Interview in the Herald with Tim Groser:

“My office worked out two or three years ago that I was overseas more than 200 days a year and boy, I’m not going to miss that,” he said.

“Constant travel – you have no life at all.”

He is looking forward to resuming a personal life, going to the movies, playing music, getting fit, things he found impossible to do while on the move.

So what music will he be listening to?

“I like to play music rather than listen to it,” he says.

“In my youth I played bass guitar in rock bands. Now I play acoustic and jazz guitar, electric jazz.”

Never too late to form a boy band!

He was given a baby grand piano by his grandmother, a concert pianist.

“And it has sat there, waiting for me to open her up and start to play it. So I have a strong emotional connection with music.”

He will buy a modern electric piano in the United States and keep his baby grand in storage in New Zealand.

A suggestion that it might be hard for someone in his 60s to learn new things is dismissed.

“I don’t believe that at all,” Groser says with his characteristic self-belief that is sometimes mistaken for arrogance.

“I’m learning Spanish and I’m learning Spanish faster than I have learned another language,” he says.

He already speaks Indonesian and French, which has helped with the Spanish.

They say the first new language is the hardest.

And because of his close working relationship with the US Climate Change envoy Todd Stern and US Trade Representative Mike Froman, he says he has been invited by both of them to take part in the political sell of the TPP and the Paris agreement in Washington.

“I will have to avoid becoming involved in their internal politics but putting the substance of the case as the New Zealand Government’s Ambassador in Washington, I’ve got a probably unique position in both these areas.

Basically one needs to try and get Democrats on board with the trade deal and Republicans on board with the climate deal.

Stuff reports:

A powerful and secretive panel that has spent millions in ratepayer cash with no signoff from the Wellington City Council table is being put under the microscope after the CallActive loan debacle.

The council panel was created in the wake of John Key’s comments that Wellington was dying. It promptly handed out a $300,000 loan to call centre CallActive.

Last week the Office of the Auditor-General confirmed it had received a complaint about the panel’s loan to CallActive.

The panel considers $100,000-plus proposals to the Wellington economic initiatives development fund, from which $9.4 million has been committed in two years without councillor signoff.

About $8m was committed by the panel, with chief executive Kevin Lavery deciding the remaining under-$100,000 proposals.

Councillors are updated only annually on its spending, in a report that has been slammed as “waffle”.

The two reports to date did not include comprehensive lists of recipients, how much they were given, or any economic benefits of the money spent.

This is very sub-standard.

I would expect reports at least quarterly, and full details of recipients, amounts and expected benefits.

Councillor Andy Foster said there was “general disquiet” among councillors about the panel, and the way decisions were made.

“What we’re looking for is a balance between the need for confidentiality and accountability. At the moment it veers very strongly towards confidentiality.”

These are public funds. If a recipient doesn’t want publicity, then they could of course not put their hand out for the money.

The Telegraph reports:

Ministers want to extend FOI powers to the charity sector to allow members of the public to keep track of the way government grants are being spent.

Fraser Nelson writes in The Telegraph:

While overseas support has been crucial and highly effective in the struggle, the strongest force pushing back disease in the continent is capitalism; trade still brings in far more money than aid. Indoor smoke, dirty water and hunger still kill more Africans than malaria, so when a villager can afford rudimentary sanitation and healthcare, the effect on disease is profound.

A recent African Union conference set a two-year deadline to turn the whole continent into a free-trade area. This is no mere fantasy: since the beginning of the century, the value of trade between African countries has risen five times over; mobile phones are now as common in Nigeria and South Africa as they are in Britain.

A free trade zone within Africa – a very good idea. Wealth for Africa will  come from trade, not charity (but charity is needed for now).

Bill Gates’s charitable foundation has played a full role in the battle against malaria. It does not rely on pulling heartstrings to gain support, so he is free of any need to spin a tale of Africa in meltdown. Instead, he talks about “mind-blowing” progress being made before our eyes. On current trends, he says, there will be almost no poor countries left within 20 years.

If this sounds like a wild exaggeration, it shouldn’t: all the data is pointing in this direction.

