Kiwiblog

Gavin White from UMR blogs:

Some of you may have seen some of our research commented on in the media earlier in the week. The research has been interpreted as supporting Gareth Morgan’s campaign on cats, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clear cut as that. 

In other words, don’t believe the spin of a campaign that selectively quoted the results.

The media reports focussed on one statistic: the fact that 54% of New Zealanders supported some form of controls that would reduce the future population of cats, once told that an Otago University study estimates 1.12 million native birds are killed by domestic cats each year in New Zealand. The question cannot, however, be treated in isolation: the other questions in the survey make clear that the sorts of controls people are actually prepared to have are actually pretty mild.

So what were the full results.

• 62% believe that all cats should be neutered or spayed.
• 57% think that cats should be banned from areas near wildlife reserves, forests and national parks
• 53% believe that all cats should be registered and microchipped
• 42% consider that all cats should wear bells
• Just 12% believe that cat owners should not replace their cats when they die
• Only 7% think that cats should be kept indoors at all times of the day.

This reflects I think the common sense approach of New Zealanders. Only 7% agree with the more extreme proposals from Morgan, but a bit over half agree with some of the more moderate stuff.

Gavin also points out:

In the question on banning cats from near wildlife reserves, forests and national parks, I suspect that many people would have used a reasonably narrow definition of the word ‘near’ (e.g. within a few streets of the park boundary).  It would be stretching the case to say that the poll supports banning cats from whole suburbs or towns (like Karori, which is adjacent to the Zealandia wildlife reserve, or Ohakune, which is near the boundary of Tongariro National Park).

A very good point also. It’s good to have pollsters commenting on their own research publicly – they are often the one best placed to know what limits there are in interpreting what it means.

Matthew Backhouse at the Herald reports:

The philanthropist’s Cats To Go website was initially met with outrage from cat lovers, but responses to questions in UMR Research’s monthly online survey show the public may be coming around to his views.

Not really. The survey showed that the moderate proposals have support – as they should. But there is total rejection for his more extreme proposals.

The survey of about 1000 people found more than half supported neutering all cats, registering and microchipping all cats, and banning cats from areas near wildlife reserves, forests and national parks.

This is not surprising. And if Morgan had campaigned on those issues solely, then I’d say he would have got a far better reception.

But two of the measures Dr Morgan advocates were met with far less support, with only 12 per cent agreeing cat owners should not replace them when they die and 7 per cent agreeing cats should be kept indoors at all times.

And these measures were at the core of his campaign. His website is called Cats To Go – not Cats To Be Registered.  The top infographic on his site says “Make this cat your last”.

Far from endorsing his views, this poll is a total rejection of his extremism.

Shane Cowlishaw at Stuff reports:

Gareth Morgan has shown his claws in a public catfight with an SPCA board member.

The philanthropist and economist held a public meeting in the Wellington suburb if Karori last night, where he put his case for creating the first “confined cat” suburb, to protect native birds in the Zealandia sanctuary.

As part of his presentation, he produced a “Wanted” poster naming Wellington SPCA board members, accusing them of being ill-equipped to deal with the cat catastrophe.

But one of the wanted men was in the audience, and took issue with Dr Morgan.

Emanuel Kalafatelis said he had been prepared to listen until things got personal. He pleaded: “For God’s sake, let’s not jump into this. Let’s at least get all the facts. Let’s get New Zealand-based facts. Not global facts.”

Dr Morgan responded: “I’m not going to support any organisation which in effect is attacking New Zealand’s wildlife . . . these people have no ethical compass.

Pathetic and puerile. Also a degree of bullying.

He stressed he was not campaigning for the eradication of all cats, but simply restrictions on where they could roam.

“This is not an assault on indoor cats. I don’t care how many confined cats you have – what I care about is where they wander.”

But that is not true. His website is called “Cats to Go“. It has a section on how nice NZ would be with no cats at all. He advocates no one has a cat at all, rather than just keep them inside.

