From last week, Stuff reports:

Four of the top 10 most congested roads in New Zealand are in Wellington.

The SUNA Traffic Channel made an analysis of major metropolitan roads using speed and vehicle data from thousands of vehicles carrying GPS systems.

1. Southern motorway around the Ellerslie Panmure Highway exit (Auckland)
2. Northwestern motorway between Great North Road and Rosebank Road (Auckland)
3. Northern Motorway between Tristram Ave and Upper Harbour Highway (Auckland) 
4. Johnsonville to Porirua Motorway from Takapu Road to Westchester Drive (Wellington)
5. Southern Motorway between Wrights Road and State Highway 75 (Christchurch)
6. Western Hutt Road (Wellington)
7. Wellington Urban Motorway (Wellington)
8. Southwestern Motorway between Rimu Road and Onehunga Harbour Road (Auckland) 
9. Pakuranga Highway/South-Eastern Highway (Auckland).
10. Centennial Highway between Johnsonville and Newlands roads (Wellington)

Auckland gridlock is worse, but this shows Wellington congestion is still a big issue. Transmission Gully will help with some of that, but not all.

The Dom Post editorial:

Marriage should be the union between two people. Whether they are both men or both women should be no business of the state. …

There is also no reasonable explanation as to why gay weddings would undermine the sanctity of marriage. Each marriage is an individual union between two people. It stretches credulity to suggest that heterosexual couples will suddenly decide not to tie the knot, or to get divorced, just because gay couples have the right to marry.

Although gay couples can enjoy many of the benefits of marriage through civil unions, the fact remains that denying them the right to marry purely because of their sexuality relegates them to second-class citizens.

The law as it stands belongs to a society that disappeared long ago. It is discriminatory and it is time it was changed.

A good editorial. In 15 years time, people will look back with surprise that this issue was even controversial.

Enjoy.

Stuff reports:

It’s probably the first time in history that teddy bears have defeated generals.

Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko has sacked two of the nation’s top defence officials after two Swedish advertising agency employees piloted a light plane into the country’s heavily guarded airspace, dropping 879 teddy bears decked out in parachutes and slogans supporting human rights. …

The Belarusian ruler nicknamed ”Europe’s last dictator” on Tuesday (local time) fired the nation’s air defence chief and the head of the Border Guards service and reprimanded several other top security officials, his office said.

Thomas Mazetti and Hannah Frey, the two Swedes behind the stunt, said they wanted to show support for Belarusian human rights activists and embarrass the country’s military, a pillar of Lukashenko’s power. …

The Swedes’ yearlong preparations involved learning how to pilot the three-seater Jodel aircraft and purchasing the plane. They financed the 150,000 euro cost of the stunt with their work in a small advertising agency.

The pair said they were inspired by similar protests staged by Belarusian activists, who have at times arranged plush toys in such a way that they appeared to be protesting the regime.

”Our campaign was a campaign in support of that. An airlift in support of the teddy bears, from teddy bears around the world,” Mazetti said.

The flight began and ended at the Pociunai airfield in southern Lithuania. Thunderstorms that day may have made it harder for Belarus to scramble aircraft to intercept their plane, said Mazetti, though he acknowledged they risked being shot down.

”We flew an airplane at 50 metres, that’s 150 feet, for one and a half hours inside Belarus. Of course we were aware of the risks. But it was a calculated risk and we thought we needed to take that risk ourselves – we couldn’t hire anyone,” he told The Associated Press during an interview in Berlin, where the two are currently staying. ”But we will not do it again tomorrow, if I put it that way.”

What an innovative stunt, albeit a risky one.

I’ve met members of the Belarus opposition, and things are very bad in that country. Eventually they will get to claim their inherent freedoms, as most of that region has.

Stuff reports:

Giving coroners’ recommendations “more teeth” is a necessary change, the chief coroner says.

A review of the coronial system and the 2006 Coroners Act was announced yesterday by Courts Minister Chester Borrows.

It will be led by the Justice Ministry and will consider the role coroners have in making recommendations, as well as whether agencies should be required to formally respond to those recommendations. …

Chief coroner Judge Neil MacLean said it was important that agencies responded to coroners’ recommendations, whether it was to agree, disagree or state there was no money to make the changes.