This is a story that is not told very often, but it is none the less the story of our age: globalisation is spreading ideas, medicine and wealth, forcing down inequality and bringing the world closer together.

With enough capitalism, poverty might become history after all.

In 1990 over 40% of the world lived in extreme poverty, Today it is under 20% and shortly after 2020 it is projected to be under 10%. A remarkable change in just three decades.

Rodney Hide writes:

My end of year prediction looks even further out. Our next government will be a National-Green one with Peters sidelined and furious.

Under Shaw’s leadership, the Greens are quietly repositioning. They joined National in hailing the climate change agreement concluded in Paris.

In that one moment they were no longer outsiders throwing rocks at those inside. They were responsible, stately and showing an ability to compromise and work with others.

It makes sense. The Greens need leverage to achieve policy. They have none if their only option is Labour. They need to sidle quietly up to National. And they are.

Key for a fourth term will pay their price. It will be for a comprehensive tax on greenhouse gas emissions, including agriculture. National in its cunning will make sure the tax takes more than three years to implement.

The election of Shaw will prove a tipping point but one we never noticed. Dunne will remain in office like the cabinet table and chairs. And Peters will be the angry man in opposition.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I really can’t see Metiria Turei as a Minister in a National-led Government. However that would be preferable to Winston in Government!

Stuff reports:

Conservative lobby group Family First have launched an online TV service for parents worried about exposing their children to offensive content.

The online streaming service, called “Family First TV”, allows families to rent or buy content with granular controls over who can see what. It also offers a large amount of political content from Family First for free.

Family First trumpet the granular parental controls as the main innovation within the service. The system is split into four separate five point scales – language, violence, sexual themes, and adult themes.

For example, a “1” on the sexual themes scale signifies an on-screen kiss or a partially naked character, while a “3” signified implied intercourse – such as a “morning after” scene.

Parents can create different profiles for children with fine tuned levels, and assign credits for them to rent or buy the content.

Spokesman Nick Hitchins argued that sticker ratings don’t give parents enough control over the content their children see.

“A PG can be anything from fantasy swordfighting in Puss in Boots through to teenagers kissing behind the bush through to people using some quite colourful language,” he said.

“Instantly,our insights panel gives families the ability to say ‘what is going to occur in this that might concern me’.”

Hitchins points to the M-rated Star Wars: The Force Awakens as an example of this imprecise rating. 

“Parents are suddenly in a quandary. M in my mind suddenly feels like I would tell my kid they need to be sixteen before they can watch that. Now comes Star Wars which used to be pretty much PG all the way through.”

Michelle Baker from the Office of Film and Literature Classification said they were always happy for parents to look up extra information on films they wanted to show their children.

“We would like to put as much information as we can on the sticker, but there are some limitations on the physical label,” she said.

This is a good initiative from Family First. Empowering parents to be more specific as to what they deem suitable. The current classifications are very broad, and a voluntary system that provide more detailed ratings will I am sure be welcome by some parents.

Tracy Watkins writes:

Dunne manages these things with surprisingly few ripples. Having served in more government’s than probably any other MP he is the master of MMP politics – the tortoise to NZ First leader Winston Peters’ hare. 

But United Future’s parlous stage – dependent on the goodwill of Ohariu voters to survive – is a constant reminder of the fragility of Dunne’s legacy.

At the last election it polled fewer than 6000 votes. That followed the ignominy of being deregistered over a question mark about having the necessary number of party members.

That has sparked a period of soul searching, with the party hierarchy asking its members “what do you think we should be about?”.

Dunne says while that provoked some “sneering” from his opponents and the media it proved to be a useful exercise.

“We had a couple of hundred detailed responses and they lined up quite well with here we should be. “

The next step would be refining those core values to two or three key philosophies.

“I guess  I learned a very valuable lesson at the last election to my cost.  We thought we were going to be different by producing policy and we produced a great thick manifesto and all that stuff.  That was to be our point of difference and it just went nowhere. People said ‘you want to talk bout policy? We want to talk about Dotcom’.”

So next time, while United Future won’t be “junking policy” it will go into the election with two or three “key ideas”.