There is room to debate the SPCA policy on cat colonies. There is also room to have an education campaign on keeping cats indoor, putting a bell on them etc. A debate on those issues would be good.

But you can’t both have a sober sensible debate on that, and also be the hysterical person launching websites calling for all cats to go, and personally vilifying SPCA board members.

You can choose the option that gets lots of publicity for yourself, and achieves nothing but pisses people off. Or you can choose the harder option of trying to have a sensible sober debate on responsible cat ownership. It is a shame Morgan has chosen the former and goes for headlines over effectiveness.

No this isn’t a post on Graham Capill. It is back on the issue of cats. A reader e-mailed to say:

If Gareth Morgan had done anything sensible, like say putting “removing apex predators” in scholar.google.com, he would have found that it is well understood that removing a species such as cats (apex predator) from an ecosystem causes an explosion of smaller predators (meso predators).   In NZ that would be all the Mustelidae (Weasals, Stoats, Ferrets) and Rats.  It would also lead to an explosion in the numbers of mice who compete for food and possibly an increase in Hedgehogs (who also predate our birds).   Here’s an example of what he might have found http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01347.x/full   He could also have talked to some actual NZ ecologists, but hey.

Sci Blogs have had some good balanced posts on this also.

Adam Dudding at the SST profiles Gareth Morgan:

Setting aside the unprovoked Yank-baiting, let’s have a quick recap of the people to whom Morgan has recently offered free, potentially unwelcome, advice.

Cat-owners, obviously, and he embellished his position by telling The Atlantic magazine: “The most oft-heard and erroneous utterance we get here from cat owners is, ‘Oh but my pussy only kills rats and mice, he’d never harm a native bird.’ As you can see this denial verges on explicit stupidity.”

He told Wellington’s Phoenix football team (which he part-owns) it needed to start playing a more “attractive” attacking game (the team has since performed even worse than usual). Fans who disagree are “pathetic” and “don’t know much about the game anyway”, he told Radio Sport.

Last year he told the Greens they don’t understand economics, urged farmers to abandoned “environmental retards” Federated Farmers, and suggested the government totally restructure the tax and welfare systems.

He’s co-authored books setting the record straight on climate change (it’s happening), public health (it needs reform), the world’s fisheries (they’re running out), and the finance industry (it’s ropey). When his investment company, GMI, launched its own KiwiSaver fund in 2007, part of his pitch was that all the other providers were doing it wrong. When challenged last year about the fund’s underwhelming performance, he said investors and the financial media were ignorant.

Taking an interest in the world is one thing, but the sheer breadth of Morgan’s claimed areas of wisdom, and the fact that his personal wealth allows him the time to run around sharing it, have seen him become arguably New Zealand’s biggest know-all.

Everyone is ignorant and pathetic except Gareth it seems.

Naturally, he claims to know what he’s up to.

Apparently, behind the provocations and the droopy moustache lies the coolly calculating brain of a trained economist who still believes in the miracle of the market and the rationality of people – just so long as they’re well-informed (which isn’t to say he’s a fellow-traveller with the free-market fanatics of the ACT party, whom he considers “mad” and “disgusting”).

Questioning the status quo “is just a natural effect of being trained as an economist. You tend to be looking at the public good.”

His methods, as irritating as they may be, are simply about efficiently disseminating high-quality data. “You basically scatter the chooks and then you say, ‘Calm down. I’ve got your attention. Now look at the evidence.’ “

If only that was the case. But in reality his cat jihad is the exact opposite of what you’d expect from even a primary school economist. The most basic thing in economics is you look at both benefits and costs. Morgan has just done a rant about the cost of cats, and ignore any benefits. That isn’t high quality data. That is low quality polemics.

Eric Crampton does what Morgan didn’t, and applies economics to the cat issue. Eric also linked to a website showing with great humour how lethal cats are. Far far more effective than what Gareth Morgan did.

