Kiwiblog

Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn blogs:

On March 8, British teenager Azhar Ahmed posted the following to his Facebook account:

People gassin about the deaths of soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy’s were the Taliban not innocent harmless familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE FOKKIN SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soliders grave & wish him hell because that where he is going..

For posting this, he was arrested and charged with a “racially aggravated public order offence”. That charge was dropped when he appeared in court – perhaps because even the Yorkshire police could understand that “British soldiers” are not a racial group – and instead substituted with one of using a telecommunications network to send a grossly offensive message. He will face trial in July, and it is unclear what sentence he may face.

Now I agree that one should not face court charges for saying offensive things on the Internet. The threshold should be if you are promoting actual violence or crimes. So for example saying “I hate Jews” should not get you in court (it should get you on the front page of the newspaper though) but saying “We should kill the Jews” should get you in court. Saying “I wish all Jews were dead” doesn’t meet the criminal threshold though (in my opinion).

However it is a pity that Idiot/Savant did not also mention this story, which I blogged on. Also in the UK, a 21 year old student was actually jailed (not just charged) for 56 days for gloating when a black footballer collapsed on the field, saying he hoped he was dead, and also using racial abuse when people challenged him.

Now both these cases had defendents say pretty offensive stuff. I don’t think either should be in court. But does Idiot/Savant think it is okay to send people to jail for saying something racist, but wrong to charge people for saying all British soliders should die and go to hell?

My suspicion is that I/S is more a defender of offensive speech he politically agrees with, than of all offensive speech. If not, I welcome his views on the above case.

UPDATE: A few people have said I am being unfair to say that I suspect I/S is more a defender of speech he agrees with.  He has often defended the right of people like David Irving to be heard, so my comment was unfair and I retract it with apologies.

However I do think that considering how often he posts on this issue, his lack of comment on the UK jail sentence for a racist offensive tweet was unusual. As he did not condemn the jailing, I thought he might actually support “hate speech” laws as many on the left do (which motivated the post – to challenge him on this issue), but having checked he blogged in 2004 that he did not, so really the post was un-necessary.

A guest post by Peter Freedman:

Australians are incessant, almost pathological gamblers.

If two kookaburras land on a tree miles in the outback, it’s a fair bet that within minutes a bookie is making odds as to which one will fly away first.

Latest figures available show $69 a year is bet for every man, woman and child in Australia.

“Most forms of gambling are legal in Australia, and the activity is highly popular. The average adult Aussie will lose about $1,000 (US $679) on gambling each year. This means that Australians lose more money per adult at gambling than any other group on the planet. This number has increased 2½ times over the last 25 years. In fact, more money is spent on gambling than on sporting, cultural or entertainment events.” -world gambling review website.

Australia, with 360, has more racecourses than any other country in the world. Poker machines make up 56% of the gambling industry here. In Brisbane you can go to a race meeting every day of the week if you want. Within two hours drive there are courses at Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba, Ipswich, Beaudesert, Gold Coast plus two in the city, Eagle Farm and Doomben, the two just across the road from each other.

Gambling addiction is a huge problem, a 2010 report by one hospital showed 17% of attempted suicides were problem gamblers.

Recently the Gillard Government, cheered on by Independent Andrew Wilkie, threatened to introduce “mandatory pre commitment” for pokie gamblers. This would require EVERY gambler to set a limit before he, or she, said down to mindlessly pull a handle or push a button.

This was well intentioned nonsense. Firstly, it treated all gamblers as if they were addicts, and secondly, a gambler could set any limit at all, from $1 to a gazillion. The Lib/Nat coalition’s response was even worse: they proposed voluntary pre commitment. What’s next, asking every smoker to sign a piece of paper saying they wouldn’t take more than two puffs a day, but nothing would happen to them if they didn’t keep their promise?

The chartered clubs, a huge industry here, went ballistic. They rely on pokie revenue to such an extent that one club near where I live offers lifetime membership for $1. No, not $1 a year, a buck for the rest of your life!

But the clubs did a very clever thing. Rather than taking up the example of the billionaires of the mining industry and entering a full on war which made the newspapers lots of money in advertising, the clubs kept their powder dry and sat down and talked to the government. It worked and the legislation was watered down.

Wilkie went into a sulk, Abbott looked silly and, for once, Gillard pulled a handle and landed the aces. Labor backbenchers, reliant on gambling votes, heaved a huge sigh of relief,

Bookmakers are legal in Australia. In NZ they are not, except for the TAB, which can offer what is called “fixed prices”. “Tote odds” are also available.

Tote odds means the winners receive back all the money gambled, less taxes and the TAB’s take. That way the TAB doesn’t care which horse wins, the total payout is always the same.

A bookie sets his own odds relying on his skill and knowledge. So he hopes an outsider wins so he doesn’t have to pay out much. When a hot favourite gets rolled, the bookies smile.

The NZ TAB is, in my opinion, a rotten bookie. The moment a horse is subject to a decent bet it brings its price down. A good bookie, confident in his knowledge and ability would keep the price the same and invite a big punter to “have another go”.

There are legends of battles between big (and I mean BIG) punters and top bookies. One tells of a punter who put $250,000 on a 10-1 shot. Come again, smiled the bookmaker and put the price up two points. The punter wagered another 250k. The horse lost.

In my heyday I enjoyed a punt. Not big, the most I ever put on a horse was $200 at 10-1. It won easily.

I once collected over $3000 for a $10 bet. I bet that four horses in different races would all run a place at good odds and they all did.

Gambling can be fun or can lead to misery. The simple rule is: Don’t gamble money you can’t afford to lose.

Good punting!

I consider our gaming laws relics from Queen Victoria. Some changes I would make:

• Remove the TAB monopoly on sports betting
• Allow Internet gambling (esp as Kiwis just user overseas sites anyway)
• Allow any Casino operator that meets good character tests to set up a casino in a suitable area

Geoff Palmer at Stuff reports:

In 2010, Washington DC unveiled its state of the art internet-based electronic voting system.

To demonstrate it, it held a unique public trial: a mock school board election in which people were invited to test the new system and even, they challenged confidently, try to compromise its security. Within days of it going live, an unlisted election candidate – one Bender Bending Rodriguez, also known simply as Bender from the TV series Futurama – was the leading contender, with 100% of the vote.

Which will be used by some as a reason why there should be no Internet voting, but look at the details:

They found an unencrypted copy of every registered voter’s authentication code, and those, combined with the public key used to encrypt the ballots, allowed them to alter every vote already cast and replace any subsequent ones with fakes.

Having the authentication codes unencrypted is a pretty big security hole.