The task now was to decide: “What are those messages, what are those things that for a party our size and place where we can say we will make a difference?”

But Dunne admits he is also grappling with the other dilemma facing small parties – succession planning.

“Do I have an answer to it at this stage?  No.  But it’s something that all small parties [have to think about].  Do they have some sort of strategy?  We’ve got some people who are putting their hands up at the moment, the big challenge for us is how do you get those people up and give them the profile to be taken seriously? There’s no lack of enthusiasm. There’s just that practical reality of ‘how do you get people to notice?'”

So long as Dunne retains Ohariu, United Future’s lifeline remains intact – but as Dunne himself acknowledges, that is not the full picture.

Dunne has won Ohariu 11 times since he won it off Hugh Templeton in 1984.

His majorities have been:

• 1984 – 1,371
• 1987 – 4,492
• 1990 – 783
• 1993 – 1,065
• 1996 – 8,513
• 1999 – 12,557
• 2002 – 12,534
• 2005 – 7,702
• 2008 – 1,006
• 2011 – 1,392
• 2014 – 710

But of perhaps more importance is where his electorate votes are coming from. Below is what % of Labour an National party voters gave Dunne their electorate vote

• 2002 – Labour 47% National 57%
• 2005 – Labour 34% National 52%
• 2008 – Labour 16% National 44%
• 2011 – Labour 13% National 57%
• 2014 – Labour 9% National 59%

Dunne used to get significant support from both Labour and National voters. Since 2008 his electorate support is overwhelmingly from National voters.

Phil Quin writes in the Business Spectator:

But personal style and policy restraint alone do not explain Key’s durability. It lies in his masterful positioning, aided in no small way by his opponents’ ready willingness to shimmy left to accommodate him. As a result, New Zealanders get a National Party Prime Minister to oversee and implement what is essentially a Labour Party platform. Among voters — as opposed to perpetually outraged partisans — this feels close to optimal.

If you were to review the John Key years with names and labels redacted, the ideological impetus of the governing party would not be immediately apparent.

To the naked eye, policy differences between Key’s National Party and the previous Helen Clark-led Labour government (1999-2008) are barely discernible. Key kept Labour’s massive family tax and benefit scheme intact, maintaining or boosting expenditure on health and education. He extended free doctor’s visits from children under 6 to under 13 and, for the first time since 1977, Key even increased unemployment and other welfare payments in real terms.

Meanwhile, his government rolled out a national broadband scheme and rebuilt earthquake-struck Christchurch with the kind of central planning that wouldn’t seem amiss in Beijing or Hanoi. On the world stage, Key’s noncommittal internationalism is indistinguishable from Helen Clark. And if the government’s account is to be believed, their Trade Minister spent less time at the recent trans-Pacific Partnership talks advocating economic liberalisation than defending New Zealand’s exceedingly generous, and inarguably socialist, pharmaceutical subsidy scheme.

Quin has a point. However I would argue (and will post on this in 2016) that Key has done stuff which is both traditionally left (welfare boost, universal health expansion etc) and stuff which is traditionally right (partial asset sales, welfare reform).

Have been looking at how many people watch various current affairs shows on television, and how much of a subsidy they get from taxpayers through NZ on Air.

The funding figures for the four shows (from NZ on Air website) are:

• The Nation $899,000 for 40 hours
• Q + A $845,000 for 40 hours
• Backbenches $606,000 for 20 hours
• Media Take $482,000 for 10 hours

Cost per hour:

• Media Take $48,200
• Backbenches $30,300
• The Nation $22,475
• Q + A $21,125

Average viewers per episode (based on Nielsen data):

• Q+A 99,000
• The Nation 49,000
• Backbenches 25,400
• Media Take 1,900

So the cost per viewer hour is:

• Media Take $12.68
• Backbenches $1.19
• The Nation $0.46
• Q&A $0.21

It is hard to believe we are spending close to half a million dollars a year on a show watched by fewer than 2,000 people a week. In fact the taxpayer subsidy may be even greater than that as it shows on Maori TV, and they also get $55 million a year.

