Equity vs Rights

There is a realignment of politics that has been occurring around the world for some time. The traditional battle lines between the left and the right are no longer relevant in an age where progressive leaders align with global corporations to suppress free speech and conservative parties are attracting support from low income, working people. The new battle lines are becoming clear. On one side is the globalist, corporatist, governing elites; on the other side is the demos, the hoi polloi, the hard-working common people who keep the world functioning. It is a fight between those who think they are uniquely qualified to run everyone else's lives and those who want to be left alone to run their own lives.

The first group consists of those who regard every issue as a justification for expanding the power of government, whether it is climate change, economic inequality or Covid-19. It doesn't matter what the problem is, the answer is always more steps down the road towards totalitarianism - banning behaviour and views they consider undesirable, intruding more on our privacy, seizing more money from the most productive in society, and restricting movement and freedom of association. These are the people with the power in our society - they are highly organised, very well funded, have almost exclusive control of the mainstream and new media, and are in lockstep on every issue. 

On the other side is a disorganised rabble that often doesn't even know it shares a common interest. Many don't have a strong political philosophy but they tend to be sceptical about the extent of the problems the powerful profess to be concerned about and the solutions promoted by the elites. They accept that humans do have some impact on the climate, that economic inequality is growing by some measures, and that Covid-19 is a real killer, but they are smart enough to realise that they are the ones expected to bear the greatest costs of the solutions while the elites reap the benefits.

The issues are similar across the world but vary in degree from country to country. In the United States, race is the key issue. In Europe, immigration is the main battleground, and national and religious identity are important factors. Here in New Zealand it is Maori tribal rule, rather than race per se, that is the principle cause that the elite has adopted.

Identity politics is at the root of all these fights. The key question is whether your value as a human being is related to some immutable characteristics such as your ancestry, sex or gender and sexuality, or whether it is related to factors that you have some control over, such as your moral character, your behaviour and your achievements. More than three thousand years of Western civilisation led to a social system that put the greatest value on the latter factors - it was the gradual recognition of the dignity and sovereignty of the individual that paved the road to modern, liberal society. This philosophical thread can be traced through Judaism, Athenian democracy, the Roman republic, Christianity, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the abolition of slavery and the establishment of universal suffrage. There was much backsliding along the way, but the direction was overwhelmingly towards judging people as equal in rights regardless of their inherited characteristics.

Equity - equality of outcome - is the professed goal of those on the authoritarian side, but equity is the opposite of equality as understood by Enlightenment thinkers. John Locke, who has as much claim to be called the father of the Enlightenment as anyone, defined equality as the "equal right...to...natural freedom" and said it was dependent upon "not being subject to the will or authority of any other man". In other words, Locke realised that rights are all about the absence of force. 

Equity is the opposite - it means subjecting everyone to the levelling power of some all-powerful authority that must "harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions." Alexander Solzhenitsyn recognised this conflict when he said, "Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free." 

Those who value equity above all else believe that the means justify the end. If you believe that the purpose of the individual is to serve the good of the collective, there is no limit to what can and should be done to individuals to achieve this. If you believe people are good or bad because of their immutable characteristics, there is no possibility of redemption for their original sins (viz. "white guilt"). And if you believe that the way to achieve equality is to bring those who are "privileged" down to size, sooner or later you are going to start chopping off feet.

Covid-19 has provided governments with the justification for repressing the rights-based freedoms we have taken for granted for decades - freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and freedom to operate a business or to go about your work. But governments have been selective in their application of these restrictions - certain businesses considered essential by some arbitrary criteria were allowed to remain open during lockdowns (e.g. in New Zealand supermarkets were open but not butchers), and protests and even violence by groups such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion have been condoned, while small, peaceful gatherings of people that the authorities disapprove of have been treated as insurrections. In other words, Covid-19 has established the principle that rights are the property of the government to bestow on those they see fit, and a privilege to be denied to those who do not have the government's favour.

The former prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, said this very explicitly when talking recently about Covid-19 vaccinations: "If you want to get the young people who are not being vaccinated, to be vaccinated, take away some of their rights." This demonstrates his utter ignorance of the nature of rights. I don't intend to get into a detailed discussion here about the metaphysical and ethical basis of rights, as I have written many earlier posts on the subject, but while philosophers might disagree about the nature and source of rights, almost all agree that rights don't exist at the discretion of governments. The fact that the Nazi regime killed six million Jews in the Holocaust doesn't mean Jews didn't have the right to life. If John Key believes the government can take away rights of young people who aren't vaccinated, then, like many political leaders today, he shares some philosophical principles (or, at least, the lack of them) with the Nazis. Perhaps it is not surprising that his government was only too willing to violate New Zealanders' rights while in power. 