While they were about it, they blocked other attacks coming from New Jersey, India and China, and noticed that hackers from Iran were accessing part of the system via a default admin password (“admin”). 

And that is just incompetence.

There are risks with Internet voting, but they can be minimised and mitigated. You could have (for example) a paper copy print out at Election HQ of every vote cast over the Internet. You can have confirmation e-mails of votes. You can have random audits.

I’m not an advocate of only having Internet voting, but in an era of declining turnouts, having the option to vote over the Internet would help turn that around.

A guest post by Peter Freedman:

Former Health Services Union official Craig Thomson has been a naughty boy. He used a union credit card to visit ladies of the night, obviously to try and recruit them as union members.

Thomson is also a Labor MP. To be a Labor MP in Australia it is not quite compulsory to have been a unionist, but is certainly an advantage.

The dominance of unionists in the Parliamentary Party is distinctly unhealthy. Not only does it give the LNP a stick to beat the left over the head with, but union officials are not always nice people to know

Not that union connections are restricted to leftwing parties. Bill iBirch once confessed to me he had joined the Meatworkers Union when just a lad, probably not something he would bring up over the pinot noir at a National Party pissup.

Thopmson’s dilemma has been all over the rightwing papers and the LNP, understandably, are having a ball. Constant demands that Thomson release to the media his laundry list and the extent of his vegemite addiction are in the news every day.

Questions beginning “Given that the member for Dobell is a proven debaucher of innocent young females, could the Minister please explain……” tumble out one after the other like clowns in a circus.

And the police, Fair Work Australia and a very suspicious man in a grubby raincoat and felt fedora who looks definitely ASIO, have all been ferreting away to get the dirt on Craig T.

Julia Gillard is standing by this ratbag because she has no choice. When the cold winds of a snap election are blowing up your majority skirt all you can do is try to pull it down even if the result is that you protect a scumbag like Thomson.

My prediction is that Thomson will not be charged and if he is will not be convicted. Fucking a prostitute using your penis and someone else’s credit card is hardly the crime of the century.

Thomson, incidentally, was born in Wellington.

A guest post by Peter Freedman:

Can Do Campbell Newman has a huge problem with his enormous victory in the Queensland State election. He now has to try and keep 78 ambitious politicians in line when many of them must know they will be one term wonders. Everyone will want a job and those who end up being about as active as the guys who are doing some sort of road works at the end of our street and have been doing whatever it is for almost two years now will be mischief makers.

The LNP will have to hire the Gabba for the caucus meetings while Labor can have theirs in a phone box.

Labor has hit rock bottom and their only way now is up.

The result is typical of the sort of outcome you get with an FPP system.. There are no winners, practically no Opposition and all Campbell’s little puppies will be pooping on the floor and weeing on the carpet.

Can Do was a major in the Army and was nicknamed Noddy because he got up to a few tricks. He is also an authoritarian who doesn’t listen to anyone and expects everybody to have their kit spick and span and their gear in pristine order.

His attempt to keep his huge team under control promises to be an interesting sight.

Campbell will indeed have no effective opposition from other parties, so the opposition will come from within his own party. I know from experience of National’s 1990 landslide win, that some of your new MPs are not that well suited to be MPs. In seats that you never expected to win, the nomination often goes to whomever wants it. So Campbell will have some difficult MPs to deal with.

The good news for him though it that short of being found to be having an incestous affair with four nuns, Campbell will get a second term. Even a third term at this stage looks likely as Labor will need a lot of time to go from seven MPs to the 45 needed to govern.

Great news, reports the Telegraph:

Famed for its masterful lampooning of the inner workings of British government, Yes, Prime Minister captured the obfuscation of Whitehall mandarins to a tee.

Now, nearly a quarter of a century on, the much-lauded satirical sitcom is set to return to our screens for a new series seemingly based on the current Coalition government.

This time around the Rt. Hon Jim Hacker, previously played by the late Paul Eddington, will be confronting “the greatest economic crisis in a generation”.

Presented By Rachel Smalley (Duncan is having the week off)
The Foreign Affairs Ministry — Foreign Minister Murray McCully on the Ministry’s restructuring.
Robert Ayson (VUW) and Penny McDonald (former diplomat) will debate the Ministry’s future.
A special report on the Bainimarama Government and interview with the Fijian Leader.
Murray McCully will also comment on this and the future of our sanctions with Fiji.
And on Sunday Brian Edwards and Bill Ralston will look back (but only occasionally in anger) at the week and the way the media saw it.

SATURDAY 0930 — SUNDAY EDITION 0800 — TV3

The Herald reports:

A UK student who posted a series of racist comments on Twitter following footballer Fabrice Muamba’s cardiac arrest has been jailed for 56 days.

Liam Stacey, 21, caused widespread revulsion by reacting to Muamba’s mid-game collapse by writing: ‘LOL [laughing out loud], **** Muamba. He’s dead!!! #haha.’ He responded to criticism of that message with vile racist tweets. …

Stacey initially claimed his account had been accessed by somebody else, but later pleaded guilty to racially aggravated harassment. He was sent to prison to “reflect the public outrage” at his comments.

Stacey also faces expulsion from Swansea University. The third-year biology student had hoped to become a forensic scientist. Describing his tweets, prosecutor Louise Barron told the court: “The offence is clearly racially aggravated.

“There was sustained and gratuitous racism. These were unprovoked comments and persistent abuse. The recipients were disgusted.”

Jailing the student at Swansea Magistrates’ Court, District Judge John Charles said: “Not just the footballer’s family, not just the footballing world, but the whole world were literally praying for Muamba’s life. Your comments aggravated this situation.

“I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done.”

Now let’s be very clear. His comments were vile and racist. Some of his actual tweets are here. He absolutely deserves to be vilified in turn, to be kicked out of his university etc. Gloating that someone may die as they have collapsed on live television is awful.

But should someone go to jail just for saying something which is racist and offensive? I am uneasy about that. I think they should be exposed and suffer consequences as most people will shun them for what they said. But I think a prison sentence for a 21 year old who did some racist tweets is not a good thing.

This is new Queensland Premier Campbell Newman on election night. Now recall that Labor Premier Anna Bligh launched a massive smear campaign against Newman and his wife’s family. She even said that Newman would end up in jail.

At 5:20 see what he says about Bligh. It is:

I want to acknowledge and thank the Premier for her service to Queensland and particularly I think it is appropriate this evening that we all thank her and particularly acknowledge her inspirational leadership during the 2011 floods and Cyclone Yasi

A very good start to his new job. He would have had every reason to be bitter about her smear campaign against him, but he rose above it.

