The Herald announces:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will be the guest editor of the New Zealand Herald’s 125th Suffrage edition, to be published on September 19.

This is very efficient. Having the PM edit the Herald directly cuts out the middle man!

Jonathan Tracy, a classics lecturer at Massey writes:

As a humanities lecturer in Classical Studies at Massey University, I am disturbed by the recent push toward censorship – or, in the current euphemism, “no-platforming” or “de-platforming” – of dissenting viewpoints, both at Massey and in New Zealand and the Western world as a whole.

It is interesting he explicitly recognises it has happened at Massey. Presumably he rejects the official propaganda that the decision had nothing to do with the views of Dr Brash, and was just a security issue.

This illiberal trend is a betrayal of the heritage of free thought, inquiry, speech, and debate bequeathed to us from the ancient world. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the key distinguishing feature of life under good emperors – as opposed to bad, tyrannical emperors – is that a good emperor leaves you “free to think what you like and to say what you think”.

We owe Tacitus a lot. A lot of what we know about the Roman Empire comes from him.

Nero’s reaction was a gag order banning Lucan from all public speaking, including recitation of his works. Incensed by this attack on the free expression of his poetic voice, Lucan ended up joining a conspiracy to assassinate Nero. The warning for us today seems clear. If heretics, misfits, and troublemakers are denied the right to communicate peacefully with interested audiences – and that is exactly what “no platform” means – they may eventually feel justified in resorting to more drastic measures. Free speech acts as a vital safety valve for the discontented members of society.

And the reason hundreds or thousands of people are willing to pay money to hear Lauren Southern speak, is basically because so many people try so hard to deny her the ability to speak.

From the early Church onwards, some Christian fundamentalists stridently insisted on a complete break from this whole classical culture, demanding that “no platform” should be given to such dangerously pagan authors. One famous example was the Church Father Tertullian, with his dismissive rhetorical question, “What has Athens (i.e; pagan Greek philosophy) got to do with Jerusalem?”

It would have been very easy for the monks just to let Classics die, on grounds of its obvious deviance from the ideological consensus of medieval Europe. But we would be much poorer today as a civilization if all the beautiful, dissident, dissonant voices from classical antiquity had indeed been systematically and permanently “no-platformed” into silence during the Middle Ages. The Renaissance would certainly never have happened, nor – in all probability – would the scientific revolution or the rise of modern democracy.

Instead, the monks made the active choice to pass on to future generations – including us – the perspectives of classical authors with whom they often vehemently disagreed. They had the full courage of their convictions, believing that if their Christian faith was true, it could stand the test of exposure to non-Christian – and even anti-Christian – opinions and arguments. And thanks to their enlightened stance, we continue to read and be enriched by Homer, Plato, Ovid, Lucretius et al.

An interesting observation that had not occurred to me before.

As a modern institution of higher learning, Massey should strive to be at least as open-minded and tolerant of diverse viewpoints as a monastery from the so-called Dark Ages. After all, as long as we can discern the truth clearly, love it passionately, and defend it vigorously, we have nothing to fear from open debate; and if we can’t do those things, then why are we claiming to be a university at all?

That is Massey’s challenge?

Will it retract and apologise for the ban on Don Brash, and labelling his advocacy hate speech?

Kirk Hope writes:

Business can only react to what’s in front of it. If the perception is that the seas are calm, confidence reflects that.  If the perception is of a few waves ahead, confidence suffers.  

Right now, business is looking ahead and seeing looming waves.

A list of costs is coming down the pipeline that business will have to figure out how to afford. 

The obvious ones include increases to the minimum wage and the pressure that then puts on wages at higher skill levels, plus a long line of wage claims with industrial action firmly attached. 

Every initiative adds costs and removes jobs at one level or another.  And unless productivity increases, business won’t be able to absorb those costs. 

Add to that a significant legislative agenda – some 120 reviews announced so far plus a number of policies with the potential to impact on growth and therefore on business. 

Basically business has no idea what the Government is going to do. This is probably because the Government has no idea what it is going to do.

And there is now indisputable evidence of a downturn in business confidence impacting on actual activity. 

Lead indicators like the BNZ BusinessNZ Performance of Manufacturing Index (PMI) and the Performance of Services Index (PSI) provide some of the most up-to-date pictures of business activity across the country. 

