The Minister’s rejection of the Canadian Pension fund bid for 40% of Auckland Airport says:

“…we are not satisfied that the proposed investment will…benefit New Zealand or…any group of New Zealanders…We are conscious that others may disagree …on the basis [that] incoming funds arising from the sale …is of such magnitude as to constitute a benefit in and of itself”.

Rather mysterious that hundreds of millions for NZ retirees who could turn around and buy shares in the same company tomorow for a third less is not a benefit to a group of New Zealanders.

Still the fine print of the reasoning shows someone’s hard work to appeal proof it. In particular there is only passing reference to Regulation 28(h), last month’s dodgy amendment to protect “strategically important infrastructure on sensitive land”.

That is shrewd. The Regulations Review Committee should invite Parliament to disallow that regulation. Perhaps the Ministers are anticipating that kind of embarrassment, because they’ve carefully stirred up a blancmange of other uncertainties to reason to the point where they can tell the Canadians to keep their money.

Katrina Shanks MP is forcing into the open the increasing risk for pregnant women, as reported in today’s Herald. I worried about the problem a month ago.

It is not often that warnings of ideological bigotry are so precisely borne out by events.

John Stossel’s column bewailing the US lack of the “English Rule” on litigation costs (simple loser pays) has interesting material amongst the usual dross in the comments string. What do you know of “barrattry” for example?.

It’s worth a look for New Zealanders, because wimpy judging here, over generations, has left us in a half way house between the English and the American positions.

We’re not as naked before the lawyer bullies as US defendants, because a successful defendant is likely to get an order against the plaintiff for about half his or her lawyer costs. But when the vindictive kiwi plaintiff is funded by legal aid (so cares nothing about costs) even the defendant who has done nothing wrong at all should often give in to the blackmail, because success almost never results in an order for the government to pay for the damage it has funded.

When our government is effectively suing you, the judges gang up with the government. So much for the lawyers and judges as defenders of the individual against the state. So in New Zealand the wrong to innocent defendants driven bankrupt is just as outrageously unjust as in the US.

Lawyers will sanctimoniously argue that it is not “fair” to force the initiator of a bad case to pay for all the loss they cause, because almost invariably there is some reason to complain. But what they really like is the power to affect others. Fine tuning who gets what when the case ends is satisfying. Loss of that power to interfere lies behind most lawyer opposition to clear, certain law.

One might suspect that fear of a drop in litigation could also be a factor. Certainty in costs awards deters the bringing and the defending of foolish cases. Of course it encourages the bringing and the defending of meritorious ones.

Maybe the litigation lawyers know that there are more foolish cases than meritorious ones.

For a brilliant compression of ‘Old and New Wisdom in Finance’ see the table by Peter Sinclair, Professor of Economics, University of Birmingham.

Thanks to Bryce Wilkinson

The generation about to become influential will never comprehend the depth of truly astonishing ideological transformation crytallised yesterday in Beijing. 

A Labour Prime Minister signing a free trade agreement in Beijing is Rogernomic’s gymnastic triumph over economic superstition. For nearly a century there could have been no greater sin for a Labour leader than to expose NZ workers to free trade with a country with “pittance” wages and some of the most publicly flouted labour laws in the world.

The Prime Minister displays her awesome political supremacy over the left by being accompanied by union leaders. 

I think H Clark will go down in our history with the same judgment as Muldoon – a political master who used her power only to hold it. She could have used her political genius on the left’s black hole welfare, education and crime policies. Instead she has bribed her supporters to protect the emergence of an illiterate, barely employable, and vicious under-class.

The free trade transformation, and its implicit acknowledgement of economic orthdoxy, will be the arguments against that judgment.

I’m looking forward to 4 pm today.  National Radio’s afternoon host Jim Mora is always a pleasure to talk to – though he’s a voice in the ether to me as well as to the audience. I’m in the Wellington studio while his other guest is usually with him in Auckland.

Even before I joined his panel I enjoyed radio as a satisfying medium for topics that need more than a 15 second slogan. I never know till the day who I’ve been paired with but that’s no worry. Jim Mora can take the ice out of any conversation.

Today I’ll spend a few hours collecting donations on Lambton Quay for Wellington’s Karori Sanctuary.  

