments standing, on the basis that they usually display the malice and limitations of their authors.

I’ve been impelled to revisit this by some of the misrepresentation of history, of National policy and about me that is a feature of this election, under a law that prevents free speech in response.

So for example I’ve decided to remove false comments  from now on, when I get around to seeing them, unless their falsity can speak for itself in relation to the post. This removal policy will mainly apply to commenters with a history of  no integrity in debate.

The first example is "Jason". He consistently misrepresents points to set up a straw man to burn. I’ve left them in the past because his reasoning is so wet it douses his matches. His straw men survive, looking silly.

But the Labour campaign relies on misrepresentation and the law’s restrictions on the ability to reply. When integrity in debate goes there may a kind of Gresham’s law at work (freely circulating counterfeit currency destroys reliance on the good currency as well as the fake).

So I’ll start in my small corner, and make sure my site at least is not helping some of their liars. If you are wondering what straw broke this camel’s back I’ll leave the trivial but false comment in the first response to "Boobs on bikes" as an example

On Sunday morning I biked out to Ngauranga Station to join the inspection party organised by Alastair Smith of Cycle Aware, for a look at the reclaimed coastline beside Ontrack’s lines. We want a safe foreshore cycle route to link up as part of the Great Harbour Way.

See Alastair’s submission notes for a summary of the benefits.

There’s a cost estimate of $40m for a proposed cycle/walk way on the seaward side of the tracks. I wanted get a feel for the problems. I’d previously suggested to  CAN and Celia Wade-Brown that the Council do an estimate for a route that would use elevated boardwalk sections for the parts where southerly storms would wash out ordinary track work.

I’m not confident that least cost practical solutions will be properly explored by the interested parties. There seems to be some pressure for gold-plated solutions, perhaps to fend off the need for decision.

It is easy for GWRC to defer decisions on the grounds that we should first know the outcome of their "triangle" planning, on how the Porirua, Hutt and Haywards roads will develop.

An extension of the reclamation should get an Ontrack contribution because it would help protect their tracks. But they might prefer to keep people as far away from their tracks as possible for as long as possible. A board walk would have to be in removeable sections to allow fresh rubble to be dumped to replace storm damage from time to time.

But the most interesting suggestion I heard was for a single track to be cut along the hill face above the Hutt Road from Ngauranga to Korokoro. It would make a marvellous traffic safe route for mountain bikes, and could become one of Wellington (and New Zealand’s) classic rides.

I could tell Alastair was anxious as soon as he mentioned it to me that enthusiasm for the MTB track could detract from pressure to create a safe route for road bikes along the foreshore. I think the opposite would be the case. If mountain bikers became accustomed to the single track, and walkers could also use it,  the pressure for a road bike suitable flat alternative could increase, not least from mountain bikers who also like road biking.

One way to guarantee such pressure would be to make the hill scarp route one way. Bikers would have to go the other way on the road or catch the train.

The NBR New Zealand Opera’s production of Janacek’s Jenufa is wonderful. Do try to see it. 

I like familiar classics. I reserve my judgement on musical novelty and under-discovered works.

So when Jenufa in the first act showed herself as an airhead, throwing herself at a pompous prat,  the singing and the music couldn’t redeem it for me..

The second and third acts set that right. The music and singing were glorious. I was sorry when each ended.  

How will Morning Report reflect candidate comments on Steve Crow’s plan to run his Boobs on Bikes parade in Wellington on election day?

When Radio NZ called this evening I found myself resenting the attention to Crow’s stunt, and wanting to find some way to make the issue so boring that RNZ would drop the item. Before calling RNZ back I wondered whether my instinct was just envy, prompted by the lack of RNZ interest in what seem to me more important questions facing Wellington voters.

I felt my resentment was not prudery, because I could not imaging myself being offended by the parade, even if it seems tawdry. Pictures of the Auckland parade make the crowds seem curious but shortchanged more than anything else.

The Radio NZ interest shows that Crow will attract enough controversy to mix with titillation to get his crowds. I’d be very surprised if the Wellington City Council could stop the parade. I’m not sure that they should be free to stop it. 

So why would I prefer Crow to fail?

I think it is because exploitation of the power to cause offence is such a cheap tactic, and because it cheapens those whose reactions make it work, yet if they do not react their values are cheapened. 

