Kiwiblog

Hey the Police have so much spare time, that they managed to fit on acting as debt collectors for David Benson-Pope.

Hey I think Anna owes me $8 for a glass of wine I paid for, could the Police go around and also collect that debt for me? That 111 call will still be waiting when you get back.

They have also managed to find the time to issue three times as many speeding tickets, since 2000.

The Herald has a column on the issue of rates vs taxes for local bodies.

I actually support taxes, as in a local GST preferably, over rates for a number of reasons:
* Property values are a stupid way to fund local government services
* As the values of properties change so often, it is very hard to ascertain how much extra you are paying due to council spending decisions
* Unless a Council very publicly and explicitly increased a local tax rate, then Councils would have to live within their income, rather than the insane system at present where they spend what they want, and then strike a rate level to fund it.

Many Council services should in fact be funded through user charges for services such as water, sewerage, waste, roads etc. However for things like parks and libraries a local tax in return for abolishing rates would work for me.

Pro Kyoto groups try to portray the US as the only holdout to the Kyoto Protocol, and hence saving the planet.

Owen McShane points out that amongst APEC, New Zealand is in fact the only country likely to actually you know tax people more to do something.

“Signing the Kyoto Protocol has made us the Apec outcast. The United States and Australia have refused to ratify the accord. Japan has “accepted” but it is a Clayton’s commitment. Russia has signed, but doesn’t have to do anything for at least five years. Canada is trying to weasel out of its commitments because it exports so much clean gas to the US.

China, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea are all classed as developing countries and hence too poor to be expected to sign. So, too, are Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We are one of the “super rich”, unlike such “desperately poor” economies as Singapore and Hong Kong. “

Ken Shirley’s article on the wananga problems is a good read. Some key things to remember:

* Labour gave a $46 million capital injection in 2000, despite a previous capital injection of $6 million the year before
* Labour sent the wananga an apology letter stating that the Crown accepted it had “breached the principles of the treaty”, somethign the previous Government had declined to do
* Institutions enrolling Maori and Pacific Islands students in courses got an extra $125 a student
* The government’s funding rules for EFTS provides cheap, low-cost, non-degree courses with almost as much subsidy as that provided to universities for more costly science degrees.

The Opposition is having its best time ever in the House ripping the Government to shreds over NCEA, Wananga funding, LAV purchases, George Hawkins. All the media say it has been a great period.

So Richard, Stephen and Deborah think it is a good time to critique the strategy of their future coalition partner. I’m sorry but is there a better word than stupid to use? Well not one that is printable.

There are times when I think it would be a tragedy if ACT do not get re-elected, as I want a coalition partner on the right as well as the left. And I generally like the ACT MPs. However there are times like today when I wouldn’t mind lobbing a small grenade into their caucus room!

As expected Brian Nicolle has been cleared of any illegality for distributing a series of newspaper articles about Dick Hubbard last year.

I never ever thought that merely providing a copy of a newspaper article would qualify as campaign expenditure and hence an offence. It was always a hysterical beat-up by the Herald.

This of course is not good enough for Brian Rudman who now wants the law changed so Nicolle would have been found guilty.

So if your political enemies are deemed innocent, you try and change the law so you can get them next time. Very principled.

Matt McCarten is becoming as promiscuous as Paris Hilton having gone in just a few months from Leader of the Alliance to campaign manager for the Maori Party and now a key mover in the formation of the yet-to-be-launched political party Aotearoa New Zealand.

McCarten is a good political operator, and I suspect the Maori Party will miss his skills.

This is unlikely to be of interest to a huge number of people, so most of it is over the break. If you do not know what all the acronymns are, best to give up now

Sunday 20 Feb

Today was the 1st day of the AGM of the Asia-Pacific Top Level Domain Association. Much of the day focused on issues with ICANN and IANA.

IANA reported that they expect the root zone to implement DNSSEC by the end of 2005 and IANA plans to by ready by end of March with a trial signed zone.
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The global web blog community is being called into action to lend support to two imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers’ is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day”.

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

The Republican Party in the US is on the verge of becoming the natural party of Government. This is not due to their strengths as much as the idiocy of the Democratic Party which makes Michael Moore their unofficial spokesperson.

The latest example is Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) who stated publicly that the fake CBS memos were planted by Karl Rove to discredit Dan Rather, and divert attention from President Bush

Our gracious leader has said with regards to the NCEA debacle that “someone needs to take responsibility“.

I agree Helen. Can I suggest you start by looking down the cabinet table, no not there, one more seat along. Yes there. That would be a good start.

To show I can be balanced, I will praise Helen Clark’s performance as PM with regards to her relationship with John Howard.

Despite being from very different sides of the political spectrum, it is obvious Clark and Howard have developed a very good working relationship. This is an important thing for us.

The NZ Herald has a headline of “Mobile phones linked to 17 road fatalities“.

I await headlines such as:

* Having children in car linked to 39 deaths

* Radios in cars kill 29 people

* Passengers biggest distraction in car deaths – call for mandatory one person cars

* Killer food responsible for 24 road deaths

For once I agree with the Government and research on all driver distractions is needed, not just a knee jerk ban on cell phones which research to date shows are not even at the top of the distraction pile.

