Saturday’s Herald featured the growth in public sector pay that gives Wellingtonians the highest average hourly pay rates in the country.

Then Garry Sheeran in the Sunday Star Times reported on the extraordinary growth in the pay of senior City Council management. Being an Auckland paper they dwelt on the Auckland region councils in the 10 city study, but some contrasts caught the attention of a friend who dropped in his copy with annotations.

Dividing the reported cost of senior management by the reported numbers of ratepayers he got the following costs per ratepayer:

Wellington       $66.41

Waitakere        $46.56

Rodney            $45.26

Hamilton         $44.23

North Shore    $40.66

Dunedin          $37.32

Manukau         $31.63

Auckland         $19.72

Tauranga        $16.10

Christchurch  $11.19

How come Wellington is 43% higher than the next most generous (Bob Harvey’s pretentious Waitakere) and 6 times the oft-mocked Christchurch?

Would the Peoples Republic of Christchurch repay closer study?

I want Wellington to be a high salary city, so I hope that Wellington has a good story to explain this anomaly. Perhaps the other cities use consultants while Wellington does everything in-house? Whatever the reason we should know it.

It is not necessarily good management to build in-house capacity where consultants can be more experienced, and objective. Wellington is the home of consultants. And if consultants prove to be no good they can not claim the golden parachutes that H Clark vowed to get rid of 9 years ago.

If Wellington City Council says we’ve got people 43% more valuable than any other city, and it shows in the the efficiency and quality of the results for ratepayers  that’s great. But I’d love to hear how it is measured. If it stacks up I’ll gladly defend those salaries.

From my recent experience of resource consent costs I fear that can’t happen.

I’ve just put up a page on the Crossways community centre issue. The page contains a paper I wrote after hearing that "people like [me] are always against community assets", from a person  urging me to avoid supporting Mt Victoria’s push to acquire its community centre from the Presbyterian Church. 

Wadestown too seeks a better centre, and has been told that it is too close to the facilities of the City. I suspect that Wadestown rates too are subsidising activities that do little for Wadestown’s people. 

I strongly support rates money being spent on what economists call public goods. I acknowledge the doubt about what are genuinely public goods (in my view sponsoring the stadium was sound, while sponsoring the promoters of events is likely not to be) but community centres will usually qualify.

I was told that  Council officers had said that Mt Victoria was so close to the cafe district that it did not need a meeting place, and that poorer suburbs should have first go at any money for such purposes.

The informant with the weird assumption that economic rationalists always oppose public facilities knew nothing of Cathy and my long history in our local community activities. We are still the deliverers of the Mt Victoria newsletter for our local streets since it began, perhaps 25 years ago.

So I set out to record the case for public goods like community centres, in rich communities and poor. Indeed there is an argument that prosperous communities might need them more than poorer ones, precisely because of the risk that amidst prosperity, the wealthy and their neighbours might have fewer places where they meet on equal terms. I remember from our days of regular eating at Crossways the welcome and the usefulness it gave to single people who might otherwise have found their loneliness emphasized if they’d turned up for companionship to commercial cafes or pubs.

After the paper went to the Councillors I thought might be influenced  several replied, pointing out other reasons for not supporting the Crossways project. They fear that it could become a white elephant, that it will be expensive to maintain, and that the young families that found it such a boon in the past were now less likely to participate in community initiatives.

Perhaps. I hope they’ll decide to take that risk. The selfless people who’ve been promoting the Crossways purchase look a safe bet to me.

A columnist in today’s Australian doesn’t make it any easier for Australian politicians. Dr David Evans has good credentials

"I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector."

His conclusion is unequivocal:

"What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy."

Yet non-scientist politicians in a democracy have little choice but to respond when there is equally ‘conclusive’ scientific opinion going the other way, apparently from more scientists.

I see the dilemma as being very similar to the never ending defence spending question. Violently opposed opinions on the nature, source, imminence, cause, remedy and direction of threat are held by intelligent, sincere and well informed people. We will only ever know in hindsight who was right, but the consequences of backing the wrong opinion can be enormous. Frequently the right thing (in hindsight) was to dither and do nothing, but sometimes that is fatal. 

It would be desperately negligent not to at least get machinery in place to depress carbon emissions. Whether it is ever fully cranked up is another question. The Aussie system is  clearly designed with room for second thoughts and delay. In the time before the machinery is fully operational much more will be learned about the problem.

