Biologist Bob Brockie writes:

Greenie alarmists spread needless fears about science.

They have long spread misinformation and lies about genetic engineering (GE), claiming it has never done any good, only harm. But these claims fly in the face of scientific evidence.

In separate reports, the OECD and the American Academy of Sciences reviewed more than 1000 scientific studies of GE earlier this year. They found that farmers using GE got bigger crops, made more money and used less insecticide than conventional farmers. They concluded that GE has never harmed anybody, nor harmed the environment.

Every claim made about the harm from GE has not eventuated.

Greenies hate fracking, claiming it pumps hundreds of chemicals into rocks and these contaminate aquifers. But they’re wrong – 99.5 per cent of the anti-fracking fluid is sand and water, and the miniscule remainder is a mix of 13 chemicals which you would find in your kitchen, bathroom or garage.

And fracking has been wonderful for greenhouse has emissions, allowing the US to significantly reduce its emissions as fracking has  given them energy independence.

The NZ Herald editorial:

Labour’s first big shot in the Mt Roskill byelection – a pledge to invest $680 million in a light rail system – has rightly been labelled “pork barrel” politics by senior government figure Steven Joyce. …

In reality, all the players should be holding off pledging funds to the big-ticket items which Auckland is going to need in the coming years.

Last year’s Auckland Transport Alignment Project had much going for it in that it got all the key parties together to settle on the direction of the region’s transport system over the next three decades.

The light rail project, meant to run from Wynyard Quarter to Mt Roskill, is a component of the strategic plan, which budgeted for a $23.7b investment in the first 10 years alone.

Clearly the numbers are sizeable, and most likely subject to change.

Just yesterday the Greens were highlighting congestion problems with a road-only additional harbour crossing, saying some form of rapid transit was essential to future-proof the $4b tunnel to be built sometime between 2030 and 2050.

Who can say with conviction that the transport technology in use today will still be with us in 10 or 20 years?

Pushing ahead with the Dominion Rd light rail scheme might, or might not, be the right project to lift up the pecking order.

Such however are the scale of the transport pieces that it would be a mistake to cherry-pick one when it could simply create costly snarl-ups in another part of the Auckland transport mosaic.

And the experience in Australia is the huge cost blow outs occur when politicians do cherry pick.

In my view you should leave politicians out of it, and have any transport project with a BCR greater than say 1.5:1 automatically funded.

The latest ABC poll finds:

• Trump 39% favourable and 58% unfavourable for a -19% net favourability
• Clinton 38% favourable and 60% unfavourable for a -22% net favourability

The net favourabilities in October of election year for recent candidates has been:

1. Obama (2008) +29%
2. Reagan (1984) +22%
3. Clinton (1996) +20%
4. Clinton (1992) +20%
5. Bush (1988) +17%
6. McCain +13%
7. Bush (2000) +12%
8. Dole +12%
9. Gore +7%
10. Obama (2012) +6%
11. Romney -4%
12. Bush (2004) +3%
13. Kerry +2%
14. Dukakis +1%
15. Bush (1992) -6%
16. Mondale -11%
17. Trump – 19%
18. Clinton (2016) -22%

Every other winning candidate has been elected (for first term) with at least a +12% approval, and Clinton is at -22%.

Clinton’s unfavourables by demographics are:

• Nonwhites +22%
• College grads -10%
• Women -11%
• All – 22%
• White women -25%
• Non grads -29%
• Men -35%
• Whites -36%
• White men -51%

The SSC has released the latest data. Some of the changes:

• Working age people on benefits down from 321,869 to 279.769 – a 5.3% fall with long-term savings of $3.6 billion
• Early childhood education attendance rate up from 94.7% to 96.6%
• Immunisation rates up from 84.0% to 92.8%
• Rheumatic fever hospitalisation rate per 100,000 down from 4.2 to 2.4
• Substantiated child abuse down from 3,294 to 3,002
• 18 year olds with NCEA Level 2 up from 74.3% to 83.3%
• 25 to 34 year olds with NCEA Level 4 up from 51.9% to 56.5%
• Crime rate down from 1,099 to 844 per 10,000 (but rising in last year)
• Violent crime rate down from 117 to 105 per 10,000 (but rising in last year)
• Youth crime rate down from 371 to 214 per 10,000 (but rising in last year)
• Reoffending rate down 32.2% to 28.0% (but rising in last year)
• Government transactions online increased from 29.9% to 52.2%

The Herald reports:

Solid Energy New Zealand’s creditors will get as much as 55 cents in the dollar after the failed state-owned enterprise’s mines were sold to three parties, including a tie-up between ASX-listed Bathurst Resources and the Talleys Group.