Hat Tip: Andrew Bolt

Stuff reports:

Controversial Kiwi businessman and former cop Ross Meurant has come out swinging at proposals by Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully to make it easier for New Zealand to ignore the United Nations when imposing trade sanctions on other countries.

Meurant, a polarising figure since his days as head of the notorious police “Red Squad” during the 1981 Springbok Tour, says McCully is seeking to “demonstrate his subservience to America’s blueprint of who should rule the world”, and if New Zealand gains the right to impose autonomous sanctions, it will be used to stifle trade with countries the US does not approve of, such as Syria.

McCully told the Sunday Star-Times his proposal, if approved by his cabinet colleagues, wouldn’t come to pass for at least a year and is not yet aimed at any particular country. He said if passed, his proposal would follow the lead of legislation passed in Australia last year (which has allowed them to impose autonomous sanctions against Iran, Myanmar, Fiji, North Korea and Zimbabwe).

I thought the proposal was fairly unremarkable. I suspect in the vast majority of cases we will only impose sanctions when the UN does, but there may be occasions when one wants to impose sanctions for sound reasons, without giving Russia and China a veto.

Meurant has a particular interest in Syria because since 2007 he has been involved in an abalone aquaculture project there. Six months ago he began setting up a business exporting phosphate from Syria to New Zealand for agricultural use, but the deteriorating political and security situation halted those plans.

While New Zealand currently has no restrictions on trade with Syria, Meurant says US restrictions on financial transactions with Syria make things complicated.

“I was thwarted by the US financial transactions blockade in making payment in US dollars to Syria for a sample container of phosphate.”

Oh I was wondering why Meurant was interested in this. He doesn’t want any sanctions against Syria, no matter how much they butcher their citizens, because of his business dealings. Typical.

Stuff reports:

Gerry Brownlee’s comments that Finnish people are uneducated and disrespectful to women have sparked outrage and made headlines in the European nation.

“The story is flaming in the Finnish media,” Juha Parikka, counsellor to the Embassy of Finland said.

Auckland lecturer Merja Myllylahti has even started a Facebook group, calling for Brownlee to visit Finland “to learn some facts”. …

Brownlee’s spokesman said the  comments were made in humour, were based on OECD figures and were part of a general debate.

One Finnish blogger responded:

Just you New Zealanders stop raping sheep, children and your Maori slaves, which is a satirical comment with a shadow of fact in it so no hard feelings, and we’re okay.

People are getting a wee bit sensitive over this. But just in case Finland declares war on New Zealand, I’d better try and make peace, especially as we have no combat airforce left.

Personally I’m very fond of Finns, having spent a few days in Vegas with four young Finnish politicians. Thankfully what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but let’s just sat everyone had a great time.

Now I’m also very fond of New Zealand, and Gerry is right that in several areas New Zealand is the better performing country.

But in one key area, I’m prepared to concede that Finland is the superior country. They clearly have a more impressive armed forces.

I have said many times that overall MMP is significantly superior to FPP. But the recent slaughter in Queensland reminds us of something that you don’t get under MMP – the satisfaction of seeing a despised Government crushed at an election.

Australian Labor won only 7 out of 89 seats, despite winning 27% of the vote. Now this is certainly unfair in terms of proportinality. But in terms of teaching a Government a lesson (being don’t lie and don’t run dirty smear campaigns), MMP reduces the impact of losing the public favour. You can’t actually throw out the top Ministers, as they did in Queensland, as they would all remain safe on the party list.

In fact under MMP it is possible Labor could have retained power in Queensland if they did a deal with Bob Katter.

Again don’t get me wrong, MMP is better than FPP overall. But I do miss losing the ability to really punish a Government as they have just done in Queensland.

The Mercury reports:

The Greens’ hero was met with a standing ovation when he delivered the 2012 Green Oration, which called for a single global and democratic parliament.

“Let us create a global democracy and parliament under the grand idea of one planet, one person, one vote, one value,” he said.

Senator Brown said he would call on the world’s 100 Greens parties to back his “earth parliament” at the third global Greens conference in Senegal next week.

So which Green MPs are attending the global Greens conference and will they be voting in favour of there being one global parliament under one person, one vote, one value.

Under one person, one vote, a majority i the global Parliament would be held by representatives from China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Russia and Bangladesh.

In one sense I  have some agreement with Senator Brown. It would be nice to have a global Parliament, so there are no trade barriers etc. Ironic, as the Greens are the most protectionist party around.

But it could never happy with so many countries presently governed by repressive regimes. It would just extend that repression to the planet. And God knows how many things the Greens would try to ban on a global scale, if there was a global Parliament.

What I would support is a super-parliament of democratic countries. Only countries with true democracies, with freedom of speech and religion, with a free media could join.

Two seats are still in doubt, but they will not change the scale of the slaughter in Queensland. Labor were hoping to retain at least 20 seats, but they look to have gone from 51 seats to seven seats.  This means they do not automatically get recognised as an official party in the Queensland Parliament, with access to offices, staff and resources.

The LNP will have 78 out of 89 seats. Bob Katter’s Australia Party got two, and others got two.

In terms of primary vote Labor dropped 15.7% to 26.6% – around what NZ Labour got in our 2011 election. Instant run-off voting is harsher on losing parties, than MMP is.

The LNP got a very high 49.7% primary vote.  The Katter Party got 11.6% – more than the Greens on 7.6%.

Too early to know the two party preferred results but it may be over 60% for the LNP. Commentators have said that many of those who defected from Labor to Katter did not rank any candidate beyond their first, so their votes were exhausted, rather than preference back to Labor.

Labor look to be in opposition for at least two, maybe three, elections in Queensland (unless some major scandal).  They ran a dirty negative campaign against new Premier Campbell Newman, with former Premier Anna Bligh even declaring he will end up in jail over his business dealings.

Federal Labor also look set next year to run a similar campaign. Their only slogan will be to stop Tony Abbott. When Rudd challenged for the leadership, that was all he could talk about.

I saw concession speeches by Anna Bligh and Kate Jones (who lost her seat to Newman). Both seemed to me to be quite arrogant and defiant, with little of the contrition you would expect for such a massacre.  Left politicians always seem to retreat into talk of how proud they are of their values, as if other politicians are not. Jones was thought to be a potential replacement for Bligh, but is now out of Parliament. She is fairly typical of modern politics – elected at age 27 after working as a media advisor to two Ministers, and married to Bligh’s former media advisor. These career politicians tend to be very skilled at politics, but do not always have a lot of experience of the world outside politics.

The next elections in Australia are Northern Territory by August 2012 and ACT in October 2012 but hey are  of little importance. The only state election before the federal election is Western Australia in March 2013. The Liberal Party is currently 18% ahead of the Labor opposition there so a change of Govt is unlikely.