Q&A is the most watched show, and the one you can justify the easiest. The Nation has half the audience for a slightly larger budget. Would we be better served by having just one show, and giving it more resources so it can do more in depth?

I’m a big fan of Backbenches but an audience of 25,000 is pretty small for a cost of over $600,000.

NZ on Air funding should not just be about ratings, but on the other hand funding shows that fewer than 1% of NZ watches (or for Media Take fewer than 0.05%) suggests a problem.

Received this month the annual newsletter from Wellington City Councillor Nicola Young. As with last year, a good example of concise and useful reporting back to constituents:

My 2015 highlights

• City lanes – I campaigned for Wellington’s inner city lanes to become features, rather than dark corners; it’s been talked about for years, but nothing ever happened. Eva and Leeds streets are now bursts of colour in Te Aro; Masons Lane (between The Terrace and Lambton Quay) has had a much-needed facelift; and Bond Street’s temporary makeover will now become permanent. Wellington’s CBD has about 75 lanes, and rejuvenating them is a big part of being a fun, walkable city – but also a boost for local businesses.
• Victoria Street upgrade – this reflects the area’s transformation from light industrial to an attractive, high-density residential zone; the upgrade included a major overhaul of the street’s subterranean infrastructure. The new Whitirea / Weltec development on the corner of Cuba Mall and Dixon Street will transform the area even more.
• St Mary of the Angels – this iconic church has some of the best acoustics in Wellington, so it’s an important venue for music performance. It’s undergoing $10million of seismic strengthening so I am delighted the Council contributed $400,000 from its Built Heritage Fund. You can see photos of the engineering works here.
• Erskine College – I fought successfully for my old school in Island Bay to be designated a priority ‘Special Housing Area’ so it’s easier for the land to be developed.  After years of inaction, architects are now working on the plans (which preserve the glorious chapel) and construction will start late next year
• Pandas, etc. – I will continue to fight against wasting money on fantasy projects such as the idea of renting pandas for Wellington Zoo ($400k for the business case and potentially $50million for a 10-year lease) and sponsoring professional sports teams. We need to focus on delivering the core council services things well, and not get distracted by vanity projects.
• Civic Square revamp – It’s now almost certain the old Town Hall will become a music hub for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Victoria University’s School of Music, with the glorious council chamber returned to municipal use. The seismic strengthening work will cost over $60 million, and will be partially funded by the sale of long-term leases of the Jack Illott Green and the MFC car park.
• Public Transport – I called for an integrated approach to our buses and trains, instead of decisions being made by WCC, Greater Wellington Regional Council, NZ Transport Association and KiwiRail. It’s likely we will have progress on streamlining this in 2016, and you can read my article in the DomPost here.
• Cycling – I’ve pushed for more bike locking points: perhaps you’ve seen the 50 brightly coloured ‘cyclehoops’ where restricted space makes it difficult to install normal bike racks. I’ve had bike stands installed at Aro Valley’s Community Centre and at the ticket barriers at the Westpac Stadium, and I pushed for the new bike ‘corrals’ coming soon to the CBD. I support bike lanes in the CBD and neighbouring areas, but fought the Island Bay Cycleway, as it failed to meet NZTA’s funding criteria – I’ve been consistent about this: we need bike lanes where there’s most demand, not least. 
  
• ‘Keep Kate’ – I launched a campaign to save the quirky Kate Sheppard pedestrian lights (near Parliament) when I was told nothing had been done to make their temporary permit permanent. Official Information requests proved my fears were correct, and senior Council officers thanked me – the petition meant we’d secured the lights future in the space of 18 hours after months of inaction!
• The Wellingtonian councillor ratings – I was delighted when The Wellingtonian rated me as the second-best performing councillor and highest of the newbies – “beating many old hands”, as the paper put it. My friend Paul Eagle (Southern ward) topped the poll.

And a note for the future:

In my two years as a councillor I’ve been shocked at how much time and millions of your dollars are wasted on vanity projects and consultations that are ignored. The cost of this indecisiveness is a major contributor to this year’s average rates hike of 5.1%.

