A friend sent this to me. Very cute.

The special votes are still being counted, and they are not helping Labor. Not only is the coalition still on 73 seats to 72 for Labor, but yesterday they overtook Labor on two party preferred voted. Gillard had suggested that Labor’s TPP lead is why the Independents should support them.

Now the Coalition leads on primary votes, TPP votes and seats.

Fred Siegel is a professor of history and senior fellow at a centre-left think tank in the US.

In this article for City Journal, he argues the rise of environmentalism has poisoned liberals’ historical optimism:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.

In the late 1960s, liberals appeared to have the better of the argument. Something approaching the realm of freedom seemed to have arrived. American workers, white and black, achieved hitherto unimagined levels of prosperity. In the nineteenth century, only utopian socialists had imagined that ordinary workers could achieve a degree of leisure; in the 1930s, radicals had insisted that prosperity was unattainable under American capitalism; yet these seemingly unreachable goals were achieved in the two decades after World War II.

Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.

The full article is a provocative read.

Simon Power announced last week:

The Government today named two members of the new Electoral Commission, which has been created as part of the Government’s wider programme of electoral reform.

Justice Sir Hugh Williams QC has been appointed chairperson, while Robert Peden will be Chief Electoral Officer.

There should be no controversy over these appointments. Sir Hugh is the current president of the (old) Electoral Commission, and Mr Peden was the Chief Electoral Officer, of the old Chief Electoral Office in the Ministry of Justice. Both very solid choices.

One further Commissioner is to be appointed, and he or she will automatically be Deputy Chairperson.

Bill Bennett has a list of NZ media on Twitter. Very useful.

Also Brenda Wallace has a list of MPs on Twitter.

On Breakfast last week, Paul Henry interviewed two principals – one is a campaigner against national standards (and head of Canterbury Principals Union), and the other is a ordinary principal.

I recommend people go watch the video, to see the contrast in attitudes.

The Herald reports:

Supermarkets are drug “pushers” who are selling high quantities of discounted wine and should be viewed the same as dealers dishing out Ecstasy pills or morphine.

It may seem extreme but it’s a view that Professor Doug Sellman, director of the National Addiction Centre and spokesman for the Alcohol Action Group, is taking quite seriously.

Need more be said. Alcohol Action are not the voice of a balanced group. It is an extreme voice, pushing policies that few New Zealanders would agree with. Sadly, it seems to be the group that the Law Commission gave the most weight to.

Fran Mold has today quit as Deputy Political Editor for TVNZ, according to well placed sources.

The reason is an agreement in principle that she will replace Kris Faafoi as Chief Press Secretary to Phil Goff.

However the timing of this is very is interesting. You see Labour have yet to have their “democratic” selection process. Yet the outcome seems certain enough that Fran has quit prior to the 18th of September when the selection is made. I guess, the head office delegates are not going to be listening to who makes the best speeches on the night.

Tom Pullar-Strecker reports:

Pacific Fibre may charge internet providers a fee per customer to use its proposed international communications cable, rather than charging for a set amount of bandwidth, to encourage them to offer generous or unlimited data caps to broadband users. …

Co-founder Rod Drury said carriers had to guess how much capacity they might need on the existing Southern Cross Cable. Pacific Fibre’s approach would be to avoid a situation where consumers faced restrictive data caps while most of the bandwidth available on subsea cables went unsold.

“We don’t want to be `Southern Cross minus 5 per cent’. Why don’t we flip the model around and go to a per-person charging model and then try to give internet providers as much bandwidth as we possibly can for that?” The charges could be segmented by customer type. “You could do it for mobile connections, home connections, schools, hospitals and businesses, and set a reasonable price.”

Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Ernie Newman welcomed the approach. “The way the world is moving is towards all-you-can-eat-type plans and any move like that has got to be the way of the future.”

Hear hear.