Also Claire Browning at Pundit exposes some hypocrisy:

Gareth’s speech to our 2012 conference was a doozy. A cautionary tale of the “green extreme”, on how “tub-thumping activism” was giving conservation a bad name, he rounded off by telling a 14 year old girl (a guest of ours, who stood up and bravely, passionately challenged him in front of a room of 300 people) that her question was “pathetic” – and somewhere in the middle of it all, offered this:

“2. … polarization of views on conservation – if you’re pro-conservation you’re anti economic growth. This needlessly alienates huge numbers of people from conservation that should be our constituency.”

“Considered conservationists need to have the courage now to disown publicly this behavior,” he said, and ensure that those responsible for it were marginalised.

Shouldn’t you at least practice what you preach? Browning also points out:

Gareth’s playing politics. He wants something moderate, if we’re lucky; he’s flying a kite for something extreme.

For better or worse, he’s started a predator-free New Zealand debate. Yay! I wish it were PFNZ we were debating, not cats! I agree with him: “some of the debate has been pretty facile” – chiefly, the information on his own website.

But there’s no use (my friend and former colleague Nicola) whiningabout how the results of this are “frankly disturbing” – rambling about how some of your best friends are cats, etc. He threw a grenade, and lit a fire – he is the grenade, his own wee self-contained incendiary device. Not much cause for complaint about the results, and Gareth sure isn’t complaining.

What we’ve also got is a sort of low-grade civil war in which – redubbing his own words to our conference – “if you’re pro-bird, you’re anti-cat”. And what’s really disturbing here is the lack of policy smarts about it.

Having found your problem, is the response well-targeted? Is it a proportional response? Benefits vs costs?

From the people who weren’t Gareth, we learned what those of us with cats already know: there’s no basis to vilify all cats. Not all house cats are hunters (I’m not offering this on my own observation, although this is also true). Even among those who are, overall, imperfectly, it probably works out:

And Claire provides lots of links.

Having your son earn you lots of money doesn’t make you an expert on everything.

This is not to say I think Morgan is of no value. I’m reading his book on Antarctica at the moment, and it is pretty good. I’ll do a review when I have finished. But any value from his energy and contributions is fast disappearing as he becomes just an angry ranting rich guy. Morgan should practice what he preaches and actually provide us with high quality data.

Richard Boock reviews his performance as a team owner:

If a presentation was to be made on “what not to do as a pro sports team owner”, Morgan’s example this season would be front and centre. It was funny enough when he started rebuking the local media for not being sufficiently sycophantic in their reporting, and threatening to take games away from Wellington unless more people attended. As a Twitter pal mentioned, it was like he was channelling Basil Fawlty, berating folk for daring to complain.

Still, Morgan’s most recent strategy, attacking his own fans’ views as “pathetic”, and “unsophisticated”, and suggesting many didn’t understand the game, was staggeringly funny even by his standards. Forget the pot and the kettle for a moment, the idea he thinks anything positive will come from slagging off his own customer base is standup comedy material. What will he do next to fans? Threaten to lock them out?

One could almost make a comedy show from it indeed!

As the story on Gareth Morgan’s call for a cat genocide is staying topical, I thought I’d elaborate on why it is such a near sociopathically bad idea.

First of all, I think most would agree that yes cats eats birds. And as far as I know you can not train a cat to only eat exotic birds and leave native birds alone, so cats eat native birds and it is bad for biodiversity if a species is wiped out.

I would certainly dispute that non-feral cats alone have killed any species, as do experts.. As almost all cats live in urban areas, any impact from domestic cats is geographically limited. It is estimated 25 million birds are killed annually by predators (possums, stoats, cats feral and domestic). It is also estimated that 1 million birds are killed annually by power lines, so maybe someone will advocate we get rid of electricity to help native birds. And wind turbines are a massive killer of birds overseas – around 1,000 per wind turbine.

Now most would agree it is beneficial to not have native birds killed. But do we as a country ban wind turbines and ban electricity lines, to protect birds? Of course we don’t. Why? Because the benefits from wind turbines and power lines exceed the detrimental impact on birds.