Administrator’s Brendon Gibson and Grant Graham of KordaMentha today said they expect returns from the asset sales to be between 45-cents-and-55-cents in the dollar, above the top end of the 35-to-40-cents range initially estimated for a managed sale, they said in a statement. Three deals were signed and are expected to settle in the first half of 2017.

Phoenix Coal, a joint venture between Bathurst and the Talleys, will buy the Stockton export operation and two Waikato mines, while Palmer MH Group’s Greenbriar purchased two Southland mines, and West Coast miner Birchfield Coal Mines purchase the Strongman and Liverpool mines on the West Coast.

The company was placed in voluntary administration last year after concluding it had no realistic prospect of refinancing $239 million of debt facilities due to mature in September 2016. The company’s downward spiral began in 2013 when slumping global coal costs exposed its commercial error in carrying substantial debt on its balance sheet to pursue a variety of novel energy projects that a previous board and management believed would give the business a future beyond coal extraction.

I guess not even Labour will oppose this asset sale.

But the collapse of Solid Energy is a good reminder that taxpayers should not own shares in commercially competitive companies. Why should we carry the can when global prices slump?

Stuff reports:

A donor claiming to be Ian Binnie, the retired judge appointed to review David Bain’s compensation claim, has given a donation to Bain’s Givealittle campaign

Justice campaigner Roger Brooking set up the Campaign for David Bain page, raising just over $12,000.

Included in the 85 donors was $250 from a person named “Ian Binnie”.

Brooking understood the donation to be from the retired Judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, who concluded Bain was innocent on the balance of probabilities of the murder of his parents, two sisters and brother in Dunedin in 1994.

“There is the option to make the donation anonymous, so he clearly put his name on it because he wanted people to know how strongly he felt.”

This is spectacularly inappropriate, and reinforces all the concerns people had over Judge Binnie’s report. He clearly has become a crusader for Bain, rather than a detached independent judge.

MYOB released:

With around a year to go before the General Election, the National Party enjoys overwhelming support from New Zealand’s small business owners according to a survey from accounting software provider MYOB.

The MYOB Colmar Brunton Business Monitor surveyed 1,012 small business owners from around New Zealand on their attitudes to the political parties and what policies they support.

When asked what political party is best for helping their business succeed, National came out in front with 57 per cent saying it is best for them while Labour had just 10 per cent support. New Zealand First had 4 per cent, the Greens 3 per cent and ACT 2 per cent. No other parties registered and the rest were either ‘don’t know’ or ‘none of them’.

So the level of support from small businesses in order is:

1. National 57%
2. Labour 10%
3. NZ First 4%
4. Greens 3%
5. ACT 2%

“It’s obviously a good result for the Government. People do trust John Key and Bill English’s economic management. There is a strong sense in the small business community that the country is on the right track,” says MYOB Head of Small Business Ingrid Cronin-Knight.

“MYOB’s Business Monitor also found 42 per cent of business owners expect their revenue to increase in the next year, while just 11 per cent expect it to decline – so obviously the strong economy is playing well for National.

These are small, not large, businesses that have 20 or fewer employees.

Other findings:

• 63 per cent want to retain the 90 trial period for new employees, verse 18 per cent who oppose it.
• 93 per cent of small businesses think the Government needs to ensure multinational companies pay tax on profits earned in New Zealand.
• Two-thirds of small business owners believe in assigning a proportion of Government procurement contracts to small businesses.
• There is a split on whether the age of superannuation entitlement should be raised to 67, with 47 per cent opposed to lifting the age, while 37 per cent support it.
• There was also a split on pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal – with one third supporting the deal and 29 per cent wanting New Zealand to pull out.

A very good article by Nevil Gibson in the NBR:

Yet this radical resurgence must have some basis in real conditions and this is supplied from an unexpected source – the establishment media and its antipathy to the National-led government.