“I’ve made no secret of it with the ministry and relevant ministers that I’m interested in seeing if we might follow the Victorian model and get a little more teeth to recommendations.”

At present, coronial services are provided by the chief coroner, 15 coroners and support staff . For the year ending June 30, coroners took jurisdiction of 3320 cases as well as providing advice on a further 2633.

I’m unsure about whether making it mandatory for agencies to respond is a good idea. Of course all recommendations should ideally be considered, but a formal response to 3,320 cases a year (not sure how many involves recs) could involve a lot of bureaucracy.

But even putting the number aside, a related issue is the quality of the recommendations. Each coroner is independent and can recommend anything. The job of a coroner is to focus on reducing deaths, but not on getting the balance of risk right, and this means some recommendations are impractical or worse. As an example, the Herald reports:

A coroner has recommended that a licence should be needed to hire nail guns – a move labelled an overreaction by DIYers.

And many recall the seat belts for quad bikes recommendation. Do we need a government department to really look into the pros and cons of needing a licence to hire a nail gun? I’m unconvinced.

What could be a partial solution is to have recommendations go to the Office of the Chief Coroner, and ones that are endorsed by him or her, then need a response?

Rob Stock at Stuff reports:

The parliamentarians found it was more difficult to calculate an average tax rate for middle income New Zealanders, but an indicative comparator for someone on an average wage was 17.9 per cent, although Working for Families entitlements would reduce the average net tax rate to 8.4 per cent for a single-earner parent with one child, or 2.3 per cent with two children.

Yep, most people who have children pay little or no tax.

Since the changes in tax rates things will have changed a little, and the wealthiest will have seen their effective tax rates drop on paper at least, because the IRD has been strenuously pursuing them to extract more tax, and the IRD expects to bring in an extra half a billion dollars in revenue from the high net wealth individuals in the next 10 years through its crackdown.

Good – I support a low rate, broad base, with few exceptions.

But actually, when it comes to income taxes, New Zealand is something of a tax haven, because when Working for Families rebates are taken into account, 40 to 50 percent of households “effectively pay no net income tax, and roughly 40 to 50 percent of total net income tax is paid by those in the top 10 per cent income bracket, suggesting that the tax burden falls most heavily on the wealthy”.

Indeed. I’ll be blogging more on this, based on some interesting tax data I got under the OIA from the IRD.

Following on the cats that look like David Cunliffe page, we now have the weasels that look like Colin Craig page.

I especially like the Colin wonders where to put his paws page.

I’ve blogged at Curiablog the results of the One News and 3 News polls.

Both polls have National up and Labour and Greens down. Shearer’s preferred PM numbers have also dropped, which will put the acid on him from his caucus.

I think the polls reflect that the Government has got through the various distractions and issues of the first six months, and is now concentrating on implementing its programme. The other factor is that Labour are not a convincing alternative yet, and in fact are going backwards.

Was invited to Gryphon Theatre on Friday night to see Stagecraft put on their version of ENRON. It was my second outing to Gryphon Theatre, which is one of the many small venues around Wellington. They are located by the corner of Ghuznee and Taranaki Street.

Was so caught up in pre-show conversation at JJ Murphy’s, that we only checked the time at 7.59 pm and was a 8.00 pm session. Luckily only one block away to run to, so we got there only a minute late, and got in before they started.

The play is written by Lucy Prebble, and based on the book “The smartest guys in the room”, which has been at the West End and Broadway. It did not do well at Broadway after a hostile NY Times review, but did get critical acclaim from many other reviewers.

I was worried that the play might be an anti-capitalism rant, but it wasn’t. With some great props, and skillful acting and directing, the downfall of Enron was accurately chronicled. Three of the four main characters were actual people – Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow. Claudia Roe was an amalgam character.

For those who don’t know, the bankruptcy of Enron was the then largest collapse in US history, and it also led to the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen accountancy firm. I had never got into the details of exactly what happened at Enron apart from a general knowledge of mass fraud. Well the play actually informs you of what happened. You see the the various techniques used to make it look like they were profitable, when they were not. It should be a required play for first year accountancy students.

20,000 people lost their job with the collapse, $35 billion of debt unpaid, including $1.2b of staff pensions.