I pay an enormous amount for Internet data. There is my home Internet connection and my work Internet connection. Then you had the Vodem for mobile Internet. Add on the data plan for the Blackberry and the data plan for the iPad, and you get the idea.

Wouldn’t it be great if Vodafone or Telecom offered a universal data package, regardless of medium. Say 20 GB a month which can be used on any of your devices.

The NZ Herald reports:

Need Winz advice or want to challenge Government policy? Just leave a comment on the minister’s Facebook page.

An open, transparent government should interact with the public using the internet and social media, the Labour Party says.

The party held its first OpenLabourNZ conference at the weekend, promising to improve transparency and ways the public can engage the Government. …

Kiwiblogger and National Party member David Farrar, who attended the conference, said it remained to be seen what the Labour Party would adopt.

“But they’ve been having a good open process to get people’s ideas. Often in policy development, a party is pretty opaque, where you just see what comes out in the end.”

The highlights for me were the video contributions from Andrew Raseij from the US, and Senator Kate Lundy of Australia. The best ideas are often already being implemented somewhere else, and this was no different. We also had Senator Lundy’s advisor, Pia Waugh, who was a non stop source of good ideas and enthusiasm.

Turnout was a bit down on what I expected for an event like this, but it was good to see half a dozen MPs there, including Phil Goff. Culture changes only happen if the leadership buys into it – otherwise it becomes a silo.

The Open Labour Wiki will be updated with some of the ideas from the conference, and I look forward to seeing what formal policy emerges from the process.

The Herald has surveyed MPs on where they stand on the drinking age. They have a story, and full results.

I’ve summarised the results, by party. They are:

So MPs for 18 are slightly ahead of 20, but a third of the Parliament favours a split age. What will be important is if a split age is defeated, will those MPs then vote for 18 or 20.

Bernard Hickey is one of the few voices arguing that the Government should allow South Canterbury Finance to go into receivership:

But now the government faces an urgent decision between putting South Canterbury into receivership now, or putting in yet more taxpayers money in the hope it can survive and then thrive past the end of the government guarantee.

The choice is a difficult one. The immediate pain from a receivership would be substantial.

Receivership would trigger a payout to investors under the government guarantee of around NZ$1.7 billion. Some believe that shock to the government’s finances would be enough to trigger a review of New Zealand’s sovereign credit rating downgrade by Standard and Poor’s and/or Moody’s.

I don’t believe it would be enough to justify a rating review, but if it did that would immediately increase wholesale interest rates, which would eventually flow through to the entire economy. There is also the fallout on the South Island rural economy.

Any receiver would force through sales of farms, property developments and small businesses, many of whom are not paying the interest on the loans received from South Canterbury Finance. Dairy farm prices in the South Island could potentially take a big hit. Some believe this could send a new chill through the South Island that eventually cost jobs and stunt any recovery of economic growth. That’s because the Australian-owned banks are unlikely to step in to take over the loans.

This is the potential cost of letting it fail. It may be quite huge. It’s easy to just say “let them fail”, but that will mean a large payout by the Government, and a hit to the South Island economy.

South Canterbury Finance does not have a future beyond the end of the Deposit Guarantee. To have such a future, it would need to substantially increase its credit rating, find a new funder and convince already sceptical investors to go naked in backing the finance company without a deposit guarantee. They will also have to do it without their talisman Allan Hubbard, who will be long gone as owner and maestro.

At some point New Zealand’s dairy farming sector, particularly in the South Island, will have to reduce its debt.

When that happens it will be painful.

But as many investors in finance companies such as Strategic, St Laurence, Hanover and Dominion would attest, giving finance companies more time to ‘work it out’ and wait for the ‘market to bounce back’ is often worse than pulling the plug immediately. The New Zealand government faces a bail out decision in the same way Hanover Finance investors did 8 months ago and 12 months before that.

This is the crucial test – can SCF survive in the future if bailed out. Some compare it to Air NZ, which has thrived after a bail out. But there is a major difference between deciding to fly on an airline, or lend money to a finance company.