The vote in Queensland was primarily on state issues, but the scale of it will have Labor nervous, especially with NSW having had such a strong result also. If this sort of swing happened in the federal election, even Kevin Rudd would lose his safe seat.

Tony Abbott was on TV this morning saying that the Coalition will repeal the carbon tax, no buts and no ifs. When asked about the Senate, he said that he doubts Labor will want to be punished twice over the carbon tax but if they blocked it in the Senate he would do a double dissolution election.

An interesting article in the Guardian:

Some 7,700 UK drug users and 4,000 from the US and Canada took part in the detailed survey, carried out online in November. Respondents were asked a range of questions including what drugs they took, how often, and what the health and legal consequences were. It was conducted by the independent drug use data exchange Global Drug Survey, in association with the Guardian and Mixmag, the clubbing magazine and website.

One of the strongest underlying messages is that this group of drug users report as happy, healthy and educated, and feel at ease with their recreational consumption of a range of illicit substances from cannabis to ecstasy to cocaine. They are not in rehab, prison or in trouble with the law and do not take heroin or crack.

The mean age of UK respondents was 28. Nine out of 10 were white, three-quarters were in work and earning between £10,000 and £40,000. Some 55% were educated to degree level or above.

A key conclusion being:

Dr Adam Winstock, a consultant addictions psychiatrist and director ofGlobal Drug Survey, said: “This is the largest assessment of current drug use ever conducted. What is overwhelmingly tells us is that people are not defined by their drug use, but that the harms that drugs can have are defined by the way people choose to use them.

“The challenge for government and policy makers will be how to regulate and craft a public health response which remains credible and respects individual choice.”

Absolutely. Demonising all drug users as criminals is not good policy.

The Telegraph reports:

The adult rate of the minimum wage is to rise by 11p to £6.19 an hour from October, Business Secretary Vince Cable announced today.

That is $11.90 in NZ dollars, which is 88% of the NZ minimum wage of $13.50 an hour. So the next time Labour or the unions insist our minimum wage is set at third world standards and keeps people in poverty, remember it is 13% higher than the UK one.

But the rates for younger workers will be frozen at £4.98 for 18 to 20-year-olds and £3.68 for 16 to 17-year-olds. 

Sensible when the focus is getting them into jobs.

The starting out minimum wage in NZ is $10.80 an hour, and doesn’t even apply to all under 21s like the UK one. It only applies to 16 and 17 year olds for their first six months with an employer or 18 and 19 year olds who have been on a benefit for at least six months.

The UK youth minimum wage is NZ$9.58 for 18 to 20 year olds, and NZ$7.08 for 16 and 17 year olds. That means those on the starting out minimum wage in NZ are getting 13% more and  53% more respectively.

At the weekend the film Lost Airmen of Buchenwald was on television. It told a fascinating little known story of 168 allied airmen who were illegally sent to a concentration camp in WWII, and how Acting Squadron Leader Phil Lamason kept them alive. Lamason is a kiwi, and amazingly is still alive aged 93.

The 168 airmen were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, which was technically not an extermination camp, but still saw 55,000 people shot or worked to death.

Lamason as the senior officer assumed command of the airmen, and many of them say his leadership kept them alive. Lamason kept asking for them to be transferred to a POW camp, but this was denied. They were ordered to work as slave labour. Lamason refused to order the men to work, as allied soliders could not work for war production for the Nazis. He refused to back down even when threatened with summary execution by an SS officer.

Lamason managed to get word to the Luftwaffe, about the airmen being held at the concentration camp. He was hoping they would intervene, as they would not wish their captured airmen in the UK to be treated in the same way. Two Luftwaffe officers visited the camp pretending to inspect bomb damage, and talked to Lamason. They reported to Hermann Goering who ordered them transferred.

However before news of the transfer came through, they were ordered to be shot on 26 October. Only Lamarson knew this, but didn’t tell the others to keep morale high. Then the transfer came through on 19 October.  They were just one week away from execution. 166 of the airmen were transferred and survived.

It was a fascinating documentary and well worth watching. New Zealanders can be very proud of Mr Lamason, a true war hero.

An interesting article in the NY Times on why some countries go bust:

Over the centuries, proposed answers have varied greatly. Smith declared that the difference between wealth and poverty resulted from the relative freedom of the markets; Thomas Malthus said poverty comes from overpopulation; and John Maynard Keynes claimed it was a byproduct of a lack of technocrats.  …

Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most famous economists, asserts that poor soil, lack of navigable rivers and tropical diseases are, in part, to blame. Others point to culture, geography, climate, colonization and military might. The list goes on.

But a different theory:

Now, in their new book, “Why Nations Fail,” Acemoglu and his collaborator, James Robinson, argue that the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy. It’s an idea that was first raised by Smith but was then largely ignored for centuries as economics became focused on theoretical models of ideal economies rather than the not-at-all-ideal problems of real nations.

I don’t see this as contradictory to what Adam Smith said, but complementary to it.

Consider Acemoglu’s idea from the perspective of a poor farmer. In parts of modern sub-Saharan Africa, as was true in medieval Europe or the antebellum South, the people who work the fields lack any incentive to improve their yield because any surplus is taken by the wealthy elite. This mind-set changes only when farmers are given strong property rights and discover that they can profit from extra production. In 1978, China began allowing farmers to benefit from any surplus they produced. The decision, most economists agree, helped spark the country’s astounding growth.

Absolutely. Those who for 100% state ownership should look at the massive difference it made in China to allow people to gain reward for their efforts beyond what the state mandated they should get.

According to Acemoglu’s thesis, when a nation’s institutions prevent the poor from profiting from their work, no amount of disease eradication, good economic advice or foreign aid seems to help. I observed this firsthand when I visited a group of Haitian mango farmers a few years ago. Each farmer had no more than one or two mango trees, even though their land lay along a river that could irrigate their fields and support hundreds of trees. So why didn’t they install irrigation pipes? Were they ignorant, indifferent? In fact, they were quite savvy and lived in a region teeming with well-intended foreign-aid programs. But these farmers also knew that nobody in their village had clear title to the land they farmed. If they suddenly grew a few hundred mango trees, it was likely that a well-connected member of the elite would show up and claim their land and its spoils. What was the point?

Which reinforces the need for clear property rights.

Acemoglu, Robinson and their collaborators did not come up with the idea that incentives matter, of course, nor the notion that politics play a role in economic development. Their great contribution has been a series of clever historical studies that persuasively argue that the cheesiest of slogans is actually correct: the true value of a nation is its people. If national institutions give even their poorest and least educated citizens some shot at improving their own lives — through property rights, a reliable judicial system or access to markets — those citizens will do what it takes to make themselves and their country richer. 