While the left has plenty of internal divisions about its priorities and strategies, it thrives on persuading its sympathisers in the media that some issues can gain traction.

These are collectively known as identity issues and Dr Edwards has produced a fine set of graphs on his blog to make the point. He has tracked media coverage of certain “radical” terms over the terms of the six Labour and National governments since 2000.

These terms will be recognised by NBR readers, who may also wonder why they have become more familiar in recent years. They comprise inequality, poverty, gender, feminism, identity politics, capitalism, race/racism, political correctness, ethnicity and working class and Marxism.

Two of these are illustrated in the graphs and they provide an astonishing answer. Media interest started to rise dramatically after the election of the National government on the cusp of the GFC in November 2008.

From 2001-09, the New Zealand Herald had an average of just 38 articles a year on inequality. But two years later it had jumped nearly four times that amount and is now 420 a year or eight times a week.

And here is the graph of it:

Now no matter what indicator you use, the data all shows that inequality has not increased in any significant way since 2008. In fact has been constant most of the last 20 years.

Yet you get this almost 1000% increase in reporting on it, just because of the change of Government.

Stuff reports:

A former New Plymouth District Councillor has won the battle for selection as Maori Party candidate in the Te Tai Hauauru seat at next year’s election.

Now he faces an even bigger challenge, to get around the enormous electorate and rouse the support he will need to take the seat off Labour MP Adrian Rurawhe.

“Without a standing MP, a lot of the electorate has gone to sleep, we Maori Party electors need to be reawakened, renergised and reconnected back to the party,” he said. 

Tamati was chosen ahead of South Taranaki’s Debbie Ngarewa-Packer by the Maori Party at a meeting on Saturday.

“When my name got read out it was quite overwhelming,” he said.

“But I was buoyed by the support I’ve been given and the large group of people who came with me to the meeting, I felt really empowered.”

Tamati, of Te Atiawa, Ngati Mutunga and Ngai Tahu, is current chief executive of Sport Taranaki and was a New Plymouth District councillor for 15 years.

He is a former international rugby league player and coach and is the president of NZ Rugby League. 

Tamati will be a high profile candidate for the Maori Party. I understand they also have some very high profile candidates lined up for Te Tai Tonga and Hauraki-Waikato.

Stuff reports:

Republicans’ growing unity behind Donald Trump has helped pull him just one percentage point below Hillary Clinton and placed GOP (Grand Old Party – or Republican) leaders who resist him in a vulnerable position, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll.

The Post-ABC Tracking Poll continues to find a very tight race, with Clinton at 46 per cent and Trump at 45 per cent among likely voters in interviews from Tuesday through Friday, followed by Libertarian Gary Johnson at four per cent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein at two per cent.

The result is similar to a 47-45 margin in the previous wave released Saturday, though smaller than found in other surveys this week. When likely voters are asked to choose between Clinton and Trump alone, Clinton stands at 49 per cent to Trump’s 46 per cent, a margin that is still statistically insignificant.

It is insignificant in that it is less than 95% probable Clinton leads. The probability is 83%.

Of course only one poll but the race has got tighter. A few days ago Trump was at 12% to win and now is at 23% on 538’s polls plus model.

Currently Trump has 215 electoral votes to Clinton’s 323. The states he is closest in but trailing are:

1. Florida 0.6%, 29 votes
2. North Carolina 1.2%, 15 votes
3. Nevada 1.5%, 6 votes
4. Colorada 4.8%, 9 votes

Those four would give him 59 more to make it 274 Trump and Clinton 264.

Stuff reports:

So there was some irony yesterday when Labour promised to bring home the bacon for Mt Roskill by fast-tracking a $1.4 billion light rail plan. 

Labour leader Andrew Little argued it was not an election bribe, because he was only promising to bring forward from 2028 a project already on the books. And it would provide broader benefits to Auckland. The 10 bridges were very much a Northland thing. But the timing had that familiar porcine smell.

National’s campaign manager Steven Joyce, who deserves his share of the blame for the Northland debacle, added to the irony accusing them of taking “pork barrel politics to a whole new level” – apparently because the cost of the bridges paled beside the $1.4b price tag for light rail.

He also accused them of being “desperate”.

But for both parties there are big issues at stake.

If National pulls off an unlikely win it can reinstate the old order, prior to Northland, where it would needs but one of its three “Kling-ons” for a majority in the house.