There was some great use of props. The Enron board was portrayed by three actors with large mouse heads and blindfolds. It was a very effective visual metaphor. And you can only love the raptors, representing the nominally independent companies they transferred their debt to – shown as actual raptors feeding on dollar bills.

For a company to be independent it had to have 3% different shareholding. So what Enron did was set up raptor 1, 97% Enron owned and 3% owned by raptor 2. raptor 2 was 97% Enron owned and 3% owned by raptor 3. This carried on through to raptor 4, which only needed independent holdings of 3% of 3% of 3% of 3%, which they got off firms such as the Lehman Brothers (and you will love how they are presented as a pair of Siamese twins).

Tim Yarrow played Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO. He started the play as a socially awkward accountant and became the confident CEO consumed with his own brilliance. John Chalmers as the good old boy Ken Lay, who didn’t want to know the details. Luke Gumbley played Andrew Fastow, the ambitious CFO who put it all together. Michelle Jordan was the fourth main character playing Claudia Roe, the female excutive who battled their plans, but not too hard.

They had a large ensemble who provided delightful interludes as staff, as raptors, as a a chorus, as news presenters etc. Emma Yarrow stood out with her singing. It is not a musical, but it did have some brief singing and dancing interludes which were fun.

The play is a long one, lasting two and a half hours (with an interval). However I never lost interest, as you really wanted to see how the story would be told, as it moved towards the inevitable conclusion.

Enron is on until 11 August. I enjoyed it. Despite the serious topic, they managed to be both fun and interesting. If you’ve ever wondered how a company can lose $35 billion and yet show a profit, then go see the play.

David Fisher reports:

A ginger beer maker whose advertising offered to swap a ginger child for the drink has apologised for offending people, and has asked for police help given the strength of the criticism.

Nothing more scary than an angry ginga. Yes, I do mean you Belinda.

The public backlash left Hakanoa Ginger Beer maker Rebekah Hay frightened and in tears.

“I’m sorry I offended people. It was the reason behind the campaign that made us say yes. I wouldn’t have done it if it was just a joke.”

She revealed that she only agreed to the campaign after a marketing manager, Dave King, came to her with the idea after his ginger-haired son had been bullied.

“He’s a really sweet kid,” said Mr King of his 8-year-old son who lost his school bag to four bullies. The contents were tipped to the ground and the bag thrown over a fence after jibes about his ginger hair. “When I told people about it, they said ‘that’s what you get for being ginger’.”

The reaction angered Mr King and he wanted to do something about it. He dreamed up the campaign and told his staff to find a ginger beer company that could be used as a vehicle.

So the campaign was actually to raise awareness of ginga bullying.

For the record any bullying of any kid for any reason is bad, and reflects more on the bully than the recipient.  Adult humour and school age bullying should not be conflated.

Quite a few of my friends hassle me because I have Jewish heritage. I’ve got no problem with that, and I hassle them back in turn on whatever basis I can find. If however a kid got bullied at school for being Jewish, that would be bad and wrong – but it would not be because of adult humour.

The Herald on Sunday editorial says:

What is plain is that the law, which Prime Minister John Key said “anyone can drive a bus through”, is hopelessly inadequate. Local Government Minister David Carter confirmed this week that the Local Electoral Act will be amended before next year’s local body elections – but it seems the intention is only to bring it into line with the rules of the Electoral Act (which covers MPs). The local version sets no limit on the number or size of anonymous donations. Nor does it stop the use of trusts to ensure donors’ anonymity.

But it is time to go further and stop anonymous donations altogether. Nobody expects disclosure of the source of each coin thrown into a plastic bucket at a meeting. But it is fundamentally inimical to the idea of democracy that people can donate large amounts of money to political campaigns without voters’ knowing about it. Generous donors don’t give money to politicians without expecting something in return, and we should know who is giving what, not for the hell of it, but so that politicians’ behaviour can be assessed in the light of the largesse.

I can only assume the editorial writer doesn’t know the Electoral Act well. It does effectively ban large anonymous donations. No party or candidate can accept an anonymous donation of over $1,500.

There is an avenue where a donor can donate anonymously through the Electoral Commission, so long as they sign statements swearing the recipient party does not know of the donation. It wasn’t used a lot, and I actually support it being removed.