So the question is do we get benefits from domesticated cats? Now I absolutely accept not everyone likes cats. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether people should be allowed to have a cat as a pet because they do want one.

And this is where I think Gareth Morgan and others who advocate NZ should rid itself of domestic cats have something wrong with them, and are lacking in some basic human empathy. Cats can and do play a huge role in quality of life for many New Zealanders, especially more elderly New Zealanders. The companionship they get from cats is incredibly powerful, and the bond a human can have with a pet can be incredibly strong. If you are a elderly New Zealander living by yourself (and a dog is not an option as they need exercise), a cat can make a huge difference to quality of life. And to be honest anyone who thinks a few birds are more important than the happiness so many people get from their cats, has a warped sense of priorities.

Cat owners should of course be responsible. Stick a bell on your cat and get it spayed. But  advocating that NZ become the only country (except maybe Antarctica  in the world that has no cats is just bonkers, and anyone who seriously advocates it has what I regard as very warped values.  Nothing wrong with not liking cats yourself, but something very wrong in advocating no one should have a cat.

Amelia Wade at NZ Herald reports:

Top New Zealand economist Gareth Morgan is launching a campaign to eradicate domestic cats.

Dr Morgan has set up a website calledCats to Go, where he calls the animals sadists and natural-born killers that destroy native wildlife.

SPCA chief executive Bob Kerridge called the scheme “hare-brained” and offensive.

He understood Dr Morgan wanted people to stop buying new cats and to not replace pets when they die.

“People consider cats to be a member of the family. So he’s trying to, quite frankly, take away the civil liberties we all have to choose who we want in our home.”

What a fruitcake campaign. Absolute nuts. Why not also offer a toaster to every family who has one child only, as children are also bad for nature.

You should read the site – it is hilarious. Chapters include “Your domestic cat is not innocent” and he imagines a world without cats:

Imagine a New Zealand teeming with native wildlife, penguins on the beach, Kiwis roaming about in your garden.

Yes getting rid of cats will lead to kiwis in every garden, and penguins on every beach!

This is so nutty, I’d withdraw any funds I have in his KiwiSaver scheme, if I I had any there. I also like this FAQ:

So are you suggesting that I just go out and have my cat euthanised?

 Not necessarily but that is an option.

So Morgan isn’t saying you must exterminate your pussy – just that he would like you to.

Paul Thompson at The Press writes:

 I have seen some horrible things on a football training field – punches and tantrums thrown, nasty episodes of bullying and grown men in tears.

But most chilling of all was the photograph of Gareth Morgan taking part in a Wellington Phoenix practice last week.

Morgan is a brilliant economist and generous philanthropist and deserves praise for investing cash in the Phoenix.

But he doesn’t belong anywhere near the training pitch. Whatever he is trying to achieve isn’t working. His meddling is damaging the team he part owns.

Ownership gives him and his Welnix partners the right to do whatever they like with their club. But that doesn’t mean that those are the right things to do.

The Phoenix are in full-blown crisis. The coach has been emasculated by owners who have issued a directive on how the Phoenix should play despite having no knowledge of the game. The players are confused and fearful for their future. The tactics are all over the place.

The team is now bottom of the league and, worse, is displaying a level of incompetence that strongly suggests that is where it belongs.

Harsh, but not unfair. The best tea owners are silent ones!

You have to feel sorry for Herbert who, despite having a good coaching record in the A-League, has been rendered powerless to impose tactics that will get results.

He is compliant with the owners’ wishes because he clearly has little option but to publicly support their whims. He is clearly held in such low regard that, despite being the football expert, he is not running the show.

This season is looming as a train wreck. There appears to be a willingness to sacrifice short-term results – otherwise known as winning – for an ephemeral, long-term pipe dream.

But winning matters to the fans and it certainly matters to the players as well, who look shell-shocked to find themselves in such a parlous position.