Both surveys show lower levels of expansion that have not been seen in some time. 

Out just this week, the latest PMI shows New Zealand’s manufacturing expansion continuing its downward trend. It has revealed the third consecutive month where expansion has weakened as well as a second consecutive monthly reading below the series’ long-term average.

More concerningly, given that the Index is based on actual activity, it is hinting at further than just a slowdown in the manufacturing sector. If that continues, the economy will start contracting.

Remember all those years of Labour claiming there was a manufacturing crisis. Well they may finally be right!

The unadjusted PMI has dipped below 50 – 49.5. Seasonally adjusted it is at 51.2. This is the lowest (except last December) since December 2012.

Stuff reports:

Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter has biked to the hospital to have her first baby.

The 38-year-old – who is the Minister for Women and Associate Minister of both Health and Transport – posted a series of snaps to Instagram on Sunday.

“Beautiful Sunday morning for a bike ride, to the hospital, for an induction to finally have this baby,” she wrote.

Now that is walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

I recall one former Green MP in Wellington who was always going on about public transport, yet it was very obvious she had not used a bus in decades.

Biking to hospital to give birth is impressive. If JAG cycled fast enough over some judder bars, she might not even need the induction!

Stuff reports:

An Auckland law student is starting a female-only ride-sharing service, believed to be the first of its kind in New Zealand.

DriveHer is similar to Uber, where users can hail a car using a cellphone app. The difference is its drivers – and riders – must be women.

DriveHer founder Joel Rushton, 23, told Stuff he often worried about his partner’s safety when she caught taxis home late at night when they were living in Melbourne and was inspired to start the business after learning about a women-only ride-sharing service in Australia called Shebah.

“It’s a service that we shouldn’t need. It’s sad that that is the way that the world is, but it is the way that the world is. We need to protect people that we care about,” said Rushton, who is in his third year of an LLB at the University of Auckland.

People were vulnerable when they got into a car with a stranger and while some women might feel safe alone with a man, a women-only service was a good option for women who felt uncomfortable in that situation, he said.

Seems like a good idea to me. It gives passengers a choice.

Stuff reports:

The pin has officially been pulled on a joint convention centre and Sir Peter Jackson movie museum in Wellington.

On Tuesday, his company, The Movie Museum Limited (TMML) and Wellington City Council jointly announced the “mutually-agreed parting of the ways” for the venture that was revealed in 2015.

However, Jackson said he was not ruling out a capital-based museum in the future and was considering other options.

It would be great to have a museum that can showcase the incredible collection Jackson has. But I prefer one which has less reliance on the ratepayer.

The project was first budgeted to cost $134 million, increased to $165m but Wellington Mayor Justin Lester said the envelope of money was closer to $180m.

Too much money, but I’d rather it did go on a movie museum that a second classical concert venue.

The council would now move forward with the convention centre plan, replacing the movie museum with a 1500 square metre exhibition space that looks set to be run in partnership with Te Papa.

Exhibition spaces around the world were undergoing a renaissance and the council expected it to be a revenue earner – on par with the movie museum estimates, he said.

Really? If is it such a good revenue earner, can’t a private company be found to rent the space and they run an exhibition business there?

Caitlin Flanagan writes in The Atlantic:

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

The boys graduated from high school and went off to colleges where they were exposed to the kind of policed discourse that dominates American campuses. They did not make waves; they did not confront the students who were raging about cultural appropriation and violent speech; in fact, they forged close friendships with many of them. They studied and wrote essays and—in their dorm rooms, on the bus to away games, while they were working out—began listening to more and more podcasts and lectures by this man, Jordan Peterson.

A guest post from an Australian lawyer who looks at free speech battles in Australia and NZ:

I am an Australian lawyer working in Australia.

I care about free speech.

My firm disparages free speech and its ‘Nazi’ adherents.

Mr Farrar generously agreed I could guest post as anonymous.

I reached out after I saw Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux speak in Melbourne, then abused and banned in New Zealand.

It is surreal New Zealand disdains free speech more then Victoria. Victoria has a dedicated Minister to end free speech and create inequality called the ‘Minister of Equality’.

I’m not here to criticise New Zealand. Free speech in New South Wales (NSW) is worse.

On 27 June 2018 the Crimes Amendment (Publicly Threatening and Inciting Violence) Bill 2018 (Act) was assented. A new section 93Z of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) is now in force in NSW.