One can debate about whether the limit for anonymous donations should be $1,500 and what the disclosure limit should be ($1,500 for candidates, $15,000 for parties) and should these limits applies to local body campaigns.

Ideally the disclosure limit would be variable based on the size of the campaign. A $2,000 donation to an Auckland mayoral candidate is probably 0.2% of their total campaign spending, while the same donation to a small district council might be 10% of their total spending.

Rodney Hide writes in the HoS:

The Marriage Act 1955 doesn’t say I can’t marry a man or that a woman can’t marry a woman.

But the courts have ruled that it wasn’t Parliament’s intent to enable same-sex marriage and that it’s up to Parliament, not the courts, to declare whether same-sex marriages are lawful, not the courts. It’s a fair call.

Back when the Marriage Act was enacted, homosexual activity was a crime carrying a maximum of life imprisonment. It’s a safe bet that parliamentarians then weren’t envisaging they were passing a law that would enable two men to apply for a marriage licence.

A very safe bet.

But even then the law had softened towards homosexuality.

Parliamentarians in the early days were hard core and set the penalty for homosexual activity as death. The death penalty for buggery was removed in 1867.

The 1893 New Zealand Criminal Code was still discouraging: “Everyone is liable to imprisonment with hard labour for life, and, according to his age, to be flogged or whipped, once, twice or thrice, who commits buggery either with a human being or with any other living creature”.

The flogging for buggery was removed in 1941 and hard labour removed in 1954.

The 1961 Crimes Act reduced the maximum sentence for sodomy between consenting adult males to seven years’ prison.

The big change was in 1986, when Parliament voted by a narrow margin to decriminalise homosexual activity. Consensual sex between men was no longer a crime.

A very interesting history lesson. And I’m willing to bet that at every stage, there were probably opponents who warned that this law change would be awful for New Zealand. They were wrong every time. Hell, as an 18 year old student I was against, due to the fact my views were based on fear and ignorance, rather than principle.

Is there a single MP alive today who voted against decriminalising homosexual activity in 1986, and doesn’t regret it? I doubt it. People may be surprised at some of those who voted against.

Stan Rodger, Peter Tapsell, John Terris, Whetu Tirakatene-Sullivan, John Banks, Bill Birch, Jim Bolger, Philip Burdon, Michael Cox, Warren Cooper, Paul East, Tony Friedlander, Jim Gerard, Doug Graham, Doug Kidd, Denis Marshall, Roger McClay, Don McKinnon, Jim McLay, Winston Peters, Ruth Richardson, Lockwood Smith, Simon Upton, Venn Young were some of the 44 votes against. It only passed 49 votes to 44.

Only three National MPs voted for it – George Gair, Katherine O’Regan and Ian McLean.

I know a lot of those who voted against it, and they are good people. But I bet you the vast majority of them 25 years on regret their vote. It must be tough to have on your record that you voted for consensual sex between two adults to remain a criminal offence.

While I respect legitimate and sincere views against same sex marriage, I do think there will be quite a few MPs who vote against who will end up with regrets in the future. Same sex marriage is absolutely inevitable in my view, as support for it is massively high amongst under 35s. And in 15 years time, nothing will have changed except some gay couples will be married, rather than just in a civil union.

But the MPs who voted against will find that in 15 years time, many New Zealanders will find it incomprehensible that they voted against allowing same sex couples to marry – just as in 2010 we find it incomprehensible that such good MPs such as  Jim Bolger, Philip Burdon, Michael Cox, Paul East, Doug Graham, Doug Kidd, Don McKinnon, Jim McLay, Ruth Richardson, Simon Upton and Venn Young voted to retain a law which made consensual adult sex punishable by up to seven years in jail.

Can anyone find an MP who voted No in 1986, and would vote the same way today on the same law?

Consensual sex between women was never illegal in New Zealand. Early legislators thought such a thing impossible and didn’t like to think about it and so never criminalised it.

Good old Queen Victoria!

Rodney concludes:

I have enormous respect for conservative values and traditional ways of doing things. But here’s the question for those pushing traditional values against same-sex marriage: what tradition do you want our Parliament to push back to? The death penalty? Flogging? Hard labour? Life imprisonment? Seven years’ jail?

