In it For Life is the brilliant motto of Surf Life Saving New Zealand and looking round the delegates at the New Zealand Surf Awards on Saturday night, we should be very proud of them.

Fit and strong, old and young, men and women, it was a good looking group of kiwis in the Duxton Hotel honouring their peers and celebrating 40 years of partnership with BP and Europa.

The surf life savers enjoy life and save lives. More than 1600 people were rescued by them on our beaches last year.  Yet their funding from the NZ Lotteries Board was less than the year before, leaving them to raise the difference.   Compare that with the futile campaigns on which the Government has squandered millions eg micro chipping dogs.

The partnership with BP (originally Europa) is one of the most long lasting of commercial sponsorships.  The story is great.  Surf life saving started nearly 100 years ago on Lyall Bay beach in Wellington and New Brighton in Christchurch with teams sending out swimmers with belts and reels.  The Wahine storm of 1968 proved the worth of boats for life saving.  A month before the storm, Europa Oil had presented a boat to Worser Bay SLSC and it saved a number of lives.  Jet boats followed, but they proved expensive.

In 1975, Two kiwis, John and Chris Speight, saw the need for a fast inflatable to rescue people in the waves and developed the orange boat for New Zealand surf conditions. The BP sponsorship now supports more than 200 inflatable rescue boats nation-wide.  You will have seen them on Piha Rescue.

Nathan Smith and Liam O’Toole, 15 year olds from Papamoa, were awarded the BP Surf Rescue of the Year for saving five girls at the beach last December.  Sam Mulcahy, another youngster, from Lyall Bay SC, was also honoured for his rescue of an older man at that beach, who subsequently died.  Then there were many older surf life savers who had given up to 50 years of service, recognised in life or service awards.  They looked hearty, fit and energetic, the sort of modest guys it would be good to have a beer with.  Perhaps surf life saving is the secret to an active old age.

Two of our children have been involved in surf life saving and we hope they continue for a long time yet.

The UK Home Secretary Jack Straw seems to have signed up to Sensible Sentencing.

"Labour will always put victims and their families first," Straw said. "That’s why we are transforming criminal justice from a bureaucratic system to the public’s service. It’s about a change of culture, of attitude, about lifting the veil which sometimes keeps justice from view: explaining more, hiding less."

He’s using attack as his defense of Gordon Brown’s New Labour (or perhaps as his assault on Gordon Brown’s position?).

Straw reprised Blair’s most famous line. "…our values are the ones most likely to create safer communities. Fair rules, firm punishments. Rights but also responsibilities. Deterrent and reform. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."

He is targeting the lawyers’ legal aid budget .

More significantly he pushing to "open up" the justice system. For example he wants to:

• Introduce online court records "so anyone can see for themselves what happens when someone appears in the dock" .

[I’ve urged for years the restoration of open justice in our courts.]

•  make community sentences more visible to the public so that people can see them working. "We are introducing high visibility jackets for all those on such sentences" . 

[Wellington’s Constable Theo Gommans has pioneered this, with pink jackets on graffiti artists.]

I’d love to see a similar automatic penalty for Wellington litterers. Regular pink jacketed work gangs of litterers and graffiti artists could clean up the noisome wildcat dump sites in our reserves. They are inevitable since council tip charges became absurd, but that does not mean we should not use social slobs to clean them up.

Recently I caught part of an employment law seminar.  A roomful of anxious looking people earnestly absorbing a refresher on proper process.

Though I suspect few of them thought hard about it, essentially it is an ‘update’ on how to manufacture evidence.  Things like:

• How to create a self serving record of consideration of an employee’s request for flexible working hours?
• What will show you have ‘not decided’ on your plan before you go into consultation?
• How to tweak your language for a reasonable chance of fending off a tactical (or substantive) lawyer challenge to a restructuring plan?

The decent mainly young execs all around me showed no signs of contempt or irritation. I doubt whether it crossed the minds of any of them to wonder why they were being schooled in faking sincerity whether they felt it or not. Pretence demanded by law is just part of their mental furniture. Many of them have grown up in a world where the law is much more concerned about process than truth or the substance. To them the law is just another facet of a world of falsehood of various degrees.

I suspect if I’d shouted out, the seminar would have found reasons to feel OK. Why should the manufacture of evidence be any worse than polite social lies? Both seem necessary for ordinary people to get by, to do ordinary reasonable things with minimum friction.

I hate what has happened to the youth ideals of my generation, when sincerity was the virtue that trumped all others (even tolerance and certainly politeness). That generation in power has created a body of law for liars that would stun the parents we were out to shock. It rewards routine lying. Indeed it may be virtually impossible for businesses to function if they do not play the game.

I was reminded of W Peters feigned outrage before the Privileges Committee at what he considered to be Owen Glenn’s "coached evidence". I think they call it "projection".

No wonder W Peters thinks its worth spouting nonsense and H Clark can pretend she can’t act on anything less than a formal outcome of proceedings. Employment law steers people straight to lying, by forcing them to pretend they act in ways no sensible person would act, and indeed in ways no self respecting employee would want them to act.

