Stuff says –

“Former prime minister Mike Moore has landed the plum job of chairing a Russian billionaire’s charitable foundation”.

I sincerely hope that this is not the DomPost’s April Fools day joke.

 Mike Moore’s instincts and enthusiasms should not be harnessed, they should indulged. I hope he’ll irrigate oasis growth  in ideas by delighted splashing in this deep money puddle.  

100 years ago Welllington post office clerk Bert Baskerville advertised for others to join him on  a self paid rugby tour to Britain. He’d read about huge amounts being earned in the Midlands by teams willing to ignore snobbery and play for a share of the gate takings.

His team members got a good return (some mortgaged their houses to go)  but the snobbery lasted.

A couple of months ago I was accordingly surprised when David Rutherford (sports law specialist and former NZRFU CEO) floated the idea of an exploratory union between selected clubs of the two codes at junior level. “The junior versions of Rugby are so close to League” he pointed out. But more significantly he saw the opportunity for the clubs to get better rewards for the dedication of the increasingly scarce parent coaches, managers and other volunteers who keep these sports going for children.

Volunteers are too valuable to under-use. He thought that Rugby clubs might have more depth in people available to run clubs. On the other hand families that play league might be better at keeping alive the flame of desire to play these codes, in competition with soccer.  If the kids from both traditions played together in the same clubs, they could choose which way they specialised at the age when the sports become full contact.

As I have not been chosen to chair Wellington Rugby League for my deep familiarity with the sport I was non-committal, though I did ask my board whether the idea was outlandish. Yes it seemed.

Yet this morning’s Herald has new Kiwi coach mentor Wayne Bennett proposing something remarkably like the Rutherford speculation. 

I’ll see whether there is enthusiasm to test the idea in any of our Wellington clubs.

Judging from the comments on the Herald website there will be little appetite from either tribe of  oval ball chasers to end their historical bristling.

An unposted snippet in this morning’s DomPost announces that TEC is funding a research project on the midwife shortage. What uselessness.

There’s not much mystery about it to the sad doctors who’ve watched the 20 year decay of their proud medical field. They lost the political battle with the the midwives union (the so-called College of Midwives). As doctors gave up obstetrics the field has become a swamp of liability anxiety, overwork stress,  and people shortage.

Search Stuff for “midwives” for a taste of looming crisis.  New Zealanders are settling for third rate in mother and child health. Those responsible are the kind of politicians who trumpet their caring character in rhetorical legislation like the anti-smacking amendment, but can not admit that their theories have failed in practice.

Yet obstetrics was an area in which New Zealand was up with the best in the world, amply supplied with eager doctors and nurses.

Poneke has blogged on the decline in breast feeding and early ejection from maternity wards. This post is drawn from my comment on that post as a symptom of ideological failure.

H Clark was Minister of Health when the rot began.

I’ve been following developments with interest since I helped settle terms of some lead provider contracts for antenatal and birthing services. Doctors warned repeatedly that the new arrangements would push doctors out of obstetrics. The warnings were were dismissed as evidence of the medical profession’s incorrigible paternalism and the self interested medicalisation of a natural function.
The mantra was “a right to choose” (translation – “kick out the doctors”).

It is plain now that doctors’ warnings were understatements. Every medical student then observed and often assisted at numerous births before graduating. Now it is common for them to assist at none, and only the luckier women students are likely to have seen one. Midwives lock the students out by discouraging patient consent.

The true victims of this reversal are everywhere in Wellington today, anxious pregnant women who can’t find midwives, and overstressed midwives. There’s no question of choosing a GP, because they’ve stopped practising in the field, specialists are rare and replacements are not coming through.

Under National Party rules I could not make public statements  during the selection period. The purpose is to avoid Clinton/Obama style fraticide (though voters generally benefit from that searching exposure even if the Democrats do not in the short term).

I could maintain this blog’s posts during that period on condition they did not mention the selection process or attract MSM attention.  Statements as Wellington Rugby League chairman were also permitted.

The gag chafed. I avoided Kiwiblog to reduce the urge to comment. Catching up now, I wish I’d participated in some of the conversations on my selection. I’m grateful to the decent people who injected  fact into comment strings, but I could have linked to the Hansard reports of debates to counter others’ dishonest or ignorant meta references. 

The distortion of my position on the Prostitution Reform Bill is typical. I ended up chairing the Select Committee on it. We soon found that prostitution has not been a crime in New Zealand for over 100 years. Only pimping and brothel keeping were crimes. The Bill was therefore largely a linked set of dishonest slogans. It created more vague new crimes than it eliminated, and removed defences that are fundamental to our notions of guilt and innocence (for example with strict liability  for  publishing an ad for a prostitute under 18, knowingly or unknowingly). Police of course now do not enforce much of the new law.