Our Parliament has a sad and sorry history in its treatment of two adults who just want to love and be with one another.

Let’s hope with Louisa Wall’s bill that history is finally made just that: history.

Absolutely.

The NZ Defence Force has announced:

The New Zealand Defence Force can confirm that two personnel serving with the NZ Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan have been killed during an incident in the North East of Bamyan Province.

At approximately 1900hrs (NZ time) yesterday, NZ Defence Force personnel came to the assistance of local security forces who encountered suspected insurgents near a village south of Do Abe, in the North East.

A further six NZ Defence Force personnel were wounded during the incident, and they were evacuated to a military hospital.

Two local security personnel were also killed, and a further 11 personnel, including one civilian, were wounded.

The Defence Force is in the process of informing and supporting next of kin. The Defence Force will not release the name of the personnel for 24 hours to give the families time and space to grieve.

Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant General Rhys Jones said, “We are deeply saddened by this loss and, on behalf of the entire New Zealand Defence Force, I extend my deepest sympathies to the family, colleagues and friends of the personnel involved.”

It sounds like a very nasty attack, with a total of 4 dead, and 17 wounded. Six kiwis wounded and two dead is, off memory, the largest number of causalities since maybe Vietnam? Anyone know?

As always thoughts are with the family, colleagues and friends of those killed and wounded.

Some have tried to suggest that the PRT presence in Afghanistan is just about building things, and that they are not there as soldiers. This is a sad reminder of how untrue that is.

There is a website called Medals per capita. According to it NZ is:

• 1st for weighted medals per capita (gold=3, silver = 2, bronze = 1)
• 1st for gold medals per capita
• 2nd for all medals per capita
• 8th for medals by GDP

The site is maintained by NZer Craig Nevil-Manning.

Nice to see us doing pretty well.

A Green campaign I support:

 This week the trial of three members of the Russian feminist punk group “Pussy Riot” started in Moscow.

They may have been rude and they may have been offensive but the charges are clearly politically motivated and totally disproportionate to the offence. Amnesty International considers the activists to be prisoners of conscience and are campaigning to free them.

Today Jan Logie, Denise Roche and I paid a visit to the Russian Embassy in Wellington to hand over a letter saying: …

We agree with Amnesty International that they are prisoners of conscience and we ask your Government to release these young women.

Being offensive to either Putin or a religion should not result in anyone going to jail.

The three band members. Russia continues to go backwards.

Stuff reports:

Police have been stunned but delighted by the drop in arrests for drunken driving by teenagers – almost a year after the zero alcohol limit was brought in for the under-20s.

Figures released by police under the Official Information Act show that in first nine months of the new law coming into force on August 7 last year, 3091 youths aged 15-19 were arrested for drink driving.

The figure for the 12 months before the law change was 6414 – tracking towards an ‘‘absolutely brilliant’’ change, acting national manager road policing Superintendent Rob Morgan said.

Police had expected the introduction of the law to lead to more offences overall for young drivers, but it appeared as if the law change was acting as a deterrent  ‘‘… certainly these results are very encouraging,’’ he said.

This is excellent. It shows the value of laws that target correctly.

In fact youth drink driving has been declining for several years, which shows that the age of purchase being 18 is not a barrier to safer roads.

Fran O’Sullivan writes:

I’ve really drunk the Kool Aid when it comes to the inspirational blueprint for Christchurch’s new CBD. It is a stunner. Compact. Cutting edge. Green. Sustainable.

It was crunched out in just over 100 days; a brilliant demonstration of that old maxim “pressure makes a diamond”.

It is also a plan that all New Zealanders need to embrace.

I doubt many of us seriously appreciated that the whole of New Zealand is pretty much a seismic zone until the devastating Canterbury earthquakes hit.

Yeah I thought it was just Wellington that was going to get a big one.

But I’ll never forget the look of abject horror on the faces of the hundreds of people who poured out of the Christchurch CBD after the 6.3 magnitude quake that struck on February 22, 2011 … or the grim chat I had with Mayor Bob Parker at the Christchurch Art Gallery shortly afterwards when he told me “there has been serious death”. Nor will I forget the sincerity of former US Secretary of State Richard Armitage, also in Christchurch when the quake struck, who later that afternoon told me the United States had instantly offered assistance from its own military based in Hawaii.

