Sign on Glasgow Street wall.  Under Wellington City Council rules, election signs on Council property may go up only after the official start to the campaign. On residential property, signs may only advertise a neighbourhood event.

Whether on road reserve or private property, it seems to breach WCC rules.

Another case of Labour breaking the law they insist everyone else obeys?  Perhaps for an epitaph it’s OK.

At yesterday’s Social Justice forum at St Andrews on the Terrace, from the head nodding I discerned a consensus in favour of State tenants being permitted to buy their own homes (National’s policy). That included guarded favour from the other party representatives ( the Labour candidate was in favour only if those sold were replaced, which is National’s policy).

One of the delegates explained his enthusiasm by favourably contrasting the "feel’ of Porirua streets, with the feel of Manukau. He thought that Porirua’s advantage was probably a much longer average tenure, allowing a genuine sense of community to emerge.

It would be interesting to know from the Housing Corporation whether Porirua is distinguished in that way, and whether other sorry indicators (vandalism, rent default etc) are significantly lower in porirua.

That focus on long staying residents reminded me of my recent attendance at the AGM of the Wellington Housing Trust. The Trust’s Annual Report was ilustrated with a page from from the original Trust Deed. The Trust had updated their deed during the year.

It looked familiar. I realised I was recognising my own drafting from 25  years ago, when I was the initial honorary solicitor to the Wellington Housing Trust. Twenty five years is reasonably long term

A busy Saturday afternoon.

I’d previously committed to Joel Cosgrove’s Aro Street private election forum, followed by the St Andrews Church Social Justice forum..

When the Grand Final of Wellington Rugby League’s premier division was postponed to this weekend I had a dilemma. As WRL Chairman I desperately wanted to be there, but I try not to renege on committments. In the result I had to leave Porirua Park before the clash of the titans.

I’m sure the Hon Winnie Laban handled the League prize-giving (as Patron) without being feeling disadvantaged by my absence.

Jousting with the Aro Valley left has its charms but they are not intellectual. Too much righteous faith and too few with an objective interest in knowledge to offer sustained challenge. Still, this was a new generation. As Joel had promised, the audience did want to hear the answers, even if many only wanted to reassure themselves that their their prejudices were properly aligned. To me the extreme left’s sorriest characteristic is defining themselves by their hatreds, rather than their purposes.

The people at St Andrews were more focussed on the poor.  I came in part way through thoughtful comments by Alan  Johnson of Manukau, exploring the traps for their clients in ready access to vices like the pokies. He seemed to be challenging the audience to support limitations on personal freedoms, but with clear wariness about the consequent risks of paternalism. I would like to have heard more.

The politiican question session involved four parties – Green, Labour, United Future and National. It was well chaired by Rev Margaret  Mayman.

It was the first time I’d seen  the Green’s Russell Norman in action. Russell waxed rhetorical on a question about housing affordability. I interjected when he told the audience that the Building Act (before the Labour/United Future/Green changes) had not been concerned about buildings being weather proof.

The consequent exchange struck a note of sharp contrast with the panel’s general agreement on the seriousness of the stresses looming for the lowest income New Zealanders as energy and food costs rise.  A member of the audience described it as "unedifying".

Maybe. But the word derives from the same root as ‘education".

I think that audiences can learn more in those moments of head on conflict, about the real difficulties of politics and the importance of personal relationships, than in hours of honeyed words carefully workshopped through focus groups.

Thanks to Piripi of http://rupahu.blogspot.com/  (see the post of 17 June 2007) for the illustration of that phrase using whakaama, mentioned in yesterday’s post.

Some times the behavioural geneticists are comforting. 

A report you’ll have to pay for, but summarised by NCPA, gives us candidates reasons for not beating our breasts when voters seem immune to all our efforts.

The study lets me blame their genes. It used comparisons between identical twins and fraternal twins to find:

"Genes have a significant influence over whether you’re "liberal" or "conservative" on various political and social issues.  Some heritability estimates have been as high as 50 percent".

So  it isn’t my clunky oratory, or less than lucid reasoning. It’s just how they are. 

Is that comforting, or even more worrying?

Kim Hill often asks the questions I’ve never asked but meant to. This morning she missed one in her interview with blues musician Dave Murphy.

I loved his pieces, but must Blues singers always sing in American? It’s fine when they are American, but to me there is an irritating ‘try-hard’ overtone when they’re Kiwis.

Is it just me? When I was a child kids affected American accents to seem tough, like cowboys.  "Skiting" was a cardinal sin in those days, and Americans were skites by definition.

Is the accent a  genre rule for the Blues? What happens to those who break the rules and sing in Kiwi?