Labour, meanwhile, is looking for a solid win.

It fears a result akin to the Mana by-election in 2010 – a safe seat where on a low turnout of 55 per cent Labour nearly made a pig’s ear of it. 

Kris Faafoi eventually saw off Hekia Parata by just 1406 votes.

With one year to run until the general election Labour – and especially Little – will want to do better than merely squeaking in on December 3.

Labour must be worried to have to start their by-election campaign with a $1.4 billion promise.

It is worth noting that the BCR for this light rail project is estimated to be between 0.5 and 1.1. It is far from conclusive that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Local Wainuiomata boy Campbell Barry got beaten for Labour’s Hutt South nomination by Virginia Andersen yesterday.

Reliable sources tell me that Barry massively won the floor vote by around 70%. He also picked up the support of the delegate elected from the floor and one of the two LEC delegates.

But Andersen had the unanimous support of the three head office delegates and the other LEC delegate so beat Barry 4 votes to 3.

This seriously dents Labour’s chances of retaining Hutt South. Barry is very popular in Wainuiomata where he grew up. The local party members there were passionately behind him. He would have been a formidable candidate.

Andersen doesn’t even live in the electorate and will struggle against National’s Chris Bishop who has won praise from all quarters from his high energy advocacy and efforts in Hutt South.

Local members don’t like it when head office outvotes the local favourite. They won’t leave Labour over it, but they won’t be as motivated to campaign.

UPDATE: A lot of Labour members and supporters unhappy. Comments on Barry’s Facebook page include:

• So disappointed. I for one am not sure Labour represents my values any more.
• Looks like Hutt South is going blue next year
• Yep, Chris Bishop will be the new MP for Hutt South.
• Am speechless.Stunned.Seems like an own goal…..Oh dear
• I’m very sorry that you weren’t selected Campbell. As I said earlier tonight I believe they have made a mistake when the candidate doesn’t even live in the electorate. Wainui which is the biggest catchment in Hutt South works at a personal level, it’s relationships and proving yourself that will cause people to vote for you, something Chris Bishop has recognised and is working hard at.
  
• I am really dissappointed, but will observe the next few months to see whether Labour deserves our vote, and those of our families and youth. Malo lava le onosai uso.
• Sad to here that Labour has gone with a non resident. Even sadder they have decided to go with someone who couldn’t beat Dunne even after the boundary shift worked in Labours favour.
• I’m disappointed in the voting process here because I know that if the people there got to choose, you would’ve won. You saw how many of us came to support you. Today’s result shows that Labour isn’t listening to what the people want.
• We will be deregistering from the party now, we weren’t in there long but we were there to support you & I don’t have much faith now in the party and it’s processes – if they don’t listen to their own people, how will they ever listen to everyone else?
• What a shame and a loss for Labour. Mallard would have lost the seat in the next election to bishop. I really think that you could have mobilised the people to back you and labour would have had a chance to hold that seat. Even with your backing I don’t think she will win.
• I don’t know about Trevor losing but who is Virginia … never heard of her.
• Labour will lose this seat. But I think Campbell would have given them a shot. This is what is wrong with Labour
• I don’t see that with their selection, putting in a policy wonk from outside of the electorate, the Labour selectors have shown they don’t really care about the Hutt South people.
• Ginny has no chance of beating Bishop without Campbell who has the real relationships with the people. Bishop has done the hard yards and none of us grass roots community people know who Ginny is. Campbell was Labours only hope to keep Hutt South…
• Dumb, replacing someone established in the community with someone no one knows. They must have a magical strategy, I hope it works
• It’s completely obvious that the Labour selection committee shot themselves in the foot today. There are going to be negative consequences that will follow this poor decision they have made, especially at a local level. Which will in turn affect central Labour.
• It really does look like they chose a career politician over a community champion. Really concerned that we now have a candidate representing us who in the last election was in a totally different electorate trying to get a seat representing that community

These comments are from Labour members and supporters. Its really is a big own goal – and all because Barry has a Y chromosome.

Mark Bekhit writes at Stuff:

As a medical student with growing student debt who needed to move out of his parent’s Auckland home for a placement in Waikato, I realised I would become a part of the demographic that we studied regularly at medical school – the materially poor who performed worse on nearly all health outcomes.