Oh this is just outrageous.

The surplus has been getting so large one could call it the Hindenburg and fly around the planet on it. The budgeted surplus for the year is $6.5B and the half year accounts showed it already at $4.5B which left the possibility the year end surplus may approach $9.0B. That is a surplus of over $5,000 per family!

So what is Dr Cullen’s solution? He will present the books differently” in the budget“.

Cullen says the Budget would provide “greater clarity” on the cash position. This means try to brainwash everytone that after focusing on accrual accounting for the last 12 years, Cullen wil try and convince people that the cash position is actually more important, and that it is normal to fund long-term capital expenditure out of operating surpluses.

I think there is a simple lesson to this. Labour will never ever give you some of your taxes back. They do not see it as your money, they see it as their own. The surplus could be $10B or $20B and they would not lower taxes without a shotgun to their heads. They would rather waste half a billion on dubious educational courses than lower taxes.

The Dominion Post in an editorial said “It is becoming the practice for ministers in the Helen Clark government to give sweeping assurances that all is well in their portfolios, then to reluctantly concede later that all is not quite as well as they would have liked.”

Absolutely true. The interesting thing is that this could apply to so many portfolios,. but in fact the issue being referred to is climate change.

Forgot to take my camera into town last night so only two photos for now.

This is the Kyoto International Conference Hall where we are meeting. The consenus of the ANZAC attendees is that it has a close resemblance to a Klingon battle crusier. This might explain how the Kyoto Protocol got agreed to here

And this is the Kyoto Takaragaike Prince Hotel where I am staying. It is a huge hotel (shaped like a UFO), and only has one set of lifts so one can almost end up with a 200 metre walk to your room from the lift. The hotel is pretty standard though with little facilities – no gym, no pool, broadband connections in suites only. It is next to a train station for getting into town which is useful.

Spotted on a blog (which one I can not recall) was an interesting article about United Future in The Independent.

The bottom line is that the MPs have worked out that at least half of them are toast and none of them are keen on being below No 4 on the list.

So much to blog on this week, it is getting hard to keep up. I was going to blog about culturally offensive playdough but go read Philosophy, et cetera who has done it for me.

When people ask for an example of what is meant by political correctness, then this is it.

Ken Shirley has set out in a speech, a devastating indictment of the Government over the Wananga funding scandal. Go read the full speech.

The funding for Te Wananga O Aotearoa is not only now higher than any “other” university in NZ, but is over half the size of the Government spend on pre-school. Almost all the research shows that one can do the most good at pre-school, and that entire sector gets less than double this one institution with 350 cars, hotels, pubs etc etc.

Shirley concludes by calling for a High Court judge to hold a public inquiry, saying Trevor Mallard merely being “concerned” no longer cuts it. Hear hear.

However Trevor appears to be looking for excuses not to hold an inquiry on the grounds that Auditor-General would be insulted by having another inquiry set up. What miserable spin because he concedes in the next paragraph that the possible ownership of assets by the trusts associated with the wananga, is out of the purview of the Auditor General.

Rodney has also got some good quotes from Labour MPs announcing extra funding for TWOA.

Let’s all remember how Labour crucified Christine Rankin over spending $250,000 on a training conference for staff, the uproar over a few hundred thousand dollars on golden handshakes in tourism etc. And they have presided over a level of corruption and waste 100 to 1,000 times greater.

Everytime Cullen or Clark say there is no way at all they can afford to reduce taxes for New Zealanders, make sure you remember this and vote them into oblivion.

Tariana Turia is defending Te Wananga o Aotearoa over nepotism claims, saying “Maori tended to employ relatives who could do the job because they knew and trusted them”.

In one sense I actually do think it is one of the more attractive parts of Maori culture, that there is a very strong emphasis on helping family and hapu.

However as No Right Turns points out, it is not okay to do this when you are spending taxpayer money, or in fact any money which is not your own.

First 24 hours have been pretty good. The car we hired to get us from the airport to the hotel had GPS which was pretty cool. Around a quarter of the cars in Japan seem to have GPS mapping in them.

It is pretty cold here – around six degrees. And in fact has been snowing today. Of course I am still comfortable in a tee-shirt thanks to years of living in Dunedin!

The conference centre is huge, and in fact is the actual one used for negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol. I’ll blog photos later.

What has been great is the bandwidth. I have been getting massively fast downloads. If I was at home I would have already exceeded my 10 GB monthly allowance in a few hours. I think my laptop is about to burst into flames from over-use.

The meeting today has been fairly extensive – APTLD AGM, and for the five people out there interested in domain name issues, I’ll blog a summary tonight.

Oh yeah, I have also finally got around to installing Skype and am in love with it. Superb quality and allows to talk through your computer for free to anyone else using Skype or to a proper phone for around 10% of a normal phone call. If you are on Skype and know me, e-mail me for my username.

The more I learn about NCEA the more flawed the implementation seems to be.

Each student gets a grade average on their results. This looks like a percentage, but isn’t.

Bill English points out:

“The grade average counts only the standards that have been passed