Jail for damaging trees is an indictment on New Zealand

Every now and then I come across a story that makes me despair at the extent to which our individual rights are being eroded beyond the point of redemption. Just such a story was in the New Zealand media last week reporting how an Auckland developer, Augustine Lau, has been sentenced to two and a half months in jail for damaging trees on his own property. This isn't the first case of its kind in this country but it is a new milestone on a path that leads to the situation that exists in Bolivia, where trees and bugs have rights but those of humans are ignored.

My own residence in Wellington has a large section that my wife and I have restored to native forest, with new kauri, rimu and totara established amongst a miriad of smaller trees. Prior to our ownership, the property had been neglected and had been used as a rubbish tip. Our land adjoins public reserve land, which remains in a similar or worse state to what our property was originally, despite our efforts to persuade the local council to take better care of it. I state this so that readers will understand that I am not a philistine where the environment is concerned and to demonstrate that public ownership and interference in property rights is no guarantee of protection of the environment - in fact, quite the opposite.

The trees that Lau damaged were mostly pohutakawa, which are very common and so readily self-seeded that they tend to be a nuisance. They are certainly no General Sherman. But even if they were, trees on private property belong to the property owner and other than in a few cases where their removal may directly affect a neighbouring property (which would be covered by tort), no one else should have a legal interest in them. The fact that the Auckland Council is prepared to use the full force of the state's legal monopoly on violence against Lau for dealing with his own trees is an indication on how disproportionate our public planning laws have become.

It seems from the new reports that Mr Lau is not the most cooperative fellow and he appears to have a track record of breaches of the planning laws are concerned. In fact he sounds like a rogue. But nothing he has done comes close to justifying the Auckland Council's use of the state's legal monopoly on violence to deprive him of his freedom. This is a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a obstinate nut, and it is an indictment on the status of property rights in New Zealand that such a disproportionate response is possible under our planning laws.

Pregnant with power

I visit a massage therapist regularly to treat the occupational overuse syndrome I suffer as a result of spending a great deal of time at the keyboard. I imagine massage therapists have two types of clients - those who remain silent throughout the treatment and those who like to talk. I fall into the latter category and we enjoy conversations on a variety of subjects, usually about our interests in music, literature and even philosophy. This week we strayed into politics, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

My therapist expressed her delight at learning that the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was expecting a baby. She asked whether I shared her joy at the announcement. I responded that I was 'blasé' and that while I wished the Prime Minister and her partner all the best, I felt it didn't justify all the media acclaim it had received. I said further that I thought it would be very difficult for her to manage being pregnant and having a baby and the demands of the job, and that her determination only to take six weeks off seemed optimistic, given that every woman I know in similar circumstances has ended up taking considerably more time off work than they had initially planned. My therapist's reaction was as if I had said that all pregnant women should be chained to their beds for the entirety of their term!

It got me thinking about this whole business of Ardern being pregnant and I realised there is something about it all that makes me a little uncomfortable, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what it is. I wrote in this blog back in December of my concerns about the secret coalition agreement (which still hasn't been released) between Ardern's Labour Party and coalition partner New Zealand First. There was speculation at the time that the agreement covered, inter alia, what would happen when Ardern took time off to have a baby (i.e. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, whose party won just 7% of the vote, would become acting prime minister). The news that Ardern was aware that she was pregnant at the time of negotiating that agreement bears this out.

So what makes me uncomfortable is that our governing coalition saw fit to negotiate control of the levers of government taking into account Ardern's personal circumstances, but didn't feel the public needed, or had a right, to know. Why didn't they trust us to reveal this information earlier?

The entire media has been doing its best to convince us that Ardern's pregnancy is a very great thing for women and for New Zealand, but I'm not so sure. I think Ardern has put her personal interests ahead of the country and the power-hungry politicians in her coalition have gone along with it because it benefited them to do so. It may well be that Ardern can manage having a baby while being prime minister but the voters of New Zealand should have been the ones to decide that - and whether Winston Peters should be prime minister - not Ardern and her political cronies.

Jordan Peterson's adamantine weapons

I have been following Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson for some time and I believe he is one of the most profound thinkers and philosophers in the world today. Peterson could be described as a conservative, if only because he thinks that several thousand years of civilisation (and specifically the archetypes that underpin human morality) shouldn't be abandoned lightly, but in many ways his views are a radical alternative to everything that is taught in the social sciences today. He is best known for his lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible stories, some of which have been viewed than a million times on YouTube, and also for his controversial opposition to Canada's Bill C-16 (which I wrote about here).