Why not reinstate concern for reputation as the first reason for not preying on your neighbours?

I’ve been concerned about the law’s devaluing of reputation as a constraint on bad behaviour since I first gave advice on  privacy issues. That was in 1993, when the Privacy Act  was going through.

So yesterday I  challenged Jim Mora’s Panel (Afternoons with Radio New Zealand) with the question. They were discussing a report of distribution by the Christchurch  police of flyers warning a neighbourhood about a 16 year old burglar. The flyer used a photo of Coltraine, to avoid rules protecting young offenders from being identified, saying:

"Robbie Coltrane is not the burglar, but imagine him aged 16 with lank, greasy hair and you have the picture."

The leaflet said the boy lived locally, travelled by bicycle and burgled houses in the area.

"He will break windows to gain entry and ransack the property, targeting electronic items, cash and jewellery,"

How did we get ourselves into such a stupid pickle? Why do we have law prohibiting the most natural and effective action open to a community watching a young person become a career criminal – that is to tell neighbours to keep a wary eye on him, at the same time telling him that crime will no longer pay for him?

How nutty it is to prevent the neighbours from protecting his victims and showing those tempted to imitate him that  it will not be a successful way to spend a life?

There is no evidence that abolishing shame for youth offending (which is the real, though possibly unintended effect of privacy and name suppression in Youth Justice) has improved any outcomes.

Shame is the basis of most cultures’ informal sanctions for bad behaviour. Shame (whakaama in Maori) was the primary foundation of Polynesian responses to offending.

The anointed who’ve run criminal justice policy often pay lip service to multi-culturalism. They afflict prisoners with "cultural affirmation" programmes. But the falsity of their "respect" shows in their rejection of any genuine return to effective traditional beliefs about offending, and how to deal with it.

Instead, to avoid stigmatising a guilty threat to the community who had thoroughly earned his stigma, we risk stigmatising a whole bunch of look alikes (not to mention Mr Coltraine).

We should not be surprised at the huge pressure for more punitive formal processes, when we’ve deliberately nobbled the first line of defense of all healthy communities. 

"Fresh Start" and other expensive programmes are necessary to deal with the youth crime wave. But perhaps there would not be such a wave if we had not had years of government collusion with offenders and their families to protect kids from the reputation consequences of the harm they inflict on others.

It’s no surprise that the kids get the message that the community is not serious when it says it will not tolerate predators.

Our Reserve Bank has warned for years that our love of housing investment has been irrational. Some have said it is not irrational given a tax preference created by the absence of a capital gains tax.

Robert J Samuelson in Newsweek lists the US tax "breaks" for housing that frothed their market. He warns that the rescue plans will exacerbate that problem.

Interestingly, we have virtually none of the tax incentives that bedevil other housing markets (other than the absence of capital gains tax). Yet we’ve shared their cycle.

I agree more with those who point to red tape and compliance costs as a primary cause of  the loss of housing affordability in New Zealand.

Graeme Edgeler has helpfully directed me to the pdf download of  the Commission’s decision.

The decision is admirably crisp. It relies on a literal, not purposive, interpretation of the words of the EFA.

It accepts Andrew Little’s assurance that he does not take instructions from the EPMU in his Vice Presidency of the Labour Party, and accordingly the EPMU is not "involved in the administration of the affairs of" that Party.

A purposive interpreter might have assumed that Parliament intended to stop third parties acting under the influence of, or in collusion with, or congruently in campaigning with the party.  Such an interpreter might have given a wide meaning to "involved in" so that it impedes that two way coordination of plans and interests. Instead this interpretation says the literal words require that the involvement be by the EPMU in administering the party, and not the other way.

The decision will be a comfort for those who’ve been struggling to make sense of the Act. In effect this decision says don’t bother. If the words do not make sense in relation to the probable objectives of the Act, the Commission is not going to strain to find a way to turn nonsense into sense.

That view might not prevail in court, so there could still be risk in ignoring the restrictions when establishing third parties. But for ruthless or desperate politicians it is a green light for avoidance collaboration.

During John Key’s keynote speech to the National Party Conference, we parked  three “campaign” cars in a row on Wakefield Street.

Decorated with smiling faces and the National logo were my classic VW, and the cars of Katrina Shanks (Ohariu) and Richard Whiteside (Rimutaka). 

Thinking the cars might be a vandalism target for the Labour demonstrators, my wife, Cathy, asked workers on a nearby building site if they were sympathetic to National.

“I’ve got Bye Bye Helen on my truck,” grinned the long-haired foreman.  And yes, they were happy to look after the cars during the speech.

Genuine workers want a change in government.