Our ETS, on the other hand, seems designed more for a hair shirt fashion parade than to solve the problem. Our leaderettes seem to find hair shirts strangely becoming.

Coverage in The Economist for me moves scientific speculation from the fad to the plausible category. So an Economist article on foods thought to be good for the brain (and fending off Alzheimers) gets read right through, unlike suspect similar stuff in less authoritative magazines.

Fortunately for NZ the article commends kiwifruit (for Omega 3?) and Marmite (for folic acid).

The sting is at the end. The good can all be undone by eating too much. "This puts oxidative stress on the brain and risks undoing all the good work those antioxidants have been up to".

The UK Justice Secretary [Minister] Jack Straw has been highlighting a Labour law change that came into effect on Monday. As reported in the Telegraph it will allow homeowners –

"to use force against criminals who break into their homes or attack them in the street without worrying that "heat of the moment” misjudgements could see them brought before the courts.

For example, homeowners would be able stab or shoot a burglar if confronted or tackle them and use force to detain them until police arrive. Muggers could be legally punched and beaten in the street or have their own weapons used against them."

The commentary and explanations suggest to me that the change could be more cosmetic than real, as far as the words go – but in terms of the message sent to the Police I think it will be significant.

Way down the story the punch line is buried –

"He [Jack Straw] is understood to have decided new laws were necessary after he was involved in four "have-a go’’ incidents, which included chasing and restraining muggers near his south London home. "

Harvard scholar Radha Iyengar used the "sheep/lamb" metaphor in the title to her abstract of research into California’s "Three Strikes and You’re Out " law .

I visited California in 2004 to talk to experts when studying the dramatic drop in crime in the US since President Clinton’s 1996 reforms. Among them were James Q. Wilson (the professor whose philosophical work inspired and explained the success of New York’s Broken Windows (zero tolerance) changes), and the Rand Corporation scholar who was in charge of the analysis that California law required before the three strikes proposition went on the ballot.

They told me that they had not favoured that kind of mandatory sentencing reform when it was approved by the citizens.They thought nevertheless that it had been much more effective than expected. They remained concerned that too much of its cost was unnecessary.

New Zealand critics usually vent elite confidence that criminals are too dumb to think about punishment risks when deciding whether or not to commit their next crime. "Deterrence doesn’t work". they assert, choosing not to look at the research which has discredited that notion.

I recently came across Iyengar’s interesting confirmation of ‘Three Strikes" powerful deterrent effect, in research that nevertheless suggests some undesired consequences. The research abstract says:

Strong sentences are common "tough on crime" tools used to reduce the incentives for individuals to participate in criminal activity. However, the design of such policies often ignores other margins along which individuals interested in participating in crime may adjust.

I use California’s Three Strikes law to identify several effects of a large increase in the penalty for a broad set of crimes. Using criminal records data, I estimate that Three Strikes reduced participation in criminal activity by 20 percent for second-strike eligible offenders and a 28 percent decline for third-strike eligible offenders.

However, I find two unintended consequences of the law. First, because Three Strikes flattened the penalty gradient with respect to severity, criminals were more likely to commit more violent crimes. Among third-strike eligible offenders, the probability of committing violent crimes increased by 9 percentage points. Second, because California’s law was more harsh than the laws of other nearby states, Three Strikes had a "beggar-thy-neighbor" effect increasing the migration of criminals with second and third-strike eligibility to commit crimes in neighboring states.

The high cost of incarceration combined with the high cost of violent crime relative to non-violent crime implies that Three Strikes may not be a cost-effective means of reducing crime.

Because the research report is available only on subscription here is a link to the Slate summary of the study.

David Farrar is sometimes the best journalist in the country, carefully summarising the key discrepancies and questions in a story that is otherwise too complicated to retain public attention.

He has masterfully summarised the questions with which H Clark and Peters should be hounded till they answer.

Statistics New Zealand is reported in the DomPost as advising that our food prices have risen an average 8.2% since last June. Staples, like cheese (61.9%) bread (15.2%), and milk (22%) account for much of the rise.

Hardship is reported. The Greens demand benefit increases because "It’s terrible that children are going hungry in a food-producing country like New Zealand".

It is terrible, though when the average increase in weekly per person spending on those staples is still less than the cost of a packet of fags, we might look hard at more than just the price as the reason why kids are going hungry.

But the Greens are guilty of much more than opportunistic rhetoric.

They’re insisting on the passage of the law requiring that New Zealand fuels contain 2.5% bio-fuels by 2012, starting from 1 October this year. That Bill, now awaiting passage after the Select Committee report back, puts New Zealand among the countries bidding up the world price of bio-diesel.