Philosophers also agree that rights are universal - that they must be capable of being enjoyed by every person - and that they are mutually exclusive - we must each be able to exercise our rights without impinging on others' enjoyment of their rights. The latter is illustrated by the axiom, "your right to swing your arm stops just short of my nose." It is also why there is no such thing as "the right to a roof over your head" (to quote a common shibboleth of the left in New Zealand) - if you have such a right, others must be forced to provide it. I am sure the plantation owners in antebellum America thought they had the right to the free labour of the slaves in their fields (and they certainly had the legal right) but today almost no one would agree that slave ownership is a legitimate right.

Those who promote the equity agenda say it is about the rights of the disadvantaged, but equity is the antithesis of rights precisely because it requires real rights to be sacrificed to grant these arbitrary rights to others. And it is not as if governments that promote equity really act to protect the rights of the disadvantaged. The Ardern Government here in New Zealand has made equity a central plank of all their policies and if we take housing as a prominent example, their policies have significantly worsened housing affordability with the greatest impact on those on the lowest incomes. They have responded by passing laws to further restrict the rights of property-owning New Zealanders in a classic example of how the creation of arbitrary rights by governments depends on the erosion of real rights. The right to a roof over one's head has ended up denying many more New Zealanders homes than if they had simply respected New Zealanders' property rights (i.e. the right to enjoy the product of one's life and liberty) and let the market respond to the need for more housing.

Equity is a threat to real rights precisely because it is so insidious. It sounds like it is about fairness and dignity, and the motives of many promoting it are essentially noble. But few who promote it think through the implications of trying to enforce equality of outcomes on a diverse population with different needs and aspirations, and creating an all-powerful state apparatus to allocate resources according to inherent characteristics such as race and sex. Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, described how the relentless pursuit of equality of outcome inevitably leads to gulags and genocide. Let's hope the West wakes up to the implications of equity before we get there.

Elimination is futile

New Zealanders became complacent, even a little arrogant, about the country's Covid-19 status. We managed to keep the disease at bay for more than a year since our last strict lockdown in March and April 2020. We had a couple of more localised and less severe lockdowns in Auckland and a recent one in Wellington, but those were short-lived and we almost forgot that this disease could return. Even when Australia had new outbreaks, we thought the impact on New Zealand would be limited to closing the border rather than being a sign of worse to come. That was until last week when the Ardern Government abruptly announced, on the basis of a single confirmed community case in Auckland, the highest level of lockdown for the entire country. The response seems justified in hindsight with more than 100 community cases now confirmed including some in Wellington.

Most of the rest of the world accepted a long time ago that an elimination strategy was futile and that some level of transmission in the community was not only manageable but would ultimately contribute to herd immunity. New Zealand and Australia thought differently and imagined that their geography could protect them. In the short term, the strategy was successful - both countries achieved zero community transmissions for a while, but at a cost of turning our countries into hermit kingdoms, which don't allow travellers from overseas unless they go through two weeks of confinement in an hotel room.

Most Covid-19 experts believe the disease will become endemic - in other words, it will never be completely eliminated. Thinking of this disease like smallpox, which the world has eliminated, is wrong - you need to think of it like the common cold, which is a coronavirus in many of its variants, or the more deadly influenza. We accept that these diseases are endemic and we are sceptical about claims of eliminating them. So why do we delude ourselves about eliminating the very similar Covid-19?

The more reasonable argument for locking down is that we are doing it until the population achieves herd immunity through vaccination. Unfortunately, the latest news from Israel, which vaccinated most of its population before anyone else, is that infections are now increasing amongst the vaccinated. This may be because the effect of the vaccines wanes over time or due to the more virulent strains such as the "delta" variant, but whatever the reason, we have to accept that for now vaccination isn't a reliable pathway to elimination.

If we are determined to lock down every time we have an outbreak, no matter how small, and we know that the disease cannot be eliminated, that means we will be locking down intermittently for the rest of our lives. Is this really what we want?

Let us not delude ourselves - locking down is a massive and unprecedented infringement of civil liberties. We are all effectively under house arrest. Never before have governments locked down entire populations including healthy people to combat a disease - not for the Black Death, the 1918 Influenza, the polio epidemics of the early 20th Century, or for SARS (Covid-1) in 2002. And notwithstanding how our prime minister presents it, this is not a we're-all-in-this-together, voluntary exercise - the lockdowns are being enforced by the agents of the state with draconian powers and brutal tactics.