In summary the Act:

• makes all speech an offence depending on the reaction of a recipient (this bit’s technical – but examples clarify);
• punishes true statements;
• makes it illegal to try not to get AIDS/HIV in NSW;
• makes a bureaucrat (the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)) the speech God of NSW;
• Wrecks personal/national security, kills free speech

Do not let the Act happen to New Zealand.

I will describe for you how the Act must work.

To follow along, copy paste and open the Act in your browser.

The Act creates a new indictable offence committed when:

A person who:

by a ‘public act’;

‘Intentionally’ or ‘recklessly’;

‘threatens’ or ‘incites’ ‘violence’;

towards ‘another person’; or

‘group of persons’;

on the ground of a ‘protected trait’ [my term] being:

‘race’; ‘specific religious belief or affiliation’; ‘sexual orientation’; ‘gender identity’; ‘intersex status’; ‘that the other person has, or one or more of the members of the group have, HIV or AIDS’.

The max penalty for an individual is 3 years in prison and/or $11,000.00. For a corporation – $55,000.00.

The key term in the Act is ‘violence’.

All Speech is Potentially an Offence

‘Violence’ is the trigger for an offence and is undefined. That’s deliberate.

The Act’s coverage says its purpose is to punish standard Islamic clerics like Ismail Al-Wahwah who say muslims must kill all non-muslims. As the peaceful Koran says ‘metaphorically’.

It can do that. But that’s not all the Act does.

Look at the qualifications; the paragraphs immediately after the penalties section. Consider the second one:

“in determining an offence…it is irrelevant whether…any person formed a state of mind or carried out an act of violence”.

Take the element ‘incites’.

How do you prove speech (a public act) ‘incites’ violence?

Examine the scenario used to justify the Act:

1. Imam calls for Jihad (Speech)

 

2. Fanboy (Recipient) consequently drives truck of peace into a European pedestrian (Violence).

Formula: Speech plus action by its Recipient = Violence.

You have to prove the Imam’s speech caused the Fanboy recipient to be violent to punish the Imam.

The problem is connecting the truck of peace to the Jihad obligation reminder.

Because maybe it wasn’t the speech. Maybe it was the Koran. The weather. Alcohol. Maybe all four. To what extent? Etc.

That ‘problem’ of proving a consequential link between speech and action has been prohibitive. For 30 years pre-Act that problem’ prevented successful prosecutions of pure speech in Australia. Speech was free. You couldn’t punish speech as an action.

Now read the second qualification.

It means you don’t have to prove that causal link between speech and action. Or between speech and change in state of mind. i.e. Imam calls for Jihad, muslim kid in London buys acid. The kid doesn’t use the acid. But its possession proves speech changed state of mind.

It means to prove speech incites violence, you don’t have to identify any actions which objectively proves that.

Before?

Speech plus action by its Recipient = Violence (to discharge the element ‘public act incites’).

Now?

Speech = Violence. Because it’s irrelevant if anyone does anything in response to the speech.

Under the Act, all speech is violence.

But that’s unworkable.

If you don’t have to prove speech causes an action, you must prove it does something. Otherwise how can you distinguish between speech that ‘incites’ absent action, and speech which doesn’t incite absent action?

Here’s the only way. Define violence so you don’t need an intermediary to do the violence. i.e. the guy who hears the Imam and drives the peace truck and hurts someone. Take out the middle-man.

To make this Act work a NSW adjudicator must define violence so broadly words can cause violence by themselves. Remember, you offend as a person who:

“By a public act [speech], intentionally or recklessly…incites violence”.

Words can’t incite broken bones. What can they do? Incite hurt feelings.

What violence hurts feelings? Psychological violence.

Violence under this act must & will be defined as largely spurious non-DSM psychological violence – ‘stigma’, ‘exclusion’, ‘peripheralization’, ‘cultural denigration’, ‘fear inducement’ etc. Subjective things proved by unimpeachable assertion. ‘It hurt my feelings – 3 years jail, racist’.

This example clarifies:

1. Imam calls for Jihad (Speech) Sonia Kruger says Muslims commit terrorist (Speech)

 

2. No intermediary does anything

 

3. But, speech incites psychological violence in Recipient (Violence).

= Offence

Speech = Violence = Offence

To punish words that ‘incite’ without linked actions, violence under this Act must be defined as psychological violence. That’s why violence was left undefined. It’s a door left open by the Act’s ancient and esteemed clever architects to enable total speech suppression in Australia.