The Bill served its political purpose. Proponents were badged as social liberals. Opponents as conservative.

I voted against the Bill because it was simply bad law, with provisions designed not to be enforceable. Many speeches in support were deeply dishonest, especially about child prostitution. What’s happened since bears out my fears.  

Through-out my time in Parliament I tried to debate what bills actually did as rules, in contrast to their symbolic status as badging passwords of tribal membership. I found that few MPs read the law they were debating, so most debates centred on the claims in introductory summaries and purpose clauses. They are commonly deceitful (to sample Orwellian current practice try the purpose section of the EFA).  

I will be pilloried for failing to shout the right password at these tribal challenges. I was debating the effect of words in the bills. The others were proclaiming their own moral virtue.

A civil union example illustrates the point. Many years earlier a prominent National MP sought my views on the Homosexual Law Reform Bill. In response I developed notes based on Lady Wolfenden’s famous summary “the law has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”. The MP used the notes almost verbatim in supporting the Bill.

So I started without prejdice against Tim Barnett’s Civil Union Bill. I like him and worked constructively (as deputy chair to him)  on the many bills that came to our committee.

By the end I could not vote for the bills. We had tearful submission after submission on the need to pass the bill to end the practice of hospitals refusing deathbed access to partners because they were not married. Georgina Beyer’s speech picked up the theme and tore the heart strings. Only problem was that as far as officials could find out there was no such current practice, and certainly there was nothing in any law about it, and neither the Marriage Act nor the Civil Union Act touch on it then or now.

On the other side we had hundreds of submissions from religious people essentially complaining about the state’s gutting of the legal meaning of marriage. That was not in the bills before us. That occurred 30 years earlier, without significant protest from established religion. 

But the civil union bills did complete Margaret Wilson’s conversion of de facto status to a form of non-consensual (but devalued) marriage partnership.

Probably 4 out of the 600 submissioners we heard had read the bills well enough to pick up what was actually being done in the nearly 100 statutes that the civil union companion bill amended.

I unwisely complained at a Waikato University meeting one day about having to endure days of grumpy christians and whining gays. I regret the rudeness, but not the sentiment. Our committee room was set up by the government as a theatre for their long-running tribal battle.  But the submissions on both sides had next to nothing to do with the law we were passing.

I eventually voted against the civil union bills for many faults including because of what they did to people who did not even know they were in the firing line – deliberately unmarried and non “united” partners. 

My directness ignites the politically correct.  In Parliament I stuck to exploring issues bluntly as a personal defense against being infected by the fog of spin and hypocrisy in which most political debate is conducted.

Of course there’s a price.  Political speech is calculated and cowardly for good reason. Vivid phrases will be plucked from their context and retailed to oohs and aahs of simulated distress. Specially valuable for this purpose are phrases crystallising opinions specially demonised to distinguish superior consciousness from that of ordinary people.

I trust that enough Wellingtonians will want to see that hard work in Parliament again even if they don’t always agree with me. I think enough want genuine compassion. I look at the effect laws have in reality on the people they pretend to protect. Many people working in policy and implementation tell me they want me back, to puncture pompous political speech balloons they’re being forced to write. They want me to stand for law that means exactly what it says.

Many genuine Wellington liberals (not collectivists who’ve stolen liberal clothing) are also keen for someone they can trust to look behind the spin, and then not use it in talking to them. I will not  treat Wellingtonians as children to be humoured with PC euphemisms.

We’ll know how many by the end of the year. 

The Herald maintains its high standards in pursuing the Electoral Finance Act story that DPF (Kiwiblog) kicked off.

See also Audrey Young’s blog this morning

The Electoral Commission advice is conservative, in my opinion. “Parliamentary” material that has an electioneering effect can also be an election advertisement, but if I had a large stock of pamphlets I did not want to count against my budget I might think it worthwhile going for a declaratory judgment. Of course Labour will not want their stupidity dissected over days in public, and the other side is enjoying the perpetrators’ misery.

How does the line go – “O what a tangled web [they] weave when first [they] practice to deceive”?

The Dom Post reports the release at last of the international crime survey comparisons should mean a better informed discussion of criminal justice policy than in any recent election. I’ll use some Easter time to dig into the details.

As I’ve commented earlier the results of a similar survey just before Tony Blair’s second successful campaign for the government benches transformed Labour party policy, as UK citizens realised for the first time that their crime rates were dire, and in important areas worse than the much deplored US.

I’ve just finished thank you messages to many of the people who encouraged or guided me on the selection. Thankfully the wait was not too long for the favourable decision.  

The democratic process followed by National involves the candidate in wooing as many of the selection  delegates (60 in the Wellington Central case) as want to meet. Typically a meeting takes about an hour. I can honestly say that I enjoyed every meeting. I was asked not one silly question. The membership impressed me.