Many things cause offense to some section of our community that do not offend others. For example some
Christians are deeply offended by blasphemy. Some conscience stricken liberals are upset by ethnic stereotype jokes. Some Maori are put off by people sitting on tables where food is served. None of those behaviours would upset me, except in one circumstance – that is where there are people present who do find them offensive.

In that case I  feel embarrassed in anticipation of the rudeness shown by causing such offense, even where I can not feel the underlying offense.

I think we should feel vicarious offense on behalf of our fellows, where the offense is pointless, and able to be avoided with simple good manners. A civilised society has social pressures to sustain such manners. Causing pointless offence should have a cost that outweighs the benefits from challenging a taboo to gain notoriety for its own sake.

Succcess for Steve Crow’s stunt weakens those social sanctions. His parade will be offensive to some sincere people. Crow’s cause is Crow’s mercenary interest. And so, because he is likely to benefit from the media interest, and the portrayal of at least some of those who will be offended as fuddy-duddy, I hope that he falls on his face, without much expectation that it will happen.

I covered this briefly with Radio NZ. I wonder how much of this angle will be in their item in the morning?

We were very pleased that more than 150 people involved in the arts in Wellington turned out last night to the New Zealand Portrait Gallery to hear National’s spokesman for the Arts, Chris Finlayson, discuss National’s policy and answer questions.  They took it seriously, as they should.  They left with the certainty that Chris will be a powerful advocate for the arts inside a National government. 

Chris has put his time and money behind the arts for a very long time. I think he’s even sponsoring a suspense thriller at Circa at the moment. 

I confess to being a happy consumer of Wellington’s vibrant arts while knowing little about arts administration.  It was fantastic to walk under the sails last Friday and be greeted by the mime dancers outside WOW, to come across young buskers playing violins in the school holidays and have dancers welcome people at last night’s meeting. 

It’s a brilliant city when you can watch rugby on Saturday afternoon and then go to the New Zealand Opera’s "Janufa" half an hour later (as we will this evening). Our neighbour, Jeremy Commons’ salon operas at the Wellesley Club, the energetic Wellington Youth Orchestra and  the Affordable Art Trust shows are among my favourites.

Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and their associated industries have been great for Wellington and yet Labour wants to make their contractors into employees.  In an up and down industry flexibility is vital. I’m sure Labour do not mean to harm the people who put us among world’s best, but It is often the casual combination of such seemingly small things that determine where industries thrive or wither..

The new unlimited tax deductibility for charitable donations, wich will cover many forms of sponsorship of  the arts, could eventually make a big difference to New Zealand artists. Proposed by National and adopted by Labour it has scarcely been realised yet how significant a broad philanthropic culture can be to to the people who otherwise spend their time bowing and scraping to those who control the taps on government patronage. 

As businesses and individual patrons realise how generous this regime is audiences may also broaden.  My firm, Chapman Tripp, has been helping Circa for 20 years and I’ve always enjoyed the "duty evenings" hosting clients to plays I might not otherwise have seen.

So I think the outlook for the arts is good, despite the current economic climate.  And there’s certainly no need for the Labour misinformation (on some accounts hysteria) which has been spread about the arts. 

Take no notice of the fearmongers.  They have another agenda.

The acquittal of Tim Pankhurst and the DomPost seems to have been for a deplorable reason. The judges decided that the publication of the suppressed evidence was not contempt because it would be unlikely to affect the eventual trial.

 "Though the articles would have had substantial impact at the time on a lot of people, and had clear potential to prejudice the minds of would-be jurors, the more difficult question was how much would linger at the time of any trial, which the judges thought would be at least two years later."

What a hopeless system, when top judges casually expect that criminal charges would take 2 years to get to trial.

From the DomPost report the law of contempt remains as unsatisfactory as before this prosecution. Randerson and Gendall JJ seem to encourage rather than discourage the use of suppression orders.

I posted on this case on 30 September, worrying that the outcome would be bad whichever way it went. It seems to me worse than I feared. The law is more obscure, suppression is encouraged, and in addition the judges treat as normal the quagmire that allows cases to take years when they should be over in a few months.

The decision is yet to be posted on the site for judicial decisions. I hope that the actual judgments are not as depressing as they sound.

 On the other hand – great news for the news guys, and congratulation to their defence team.

That’s the great headline to the DomPost story of Raewyn Gardiner’s defence of her cakes.

It shows a great spirit, a great picture, a great outcome and its great advertising.

I must stop for one of those cakes.