Under this Act, speech will be an offence if someone can claim it caused them psychological violence. All speech in NSW is now an offence, depending on the reaction of a recipient.

The architects of the Act, the ‘Keep NSW Safe Alliance’ (Alliance), were 31 different non-European minority bodies. Led by one. They’ve designed the Act cleverly so that subjective ‘psychological violence’ will trigger the Act. Speech in NSW, after a tribunal defines violence broadly, as it must for the Act to work, is going to be at the mercy of progressives’ psychological resilience.

Which means speech is dead in NSW.

‘Threatens’ works the same way.

But that’s not it. Because additionally…

The Act Punishes True Statements

The Act punishes true statements:

“it is irrelevant whether the alleged offender’s assumptions or beliefs about an attribute of another person or a member of a group of persons….were correct or incorrect”.

It’s irrelevant to committing an offence if what you say is true.

So, if you say a true statement in NSW about any protected traits and that true statement incites or threatens ‘psychological violence’ in a recipient – you go to prison for 3 years.

Truth about a protected trait is an offence under the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW).

The Speech God

The DPP decides what cases get standing under the Act. Until Labor get in. Then it will be the Police. Ah yes, the corrupt NSW Police on a muslim recruitment drive – they’ll be great at picking speech winners. Labor will also lower the standard from ‘incite’ to ‘promote’.

The ‘AIDS or GULAG’ Act.

The Act makes it illegal not to get AIDS in NSW.

The Act should be called the ‘Get AIDS or Get GULAG’ Act. Why?

The Act punishes true statements.

The Act will punish psychological violence or ‘potential’ violence (via the ‘threatens’ element) caused by those true statements.

Look at the last protected trait on the list: ‘a person who has HIV/AIDS’.

The only way a person can avoid AIDS they might get from someone who won’t tell them they have AIDS is to be informed by a third party. The Act makes such notification illegal.

Because that notification is a true statement. Truth is irrelevant to determining an offence under the Act. Does disclosing that someone has AIDS due to its stigma potentially threaten or incite violence against that person. Yes. Violence in the usual sense, and absolutely violence in the leftie sense it will be defined – ‘social exclusion’ blah blah blah.

I don’t dismiss the right of someone with AIDS to privacy. Individuals with AIDS deserve minimisation of the condition, empathy, kindness, solidarity. But it’s not violence to not have sex with them and die from AIDS. Look at what the ‘Keep NSW Safe Alliance’ has done:

Person A – has AIDS, won’t tell Person B.

Person B – doesn’t have AIDS. Probably doesn’t want AIDS. Going to have sex with person A.

Person C – knows Person A has AIDS. Knows and likes Person B. Likes not being in prison.

The Attorney General of NSW, the ‘conservative’ member of the ‘Liberal Party’ Mark Speakman said the Act strikes the right balance between freedom of speech and ‘stopping violence’. Lets look at Speakman’s ‘balance’.

The Act says the right of person A with AIDS not to be embarrassed and suffer ‘sexual exclusion’ ‘violence’ 100% overrides the right of person B not to get AIDS and die, horribly, and person C not to go to prison for three years for saving B from the AIDS.

Succinctly, this Act is going to cause lots of people to get AIDS in NSW and die.  Or, it’s going to cause lots of people to break the law because they’d rather not get AIDS.

It’s the ‘make it illegal not to get AIDS’ Act. From the ‘Keep NSW Safe Alliance’.

The Sonia Kruger Exemplar

Sonia Kruger, an Australia TV personality, faced hearings from 19 June 18 at the NSW Civic and Administrative Tribunal for saying the startlingly obvious trite truism:

“there is a correlation between the number of people who, you know, are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks”.

She said that before the Act – and is currently moving through hearings for racial vilification.

Well, Sonia should be happy. Because now, if you say the empirical truth that Muslims commit most rape, almost all terrorism, steal welfare etc, you go to prison for 3 years.

Ramifications

Just two:

National Security

The Act makes it impossible to make true statements linking protected traits to bad things they do. Per Sonia Kruger.

President Trump just banned funding to all communist Chinese Confucius Institutes in the United States because they are centres for corruption and espionage.