Peterson preaches a message of self-responsibility - that individuals have the potential and ability to improve their lives and to deal with the crises and chaos that are inevitable in every human life - and he has been surprised to discover his lectures appeal particularly to young men. He puts this down to a social crisis of confidence in masculinity, which is a consequence of the post-modernist philosophy that drives group identity and victim-mongering in Western societies today. We teach young men that masculinity is toxic and that it must be sublimated to more worthy feminine traits. Peterson defends masculinity, pointing out that it is also about courage, nobility and resolution, and questions whether women really want to emasculate men (and as an amusing aside, he wonders why the fastest selling paperback book of all time, purchased almost exclusively by women, is about a sado-masochistic relationship between a dominant man and a submissive woman).

Peterson has been in the news again this week, this time for an interview he did with television news presenter Cathy Newman on Britain's Channel 4. Newman is a typical contemporary journalist, who doesn't see her role as being a presenter of truth and balance, but rather as an advocate for victim groups and a warrior against their oppressors. The interview focused on Peterson's belief that women in Western countries are not, for the most part, still discriminated against in the workplace. He rebutted Newman's contention that the disparity of female representation in some highly paid but stressful jobs, such as chief executives of public companies, is largely due to discrimination, responding that in his considerable experience of counselling people at the top of their professions, women often make different (and in his view more sensible) choices about what is important to them.

Newman wanted to portray Peterson as a sexist, misogynist defender of the oppressive patriarchy but Peterson didn't respond as most interviewees would. He didn't apologise, concede or allow his views to be misrepresented. Instead, he stuck to his guns, challenged Newman's premises, corrected her misrepresentations, and supported his own claims with evidence from his years as a clinical psychologist. Most of all, he remained good-humoured throughout the interview. It worked spectacularly - without any apparent effort or intent, he made Newman seem ill-prepared, irrational and inarticulate.

I think the best thing that Peterson has done is to show how the post-modernist worldview that dominates so much of today's public discourse, and that seems so daunting to those of us who try to challenge it, is built on intellectual sand. Truth and logic are adamantine weapons that when wielded by a skilled master, will cut through even the most formidable casuistry and cant.

You can watch the interview here.

Niall Ferguson loses the plot

I have been a fan of the renowned economic historian Niall Ferguson for many years. The bookshelves in my office, where I am writing this, contain his works The Ascent of Money, Empire and Civilisation. I think he added a lot to our understanding of the extraordinary dominance of Western civilisation since the 15th Century with his identification of six 'killer apps' that drove the West's political, economic and military growth - competition, science, the property owning democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic. Therefore, I had high expectations of Ferguson's latest book, which I bought a few months ago but only got around to reading over the summer holidays.

The Square and the Tower is about networks and their ability to challenge established hierarchical political and social structures. Ferguson starts with the Illuminati, the secret society established in Munich in the 18th Century whose membership came to include princes, archdukes, clergymen and intellectuals, and which some people claim is still around, pulling the strings of power like some grand puppet master. Ferguson, to his credit, dismisses most of the conspiracy theories, for example pointing out that the Illuminati was shut down by the Bavarian government within a few years of its establishment. 

Most of the book is Ferguson's usual mix of facts, analysis and interesting connections, but where it parts ways with his earlier works is in its conclusions about current day events. Ferguson may dismiss conspiracy theories in the case of the Illuminati but is happy to embrace them in respect of Donald Trump, giving plenty of credence to the "Russia hacked the election" conspiracy and ironically blaming "fake news" for Trump's 2016 election victory and Brexit. 

He goes on to paint internet and social media giants such as Google and Facebook as the present day Illuminati and thinks they are "profoundly inegalitarian" because they are still largely owned by their founders. He seems to pine for a resurgence of totalitarianism when he says, "A generation mostly removed from conflict - the baby-boomers - had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflation and other forms of expropriation." This is reinforced when he claims equivalence between China and America, i.e. "both states are republics, with roughly comparable vertical structures of administration and not wholly dissimilar concentrations of power in the hands of the central government." Seriously, Niall?

In some of the later chapters he demonstrates his ignorance of the technologies on which he comments, for example when talking about digital currencies he says, "Bitcoin seems extraordinarily wasteful of computer resources because of the fact that it is 'mined' [on computers]." It is precisely because it involves the work of huge numbers of computers that gives Bitcoin its value, something I would have thought the author of "The Ascent of Money" would be able to appreciate. But, not to worry, if Ferguson is right, we'll all be using China's crypto-currency in future.