5.1% when inflation is 0.1%.

The Herald editorial:

New Zealanders ought to be able to find Judge Dawson’s 271-page decision online as easily as they can download movies and music and other copyrighted material. It explains the methods allegedly used by Dotcom’s Megaupload site to store such material and even reward those who did so. It is said to have provided multiple URL links to the same material and when it received a take-down notice from a copyright owner, it is said to have removed only the offender’s link, not the material.

Again I recommend people read the decision. The way Mega was run bears almost no resemblance to You Tube or Dropbox. in fact they stole hundreds of thousands of videos from You Tube to act as camouflage for what they were really doing – paying people to share commercial copyrighted movies.

It may be that these sort of practices are technically legal but it is in the interests of content providers and users that we find out. We cannot find out until Dotcom goes to the US and faces trial. He should go now.

Interesting that Dotcom claimed to be starved of funds, yet he is also saying they will fight all the way to the Supreme Court. That would suggest he in fact has plenty of funds available for his legal case.

Phil Quin blogs:

“We’re finishing an excellent year in which the polls and popular feeling on the streets tells us that we are on course to victory in 2017” – Nigel Haworth, 23/12/2015

There’s an important epistemological distinction – perhaps more accurately a chasm – between bullshit and lies.

Quin sees this claim as bullshit.

But, even if we take the averages as a fair representation of voter intention:

• The polling average shows Labour plus the Greens behind the National Party by nine points.   
• Even with NZF included in the so-called Centre-left bloc, they fall short by three points.   
• The notion that an incumbent government on anything like 49.6% can be forced from office is risible. In fact, I cannot find a single example of a government in the mid-high forties in any jurisdiction with proportional representation who have lost.  It’s mathematically possible, sure, but implausible in practice – and National has hardly dipped below 45 percent during their whole tenure. 

So the notion that Labour is “on track to victory” bears no relationship to the truth. It is – and I mean this in the strict, technical sense – flagrant bullshit. Given this, why does Haworth say it?  

Why indeed?

• Well, it feels good for him to say it.
• Party members and supporters to whom he is communicating love to think it is true.   
• Telling the truth – to say out loud that there is no evidence whatsoever that Labour is any more likely to win an election today than it was at its previous historic drubbing – is unpleasant for all concerned.  
• The broader media/political class, jonesing for a genuine contest in 2017, willingly suspend disbelief and therefore don’t question Haworth’s bullshit, allowing him to get away with it. 

National’s lead over Labour and Greens is currently 9.8%. In December 2012 it was 1.2%. So the left is doing worse at this point of the electoral cycle than they were three years ago when David Shearer was Labour Leader.

The ODT reports:

A review of the health funding model has revealed what many long suspected – the Southern District Health Board is not receiving its fair share of health dollars.

A Cabinet paper on the Ministry of Health review was released yesterday.

However, Southern’s proposed increase is relatively minor.

Had it been in place this year, Southern’s share of $11.4billion would have been 6.81%, rather than 6.78% ($775million).

So the formula tweak sees funding go from $772.9 million to $776.3 million – a gain of $3.4 million per annum.

Their deficit is thought to be around $40 million, so the impact of funding formula change is very minor. Other DHBs manage to roughly break even with their funding. The SDHB have been unable to get even close.

The Herald reports:

A heavily redacted report on Trends Publishing, at the centre of a legal spat with Callaghan Innovation over a cancelled research and development grant, said the Auckland magazine publisher had previously received hefty government funding to develop a digital platform.

A Deloitte review, obtained under the Official Information Act, resulted from a dispute between Callaghan and Trends over claimed expenditure under an R&D growth grant that was cancelled a year ago. Callaghan is seeking to claw back the $383,000 paid out under the contract which had been for $1.3 million over three years.

Trends was in the print media business, producing a range of global home and design publications. With the downturn in media advertising in recent years, it morphed into the digital space, offering both online content and digital marketing solutions for clients.

This to me does not seem innovation. It is what thousands of companies are doing – moving digital. Why should this get a taxpayer subsidy or grant?