And this is why we should do what we can to improve educational outcomes for the “tail” and why we should encourage people from welfare into work.

This suggests, among other things, that instead of supporting one-off programs promoting health or agricultural productivity, the international community should focus its aid efforts on deep political and economic change.

Absolutely.

Acemoglu and Robinson are on the pessimistic side of optimism about the United States’ chances of a resurgence. Congress, they told me, is too heavily influenced by the wealthy, and the advent of super PACs has only given elites more power. Yet Acemoglu surprised me when he said he was encouraged by the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. While neither has an especially coherent or subtle economic agenda, both show that, however frustrated they might be, large numbers of Americans still believe they can influence the political process to improve their fortunes. Since the future of American economic health lies in its people, Acemoglu explained, as long as Americans believe they can influence the process, they will.

I think the future is fairly murky for the US.

The Herald reports:

President Barack Obama is calling anew on Congress to end tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry, saying America needs to develop alternative sources of energy in the face of rising petrol prices.

Obama said in his weekly radio and internet address that he expected Congress to consider in the next few weeks halting US$4 billion ($4.85 billion) in tax subsidies, something he hasn’t been able to get through Congress throughout his presidency. …

Industry officials and many Republicans in Congress have argued that cutting the tax breaks would lead to higher petrol prices, raising costs on oil companies and affecting their investments in exploration and production.

Obama is on the right side of this one. Just as I am against subsidies for bio-fuels (especially as they caused mass starvation with crops being converted to bio-fuels from grain), I am against subsidies for oil.

We should not shelter people from higher petrol prices. That is a market signal that supply is becoming more difficult, and will encourage investment in other technologies, plus encourage greater use of other forms of transport.

As for investments in exploration and production, you do not need subsidies for that. As petrol prices increase, then exploration of new reserves becomes economically viable.

Further to my post on the  intolerance of diversity of opinion in Labour, a fascinating report by Pew on online behaviour in the US. They use the terms liberals, conservatives and moderates, which broadly are left, right and centre.

They look at behaviour amongst users of social networking sites (SNS). They find:

• blocked/unfriended/hidden someone because they posted something you disagree with – 16% of liberals, 6% moderates, 8% conservatives
• blocked/unfriended/hidden someone because they disagreed with something you posted  - 11% of liberals, 1% moderates, 4% conservatives

So twice as many liberals as conservatives block someone because they posted something they disagree with, and almost three times as many block you if you disagree with something they have posted.

Worth pointing out that the vast majority of both liberals and conservatives don’t block people just because they disagree with what they say.

A further article from the CIS paper – You Can’t Say That! Freedom of Speech and the Invisible Muzzle.

This one is by Brendon O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online, a humanist/libertarian magazine. It editoralised against the post 9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

My favourite example of political correctness involves the American Navy. In October 2001, after America had invaded Afghanistan, some of its navy personnel were preparing missiles to be fired at Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. One of the personnel decided to write a message on the side of his missile. A message to express his anger about 9/11. So in reference to the 9/11 hijacking, he wrote the following message on his missile: ‘Hijack this, you faggots.’

Little did he know that even though the American military had rather a lot on its mind at that time, his message would still cause a massive controversy. The upper echelons of the navy were outraged when they heard about this transgression. They expressed official disapproval of this homophobic message and issued a warning that military personnel should more closely edit their spontaneous acts of penmanship. They even issued some unofficial guidelines covering what could and could not be written on the side of post 9/11 missiles. Nothing offensive, the guidelines said. So it was ok to say ‘I love New York’ but not to use words like faggot.

That is my favourite story about political correctness for two reasons. First, it sums up how psychotically obsessed the PC lobby is with language. It is ok to kill people but not to offend them. It is ok to drop a missile on someone’s house or cave as long as that missile doesn’t have anything inappropriate written on its side. Heaven forbid that the last thing a Talib should see before having his head blown off is a word reminding him of the existence of homosexuality. This really captures the warped morality inherent in political correctness—where one becomes so myopically focused on speech and representation that everything else, including matters of life and death, becomes subordinate to that.

The second reason it is my favourite example of political correctness is because it captures a truth about political correctness that is far too often overlooked: Political correctness is not actually the handiwork of small groups of cultural Marxists or liberal malcontents. The rise of political correctness is simply down to the activism and agitation of unrepresented sections of the chattering classes who detest vulgar language and what they consider to be offensive ideas. Otherwise, how can we explain the actions of the American Navy? Why would one of the most powerful, well-armed institutions on Earth buckle under pressure from the PC police, from people who read The Guardian and The Age?

No. Political correctness represents something far more profound. The victory of political correctness is built upon the demise and decay of traditional forms of authority and morality. It is parasitical on the crisis of conservative thought. In fact, I would argue that the power of political correctness is directly proportionate to the weakness of the old, ‘taken for granted’ forms of morality. It is tempting to see political correctness as the imposition of a framework by small groups of illiberal liberals. To see it as a conscious project pushed through by these rather irritating sections of society. Two striking aspects of political correctness seem to bolster this view—the creation of a cabal of grumpy, misanthropic feminists and environmentalists.

First, political correctness came to the fore at a time when conservative governments enjoyed strong electoral support in the West. It really exploded in America and Britain in the 1980s when Reagan and Thatcher were in power. So the masses were largely supportive of conservative regimes. But political correctness was born at the same time and became more and more widespread, boosting the idea that the cultural elite sat down one day and drew up some rules for everyday life.

And second, political correctness does tend to be most vociferously promoted by the media and sections of academia, by those rather rarefied, aloof institutions with more than their fair share of worldly people. But to look at PC in that way only, to see it as a kind of conscious project of illiberal liberals with its list of 13 rules, as Thilo Sarrazin mentioned, is to miss the foundation stone of political correctness. The ground upon which political correctness is built is the inability of the traditional moralists to justify themselves and to defend their way of life and their moral system. That inability creates a moral vacuum, which gets rather feverishly filled up by new forms of intolerant morality. Because when you have a profound crisis of traditional and conservative morality that had governed society for so long, previously normal and unquestioned ways of behaviour are called into question. Nothing can be taken for granted anymore. From everyday speech to interpersonal relations, even nursery rhymes and fairy tales, all that was a given in the past 200 to 300 years falls apart. And political correctness fills that hole. It’s a tentative takeover by a new kind of modern day moralist. The result is undoubtedly tyrannical and profoundly illiberal and antagonistic to individual autonomy.