David Hillary also argues SCF should not be bailed out:

SCF is not a successful business, and it does not have a successful ‘good bank’ to salvage. The damage to SCF’s brand is total, SCF has been selling its best loans, and encouraging its best customers to re-finance elsewhere for probably a year now, leaving it with few good assets left. Its asset origination and management systems and personnel are the problem, and it is what needs to be closed down, not saved. …

SCF’s governance, leadership, culture and practices have been and are so bad that the company’s problems are pervasive, and this means that its liquidation value is likely to be higher than trying to keep it as a going concern.

Whatever the Government decides is going to be pretty unpopular.

The SST reports:

UNDER-FIRE EDUCATION Minister Anne Tolley has labelled a campaign against national standards a “silly political game”, and slammed the Principals Association for bringing “nothing positive to the table”.

National standards, implemented in primary and intermediate schools this year, rank all children above, below or well-below benchmarks in reading, writing and maths. Now the Principals Federation is canvassing for money to fund an information campaign against the standards, with the Auckland Primary Principals Association already pledging $60,000. …

The federation is funded from annual subscriptions paid by schools out of government funding. The Auckland primary principals’ group is funded the same way and president Iain Taylor said its $60,000 would help people “learn more about the flaws in the current national standards”.

Few people actually realise that the Principals’ Federation is in fact funded by the taxpayer.  Almost all schools pay the membership fee on behalf of the principal.

As a taxpayer, I’d like a refund please.

If principals see value in joining the federation, let them do so out of their salary – like most other unions.

The HoS reports:

The number of repeat drink-drivers caught on New Zealand roads is showing a worrying upward spiral, and is a problem police are struggling to counter.

The number of recidivist drink-drivers has risen steadily over the past three years, and more than 4000 have been prosecuted already this year.

Many of them are involved in fatal crashes.

Figures released to the Herald on Sunday under the Official Information Act reveal 7200 people were convicted of their third or more drink-driving offence in 2009 compared with 6995 in 2008 and 6639 in 2007.

These are the ones who are the real hazards. They do not drive at 0.05 to 0.08 BAC. They drive at two to three times the legal limit. And if they have been convicted three or more times, it probably indicates they have driven drunk 100+ times. And they are also the ones who tend to flee from the Police, and kill people as they do.

The Government has proposed a zero BAC limit for recidivist drink drivers, and off memory are looking at alcohol locks on their cars. I think the alcohol locks are what may make the biggest difference. It won’t stop all of them, but it will stop some of them.

The HoS reports:

Prince Charles is strange and his father so insensitive and prejudiced that he could be a breakfast TV host, says New Zealand’s former deputy prime minister.

Michael Cullen’s comments, contained in notes for a speech he will make in Wellington this week, are bound to outrage supporters of the monarchy.

As a senior Cabinet minister, Cullen described himself as the Labour Government’s “token monarchist” and fought against any move for New Zealand to become a republic.

But, in a major about-turn at a constitution conference on Friday, he will publicly lay out a road map to becoming a republic when the Queen dies.

I’m pleased to see Dr Cullen leave the monarchist camp and join the republicans.

My motivations are not so much the personal characteristics of certain royals. They are:

1. A republic would provide greater limitations on the role of the Prime Minister
2. I believe our head of state should be a New Zealander
3. Hereditary selection for a role is inferior to democratic selection
4. A move to a republic will probably lead to a written constitution, which would generally be desirable

At the #openlabournz conference earlier today, there was a good discussion about how social media can help improve interactions with Government, and we focused specifically on getting a culture in the public service where staff can engage in social media.

I made the point that the problem is the media can take a flippant comment online, and treat it as a press release, and demand the CEO comment on it or respond to it. My suggestion was that a good CEO should tell anyone who comes to them with a media inquiry about a flippant comment on Facebook or Twitter, that the person needs a life and the CEO is too busy with real issues.