As an avid promoter of healthy lifestyles, I thought I’d try an experiment to show it’s not all about the money.

So, for the last 200 days, I’ve eaten on a budget of $3.30 a day, eating the exact same food, every day, every week.

Breakfast (when I had time for it) consisted of two Weet-Bix and milk (about 30 cents a day).

That is also my typical breakfast except I have three weetbix normally.

Lunch consisted of ham and toast purchased for the week (about $1 per day). Occasionally I’d treat myself by adding lettuce and even cheese if I really wanted to splurge, which averaged about 30 cents extra.

Finally, the dinner special: pasta, mince, pasta sauce and onion, together costing about $2 a day. There’s a lot to like about this meal besides its price. It took 20-30 minutes to cook the entire week’s dinners (a bonus for a busy medical student), it tasted good enough for me to eat every day for 200 days (Monday to Friday) and had a good range of protein and carbohydrates. Add a bit of vegetables into the mix and it may have ticked all the nutritional boxes – something I will keep in mind for my next 200 days.

This was my diet for 200 weekdays straight, with weekends being my cheat days to rejuvenate, whether it was bacon and eggs, fast food or occasionally continuing the $3 a day tradition anyway out of routine. I also maintained 20 minutes of vigorous exercise each day, which cost me nothing and helped me keep a balanced lifestyle.

So he did this for around nine months.

Most importantly, this experiment illustrates the reality of poverty in New Zealand with a rather controversial opinion: it’s not just poverty of material wealth, but also a poverty of culture.

Here I was, living on $3.30 a day for food, living at one point in a house with nine other students squeezed into a four-bedroom home, and living in what many refer to as a “high-risk” neighbourhood filled with takeaway stores, fast food and crime.

I would be tempted every day on my walk to the hospital with two giant signs advertising a tempting $2 pie combo, and admittedly I gave in about twice during the 200 days.

According to everything I had been taught at medical school, this environment should have sent me on a path towards poor health and a failure to achieve. Yet, in this environment I became the healthiest, most productive and most successful I had ever been. 

Living on $3.30 a day and in a 10 person house. He is officially in poverty!

At the same time, I witnessed firsthand the health struggles of those in poverty during my medical community visits throughout the year. I noticed that while material poverty was present in the majority, there were usually other more challenging social circumstances such as abusive relationships, solo parenting, drug abuse or other criminal involvement.

The reality for many, if not most. This is why simply tax more and hand out more in welfare is not the solution.

While I don’t suggest that poverty isn’t a factor in health, social and cultural issues – such as family violence, binge drinking and fast food – may play a larger role than material poverty.

Poverty is a factor, but not the only factor or even the most important factor.

However, targeting material poverty with food-in-schools campaigns sounds a lot more attractive, and often gets much more public support in funding.

It treats the symptoms, but not the cause.

Some interesting research done by UMR for InternetNZ:

• 93% of households have Internet access
• 83% access through computers/laptops, 65% smartphones and 43% tablets
• 94% use Internet at least daily and 31% are online basically continually
• Major uses are social media 48%, get info 42%, communicate 31%, entertainment 27%, banking 17%
• Biggest concerns are security of data 27%, privacy 16%, identity theft 13%, online crime 9%

They asked how concerned people were on various issues. They proportion concerned on an issue was:

• data security 72%
• children screen time 72%
• cyber-bullying 69%
• privacy threats 67%
• online crime 64%
• identity theft 64%
• society becoming more physically isolated 62%
• people losing ability to think independently 53%
• wrong or misleading info online 51%

Matthew Lynn writes at The Telegraph:

Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, has published its latest findings on the numbers of people “at risk of poverty or social exclusion”, comparing 2008 and 2015. Across the 28 members, five countries saw really significant rises compared with the year of the financial crash. In Greece, 35.7pc of people now fall into that category, compared with 28.1pc back in 2008, a rise of 7.6 percentage points. Cyprus was up by 5.6 points, with 28.7pc of people now categorised as poor. Spain was up 4.8 points, Italy up 3.2 points and even Luxembourg, hardly known for being at risk of deprivation, up three points at 18.5pc. 

It was not so bleak everywhere. In Poland, the poverty rate went down from 30.5pc to over 23pc. In Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia, there were large falls compared to the 2008 figures – in Romania for example the percentage was down by seven points to 37pc.