Disasters do bring out the best in people, as we band together. The memory for me is the Australian police officers and others landing in Christchurch to cheery crowds.

Key has now ordered them to get the L-shaped frame of parks which will surround the new CBD in place by the end of 2013. Decisions will be made super fast. Most will bypass the Resource Management Act.

The tempo will be fast.

If anyone doubts just how fast officialdom can work when the whip is cracked just consider the AMI stadium. David McConnell’s Hawkins Construction got that up in 11 weeks.

Which has proved to be excellent.

The brute reality is that before the quakes struck Christchurch was effectively dying. The very compactness of this new city heart will ensure its vibrancy.

Something I have said also.

What if other New Zealand cities – particularly Auckland – were given the tools so they too could follow Christchurch’s example and wipe the barriers that stymie economic growth?

Hear hear. Matthew Hooton also writes in NBR:

The government has created a major political risk for itself given the sheer brilliance of its new Christchurch plan.

I try to strictly avoid writing here about anything I am working on in my day job but, like everything else that has happened in Christchurch these last 21 months, this is a once-in-a-lifetime exception.

The Christchurch plan is the result of two madcap ideas by sometimes uneasy bedfellows, Christchurch mayor Bob Parker and earthquake czar Gerry Brownlee.

  Mr Parker led his council’s “Share an Idea” campaign where the people of Christchurch got to say what they wanted in their new city.  

It wasn’t the typically stifling local government “consultation” exercise.  Lawyers, formal submissions and correct spelling and grammar were not welcome.  People just got to scribble down in their own words what they wanted.

Over 100,000 Cantabrians responded, more than a quarter of Christchurch’s population.  The campaign became the first community engagement programme outside Europe to win the international Co-Creation Association’s supreme award and it did so unanimously.

The lawyers and lobbyists who make it their business to get between the public and their elected officials were sidelined.

I wasn’t aware of the award.

The plan is radical and far more clean, green, politically-correct and urban-design-y than would be expected to be signed off by the sometimes gruff and usually conservative Mr Brownlee.  There are all sorts of parks and art and culture hubs and so forth.  Christchurch will be the most beautiful city in the world.

But the plan is far more commercially astute than might be expected from the urban designers and creative types who prepared it. 

It halves the size of the CBD, making land scarce to improve returns per square metre, creating competition among investors and developers for the best spaces.  There is going to be a gold rush.

What is interesting is that the Property Council has welcomed the plan. They represent the property owners who have the capital that is essential to making the plan a reality. They were negative on the original plan, but have been supportive of this final one, which is a good and important thing.

Decisions will be made on urban design resource consents within five working days, by a three-person committee representing the government, the city council and Ngai Tahu and they will not then need to be notified under the Resource Management Act.

Proposals will of course need to be pretty, clean and green and fit the plan but the tradeoff is that developers get a final answer in a week.

Mr Parker’s city council has then resolved to make final decisions on all other aspects of building consent applications within a fortnight. …

Do Aucklanders need to wait for Rangitoto to erupt before Len Brown will launch a community engagement programme about its spatial plan as good as Mr Parker’s “Share an Idea”?

Do Dunedites need to suffer some sort of biblical-type flood before their leaders will develop an innovative 100-day plan to deal with some of the same long-term economic challenges that were faced by Christchurch?

Do Wellingtonians need to suffer their major earthquake before they get access to 24-hour investment services, five-day resource consent decisions and two-week building consents?

Does the Waikato need to be devastated by mad cow disease before delays at the OIO and Immigration Service are sorted out?

For that matter, why on earth doesn’t the government roll out its bold, visionary Christchurch approach on a nationwide basis and just slash all the barriers to economic growth that still exist everywhere but Canterbury?

A roadmap to growth.

NZ Herald reports:

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has been accused of misrepresenting her appearance in a United Nations website profile picture.

She was appointed Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme in 2009.

Her profile page on the UN website carries a biography and high-resolution version of the picture.

John Creser, of Wellington, complained to the UN ethics office that Helen Clark had misrepresented her image on the website, saying it was wrong for her to use a computer-generated image, or avatar.