Pity the  poor candidates in Selwyn electorate. That electorate has decided to adopt a unversal primary model, so 700 widely dispersed members must be lobbied, as well as attending many meet-the-candidate meetings. The  Parliamentary election will be a doddle in comparison.

Wellington Central’s  packed selection meeting promises much for the campaign to come. There must have been more observers than voting delegates.

The formal 10 minute speech promoting myself was one of the hardest I’ve ever prepared. I tried to discipline myself with full notes (very rare for me) to over-ride the urge to understate and to be conversational. I discarded draft after draft. In the end I thought the content was OK, but the delivery definitely lacked theatrics.  “Skiting” does not come easy for men of my generation.

The selection committee were  impassive. Taking their adjudication role seriously they gave none of the normal responses to desperate speaker glances round the room for  affirmation. Fortunately for me they must have decided that while a speech-making competition was entertaining, there were other factors to take into account.

Paul Quinn’s approach got dramatically better with each practice. He will be a formidable candidate in time, and David Broome too showed the benefits of a love of public speaking. The quality of candidates, the penetration and balance in the questioning made the whole process a credit to the National party.

All in all the rigour made me appreciate just how lucky I’ve been in the past not to have to go through challenged selection procedures. I’d rather draft and speak 10 times to 150 amendments to the Sentencing Act than face that again too soon.

Now I’ll have Easter, and catch up on some legal work. Next month the excitement starts, organizing the campaign team.

An Economist article on the Rule of Law mentions the recent research rediscovering why our forebears (and Maori in 1840) thought living under British law was such a good thing.

Michael Trebilcock  (mentioned by the Economist) has explored some of the issues in New Zealand. I shared a conference session with him and Sir Ivor Richardson on economics and law, and look forward to getting a copy of his latest book.

The Economist could have cited Rudyard Kipling. In The Jungle Books Bagheera explained why life was nasty and brutish for “lesser breeds without the law” in his tutoring of young Mowgli.

Thomas Sowell’s latest column goes crisply to the heart of a common fallacy, that crime and education spending are substitutable.

I wish he’d sourced his figures, but they are in line with the only comprehensive New Zealand study of the costs of crime. NZIER’s draft report can be found, but the government stopped it there. It would have told us that crime costs (control, precautions and victim losses) amounted in the 1990s to over 5% of GDP. It would be around $8 billion today.

[Update – That is plainly a gross under-estimate. A Treasury working paper put the 2003-2004 cost at $9.1 billion of which $7 billion was private cost and loss. Thanks Eric Crampton (whose comment below alerted me to this). I wish I’d come across that paper when I was an MP ]

If only prison and educaton costs were substitutable.  19th and 20th century progressives were firmly convinced that once wealth was spread properly, so that even the poor could read and write, the criminal classes would be educated out of crime. It seemed a reasonable expectation. Sadly, the facts have mugged that hope, just as they stabbed the belief that crime would wither when everyone had a home and enough to eat and wear. The latter took a beating when depression and recession statistics showed reductions, not increases in crime. Still, many progressives believe in their hearts that violent predation is an understandable class reaction to poverty, and we have just not been nice enough for long enough to criminals to test their theories properly.

Sowell mentions David Fraser, who will visit New Zealand this year as a guest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Fraser has infuriated the self anointed criminal justice elite by lookng at the actual results of their goofy theories, rather than their fond hopes. Worst of all he insists on ignoring the other great progressive fallacy,  that penal policy should be measured by its success in rehabilitation.

The only valid measure is in fact change in crime and victimisation rates.

The international evidence is overwhelming. Rehabilitation happens, but for adults it is almost always spontaneous (no positive effect of programmes and release policies). Rehabilitation is a seductive but distracting primary goal for penal policy. Sadly it has become the only goal of New Zealand’s justice anointed. In the face of failure they redouble their effort, and the shrillness of their denunciation of doubting unbelievers.

While they fail victims suffer our spectacular increases in violent crime rates.

The Herald reports the government’s ostentatious reach for its new law pen to quell concern about body snatching, instead of enforcing existing law against body snatching.

It will not make a blind bit of difference, when the Police will not enforce existing law. One of the previous cases involved them standing aside despite an express court order.

And who can be surprised if some Maori feel that  laws will not apply to them, when we’ve had two decades of “sensitive handling” of illegal, ‘vandalous’ and contemptuous land and building occupations.

Though it did not excuse her in the slightest, there are officials and politicians who should have been in the dock alongside Donna Awatere-Huata, for a decade of not auditing, not enforcing laws that apply to others (like tax law) and thus reassuring her that normal rules governing trust and government money did not apply to her.

As to body snatching – I agree with Dover Samuels. It is flattering to be fought over. But it would be more flattering if the cost of being wrong was exposure to Police not scared (of lack of support from above?) to enforce the law.