In the few hours since the conference, we’ve had a perfect example of this play out – but with MPs not public servants.

In the House on Thursday, Melissa Lee embellished her question to Judith Collins of “Can she explain the reasons behind the record low number of escapes” by adding on “except for the fact she is such a fantastic minister”.

Nikki Kaye promptly facebooked that Melissa’s effort should win her “brown nosing backbencher of the year”.

Now Nikki and Melissa are good mates. Melissa actually responds to “Blondie” in the facebook thread. It is very obviously two mates having a friendly hassle.

Then early this morning on Red Alert Trevor Mallard posted a screenshot of the Facebook thread. It is bloody obvious that it is a friendly exchange. They even have Melissa doing a lol on it.

So far so good. But then someone at NewstalkZB thinks this is somehow a newsworthy story. They actually dispatch a reporter to phone Nikki Kaye up and ask her why she called a colleague a brown noser, and does she think John Key would approve of it.

For fuck’s sake. This was the exact point I was making at the Labour conference. An idiot media outlet thinking that a piece of friendly banter is somehow a news story, let alone some sort of scandal that the Prime Minister might need to be informed about.

The Prime Minister, I am confident to predict, would find the exchange as funny as most people would.

What really annoys me is that the consequences of such media stupidity is to encourage our MPs to become automatons – never showing any personality or humour – playing everything safe, just to avoid a potentially bad media story.

The Dom Post reports:

She could well be Australia’s next first lady – and she hails from Wellington’s “nappy valley”.

Margie Abbott has fond memories of trudging off to school in Wainuiomata in her galoshes with her slippers tucked in her school bag – and says her Aussie children can do the haka.

The wife of Liberal Party leader and hopeful prime minister Tony Abbott was born in Hutt Hospital and grew up in Wainuiomata before moving to Australia in 1983. She attended Fernlea School in the 1960s and then Wainuiomata High School.

“I can just remember things like every weekend I went down to Richard Prouse Park and I was very much involved in athletics,” she told The Dominion Post last night. “I played soccer for the Wainuiomata club for years and loved that.”

Former classmates remembered Margie Aitken as a quiet, academic girl. “She was a good student,” said one. They are now watching avidly to see if she becomes Australia’s first lady.

Ms Abbott trained as a teacher in Wellington and taught in Wainuiomata and Upper Hutt. She moved to Sydney in 1983 and met her future husband in a pub. They have now been married for more than 20 years.

I had never picked up that Mrs Abbott was from NZ. And not just for a few years as a kid, but well into her 20s.

If Abbott does become Prime Minister, that will be a useful link – he may be less inclined to stick it to us, as Paul Keating did.

The Herald reports:

Nominations open tomorrow for the National Party’s candidate in the Mana by-election.

President Peter Goodfellow said National was the underdog but would run a strong campaign and would choose a talented candidate.

“We will be looking to win the Mana by-election but we acknowledge that we have a very difficult job ahead of us given National has never held the seat.”

Mana is not a marginal seat, or ever a moderately safe seat. It is Labour’s 9th safest seat,and indeed has never ever been held by a National MP. Labour won a higher percentage of the electorate vote in Mana than in Dunedin North, Rongotai or Mangere.

Mana has been held by Graham Kelly and Winie Laban since 1996. Prior to that Porirua was held by Graham Kelly since 1987, Gerald Wall from 1969 and Henry May from 1963.

Onslow, which used to cover parts of Mana, was held by May from 1954 and Labour’s Harry Coombs from 1946. And he held Wellington Suburbs from 1938 onwards.

So Labour have held Mana, or its predecessors, for over 70 years. So don’t get fooled when the media try to talk the race up as potentially close.

The Herald reports:

Manukau’s singing, rapping mayor, Len Brown, wants to sing the national anthem at Eden Park during the Rugby World Cup.

What’s more, Mr Brown plans to invite Dunedin Mayor Peter Chin, who has sung the anthem at two test matches at Carisbrook, to join him in a duet.