If he was subject to the Act, he couldn’t say the Confucius Institutes were Chinese. Australia has dozens of Confucius Institutes. Oh well, can’t say anything about that now. I’m sure it’s different.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, has been senior on the United States Senate Intelligence Committee for nearly 20 years. It was just disclosed via Politico and others she employed a communist Chinese spy as her office manager for 20 years, called Russell Howe. If America had the Act, no one could say things like ‘Russell betrayed America to China because he’s Chinese’. I’m sure it’s different in AU too.

The Act is going to wreck Australia’s national security against Chinese and muslim hostility/exploitation. And of course, Chinese and muslim groups led by another group demanded the Act. Seditious? Subversive? Hostile? No, surely not. Australia is a multicultural utopia.

Personal Security

All the minority groups say the Act will make Australians safer when it makes them get AIDS and sends them to muslim run prisons for saying muslims’ run prisons.

Conclusion

The Act is a joke. Except it’s not a funny one. Free Speech is dead in NSW. The Alliance will kill it everywhere else too. Don’t let the fake diverse destroy your free speech.

Our leftist imbecility will retard our economy. Don’t be like us. Defend your free speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGSfHIPnupY – This video I think has media footage in NZ. The world noticed your primitive media. Quite amazing. Have a look.

Thank-you Kiwiblog

Steven Joyce takes a break from baking to comment on Linked In:

This New Zealand Herald Story from last week highlights the grave risk to many non-university tertiary providers and to the whole international education sector of the government’s proposed changes to visa settings.

Removing or curtailing the option to work after study will mean many thousands of fee-paying international students choosing Canada, Australia, or the US for study instead of New Zealand. …

It’s important to note that the vast majority of international students don’t stay in New Zealand after study. But the possibility of working after study is a big driver of where a student chooses to study.

Students like to have options.

The Immigration Minister says that he wants to remove “low-level study options” that are a “back door to immigration.” However there is no low-level study option that provides immigration opportunities – that door was shut years ago. Now we are talking about study at Levels 5 and 6 – which is the equivalent of a builder or a plumber, or a hotel manager. These are not low-level skills.

And we need more of them.

He also says he wants to remove the rorts and we all agree about that. But the appropriate response is to keep strengthening the regulators of the sector, not suffocating it with what is effectively a blanket ban on larger numbers of potential students.

Thousands of education jobs, huge export revenues, and the very viability of many quality public and private education providers is at risk with this proposed change. 

This is a chance for the new government to show it is using its consultation to truly listen. If it doesn’t the black and white reality is that another significant export earner will fall on very hard times.

Steven has pretty much kept away from politics since he left Parliament. He must care pretty deeply on this issue, to weigh in on it.

Stuff reports:

The season could be a whiteout for both sellers and consumers alike, he said, as environmental watchdog Forest and Bird has called for a total ban on selling commercial whitebait to help save the four of the five species threatened with extinction. …

Forest and Bird freshwater spokeswoman Annabeth Cohen said stopping commercial sales would help lift the pressure on the struggling native migratory whitebait galaxiid​ species – kōaro, shortjawed kōkopu, banded kōkopu, giant kōkopu and inanga.

Kōaro, inanga and giant kōkopu populations are listed as ‘declining’ by the Department of Conservation.

A declining status is not on the verge of extinction. There are four levels of threat:

1. Critical
2. Endangered
3. Vulnerable
4. Declining

This is not to argue for or against a ban, but I do wish stories would reflect that a declining status does not mean facing extinction.

John Bishop has an article in Law Talk on the issues around cannabis. Some extracts:

Data for Washington State shows the retail price per gram fell from US$35 in December 2014 to US$7.45 in late 2017. Wholesale prices also fell from nearly US$10 to just US$2.53 in the same period.

Those prices are a lot lower than what pot farmers thought they would be getting for a wholesale gram when they were first applying for licences at the end of 2013.

So good for consumers but not so good for farmers.

But, despite continuing federal prohibition, legal sales of marijuana in North America were worth $US9.7 billion in 2017, according to a report from Arcview Market

Research and BDS Analytics. That’s up a third by value on 2016.

That’s larger than many industries in NZ.

