I wish I could treat this news as immaterial. I know: 

• that talk of the lines being “strategic” is drivel -they can’t take the lines away;
• that the return they extract from us is constrained by competition law just as it has been under previous foreign and Vector ownership;
• that Vector must consider they have better uses for the $735m they’ll get;
• that if the buyer truly has deep experience of developing lines businesses in the world’s most dynamic economy we could benefit from technologies and management that comes only from  being “world class”.

But instead the news makes me depressed. It reminds me that:

• for all of my adult life we New Zealanders have been spending more than we earn;
• there are only two ways to do that – borrow from foreigners or sell assets to them, and we’ve been living high only from doing both;
• when I turn on the lights I’m relying on the savings of people in a country many times poorer than us;
• for the 9 years since I entered Parliament our leadership has squandered the most favourable terms of trade we could get, and we are no nearer paying our way in the world.

Instinctively hating these kind of sales is not stupid. It is no more stupid than railing against the waiting list and the x-ray machinery idle in a hospital because the radiologists have gone to Australia to double their incomes. What is stupid is not thinking it through to the solution. The solution is not banning “strategic assets” (whether people or wires or airports) from leaving. The solution is to stop voting for politicians who lie and pander to us, who pass laws that destroy our drive, and our risk-taking incentives, and our education quality, and our family strength.

Fear of foreign control is natural and healthy. There is a nasty suspicion that it will come to no good in the end. Ownership matters. As head offices leave a city so does self confidence and the kinds of people who exercise leadership, and arts patronage and interesting careers for our children.

But we are the feckless tenants who complain about their rent, while their  landlord lives in a smaller house in a crumby part of town with lots of family, rarely drinks, never eats out, while his kids do paper rounds and shifts in the family dairy fitted around their home work. We’d rather specialize in singing and dancing, and booze and loaf than save to buy our  own house, or even better, some houses overseas we could rent to foreigners.

See  also Anzac Day Thoughts 

Click on thumbnails for photos

After the Anzac Day service at Wellington Cathedral

With a friend whose son is a serving soldier and whose daughter was marching with the Air Training Corps.

A few words with photographer Simon Woolf and Cr Ian McKinnon

I’ve had a long interest in housing policy.  Some of that interest may have been counter-productive.

When the Wellington Housing Trust started I helped it with honorary (i.e. unpaid) legal work, though the Trust’s needs soon outran my limited property law expertise. Now I wonder whether Trust type help for the few it can, has merely disguised the left’s complicity in destroying the housing hopes of a generation. 

The ratio between average house prices and average wages has doubled under Labour. Average wage earners would now need nearly 90% of their income to service a typical buyer mortgage on an average Wellington house.

House pricing is just like any other – prices settle where supply matches demand. The kinds of people I once encouraged have succeeded in strangling supply.

I console myself that at least I stopped being a housing saboteur 20 years ago, when the Mt Victoria Residents Association moved on from opposing monster blocks that oveshadowed the neighbour-hood and began imposing the twee style preferences of its committee.  Having finials or fretwork on your house became fatal to change. I gradually disengaged from the committee, then after a few years confined to collecting inorganic rubbish and donations, ceased to attend Association meetings.  

I love the eclectic tumble of homes in our neighbourhood. It has been created by the riotously various tastes and preferences of the people who owned each home.  They did not have to please any style police.

I became increasingly concerned about what was happening to that energy as the Council effectively supported association demands. In effect now nobody  can change anything without their neighbours’ permission, or enough money to outlast objections.

Becoming passive was not easy. Catharine and I bought our first home here in 1979 and we were stalwarts of the Association, taking turns as Secretary/Treasurer for years, so I was sorry to conclude that they were doing more harm than good. But I felt that they were creating the kind of ‘monoculture’ and class environment they thought they did not want, by freezing housing in a status quo that could only favour wealth . 

And I realised that many did not actually care. Nimbys are callous about the true consequences of “doing good”.

Recently I’ve become fascinated by the stunning  transportable houses produced by  Wellington designer Rod Gibson. They will be hard to get here for a long while, because the factory in China can not pour them out fast enough to satisfy the demand for instant mining towns in Australia. Australia is getting more of another design.

Whale Oil links to a cheap housing solution in his unusually long post. A pyramid of ‘studios’ created from containers looks funky, cheap, and functional.

Those kinds of developments would be dead here before they started. Though a few recycled container shell houses have got through in the past I’m sure they’d now rust away while the permit applications lay in the dead hands of the Council.

Apart from anything else Wellington’s 10sqm-balcony-in-the-sun rule would squelch most hopes. It was introduced to kill the developers’ sensible responses to Asian student demand for affordable units of a size they were comfortable in. Councillors trumpeted their virtue as they told the people who wanted to trade space for location and price that they were not allowed such an adult decision.

Now the Wellington City Council are spending millions improving their own housing ghetto. It never occurs to the anointed who congratulate themselves on their housing efforts that even the few poor they can privilege with subzidised housing in the centre city might be better off, more proud of themselves and almost certainly safer from some of their ghastly neighbours, if the anointed had simply got out of the way of some of the better developers who would give them what they could pay for.

I’m told the government planned a bells and whistles launch last October of a website promoting paper saving. They thought it would be easy. Now it is planned for August this year, and looks suspiciously like one of the many exercises timed solely to exploit the Electoral Finance Act’s muzzling of non-government parties.

It will still be pre-election propaganda, but I understand that not all of the timing is for political gain. They’ve found paper saving issues to be much harder than they thought.

 Last Wednesday evening H Clark cut the ribbon at the formal opening of  GEON HIGHBROOK in Auckland, the largest sheet-fed printing site in New Zealand.