Against the direct and unequivocal advice of our Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, despite the United Nations Food Agency plea for the millions now starving because of the conversion of food into fuel, ignoring Time Magazine’s expose of the Brazilian ethanol industry’s responsibility for destruction of Amazon rain-forests, despite the UK Chief Scientist’s description of the bio-fuels mania as a crime against humanity, the Greens are pushing the law through that makes New Zealand one of Brazil’s customers.

We are still a comparatively rich people. Yet we have food price tensions over an 8% average increase. Think of the desperation of mothers trying to feed their kids in the vast areas where green agitation for compulsory bio-diesel has doubled the price of their staple foods. Rice has gone up over 100%.

I’m often asked, usually by well-meaning middle aged women, whether I could work in Parliament with the Greens. "Of course" I can assure them. The first Parliamentary report I drafted was a minority dissent to the waka-hopping bill. Rod Donald co-signed it when we realised we shared the same views on it. I managed to change a number of Bills through joining forces with Nandor Tanczos and Keith Locke on matters to do with civil liberties. I respect Sue Kedgley’s energetic work against cruelty to animals, and I publicly supported her campaign against battery hen farming, and sow crates.

But it is very hard to stomach the common questioning from these naive would-be supporters, that assumes the Greens are virtuous, if a little too idealistic, and a necessary antidote to excessive National pragmatism. In my experience they are often deeply hypocritical, and contemptuous of the kindness and concerns of ordinary New Zealanders, as well as of science and any research that does not confirm their religious conviction that mankind is full of original sin and deserves to sacrifice and suffer.

Their ideological rigidity on bio-fuels makes them directly complicit in the starvation of millions.

I find Dr Nick Smith far more sincere, far more determined to insist on policies that will actually help protect our environment. And most refreshingly he lacks one quality shared by all the Greens – sanctimony.

Credit to TVNZ for appealing against the appalling Broadcasting Standards Authority decision that a convict’s right not to feel public shame and humiliation trumps our right to a media free to broadcast the truth about conviction, including identifying footage of the convict.

And bigger ups  to High Court Judge Jill Mallon for vindicating TVNZ and slapping down that Broadcasting Standards Authority decision. Despite the ritual claim to be concerned about "freedom" in its mission statement, the BSA is among our greatest enemies of free speech.

Judges do not always get opportunities to hear cases in the areas of law in which they specialised before appointment. Media law was among Mallon J’s specialties at Bell Gully before her 1996 appointment to the Bench.

I hope the Advertising Standards Authority is similarly challenged some day soon. After many years of sterling service (much of it under the influence of Complaints Board Chairman Laurie Cameron and Executive Director Glen Wiggs) it badly lost its way a few years ago when it constructed a right not to be laughed at. That right has since been used to trump free commercial speech on a number of  occasions. .

Theoretically, as a voluntary association, the ASA’s subordination of freedom of speech should not be as sinister as the statutory coercion of the Broadcasting Standards Authority.  The problem is that the NZ media universally obey the ASA (though Ian Wishart in Investigate magazine would probably reserve his freedom to ignore them). So the ASA’s indifference to (or ignorance of) the fundamental feature of freedom of speech – that it only needs defence when it does offend) is a practical problem for those who would uphold liberty here.

As a member of the Justice and Electoral Select Committee I tried to get the ASA to explore the implications of some of its more stupid decisions on electoral free speech. On their reasoning a lot of very important electoral advertising could be banned from the publications of its members. Their codes include no exceptions for free political speech.

Since then the frontal Labour/NZ First/Green assault on free political speech in the EFA has rather overshadowed the bumbling logic of the ASA and even the BSA.

Harrod’s boss, New Zealander James McArthur is profiled on the DomPost’s front page this morning.

His mother, Thorndon artist Piera McArthur, is proud of him. "He’s had some amazing jobs" she says..

I’m sure she would not have been thinking of the job I recall.

James was a superb student navvy helping me excavate a basement under our first house. He turned up from Student Job Search and was blistered by the end of the first day. Over the next several months he was the one constant as a succession of his friends came, couldn’t take the pace, and did not come again.

I thought of him at a recent election meeting when a worried parent complained that her children did not bother to work when they could, because their interest free student loans did not worry them as they did her.

[Disclaimer – James’ sister Brigid, a partner at my firm – Chapman Tripp, had no prior knowledge of this praise for her brother]