To me innovation is something new. Helping a print publication business go digital is not. Is that going to produce anything we can export? Lead to new jobs?

Leading left columnist Polly Toynbee writes:

The 1% who join parties are not like other voters. Both memberships are far from the centre, Tory members even further away than Labour’s. May’s law of curvilinear disparity shows voters are more centrist than party activists, and MPs are closer to voters than are their party members.

You win in the centre.

The unpalatable answer is that policies matter less than the personality, performance and persuasiveness of leaders. Credibility on the economy and security boils down to this: does he/she look like a prime minister? Snap judgments are made. Corbyn’s image may by now be sealed for ever with too many. He’s honest – but he’s no prime minister. From no national anthem to no shooting “Jihadi John”, he doesn’t fit the template and never can.

But can he be got rid of?

Rodney Hide writes:

There’s no doubt Goff is a good and experienced politician.

He has proved that by traversing the extremes of New Zealand’s political spectrum from one side to the other and back again.

He knows politics. He was first elected to Parliament when Crone was 7 years old.

But politics is all Goff knows. Crone has lived in the world the rest of us live in. She has had to pay rates and taxes and had to budget. Taxpayers haven’t paid her wages. She has had to earn them. She has lived in our world and excelled in it. She is a mother, a top businesswoman and athlete.

It takes more skill and work to run a business than be a politician. It means providing jobs and generating wealth rather than just talking about them.

I like Goff and I have never met Crone. And that’s her challenge. She’s got to meet and reach out to a lot of people through her campaign.

That she has quit her job speaks of her commitment. It would be rude to note that Goff is keeping his parliamentary pay and resources to help with his campaign and as back-up job in case he loses.

Thanks to Crone we have a race. It’s going to be up to us. I can think of three good reasons for supporting her.

One, she’s a citizen first, and a politician second; two, her election won’t force a costly byelection and three, she can fix the council computer system.

All good reasons.

I support an excise tax on tobacco, for two reasons. One is to cover the costs to taxpayers of health costs of smokers.  Unless we ban smokers from the public health system, then that is economically sensible.

I also think increasing the price does help people stop smoking, and most smokers do want to stop – it is highly addictive.

However there comes a point at which putting the tax up so much causes unintended consequences, such as increasing black market sales. And while minor in NZ at this stage, black market sales of tobacco actually has been found by the Centre for Analysis of Terrorism to be a significant funder of some terrorist groups.

A story in the Guardian notes:

So how can governments cut off terrorists’ cash flows? Illicit markets and petty crime flourish in the poor neighbourhoods of Paris and Brussels. In Paris, several northern neighbourhoods close to where some of the November attacks occurred have large-scale markets where illicit products are sold, yet French police choose not to prioritise such small-scale crimes. Indicative of this is that France, according to recent KPMG research, is No 1 in Europe in the illicit cigarette trade, with 9bn counterfeit and contraband cigarettes imported in 2014, placing France far ahead of Germany and UK in both actual and per-capita imports. …

A terrorist involved in the attack on Charlie Hebdo had traded in counterfeit trainers and cigarettes. Amedy Coulibaly, who slaughtered people at the kosher supermarket, had an extensive violent criminal record, and the thwarted attacker of the Thalys train was a long-term small-scale drug trafficker.

And it is not just in France. The KPMG report found the following groups were profiting from the black market in tobacco:

• Hezbollah (but operating in North Carolina)
• Al-Qaida
• ETA
• Islamic State
• IRA

If you ban a product, or tax it too highly, the incentives grow for the black market. Has been that way for thousands of years.

Stuff reports:

Fonterra is hailing an agreement to eliminate all agricultural export subsidies at the World Trade Organisation talks in Nairobi as a “historic breakthrough”.

John Wilson, chairman of the dairy co-operative, said it was good news for New Zealand dairy farmers.

For years the use or the threat of export subsidies had pushed world dairy prices below their true level, he said.

“The Nairobi outcome takes global trade rules one essential step further towards a level playing field for dairy trade.”

It’s a good step forward. I’m not sure how widespread such subsidies were, but it is encouraging that agreement was reached to eliminate them.