To see how political correctness has its origins in the demise of traditionalism, it’s instructive to look at the example of the girl guides. For a hundred years or so, Girlguiding UK was a fairly straightforward organisation. It was designed to instil girls with imperial pride. The girl guides had a simple slogan and swore an oath of loyalty to God, Queen and Country. About 15 years ago, Girlguiding UK rewrote their constitution and brought out a new mission statement. They turned one page into about 20 pages. There was no more duty to God; instead, there was a promise to love ‘my God’ in recognition of the many Gods today and that there is not one true God or one true religion. The girls were no longer required to swear loyalty to the Queen or country, only serve them. And they were encouraged to feel sympathy for the Queen because it cannot be easy for her to be photographed everywhere she goes.

The key here is that nobody invaded the girl guides’ headquarters and forced them to rewrite their constitution at gunpoint. They did it themselves because those three institutions—God, Queen and Country—are no longer real sources of authority. All three—religion, monarchy and nationalism—have suffered a profound crisis of legitimacy. And it was the girl guides instinctive recognition of that which led them to voluntarily rewrite their own rules and their own outlook.

So, political correctness is not about cultural Marxists storming the citadel and forcing us to obey them. In fact, the citadel has collapsed, and they are in the rubble trying to fashion a new kind of social morality. And that is why political correctness is so hysterical, so shrill, and so intolerant. Not because it is strong but because it is weak and isolated. It has no real roots in society, and it has no real roots in history. It has no popular legitimacy, and it has no public support. It is better seen as a knee-jerk instinctive imposition of a new morality designed to replace the old. So everything must be controlled, no one can be trusted, and no one anymore knows what is right and wrong. It is the moral hole of the heart of society that gives rise to this insatiable desire to implement all kinds of new rules and regulations.

So even nursery rhymes are being rewritten. In Britain, we’ve recently rewritten ‘What should we do with the drunken sailor?’ The drunken sailor has been replaced with a grumpy pirate because we don’t want children to know about alcohol. The old rhyme used to say, ‘stick him in a bag and beat him senseless’; the new one says ‘tickle him until he starts to giggle.’ This is PC gone mad—crazy feminists in dungarees rewriting nursery rhymes and forcing them on schools. But a more important question to ask is what kind of crazy unhinged society rewrites rhymes that children sing, rhymes that have been around for generations. Only a society that has entirely lost its moral bearing and can no longer take the most basic things for granted would do such a ridiculous, Orwellian thing.

The hysteria of political correctness really speaks to its opportunistic, parasitical nature. A more confident moral system would be able to tolerate deviance. An unconfident and accidental moral system like political correctness can tolerate no deviance at all because it continually fears for its own continued survival. And it’s important to bear that in mind because sometimes the critics of political correctness are too quick to play the victim card. Janet described very well, and very accurately, the way in which politically correct people play the victim card—but sometimes so do un-PC people. Too many right-wing thinkers claim that a conspiratorial cabal of PC lunatics are ruining our lives, which conveniently absolves these right-wing conservative thinkers of having to work out whatever happened to their morality and to their traditions. Where did they go? It is easier to claim that society has been taken over by crazy, lentil-eating, sandal-wearing feminists and annoying greens; it is far harder to account for the demise of a way of life that had existed for hundreds of years. Which is why we should get to grip with these two facts.

First, political correctness is built on the decay of traditional morality. Second, it is weak, it is fragile, and it is probably quite easy to demolish. If we bear that in mind, then we can more successfully fight against this profoundly censorious and suspicious and irrational moral system. And if you feel that you are being treated like a heretic, then you should behave like a heretic. And you should pull up your socks and get your guns out.

The final article I will blog on Friday.

Reporters without Borders has released its list of countries that are enemies of the Internet. I’ve added on the nature of the Government and/or Head of State:

• Bahrain – monarchy
• Belarus - presidential republic, president is former communist now statist
• Burma - presidential republic, pro-military junta
• China – Marxist-Leninist single-party state (officially)
• Cuba – republic communist state
• Iran – Islamic republic
• North Korea – Juche (Marxist-Leninist) unitary single-party state,
• Saudi Arabia – Islamic absolute monarchy
• Syria – Baathist single party state, Arab Socialist Baath Party
• Turkmenistan – presidential republic, single party state, former communist
• Uzbekistan – presidential republic, former communist
• Vietnam – Marxist/Leninist single-party state

My conclusions are that enemies of the Internet tend to be communists,  former communists, Islamists and absolute monarchs.

Guest Post by Peter Freedman:

It had to happen. Sooner or later Bob Katter would do something absolutely tasteless, totally without any merit of any kind, to try to win votes in the Queensland State election.

Katter is a sort of Australian Winston Peters. He has been in politics for yonks and recently formed his own party. He called it the Australia Party, then decided a more humble The Katter Party sounded better and tried to delay the entire election while the change was made. He lost that round.

Now he has come up with this ad:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/state-election-2012/newman-to-prioritise-fair-dinkum-normal-families-20120312-1utcj.html

For those who can’t get to the link, the ad about is the attitude of opponent, Liberal leader Campbell Newman, over gay marriage.  It repeats the same clip of Newman saying he supports gay marriage, interspersed with a pixelated pic of two apparently naked men being friendly, but not THAT friendly.

The ad asks: “Is a vote for Campbell Newman a vote for gay marriage?” The answer to that incredibly complex question will come later.

On the surface it is just a grubby tasteless ad, the sort that has become a part of modern politics. Sigh at the drop in standards and move on.

Yet this ad has caused a huge kerfuffle in Australia! You would think The Governor General had been snapped performing oral sex on the Prime Minister, while the entire Australia cricket team stood admiringly waiting their turn.

Yes, this is a strange country. The GG, Quentin Bryce, is actually a female.  Ask that question at your next trivia night.

But the reaction to this ad is probably the strangest I have seen since arriving in Australia. Everyone is talking about it. Still worse I can’t find anyone who is defending it, except Bob K himself of course. And me.

The ad, while perhaps disgusting and offensive to some, is true. Newman DOES support gay marriage. The pic of the two men is not indecent, the pixels cover their chests, FFS, and the shot stops well before the dangly bits.

Isn’t this ad just another example of free speech?

Not if you believe last night’s Q and A on the ABC.  There were five people on the panel, an Aboriginal leader, a bright young Labor Cabinet minister, an elderly weather beaten farming leader, a cocky youthful feminist writer and a Liberal MP who wants to be the party leader but dare not say so. A more diverse mob would be hard to find.

Yet they all agreed. Katter’s ad should be banned. It demonized gay people, it was homophobic and deeply objectionable. Throw it on the fire, I say!