“I’m known as the singing mayor of Manukau and I want to be the singing mayor of Auckland,” Mr Brown said.

All I can say is make sure you vote.

Michele Hewitson interviews Cameron Slater for her weekly interview.  Some extracts:

spoke to him during the lunch break on Wednesday and, during that phone conversation, he said he thought the judge would reserve his judgment, which proved to be the case.

He then proceeded to say, mildly for him, rude things about the judge.

When we met on Thursday (he’d suggested we meet at the zoo, which was tempting but he would have enjoyed being photographed outside the monkey cage far too much) I asked whether it was clever to slag off a judge to a journalist.

He said: “He’s been rude to me!” But was being rude about him clever?

“Probably not. But then again, you know, do I trust … the justice system and that the judge will put aside personal feelings … ? Am I stupid? Probably.”

I’m quite sure the Judge will put aside personal feelings.

I asked if he was a bully and he said: “Yep. I admit that.” That’s not an attractive trait to admit to. “No, it’s not.” He says the drugs he was taking for his depression caused the “self-limiting mechanism” that most people have to “disappear”. …

He used to earn, he says, probably $150,000 a year and did so for years and now he’s on a sickness benefit and the family home has gone.

He is in a prolonged battle with his insurance company over a cancelled income protection policy.

He says he has been “a complete arsehole to live with” and “rude, abrupt, thoughtless, uncaring” to his wife.

He hasn’t been happy and hasn’t liked himself for years now. He is working on happiness and is now off the drugs he says his insurance company “made” him take and which he believes made him madder.

He said, perhaps hopefully, that he thinks the blog has become more temperate. “I’m not using nicknames and derogatory terms.” (He was still calling North Shore mayor Andrew Williams a “clown” last time I looked, but that’s almost affectionate for him.)

I’m not sure most people would term “corpse fiddler” temperate, but that was off-blog.

For Cameron, corpse fiddler is temperate!

An excellent column by Chris Trotter:

THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE DEBATE on “What should we do about our drinking problem?” one very important issue has been consistently overlooked.

The constitutional, political and moral objections to “down-sizing” the rights of 18 to 20-year-olds.

Eighteen and nineteen-year-olds have the right to vote in local and general elections, perform jury service, join the armed forces, make a will, sign a contract, and purchase alcohol. …

When it comes to the other rights, responsibilities and duties of citizenship, however, 18 and 19-year-old New Zealanders are legally recognised as responsible adults.

This raises a couple of very serious question. Having admitted 18 and 19-year-olds to the ranks of adult New Zealanders, is it constitutionally, politically and morally justifiable to cast them back into the ranks of non-adults when it comes to purchasing alcohol?

How can prohibiting their participation in a social activity in which all other New Zealand adults are free to engage without legal sanction possibly be right?

I would argue that it is neither right nor justifiable. Once specific political and social rights (like the right to vote or the right to purchase alcohol) have been given to a group of citizens they cannot be taken back without placing the rights of every other citizen in jeopardy.

Were the White Americans living in the Deep South justified in stripping their Black neighbours of their civil and political rights in the latter half of the 19th Century? Did the Nazi Government of Germany have the right to strip German Jews of their citizenship in the 1930s?

Both of these cases involved the persecution of a politically friendless minority whose morals, capabilities and behaviour were openly despised and derided by the majority.

It may surprise some, but I am attending, and in fact will be a panelist, at a Labour Party conference tomorrow.

It is the OpenLabourNZ conference, and the agenda is on Red Alert. The focus is on how to make Government more open.

I believe the Internet, and other tools, has huge potential to help open up Government. I was pleased to be invited to contribute, and my response was that I am a big believer that good policy is good policy, regardless of the source. There is no monopoly on good ideas.

So I’m looking forward to attending, and seeing what eventuates. One of the advantage of opposition is you are able to take a step back from governing, and look at whether there is a better way one can do things.