It’s $5 for a single joint which comes in a plastic silo. The bowl, which
contains an ounce of marijuana, is $125, but has enough to make about 30 joints, one a day for a month. This is where the exotic names come in. ‘Girl Scout Cookies’ is described as “famous sweet berry taste great for relaxation from pain and stress”

The Girl Scouts might not be too happy with the use of their name!

The enemies of the marijuana industry are alcohol and pharmaceutical companies which see marijuana as a threat to their products.

Fascinating.

Are there lessons for New Zealand here? One is to be clear about what
behaviour we are willing to allow.

The public do not see medical and recreational use as the same thing.
If there is to be a regime which licenses cultivators, but allows individuals
to grow some quantity for personal use, what are the permitted
quantities?

In Colorado an individual with a medical prescription for marijuana can grow 24 plants for personal use. A cultivator must have at least 2,000 plants.

If the Government wants a referendum in 2020 to be meaningful, they need to have thought about these issues in advance.

Alex Davies writes at Stuff:

Six decades of research from the United States clearly demonstrate that universities and academics are frequently heavily biased and skew overwhelmingly to the political left. …

Researchers at George Mason University examined six fields: anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, political science and sociology. Within these fields professors supported left-wing candidates to right wing candidates by an average of 15 to 1. In anthropology and sociology this skew to the left increased to almost 30 to 1.

Interestingly in the more empirical field of economics this skew dropped to “merely” 3 to 1 to the left. A federal study of political donations by academics found that of those who donated to politicians, 99 per cent (literally) donated to Democrat (left) candidates.

Academia in the US is even more skewed than the media.

What is particularly concerning is the extremist nature of left wing academic bias. In 2012 UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that while barely 0.4 per cent of academics held “far right” views, over 30 times that number (12.4 per cent) held “far left” views.

There’s far more Marxist professors than Republican ones!

Regrettably there is virtually no research on this issue in New Zealand. This is not surprising – in a small country there is little incentive for a biased and unobjective academia to turn a spot light on itself. Further, there is nowhere to run for any professor foolish enough to do so – not a single one of New Zealand’s seven major universities has any reputation for embracing right leaning thinking.

One could do a poll of university staff on political beliefs. That would be interesting.

The evidence (note: empirical data over six decades) clearly demonstrates that universities are anything but intellectually diverse or rigorous or encouraging of critical enquiry. They are overwhelmingly dominated by faculty who share a depressingly homogenous and unremittingly left-wing view of the world. This massive skew to the political left inevitably means academic employment culture becomes reinforcing, encouraging hiring of individuals that fit the mould, resulting in yet further bias; something the data from the US bears out – universities have been getting more, not less, left wing.

The Don Brash ban is a good example, and it goes well beyond the inivitation from the politics club.

Let’s say you’re a political studies lecturer at Massey and your class is going to study the Maori seats. After what the Massey VC has done, would that lecturer possibly feel safe in inviting Don Brash to a class to give his view on why they are no longer needed? Of course not. The climate of hostility would be so great that it would never happen.

You would be fine to invite Hone Harawira along to speak on why they should stay, but to dare to allow someone to argue the other side would be career limiting. I mean the VC herself has said that arguing against Maori seats verges on hate speech.

Deep down universities know they are biased – when 90 per cent of your colleagues lean left it is impossible not to know. They also know they can’t possibly admit it because a university’s single most important asset is the appearance of objectivity and open-mindedness. We know this because of a very simple thought experiment: imagine after ever media statement issued, every research paper produced, every shiny under-graduate prospectus the university had to state: “Based on six decades of data and multiple studies we have found that 9 out of 10 of our professors lean politically left or far left.”

They won’t of course. That would be telling the truth.

Perhaps until universities make a real commitment to diversity of thought the government, media and students should be a lot more careful about believing what faculty tell us.

I do think the skew here would not be as bad as in the US, but it would still be very significant.

A reader has sent me a response they got from an MP. Their e-mail was:

This is one to one and not bulk email.  Winston promised to sort out 1080 before the election.  He seems to have welshed on that.  Why?  Sort that out and come the next election you will all be in like rats up a drainpipe.  Fail and NZF will be history.

So a NZF voter who wants Winston to keep a promise and says they’ll do well if he does.

The response includes the lines:

If you wish to contact me again for an update I strongly suggest you change your tone.

Make your guesses below as to which Minister this was. It wasn’t Winston.