It is time to allow Herbert to get on with the job he is paid to do and should be accountable for – to put out a winning side and then to build on that over time.

There’s an old saying – winning isn’t everything, but losing isn’t anything!

Gareth Morgan writes at NZ Herald:

Sir Owen doesn’t like the fact that we have different levies to reflect different accident rates in different industries or with different kinds of vehicles.

His assumption is that people naturally take all care necessary and don’t need financial incentives – higher levies – to self-manage their risk. Sadly that is a sweeping assumption that has been shown to be wrong.

The history of the world teaches us that incentives matter.

My own experience with the wonderful world of ACC over the last 18 months has involved trying to understand what has been driving the bills for on-road motorcyclist injuries through the roof.

That work has revealed that we could do this a lot better. Already the annual relicensing bill for larger motorcycles is more than for cars, and that’s despite the fact that the average bike traverses way fewer kilometres a year than the average car.

In fact research we’ve done at the Motorcycle Safety Advisory Council indicates that the risk of serious and expensive injury on a motorcycle is around 45 times higher per person-kilometre travelled as it is for occupants of other vehicles.

Ouch, that is a huge difference. It is right then that motorcyclists should pay higher premiums, rather than motorists subsidise their accidents.

It gets worse. We also found that up to 31 per cent of our injuries arise from incidents involving no other vehicles. In other words we do this to ourselves because we can’t handle the road conditions.

Now of course we can blame the road as some of us are wont to do, but the reality is in most cases it’s pure incompetence or lack of self-management.

Any charging regime that gives riders an incentive to ride within their level of competence, to self-manage risk by wearing better protective clothing for example, or even lifting competency levels has to be a win-win doesn’t it?

Sir Owen might say no, that all care and no responsibility is the right ACC model and motorcyclists’ natural preference for self-preservation is sufficient.

But he’d be wrong and the rocketing bill is the evidence.

Agreed.

At present we are charged for our ACC cost on a per-bike basis. Even though you can only ride one motorcycle at a time, the more bikes you have the more you pay.

It’s some sort of wealth tax I guess but it bears no relation to the risk of injury.

Of course we do the same with cars but given that the cost to ACC of motorcycling injuries is way more per rider than it is for other vehicle types, this disjoint between risk and negative reward (the premium) is material.

The conclusion I reached, once I got to grips with what was happening in the motorcycling injury scene and what is driving ACC’s bills in this area, is that it’s pretty obvious that the levy should be charged per rider – say through an annual rider licence renewal fee.

This makes sense to me. Not sure about the practicalities, but ideally all of the vehicle insurance funding should be based on the driver, not on the number of vehicles.

Here’s a first pass at what I’d do:

* Introduce a no-claims bonus – the annual rider licence fee should be discounted for the number of successive years you have maintained your motorcycle licence but had no ACC claims.

* An excess – there needs to be a limited discount on the annual rider licence fee available to the extent you are prepared to self-insure. All riders should be liable to pay say the first $200 of any ACC claim – this at least gets rid of expensive but trivial claims. Then as well as that, a discount should be available, say up to 10 per cent on your licence fee, if the rider is prepared to foot the bill for a further $500 of injury claims.

* A break in maintaining your annual rider licence renewal should trigger a user-pays relicensing process. Obviously by imposing the ACC levy via an annual renewal of your riding licence there is a strong incentive for riders who aren’t intending to ride not to renew that class of their licence. That’s a good thing because it enables the gate to be controlled for returning riders to ensure their competency levels are adequate. Injuries to returning riders have been a source of much angst and expense. The extent of the relicensing required should depend on how long a break from riding has been taken.

* A limit to the income replacement component to ACC’s entitlement claims can be opted for by the rider when they relicense each year. It is a fact that riders with high salaries who get injured cost us a hell of a lot more in the levies we pay. Why don’t we put a limit on income replacement, or impose an additional levy if you want income replacement above a certain level? That would reduce significantly this component of the entitlement claims made on ACC that the rest of us are compelled to fund.