But wait, there’s more. Australia’s third most rightwing columnist, Andrew Bolt, the same gentleman so adored by Australia’s fourth most rightwing columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, wants the ad banned as well. Or so the feminist writer said.

Bolt’s blog is here:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/katter_disgraces_himself/

Nowhere that I can find does he call for a ban. But he clearly didn’t like the advertisement, terms like “a vile ad, openly and shamelessly appealing to homophobia” tend to give that impression.

Unfortunately for his credibility, Bolt has been openly and shamelessly appealing to the worst of human nature for years.  This man has been openly and shamelessly in and out of court so often there’s talk of providing a revolving door marked “Andrew Bolt Entrance” on one side and “Andrew Bolt Exit” on the other.

Bolt is a “Stolen Generation” denier. Despite all the historical documentation he continues to claim that large numbers of black kids weren’t snatched from their families to be placed with white families. He once asked a professor to provide “just 10 names” of stolen kids.  When the prof produced four pages of names, Bolt still remained unconvinced.

Then he defamed a magistrate, claiming she had hugged two drug traffickers as she set them free.  The magistrate said she shook their hands to congratulate them for completing a rehab programme and a jury believed her. Bolt got it wrong because he couldn’t be bothered contacting the magistrate for her side of the story, one of the first things I learned when I became a journalist. It is called “balance” or “getting both sides”.

That little mishap cost Bolt, or his employers, $246,000 in damages.

Then in late 2010, Bolt was sued by seven people for a series of columns claiming white people in Australia sometimes pretend to be black for political or career advancement. Again he was found to have broken the law. Fortunately for his employers the seven only wanted their names cleared and sought no money .

Every time he is criticized Bolt falls back on his rights  of free speech.  But isn’t Bob Katter’s ad free speech? Apparently not.

I am of Jewish ancestry. If a Nazi in full uniform marched up and down a public spot yelling  “Sieg Heil” I wouldn’t stop and offer him some matzo ball soup.  But I would believe he had a right to make a dick  of himself, whether  beschnittener or unbeschnittener. It’s called free speech.

“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend with my life your right to say it” – Though these words are regularly attributed to Voltaire, they were first used by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906).

 “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also”  Henrich Heine,99 years before the Nazis came to power.

 Think about it.

For the record I do not agree with what Peter has said on Andrew Bolt.  Nowhere has Bolt said the ad should be banned (as noted) so there is no issue of consistency. I would have thought Peter would welcome the leading conservative commentator in Australia saying “But to oppose civil unions is just bloody-minded interference in the lives of others”.

There is also another side of the story on the issues cited about Bolt. For example the debate about the stolen generation wasn’t whether or not lots of Aboriginal children were not put into white families. It was about how many were taken without the consent of a parent, and where there was no abuse – which is far fewer number.

A further article from the CIS paper – You Can’t Say That! Freedom of Speech and the Invisible Muzzle.

This one is by Janet Albrechtsen, a columnist with the Australian.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

— Mark Twain

It’s tempting to assume that the PC-crowd is having us on. How else can we explain the Seattle school’s decision last year to rename Easter eggs as ‘Spring spheres,’ worrying that a chocolate egg might remind, or even worse, offend kids by alluding to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Sesame Street has been sanitised too: episodes made between 1969 and 1974 are screened with an adults-only warning. Enid Blyton has not been spared either. To appease the ‘don’t smack children’ lobby, Dame Slap is now Dame Snap. Feminists have been accommodated: Julian and Dick are now required to share household chores with the female characters. The gay lobby has not been forgotten either: the word ‘gay’ has been replaced with ‘happy.’ Bessie has been renamed Beth to avoid any connotations to slavery. Blyton’s golliwogs have been banished. And The Lion King has been decreed full of racist and homophobic messages. According to Carolyn Newberger of Harvard University, those good-for-nothing hyenas are urban blacks who speak in gay clichés.

Surely, they’re having us on with this PC stuff.

But, of course, we know they are not having us on. And they are not imbeciles. They are smart people who really mean it. Smart because the PC virus has infected so much of what we do, what we read, how we live, how we think.

It’s the thinking part that should trouble us the most.

Earlier this year, Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University in Alabama, published a new edition of Mark Twain’s classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The word ‘nigger,’ which appears more than 200 times in the book, has been replaced with ‘slave.’ The professor worried that the word would offend too many students and turn them off from reading the book.

What the good professor doesn’t seem to know is that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn satirises Southern prejudices of the time. It is an anti-racist book. If you mess with the power of Twain’s words, you mess with the power of Twain’s message. If school children are to really think about American history and the Deep South, they need to read about ‘niggers.’ The history and the language are confronting.

Great literature unsettles us. It forces us to think about our reactions. If we’re offended, we think about why we’re offended.

By denying us the ability to think, political correctness is a heresy for those who are truly committed to liberalism. Political correctness tells people what to think. And it seeps into society, so often without us even paying attention to the subliminal message.

Because the purveyors of PC are not imbeciles but smart people armed with clever tricks, we need to pay attention.

The Left in Australia are claiming that those who raise questions about multiculturalism, immigration and the relationship between Islam and modernity have blood on our hands. I say ‘our hands’ because I have been named as someone who bears some responsibility for what happened in Oslo. Others complicit in the mass murder include Keith Windschuttle, Andrew Bolt, and Geoffrey Blainey.

Here, murder is used as a muzzle to close down free speech. And this is just the latest addition to what is a growing list of tactics to curb free speech, and even worse, to stifle genuine enquiry and independent thinking.

Here are some of their tricks.

The emotional hoax

The Left are armed with a range of emotionally charged tools to immediately close down discussion about immigration or border control. Call your opponents racists and point to xenophobia in the community. Opponents are not just wrong, they’re evil. Their views should not be aired in a civilised society.

John Howard copped this for years. When the Prime Minister Gillard called for an open debate about these issues last year, she was accused of whipping up the racists within Australia.

But remember this: the stifling political correctness that rejected an open debate about immigration in the early 1990s fuelled the emergence and popularity of Pauline Hanson.

 The victim game

The victim game has been fuelled by two recent developments. We now live in an age when ‘feelings’ are treated as a measurement of moral values, so you measure your feelings against the feelings of others to determine morality. Hence, we live in what author Monica Ali calls ‘the marketplace of outrage,’ where groups vie for victimhood status, each claiming their feelings have been hurt more than others.

Secondly, the focus on vulnerability is used to justify curbing Enlightenment values such as freedom of expression. The minority simply have to utter the word ‘phobia’ to silence all debate.

Over the last few years, we have witnessed a familiar opera of Muslim oppression.