A guest post by Liam Hehir:

I sometimes get asked why I’ll write about one topic and not another. People can be disappointed that I haven’t addressed a subject they thought merited comment. I thought I might give an illustration of why I thought this happens.

As I sat down last Sunday to compose my Tuesday column, I wasn’t sure what to write about. There were about six or seven options. The one that interested me most was probably the government’s Spring of Discontent.

With business confidence plummeting in anticipation of new labour laws, the economic outlook is an important topic. There’s already been a lot of argument about how much mind we should pay to business gloominess. And, given that the health of the economy is usually the top concern for voters, there’s room for more argument still.

So why didn’t I write about it?

The rumour was that the prime minister, returning from leave, would hit the ground running with some substantive announcement on Monday that was going to put business at ease. Specifically, the announcement was going to address the subject of trade. My deadline is 4.00 pm on Sunday so, to avoid being overtaken by events, I went with the proposed VUW name change.

In the event, all Ardern announced was something called “Trade for All”. As far as I can tell, it’s some kind of working group (if you can imagine such a thing from this government). It’s going to consider how to ensure the benefits of trade can be more fairly better distributed. And, to do this, it’s going to tour the country holding public meetings.

So, you know, if you’re a panel beater who’s been hard at it all day you can go along to some meeting to talk about the social dimensions of international trade for a few hours before going home to complete your GST return. What small business owner wouldn’t jump at that opportunity? You can hear their sighs of relief already!

The reality is that a new centre-left government was always going to come hand-in-hand with a decrease in political satire. We’re just not going to see many zingers aimed at the government from the back pages of our newspaper sections (at least for a while). But it might not be so unfair if the government keeps on parodying itself.

Anyway, that’s a textbook example in missing a window. In the unlikely event that the “Trade for All” roadshow doesn’t magically cure things, I could always write about it next week. But the caravan moves on.

By Sunday, I doubt we will even still be talking about Don Brash.

A number of people were fooled into thinking the Government’s trade announcement would be something of substance.

The Herald reports:

A mother who claims she was jailed in Dubai for drinking a glass of wine on a flight from London has told for the first time the full story of her harrowing ordeal.

But was it for that?

At Dubai International airport, she handed over her Iranian passport at the immigration desk. The officer’s computer told him that her visa had already been used two months earlier, which Ellie acknowledges was her mistake.

So she had an incorrect visa.

He advised Ellie to get a transit visa, which would allow her to stay in the country for the duration of her five-day trip.

But then a different immigration officer took one look at her Iranian passport and told her: “You get a ticket and go on a flight home.”

And was told she could not fly.

Ellie said: “I did not swear and told him I was told I could get a transit visa. He just refused to listen and he was so close I could feel his spit on my face. He was jabbing a finger in my face and was rude and aggressive.

“He looked at me as if I was like the dirt under his shoes, and I think it was because I was from Iran. If it had been a European woman he might not have reacted in the same way.”

Ellie said she became afraid so she used her mobile phone to film the immigration officer. This inflamed the situation further.

This was incredibly stupid. You’re in bloody Dubai. Maybe this may be a good idea (but probably not) at Los Angeles Airport, but to start filming security officers in an authoritarian state’s airport is incredibly dumb.

“People in Britain film police all the time. I was doing it for my own protection.”

You were not in the UK.

None of this justified what the security guards did – arresting her and her four year old daughter. Of course they should not have. But Dubai is an authoritarian state with awful human rights abuses.

Stuff reports:

NZ First’s constitution states any of its MPs who resign or are expelled from the party are personally liable for up to $300,000 if they don’t leave Parliament immediately.

The clause states if the MP is either an electorate MP or a list MP, they have up to three days to vacate their seat in Parliament, or pay up.

This is all because Peters consistently gets offside with his MPs. So now if Winston decides he doesn’t like an MP and gets his board to kick them out, they have to pay Winston’s party $300,000 unless they resign – even if they are an electorate MP.

And in a flight of fancy, Winston claims that Simon Bridges has tried to entice Ron Mark to defect from NZ First and stand for National in Wairarapa. This is of course a lie. So we have a Deputy PM who just makes shit up (we knew this).

Ron is not the most popular person with National MPs. The idea that anyone in National would try and get him to defect is about as likely as Labour trying to entice David Seymour to join them.