Its selfless founders must have been delighted early this year by the controversy when a Karori resident complained about early morning birdsong noise pollution from the rejuvenated tui population in Wellington. It means there are so many more tuis around.  We’re now happily woken most summer mornings by a tui singing in our pohutukawa. I can understand though why curmudgeons pick on tuis. Ours ends each verse with a vomit suppressing sound. So it’s a natural target in a land where most councils have banned roosters (including in peri-urban areas at the request of rural ‘lifestylers’).

I joined the Trust as a member in 1995 or 96, partly as support for Chairman Michael Morris. As a longstanding member of Forest and Bird (since 1974) I’d seen founder Jim Lynch’s arguments for it. It was a wonderful vision but I was one of those who doubted it ever getting enough money to succeed. For me Michael Morris’ support and invitation were the decider. I am very pleased I was wrong.  It has been such a success.

As an MP, I asked organisations that wanted to pay me speaking fees to send them to the Sanctuary. I wish I’d checked to see what they got.

I like the cliche for election campaigning. It conjures an image, like running for a bus with rows of comfortable seats when you catch it. 

It is actually more like cranking up the nerve to ask a suspicious queue to let you go to the front, then getting on and finding there are no seats, just a whole lot of people jostling the driver and trying to grab the wheel.

If Lefties think life is short-changing them – it most probably is. What a tragedy to spend your only life getting a face like a trade union leader.

Before I was elected in 1999 someone gave me  a copy of  Pam Corkery’s book. It explained why she resigned from Parliament. She had a wickedly funny pen, but she found politics too hard.

I soon experienced almost all the things that caused her anguish – like turning up to a hall in Waikikamukau to find only the local party secretary and no key, on the wrong night. But whereas she found it desperately depressing, I found amusement and the unexpected pleasure of new friends. 

I decided that the difference was probably just the company. She was spending her days with Alliance whingers, people whose world was envy, the awful certainty that some one, somewhere, was getting a better deal than them.

I would invariably find myself getting to know local acheivers. Sometimes they were eccentric optimists,  but nearly always they were thankful for what they had, and expecting to make their world better. They were glad to celebrate success in their neighbourhoods, whoever was getting it.

So I was delighted to find some evidence to support my unscientific impression. 

The Economist of 27 March reviews a forthcoming book (Arthur Brooks – Gross National Happiness) that reports US research showing conservatives are happier than liberals. In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very  happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44 percent versus 25 percent).   American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

 This is not because they are richer; they are not.  Brooks find three significant differentiators:   Conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to be married, twice as likely to attend church every week. Married, religious people are more likely than secular singles to be happy. They are also more likely to have children, which makes Brooks confident that the next generation will be at least as happy as the current one.

When religious and political differences are combined, the results are striking: Secular liberals are as likely to say they are “not too happy” as to say they are very happy (22 percent to 22 percent). Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being very happy than not too happy (50 percent to 5 percent). Religious liberals are about as happy as secular conservatives.

Why should this be so?  Brooks proposes that whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words).   American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier.

American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”. Emphasising victimhood was noble during the 1950s and 1960s, says Mr Brooks. By overturning Jim Crow laws, liberals gave the victims of foul injustice greater control over their lives.

But the American left is now a coalition of groups that define themselves as the victims of social and economic forces, and in as much as its leaders encourage people to feel helpless and aggrieved, he thinks they make America a glummer place”.

Assuming that the findings hold for New Zealand where religiousity is much less associated with the right, this is comforting for a National Party candidate. Who cares if our view (that successful honest self reliant responsible people improve the world) is pollyannaish?.  I win both ways. I’m happier, whether that’s justified or not, and I get to spend more time with cheerful people.

Can we speculate that the findings explain why the MSM (main stream media for newcomers to blog shorthand) are mistrusted by us and by the practical majority? The happiness research is from the US. Clear research there and here has shown overwhelming left wing preference among journalists. Their miserable victim view of the world may predispose them to unhappiness and accordingly to the temptation to project unhappiness and suspicion onto others.

Persistent media hostility to parties which trust ordinary people to organise their own lives without the supervision of their anointed superiors is accordingly explained. The journalists feel bad about themselves.

“The joys of parenthood; Why conservatives are happier than liberals,” The Economist, March 27, 2008 reviewing Arthur Brooks, “Gross National Happiness,” Basic Books, April 7, 2008.