She talked about sustainability. 

Paper is a popular target. People know they throw away paper. They’re pre-conditioned to feel it is wasteful. Paper and plastic bags may not be a rational priority for a person with genuine care about the environment, because the gains are trivial and the costs large, in comparison with say forgoing one plane trip. Still, in terms of raising consciousness of waste, paper and plastic recycling work well.

Govt Depts are now supposed only to use papers that have a minimum 3 Star rating ( legally sourced pulp, obtained from a sustainable forest and ECF, TCF or PCF bleached).

At Wednesday’s opening Ms Clark did not get a smooth hearing. Joan Grace, CEO of Print NZ in her speech  challenged Ms Clark to support the printing industry by stopping the around 10-15% of Government printing going off shore. Local printers claim that in China it can be printed on anything.

The recent FTA with China (mentioned by Ms Clark in her address) will presumably see a lot more printing going to China. 

Te Papa, which does a lot of printing, much of it outside New Zealand, may be relieved. The FTA could make it harder to order Te Papa to divert their substantial print orders back to New Zealand.

What August’s coming paper saving website will acheive then is anyone’s guess. I doubt we’ll see one obvious suggestion – stop the presses rolling hot with new rules and regulations.

I have to explain this clip:  a friend sent it to me because of the number of people complaining about the road safety shock ads.  This is a different approach.  Don’t watch it if the Danish lewd sense of humour could offend you. 

To preview a possible change of direction for LTSA see This will slow you down.

[Since this was posted objection has been raised, I think by Labour activists. To me it’s less raunchy than some of the dancing with the stars numbers. But if there seems to be genuine offence I will take this post down.]

Rewards for the early rising –

Being glad that Maj. Gen. Mateparae’s speech is dignified sad and proud in the right measures;

Remembering my father, and our trip with him to the 50th commemoration of Monte Cassino. He talked freely for the first time about his war (“probably the best time of my life, though I always feel I should be saying it was later with [my mother] and you children… I didn’t talk about it earlier because you had to be there to understand and you get too tired of people jumping to conclusions”) ;

Meeting Sue Kedgely’s  97 year old father, who was wounded, captured, escaped from an Italian prison, and hidden by villagers for 6 months before rowing to freedom, and seeing her unequivocal pride in him;

Wondering whether there is a national style czar who could tell us all when it is OK for children and grandchildren to wear their forebear’s medals – Knowing it should be the right breast is not enough. So far I could not do it for it seems corny for adults, yet to wear them is truly to honour our parents and grandparents.

Being reminded again that we need a better national anthem, when I see almost none of the gathering singing.

Labour’s suffering under the EFA is only just beginning.

But a friend reminds me that stupid people (and stupid countries) have an unending capacity to say “gotcha” as they spear themselves in the knee.

Labour came to power in 1999 vowing to end the disgraceful parade of  sackings where even people well deserving of the boot jumped with golden parachutes worth many times more than ordinary people could earn in years.

Then they passed Margaret Wilson’s stupid Employment Relations Act, turning down the chance to adopt Australian law’s salary cap on unfair dismissal claims.

I’m sure if we could get the information we’d find that Labour has enriched more duds per year than ever happened under National. 

When our young people flow out of New Zealand, I’ve always thought of their parents, wondering if they will see their grandchildren only on foreign trips, or when the kids take a duty holiday in New Zealand.

But a friend yesterday put another human face on it.  Her daughter is 28 and loves living and working in Wellington.  What makes her sad are the number of farewell parties she’s asked to each weekend for her friends going to live overseas, mostly in Australia.  These young people should be celebrating their first house purchases and promotions, not saying goodbye.

Ireland was like that for 100 years.

Will we become characteristically maudlin, like the Irish? Is there a Dave Dobbyn working now to give us our very own “Danny Boy”?

We must change the Government and encourage our enterprising young people back.

Every day I get an email from Obama, with his take on how his campaign is going, sending the favoured lines (spin) for the day, and always asking for money.

In the days leading up to Pennsylvania he was asking me to download 10 phone numbers and a script to call with.

Here’s his disposal of yesterday’s defeat.

“Stephen

—Votes are still being counted in Pennsylvania, but one thing is already clear.

In a state where we trailed by more than 25 points just a couple weeks ago, you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible.

Thanks to your support, with just 9 contests remaining, we’ve won more delegates, more votes, and twice as many contests.We hold a commanding position, but there are two crucial contests coming up — voters will head to the polls in North Carolina and Indiana in exactly two weeks. And we’re already building our organization in the other remaining states.

But it’s clear the attacks are going to continue, and we’re going to continue fighting a two-front battle against John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

I need your support right now. Please make a donation of $25:https://donate.barackobama.com/whatthismeans

Thank you for all that you’re doing to change our country.

Barack“

I’m sure Grant Robertson never intended to inflict collateral damage on Wellington’s Mary Potter Hospice when he wrote the anti John Key song squawked  by “Moana and the  Ministers’. But the Hospice took the ricochet.

Ms Clark told reporters that the Ministers were rehearsing the song (which Grant, until recently H3 in her office, admitted to writing) for last Monday’s Mary Potter Fundraiser at the Beehive. The NZ Herald report is on the Hospice’s website.

I’m told the Hospice then got calls from regular contributors saying they would stop donating. As the Hospice needs to raise over $3M a year from the public Mary Potter had to go into damage control.  They apparently told the organiser of the event they would not attend if the song was to be sung. Thankfully it was pulled.

I’m sure any damage will be short lived. Contributors big-hearted enough to help keep the Hospice operating will not let the incident disgust them for long.

But I’m not surprised that Grant is blogging piously on events in Dunedin and the China Free Trade agreement at the moment.