What was the difference between the countries where poverty went up dramatically, and those where it went down? You guessed it. The largest increases were all countries within the single currency. But the decreases were all in countries outside it.

Coincidence? I doubt it.

Across the EU, 8pc of people are defined as “severely materially deprived”, which means that they lack access to what most civilised societies regards as basic necessities – if you tick four out of nine boxes, which include not being able to afford to heat your home, eat meat or fish or a similar protein at least every other day, or pay for a phone, then you fall into that category.

Strikingly, several eurozone countries are now starting to lead on those measures. Greece, inevitably, is rising fast, with 22pc of the population now falling into that category, compared with only 11pc back in 2008. In Italy, a country that was as prosperous as any in the world two decades ago, a shocking 11pc of the population are now “materially deprived” compared with 7.5pc seven years ago. In Spain the rate has doubled, and in Cyprus it is up by more than 50pc.

And yet if you look at countries outside the single currency, that rate is either broadly stable, as it is in the UK for example, or else falling at a respectable rate – in fast-growing Poland, for example, the numbers suffering “material deprivation” has halved in the last seven years, and, at 7.5pc, is now a lot less than it is in Italy. 

More deprivation in Italy than Poland!

In fact, it is not very hard to work out what has happened. First, a dysfunctional currency system has choked off economic growth, driving unemployment up to previously unbelievable levels. After countries went bankrupt and had to be bailed out, the EU, along with the ECB and the IMF, imposed austerity packages that slashed welfare systems and cut pensions. It is not surprising poverty is increasing under those conditions.

You can’t have a common currency without a common fiscal policy.

The SMH report:

Transport projects across the country have blown out in cost by at least $28 billion in the past 15 years, according to an independent think-tank.

And the main cause of the cost increases is the tendency of politicians of all persuasions to make promises about road or rail projects before they have been assessed, says the Grattan Institute report, to be released on Monday.

We see this in NZ where politician promise light rail despite the assessment that it has a BCR of 0.05.

The report used an investment monitor by accountancy firm Deloitte to compare the early projected cost of 836 transport projects over the past 15 years with their eventual tab. It found that the largest cost over-runs occurred when the scope of a project was announced early by a politician.

So the best thing is to let the experts do proper costings of project benefits and costs, and then have politicians commit to them. Not to have politicians commit to them before they costings.

The left seem to hark back to 1975 as the high point for NZ. It was pre-Muldoon and pre-Rogernomics.

Our level of “economic freedom” in 1975 was judged to be 5.60 out of 10. Today it is 8.35, the third highest in the world.

So if we had stayed in that idyllic 1975 score of 5.6, what sort of economy would we have today?

We’d be ranked 145th in the world, alongside Ethiopa.

Ryan Bourne of the IEA writes:

Let us examine the components of the EU. First, the customs union, where the mind-boggling common external tariff and quotas on non-EU goods contribute to raising prices for manufactured and agricultural products by about 20 per cent for EU consumers, according to the research of Patrick Minford. Under the much lamented “hard Brexit” with World Trade Organisation rules, we could abolish this administrative nightmare, adopting unilateral free trade.

It is true that this would entail more customs checks, but it would lead to a substantial fall in consumer prices (about 8 per cent overall, according to Professor Minford). But the real long-term gains would come from trading on our comparative advantages. In other words, producing what we are relatively good at under global competition — pushing us further up the value chain into a future of high-end manufacturing and services.

An 8% drop in the price of imported goods would be great.

Vested producer interests will wail. Remain backers will whinge about manufacturing and agriculture facing more overseas competition. But if competition at an EU level is good, why not globally? Brexit is a chance to throw off not only the shackles of the EU’s tariffs, but also the second major economic pillar: subsidies and protections for agriculture. The Common Agricultural Policy deters innovation at a high cost to taxpayers and has been captured by interest groups using it to impose stringent, anti-scientific regulations relating to food standards, pesticide use and GM crops. It should be scrapped.

New Zealand in the 1980s showed what liberalisation can achieve. The country’s sheep stock halved and the number of beef and sheep farms fell by a third. But farms became larger and more productive, while production of fruits and wines grew sharply and a venison industry developed. There was substantial supply-chain innovation. Trading at world prices, the sector is now an international success story.