All good ideas worth considering.

Under this regime those who got their motorcycle licence years ago and haven’t ridden for yonks, or at least relicensed every year, face hurdles getting back on the bike. We know returning riders are a greater injury risk and we need them to be adequately competent for the bike they get on when they return.

By switching from ACC levies being imposed on the bike to imposing them on the rider we can control the gate on who is competent to ride a motorcycle. A five-year break, say, would require a full testing process again. Shorter breaks might demand a rider training course.

Yes this is a further assault on Sir Owen’s incorporation of accident insurance within the social welfare regime.

But then unbridled social welfare without limits, where accountability is a dirty word, is a very poor piece of social engineering anyway.

The key with ACC is to achieve the benefits of avoiding litigation, so retaining the benefits of universal entitlement but all the while providing incentives for self-management.

Hear hear.

TVNZ report:

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Gareth Morgan has taken a swipe at the Green Party and some conservationists.

He says that the majority of New Zealanders see them as “lefties”, “extremists” or “nutters,” which in the long run is holding back their cause of protecting the environment.

At Forest and Bird’s conference, Face up to the Future, Morgan also took aim at some conservationist groups he calls the “green extreme” or “loony left”.

In particular, he says that their opposition to mining and fracking is not evidence-based, and fails to consider employment and the economy.

Exactly. Too often they are anti-science and ignore the evidence. We need more evidence-based decision making, and less emotion-based decision making.

Hat Tip: Keeping Stock

As Labour retreats to 1970s protectionism, Gareth Morgan points out the consequences:

If foreigners can’t use New Zealand dollars to buy New Zealand assets why would they be willing to hold New Zealand dollars? …

Foreigners who sell us the imports we covet don’t really want to be paid in our quaint currency. So a pass-the- parcel process occurs until some foreigner is found who will either extend us credit (by holding our Reserve Bank’s IOUs) or buys one of our assets, thus giving us the foreign currency to buy those imports we crave.

So what happens when you try and stop foreign investment?

Ban foreigners from buying our assets, though, and there certainly will be a sharp shock to the system.

If foreigners can’t use New Zealand dollars to buy New Zealand assets why would they be willing to hold New Zealand dollars?

Those dollars would become like debentures in just another New Zealand finance company, in quick time worth much less than their face value – in effect the kiwi would cease to have any asset backing. It would fall and that would deter further lending from overseas. …

A prohibition of land and business sales to foreigners would be one solution – it would drive down the currency and scare off foreign lenders and investors. Argentina is currently banning greater exports of its beef despite huge international prices, simply because they want to eat it themselves and at cheap prices.

I can’t imagine how that might do anything but damage the supply of Argentine beef but it shows these sorts of whacky interventions are not unheard of. Ban land sales to foreigners but expect lower incomes as a result.

Lower incomes and even lower purchasing power as a falling dollar will push up the prices of many goods.

I have a financial interest in a dairy farm and processing factory in Brazil. For that economy such foreign investment brings growth and jobs – and milk it would otherwise have to import.

It sees also a technology transfer from New Zealand to another country – the real worth after all in our dairy industry lies in the decades of intellectual capital, productivity and technology that we have been silly enough to roll up into our per hectare land price. The benefit to New Zealand from that activity is significant as well – an inflow of profits we wouldn’t otherwise have.

If instead I’d invested in dairying in New Zealand I would simply have pushed land prices up and, I’m reasonably sure, have made less money. So it’s being argued by the xenophobes that a win-win for New Zealand and Brazil is worse than if I’d spent my money developing a farm up the slopes of the Southern Alps.

Get real. Foreign investment is how countries develop.

Remember that every transaction needs a willing seller and a willing buyer. If you ban sellers from being able to sell to the highest bidder, you are reducing the value of farms to their current farmers. The PM has also pointed out that this may push the value of the farm below the equity in it – ie banks will be more likely to bankrupt struggling farmers under Labour’s policy.