Act I starts with something simple. Perhaps it’s a book called The Satanic Verses. Or a silly Danish cartoon. Or a film called Submission. Or a cheeky episode of South Park stating that Mohammad is the only guy free from ridicule.

Then the libretto comes: Muslims scream about hurt feelings. The drama builds in Act II: death threats are issued, flags and effigies are burnt, maybe even a few boycotts are imposed, and then we hear that great aria of all accusations—Islamophobia.

Act III is the most depressing. The West capitulates, preferring the path of least resistance to launching a staunch defence of freedom of expression.

Hence then US President George H. Bush declared both Salman Rushdie’s book and the fatwa against Rushdie as equally offensive.

Hence, 20 years later, newspapers across the globe chose not to publish the Danish cartoons and Western politicians muttered about protecting hurt feelings.

Hence, last year, Comedy Central, the channel that broadcasts South Park, inserted audio bleeps and large blocks of black that read CENSORED at the very mention or image of Mohammad to prevent more hurt feelings.

And as the clever guys at South Park lamented, ‘like, we lost.’

And we, too, may lose. If we don’t even recognise the tactics, let alone the consequences, we are left with a new norm of anticipatory surrender and self-censorship.

The legal route

The victim game works so well because it is augmented by laws: the apparatus of the state is used to censor free speech.

The prosecutions are mounting: politician Geert Wilders in Holland, writers Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in Canada. And in Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is defending a claim by a group of Aborigines that he ‘offended, insulted and humiliated’ them in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The PC crowd is clever and they’re not having us on. They know that there are no useful legal tests about hurt feelings and inciting hate. They enact nice-sounding laws, build bureaucracies, and wait for them to blossom and bludgeon free speech. They have effectively co-opted Islamic style oppression to prohibit debate, be it about Islam or anything else they wish to fence off from free speech.

Death by silence

The other trick is to quietly exclude certain people from the national discourse. It is best summed up by the German word totschweigtaktik.

To be ‘totsched’ is to be subjected to death by silence—books, ideas, people that challenge the status quo are simply ignored.

Shelly Gare wrote about it in Quadrant last year. Those who are totsched find ‘their efforts left to expire soundlessly like a butterfly in a jar.’

It happened to Orwell when he wrote his 1938 classic Homage to Catalonia, which addressed Stalinist Russia’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. The left-wing literati simply ignored it. By the time Orwell died in 1950, barely 1,500 copies had been sold.

The same death by silence was used to ignore Australian writers such as Chris Kenny, who challenged the secret women’s business behind the Hindmarsh Island affair. It was used when author Kate Jennings aimed her fire at the sisterhood, post-modernism, and women’s studies.

It’s used by those who tell us that climate change will destroy us all if we do not act immediately. The sceptics are being totsched. Opposing views? What opposing views?

 The bipartisanship racket

Governments have their own tactics. In recent times in Australia, those with poor ideas and even worse policies have resorted to what is best described as the bipartisanship racket to fence themselves off from criticism on a range of topics.

The former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called for bipartisanship on Indigenous policies. It soon became clear that what he meant was supine obedience to his agenda. There could be no disagreement with the roll-back of the NT intervention. If you dared to disagree, you were immediately charged with politicising the issue. Imagine if these kinds of calls from those defending the status quo had managed to shut out the ideas of people like Noel Pearson.

The Rudd government tried the bipartisanship scam again with climate change and immigration. Each time the aim was the same: to place limits on free debate, to get opponents to rubber-stamp rather than question government policy.

No, the very last thing we want is bipartisanship when it is used so blatantly to stifle dissent and vest moral authority in one voice.

Consensus con

Another trick emerged from Canberra last year from the cloistered offices of the federal Treasury. Treasury boss Ken Henry demanded a supporting consensus from academic economists on major policy issues such as the emissions trading system and the equally ill-fated super profits tax on mining companies.

In one breath, Henry said that he supported the ‘contest of ideas’ and that there were ‘occasions on which economists might, at least for a period, put down their weapons and join a consensus.’

It sends shudders up your spine. A senior bureaucrat—who crafts a policy that, according to many, threatened to undermine Australia’s economy—demands obedience from economists. Henry lost that debate. And that’s the point of free debate. Ideas are not finessed through consensus or bipartisanship. Debate is the single most effective mechanism for disposing of bad ideas.

 Why vigilance?

The aim of political correctness is to tell people what to think and stop them from thinking for themselves. If we are serious about defending free speech, vigilance demands that we look out for the tricks and test the trickery against first principles. The alternative means more moral disorientation and a death wish for the West.

The principles are clear enough: free speech is not a Left/Right thing, as Mark Steyn said. It’s a free/unfree thing. You don’t get to cry in favour of free speech just to defend those with whom you agree. And free speech must include the right to offend. If we prosecute offensive opinions, we encourage ever more ridiculous claims to protection. We fuel that marketplace of outrage. And we end up shutting down the true genius of modern Western civilisation—the contest of ideas.

But, of course, free speech and the real value of debate depend on one more important principle: people genuinely listening to each other.

There are two more articles to come.

The Fijian Government has announced a timetable for a new constitution. This is well overdue, but better late than never. First the principles that will make up the constitution:

• A common and equal citizenry;
• A secular state;
• The removal of systemic corruption;
• An independent judiciary;
• Elimination of discrimination;
• Good and transparent governance;
• Social justice;
• One person, one vote, one value;
• The elimination of ethnic voting;
• Proportional representation; and
• A voting age of 18.

The commitment to a secular state, an independent judiciary and the elimination of ethnic voting is especially welcome. Hell, maybe one day we’ll do the same in New Zealand and our Head of State won’t have to be a particular religion, and we won’t have race based seats.

Some of the issues to be discussed are:

• Do we want economic and social rights to be included in the Bill of Rights? In other words, should there be a right to basic housing, to clean drinking water, to basic health services, to electricity?

• What should be the size of Parliament? Should it be reduced from previous numbers?

• How do we attract better quality candidates to Parliament?

• Should we have a Senate? If so, should Senators be elected or selected?

• How should the judiciary be selected?

• Should political parties and their office holders disclose their assets and liabilities?

The Chairperson of the Constitutional Commission will be Professor Yash Ghai, who is an  internationally renowned constitution and human rights expert.

The timetable is:

• July 12 – Sep 12 – Public consultation
• Oct 12 – Dec 12 – Commission writes a draft constitution
• Jan 13 – Feb 13 – Constitution considered by a Constituent Assembly

The one area for concern at this stage, is that an unelected Constituent Assembly approves the constitution. It would be better to have the Assembly amend the draft and finalise it, but have a public referendum on approving it.

But overall it looks a positive step forward.