Employment law schools New Zealanders in false pretences, in pretending that people do not and should not act on their sound intuitions. Good managers and good employees know that often one must act on imperfect information, that acting with the risk of being wrong is better than dithering.

Employment law instead schools people not to see and know or act on truth in front of them.

The focus on process is a legal plague invented to authorise lawyers (and judges) to reopen any decision they want, to punish intuitive common sense. That culture plays into the hands of the Peters and the  H Clarks of our little world.

This picture of a new born daughter was sent from Germany by a former Parliamentary intern. She is gorgeous

Agenda gave time to an Aro Valley flat exchange with the Labour candidate. The You Tube footage has been pushed by Labour blogs for weeks.

The Labour candidate has been feigning hurt from claims by a gay newspaper, drawn from their coverage on the arguments over the Civil Union Bill. It has been part of an attempt to spread an ‘anti-gay’ smear.

For the record, I favoured the decriminalisation of homosexual conduct in Fran Wilde’s Bill. I drafted speech notes used by Ruth Richardson in her support of that Bill.

Though I ultimately voted against the Civil Union Bill it was not because I objected to gay couples being able to opt in to a status of committed partners recognised as such by the law. My reasons for the votes are set out at length in Hansard. A primary reason was because the companion bill which gave effect to civil union status unnecessarily treated de facto couples as if they had chosen marriage or civil union.

Civil union rightly requires on an "I do" to change the partners’ rights and obligations. But the new law extended the same consequences to people who had never consented. Indeed some may have been actively saying "I don’t " in staying de facto.

I sat on the Select Committee hearing submissions and sometimes chaired it (in my capacity as deputy chair of the Committee). Despite hearing literally hundreds of submissions, often repetitive, I tried to give submitters an idea of the likely response to their submissions.

“If people love each other why should they not be free to marry” was an argument heard scores of times.  The same submitters often expressed the view that long term committed relationships were in the interests of the whole community, and the state should foster them.

The trouble with both arguments for how the Bill should read was that it did not mention love or long term commitment anywhere.  While I shared the sentiment in favour of both, nothing in the Bill required either, or used them as a test. I thought that if those factors were to rule, they needed to be teased out into words or principles. 

I preferred the NZ Law Commission’s draft legislation, which followed Danish and other North European precedents. They focussed on the expression of a wish to opt in to a legal partnership relationship and therefore did not leave room for debate about what exactly the term "civil union" was to encompass.

To me people who care enough to submit deserve more than leaving without any feeling for how they’ve been received. I appreciate it when people are straight with me, and I try to be plain speaking in return. People know what I think and they usually thank me for  that even if they do not agree with me. I got on well with Tim Barnett, who usually chaired the committee because I trusted him and I believe he trusted me to be honest.

 So I tried to give submitters an idea of the issues that could mean their submissions would not change the Bill. Most members just let them finish and leave without comment. 

 In relation to the argument that love should be enough to marry I sometimes asked them how the law should deal with sisters living together, or elderly mother and daughter, or uncle and nephew. All of those loving relationships could be simplified in legal terms (inheritance, asset disposal on break-up) if they were able to opt in to a status that had similar legal effect to marriage (i.e. civil union).  Some days I asked whether love should be enough if it was 3 or more long-time friends. In other words on what principle should polygamy be forbidden  if love or commitment should be sufficient conditions (let alone how they would be expressed as conditions)?

One day instead of using as my example query the elderly sisters, or other relationships forbidden to marry I responded to a particularly strong assertion that the State had no business trying to judge the type of relationship as long as there was love (a view with which I had some sympathy) I mentioned that I loved my dog, but that was not enough.

Citing that comment out of context became  a gift to militants who saw alignments on civil union as a "friend from foe" identifier. Maybe they were for many people. I treated the Bill in the same way as I tried to treat all Bills before my Select Committee – that is by reading the words for what they actually said and the legal consequences, not for their slogan power.

Similarly used have been quotations from Hansard of a speech in which I described submissions that had nothing to do with the Bill. For example many gay couples made eloquent pleas for the Bill so that they could not be barred from visiting their partners in hospital. I agreed that they should not be prevented. Trouble was – any such problem never had anything to do with law changed by the Bill. 

Many submissions on both sides were exchanges in what are now called “culture wars”. I said I was tired of submissions from “grumpy Christians and whining gays”.

Sadly in a PC world  PC opponents gain weapons from such plain speaking.

My Labour opponent makes a feature of being a gay activist. He mentions it at every opportunity. Since my candidacy was first mooted his supporters have tried to paint me as homophobic, presumably on the theory that it will mobilize Wellingtonians to his cause. 

Initially I accepted the possibility that he was genuinely upset by what he’d been told. He is passionate. For example he thinks the AIDS Foundation position on taking blood donations from gay men is not militant enough.

But now I know he is well aware of the context to those statements. He no doubt feels it is working for him.

An Islamabad hotel is shattered, and NZ Cricket’s decision to cut out Pakistan is vindicated.

Another tragedy for a country with millions of talented hard working people hostage to their fervent minority whose faith tells them that ends justify means.