The UK should leave behind the protectionism of Europe and declare itself open for free trade with any country that will reciprocate.

Surely leaving the single market will mean less foreign direct investment and more restrictive migration? Far from leaving the UK insular, I believe a clean Brexit will put pressure on the UK for the opposite. Quite simply, there will be no other choice. Given the trend for falling corporate profit tax rates and the need to maintain important FDI, Britain could lead the world in abolishing profits as a tax base entirely.

It would also become obvious that for a mature economy, trading services requires the movement of people. After initial attempted clampdowns on numbers, the country would adopt more expansive bilateral movement with many other mature nations, as well as the EU, to reflect our successful service sector.

I’m sure NZ would be keen on a bilateral movement agreement.

Greg Bruce interviews Paul Henry:

“Okay, let me talk about a person at an airport,” Henry said. “When you’re standing in the queue and you know you have to take things out of your pockets and out of your briefcase, do you know you’re going to have to do that?”

He waited for an answer, so I said, “Yes.”

“So why – the f*** – do you get to the front of the queue and have all this – ‘Oh f***! Oh shit! Oh my f***in’ Christ! I had no idea I had a hand grenade in my pocket! Oh, do I need to put my laptop in a separate thing? Do I need to take this out of my sock? Do I need to take my shoes off? Am I a complete f***in’ moron who can barely breathe on my own?’

“Do you have any idea how much that infuriates me? And I’m standing behind these c***s and I think, ‘What is it about you that is so f***ing special that you can hold me and all these other people up because you are so without your own f***ing mind that you can’t prepare in all the f***ing time you’ve had to get your laptop – ‘Oh, what have I got in here? Oh, what have I got with me? Oh, I’ve got two litres of plutonium. Do I need to put that in a separate tray?’

“You know? And you think, ‘What is it with you, you complete f***in’ moron?’ And you’re going overseas, you’re going to f***in’ Sydney or wherever you’re going, to a f***in’ CEOs’ conference and you can’t f***ing get the two litres of plutonium out of your briefcase in advance, you complete f***in’ dipstick.’

Love it.

I share his pain. When I get to the security scanner my keys, phone and all metal are in my laptop bag and my laptop is ready to go in the tray. So takes me around five seconds, while for so many others they take ages removing things they could have done in the queue.

The whole interview is very amusing.

Murray McCully announced:

Foreign Minister Murray McCully today hailed a breakthrough agreement that will create the world’s largest Marine Protected Area in the Ross Sea region of the Antarctic.

“At its annual meeting in Hobart this week, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) unanimously agreed to a New Zealand-United States proposal to establish a marine protected area in the Ross Sea,” Mr McCully says.

“New Zealand has played a leading role in reaching this agreement which makes a significant contribution to global marine protection.

“The new Marine Protected Area will cover roughly 1.55 million square kilometres, of which 1.12 million square kilometres will be a no fishing zone.

“The proposal required some changes in order to gain the unanimous support of all 25 CCAMLR members and the final agreement balances marine protection, sustainable fishing and science interests. The boundaries of the MPA, however, remain unchanged.

This is a huge win for NZ and the US, but more importantly for science.

Previous proposals had been vetoed by China and Russia but over many rounds of negotiations, a compromise was found which got them on board.

Just as Antarctica is protected for scientific research, so also is most of the ocean around it.

Stuff reports:

Antarctica’s Ross Sea region, often referred to as the Serengeti of Antarctica, is home to penguins, all manner of seals, whales, fish and sea birds.

The Ross Sea makes up only 2 per cent of the geographic area of the Southern Ocean, but hosts 50 per cent of Ross Sea killer whales, 40 per cent of the world’s Adelie penguins, 30 per cent of Antarctic petrels, a quarter of the world’s emperor penguins and about 6 per cent of the world’s population of Antarctic minke whales.

It helps conservation, but also science:

Antarctic Ecologist Dr David Ainley said the importance of the protection in the Ross Sea could not be underestimated.

The data collected from this “living laboratory” is better known than any other stretch of water in the Southern Ocean, and helps us understand the significant changes taking place on Earth right now, Ainley said.

“It is one of the most pristine marine ecosystems left on the planet and is home to many species found nowhere else on earth.”

The value is indeed the untouched ecosystem.