This reminds me of the 2002 or 2005 campaign when they used a similar photo on the billboards, and at a photo op of one going up a eight year old kid asked Helen “Is that you, when you were younger” which was priceless.

The joke was that if Helen tried to travel on a passport with her “official” photo, then she would be stopped at the border.

This week on Q+A, charter schools: a bold new innovation to save failing pupils or an experiment putting our kids’ achievement at risk?

The government this week laid out the framework for what it’s now calling Partnership Schools. While the education ministers won’t front on the controversial new policy, Political Editor Corin Dann will debate the pros and cons with the scheme’s architect, ACT party president Catherine Isaac and staunch critic, NZEI President Ian Leckie. (1+2 live in Akld)

Then, ‘The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the earth’ is a new book by science writer Fred Pearce. While Kiwis fret about the Crafar Farms sale, the super-rich are gobbling up vast tracts of land all over the globe. Should we be worried about foreign ownership on a grand scale? Or is it progress? And what does it mean for New Zealand land-owners? Pearce speaks to Jessica Mutch. (1+1 pre-rec at 7.20am)

And we’ll debate the Waitangi Tribunal’s interim ruling on water rights and exclusively reveal details from this weekend’s One News-Colmar Brunton poll with this week’s panel: Dr Raymond Miller, former Labour minister and Waipareira Trust CEO John Tamihere and UNITE union leader and columnist Matt McCarten.

Plus, a surprise guest as a wee bonus. All on Q+A.

Broadcast on TV 1 Sunday at 9 am

1. Steve Tew, CEO NZ Rugby Union on the Deloitte Report on rugby finances; privatising Super 15 franchises and the economics of the All Blacks.
2. Colin James on the week in politics
3. Louisa Wall, Richard Prosser (NZ First) and Colin Craig (Conservatives) on Louisa’s gay marriage bill.
4. Professor Duncan Bloy, media law specialist from University of Cardiff on growing moves to have Governments regulate media.
5. Bill Ralston and Brian Edwards will cast their expert eyes on the media.

Broadcast on TV 3 at 9.30 am Saturday, repeated 8 am Sunday

3 news reports:

Treasury research has found the proportion of all tax paid by the highest earners fell after the 2001 tax changes that took the top personal income tax rate to 39 per cent from 33 percent.

Far from its intended purpose of increasing the contribution by wealthy people to the cost of running the government, the 2001 tax increase spurred the highest income earners to find ways of avoiding tax, the Elasticity of Taxable Income in New Zealand paper found.

It tracks the proportion of income tax paid by different income bands between 1994 and 2008, and finds the top 10 percent of income earners had begun to pay an increasing share of total income tax in the years immediately preceding the tax rate increase and peaked at 38.9 per cent at the time the tax rate increase was announced.

“However, following introduction of the 39 per cent rate, it fell to 33.9 per cent in 2001,” the report says.

This is no surprise. I recall another report that when Labour introduced the rich prick envy tax of 39% on incomes over $60,000 – the number of people earning exactly $60,000 increased something like ten-fold.

It can be as simple as you pay yourself a salary of that amount, as company tax rate is lower, and just let the income stay with your company. Then when you retire you just keep paying yourself a salary a just below the top tax rate, so you never have to pay it.

There is a reason why almost every expert says that a broad base and low rate tax system is best. That’s why I think a land tax is a good idea, but increasing the top tax rate is a terrible idea.

The paper is here, quite readable at 41 pages. Remember this is not a model or projection – this is what actually happened! The three authors are from the IRD, Treasury and the Asian Development Bank.

They find that the share paid by not only the top 10% fell, but even for the top 1%. Prior to the Labour hike the top 1% were 10.2% of taxable income for the seven years up to 2000, and 9.3% for the seven years afterwards. So the top 1% ended up having a lesser share of taxable income after Labour hiked the top tax rate.

Their conclusion:

For the top marginal rate bracket of 39 per cent, the welfare cost of raising an extra dollar of tax revenue was found to be well in excess of a dollar. Furthermore, for the top bracket the marginal tax rate was often found to exceed the revenue-maximising tax rate, for appropriate values of the elasticity of taxable income.

So if Labour in 2014 proposes increasing the top tax rate, don’t think that means more revenue. It may mean less.