Two years ago I went to Pakistan at the request and expense of their Securities Commission. The hotel had been repaired  after much of its face was obliterated by  a bomb. Every return to the hotel involved luggage and clothing searches, scanners, mirrors wheeled under vehicles well clear of the entrance and many cold watchful eyes trying to ensure their own survival as well as that of their guests.

I counted more than 40 men on security duties for each shift.

Most significant businesses had a couple of guards at their door, one with an automatic rifle and the other with a shotgun.

I hired a taxi for a day. The driver was a fervent Muslim, with a wife and children in his family compound an hour’s scooter ride from the city. We visited mosques and madrassars as well as the beautiful old Law Courts built during the Raj.

The place had such promise in 1947. Now few seemed to have much hope for improvement

The Securities Commission was looking to update a company law drastically in need of it. A sound English law core had been encrusted with populist additions that meant few people bothered to incorporate businesses. Yet it was plain that company law was one of the least of their problems. Why put resources into that area of law?

Simple really. The brilliantly educated elite were doing it because they could, without the extremists taking an interest. Company law does not engage the fervent minority. Much more needed reforms would attract the attention of the religious. If  they decide that reform showed disrespect for thier causes, the ‘political’ response could be to annihilate the disrespectful.

Newspapers were bombed into dealing with vital issues in code (like oppression of women). The whole public climate left more unsaid than said, despite a crowded newspaper market.

Political correctness rules.

The dilemma for rulers in such countries is huge. Visiting Turkey last year underscored it. Ataturk essentially wiped out a generation of religious leadership (perhaps half a million killed) to make Turkey officially secular.

God save us from any minority who believe that ends justify means. On the other hand when their numbers pass a critical mass, can they be defeated except by those prepared to use abhorrent means that will unavoidably hurt the innocent?

We are so lucky to be able to cluck and condemn from afar those wrestling with such issues.

At St Teresa’s Fair with Cathy

 Where everyone gets a bargain

Doorknocking team assembles in the sun at Astoria Cafe

Hardly an hour passes without someone asking what I will do for their favourite cause. Business is no different.

The best thing I can do for Wellington business is make sure that the people in our major industry are valued, and feel valued.

Being government, and advising government and its agencies is our major industry.

My recent invitation piece for the Wellington Chamber of Commerce explained my mission.

If our public servants do not feel their jobs are worth doing Wellington will not buzz. Despite great creative businesses, if a critical proportion of our people feel grey, Wellington will not continue to draw and produce the brilliant people who attract their own cutting edge kind. For Wellington to thrive the people working in government must feel excited about their work. They are investing in their personal futures, as well as ours.

I can play a part in that.  I want to be a tireless advocate for a top flight public service within a National government. I want to make sure that the changes nearly everyone is hoping for do not throw out babies with the bathwater.

Our public service has been demonstrably  ‘world’s best’ in sectors in the past and it can be again.  In that respect what’s good for Wellington will be good for New Zealand .

See the article on ITQ for fisheries in this week’s Economist . It reports research establishing what our public servants theorised, then made into practical administration. Though it is not mentioned in the article, Wellington produced world’s best  fisheries policy and legislation.

"For years economists and green groups such as Environmental Defense, in Washington, DC, have argued in favour of ITQs. Until now, individual fisheries have provided only anecdotal evidence of the system’s worth. But by lumping all of them together the new study, published this week in Science, is a powerful demonstration that it really works. It also helps to undermine the argument that ITQ fisheries do better only because they are more valuable in terms of their fish stocks to begin with…. The new data show that before their conversion, fisheries with ITQs were on exactly the same path to oblivion as those without"

 The Law and Economics Association of New Zealand is holding a seminar on fisheries law on 13 October, presented by the Ministry’s top ecomomist. Non-members are usually welcome to these seminars.

If you’re in the first fifteen years of your career in Wellington, join Wellington Young Professionals.  I think they’re intending to have lots of parties.

Their inaugural event at St Johns Bar sold out within a few days, over-subscribed with more than 500 registered before bookings closed.

The generations before me invented Rotary and the Lions to network and do good at the same time. The Chambers of Commerce (and Junior Chambers of Commerce) served some of the same purposes.

Congratulations Sam and friends. It will be interesting to see where WYP evolves.

Patent attorney client entertainments are just the best . Their clients are inventors and entrepreneurs. They’re nearly all doing and making useful things, and having fun on free drinks from those they pay to help them.

The clients are risk takers, they’re optimistic, they’re always doing interesting things, they love novel/off the wall conversation, and they’re intrinsically hostile to the nannies of the left.

Last week’s drinks with Ellis Verboeket Terry,  a hot, newish Wellington firm of patent attorneys, lived up to expectation.

Among the clients was Racetech Manufacturing Ltd of Petone, the makers of world’s best race car seats. David Black of Racetech mentioned that a grateful crash survivor had recently sent them a link to some spectacular crash photography.

Who could resist a look? He’s just sent me the link.

Great crash, great photography, great outcome for the driver, and great testimony to a Wellington business.