Melissa Lee had drawn from the ballot, a bill called Broadcasting (New Zealand on Air and Te Māngai Pāho Reporting Requirements) Amendment Bill.

It is in fact a very useful bill to give taxpayers more transparency over programmes we fund.

It basically requires NZ on Air to publish every quarter data on how many people viewed a programme they funded. This includes TV and radio ratings plus online views. Also the costs of the programmes (this is already disclosed).

What this will allow us to see is basically the cost per viewer.

Number of viewers are not the only metric of success. But it is something we deserve to know. If a TV show costs say $500,000 and the average number of TV viewers is 1,800 then one could well conclude a cost per viewer of $300 is not value for money.

So I hope this bill gets supported by Parliament. Surely no party would vote against transparency.

Stuff reports:

The university club that sparked a free-speech firestorm is still keen to invite the man at the centre of the controversy back. …

Society president Christian Houghton said the group was pleased to get the talks back on track. It hoped Brash could return without a repeat of last week’s controversy.

The society wants to meet with Thomas to discuss Brash’s potential return.

“We just don’t know where the vice-chancellor stands on it, since she stopped commenting publicly,” Houghton said. “We don’t want to waste his time again … if she hasn’t changed her mind.”

Massey spokesman James Gardiner said the university wouldn’t oppose Brash returning to speak on campus. “Of course we wouldn’t. It wasn’t a ban on Brash, it was a cancellation of an event because there was a perceived security threat.”

This is dissembling bullshit. If it was a security issue, then no decision would have been made until after talking to the Police. And the VC wouldn’t spend half her press release talking about how much she hates what Don Brash says and thinks it is closer to hate speech.

Gardiner said if Brash returned, and security concerns were raised again, Massey would do its best to ensure the talk went ahead, as long as police and university security  advised it was safe.

So why wasn’t this done last time? Because the VC used security as a pretext to stop Brash speaking because she didn’t like what he says.

NewstalkZB reports:

A Greens candidate running for a state seat in Sydney previously wrote an article calling for sex with corpses to be made legal.

Party candidate Tom Raue argued that necrophilia was harmless, but he has since backtracked saying it “is a joke”, Daily Mail Australia reported.

In the article, which was written for a student newspaper in 2013, Raue wrote: “If a person gives permission for their corpse to be used for sex, and the family has no issue with it, then what’s the harm? F*** it.”

In the piece, he said necrophilia was one of the “most taboo sexualities in almost every society”, believing it should be legalised.

He wrote that necrophilia may “not be everyone’s cup of tea”, but insisted the act was “harmless and should be allowed”.

Raue, who has been a Greens Party member for seven years, previously wrote a similar article in 2012 campaigning to allow bestiality.

However, Raue strongly claims he was joking and that it is not his honest view.

Raue seems a lovely person. He has also just published a meme saying:

Attacking the rich is not envy, it is self defence.

As for his claim the column was a joke, he seems to make strident arguments in favour:

If having sex with a body is so offensive that it upsets people, that’s not a good enough reason to make it illegal. If it upsets the family of the deceased person, that’s a different issue – one of property rights. I don’t believe in private property when it comes to important resources, but it’s fine for objects of sentimental value. Corpses have extreme sentimental value and thus should belong to the family, friends or partner of the deceased. How to determine this in a fair way would require complex legal arguments that do not belong in this article.

Whoever ends up “owning” the corpse should have a say in how it is used. They should be able to decide if the organs are donated or if they want to allow somebody to have sex with the body. This should be overruled if the deceased person specified what they wanted before they died. If they stated that they did not want their corpse interfered with, that should be respected.

So unless your will explicitly says you don’t want your corpse violated, its fair game for your family to do so.

Stuff reports:

At a time in history when the relevance of the honours system is being questioned, New Zealand’s programme has been expanded to include a new category, for public servants.

On Monday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the new medal would recognise meritorious service in the public service.”Public servants rarely get acknowledged for the exceptional work they do that changes New Zealand society and lives for the better,” Ardern said.

This is a bit bizarre. I’m all for recognising good public service. There are already awards such as the IPANZ Awards. And public servants are already eligible for Royal honours for their work. I’m not sure why one needed a new medal just for public servants.

In the last Honours list there were the following honours for public servants:

• ONZM – 1
• MNZN – 1
• QSO – 2

So the concept of recognising good public service is good, but I don’t think one needs a special medal for it.