I accept that restrictions on social interaction are necessary to combat epidemics, particularly those like Covid-19 that are highly infectious and transmissible while non-symptomatic. However, like all risk mitigations, there has to be a balancing of benefits against costs and a rational consideration of the alternatives. We cannot continue to lock down for the rest of our lives. As I wrote last year when we were in lockdown, it will destroy our economy, our "social cohesion" (to use a phrase our Government seems to be very fond of) and paradoxically our health (through delays and cancellations in treatments of other illnesses), at a cost that far exceeds the that of Covid-19 infections.

Sooner or later we have to have the courage to accept that elimination of Covid-19 is futile and that we can tolerate a level of transmission without the knee-jerk reaction of national lockdowns. The only question is when we will be prepared to accept that. If the Ardern Government had been more competent in negotiating the supply of vaccines and we had been at the front of the queue as they promised rather than the worst in the OECD for vaccination rates, then we might be in a stronger position to accept the ongoing risk of exposure to Covid-19. Add to that the fact that after eighteen months we still don't have a quarantine system that can reliably keep infected people entering New Zealand from infecting the wider community, and we have to conclude that if lockdown is really the only option still available to us, then Jacinda Ardern and her ministers are to blame.

Note: As I was writing this, I saw that Rodney Hide has published on his blog a rough cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns. He concludes that lockdowns are not worth two days of lost economic activity. While I think his analysis is overly simplistic, he's probably got the ratio about right.

Afghanistan is America's Suez Crisis

Twenty years after the United States invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban regime that was harbouring the architects of the 9/11 attacks, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is back with more territory and with the same murderous intent to subjugate its people.

What was the point of it all? President George W. Bush's stated intention was to destroy Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation that launched the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, which was based in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But it took until Barack Obama's presidency ten years later before a US special operations team eventually killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda (whom it turned out was actually being harboured by America's supposed ally, Pakistan). But cutting off the head of Al-Qaeda meant that, like a modern day Medusa, it spawned a dozen other evil organisations in Iraq, Syria, Mali and other Islamic countries.

Today, with Kabul, the Afghan capital, and most of the rest of the country again in Taliban hands (they now hold more territory than in 2001), Western nations scrambling to evacuate their diplomats and citizens from a chaotic Kabul airport, and local allies abandoned to the dubious mercy of the country's new rulers, it is indeed hard to know what the point of it all was. It's not even as though we in the West have taught the Islamic extremists in the Taliban any lessons other than about our own perfidy. By all reports, the Taliban is already settling scores, carrying out executions and demanding child "brides" from conquered communities. Far from being chastened, the Taliban is reiterating their commitment to the fundamentalist Islamic goal of a global caliphate.

The Americans might have had some humility in setting out on their Afghanistan adventure if they had a sense of history, for that country has been the graveyard of empires including the British in the 19th Century and the Soviets in the 20th Century. But the Western experience of Afghanistan goes back much further than that - all the way to Alexander the Great, who married an Afghani princess, Roxanne, to help ensure the compliance of the region's rulers once he had conquered it. Perhaps Joe Biden should have followed Alexander's example and sought a second wife from among the daughters of the Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar. In Biden's case, a young second wife might have had the added benefit of staving off his obvious senescence, although I suspect it is too late for that.

Here in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern seems to have taken on board some of that American hubris and is lecturing the Taliban from afar to uphold Western standards of human rights because "the whole world will be watching." I'm sure the Taliban leaders are quaking in their boots. Meanwhile, Ardern has ordered New Zealand soldiers and a Royal New Zealand Airforce C-130 Hercules aircraft to mount a mission to Afghanistan to evacuate New Zealanders from the country. Quite how she intends this will happen when not even the Americans can evacuate their people in an orderly manner, is beyond me, but an appreciation for the reality on the ground has never been Ardern's strong point.

I don't believe the United States should have occupied Afghanistan for twenty years. There was a justification for American troops entering the country following the 9-11 attacks to track down Al-Qaeda, but that should have been a special forces mission, not a wholesale invasion of the entire country. It is not that I think the United States was morally wrong to invade - I believe, as Ayn Rand said, that although it is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations but it has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses. 

The problem here is that it was in no one's interests, least of all that of the United States, to spend twenty years trying to establish a liberal democracy in a place that has no cultural traditions on which to build such institutions. What is worse is that the United States ruled through a system of corrupt, cronyist, favours - as Jacob Siegel quotes on Bari Weiss's excellent Common Sense substack, "the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States". You can't establish a moral order by immoral means. But having occupied Afghanistan and destroyed its existing institutions, however illiberal they were, America's politicians and military leaders had a minimal obligation to leave the place no worse than they found it, and they can't even claim to have done that. President Joe Biden is responsible for the lives of the Afghans who helped the Americans during their twenty-year experiment in nation-building, many of whom will now be tortured, mutilated and killed for what the Taliban sees as their traitorous and blasphemous conduct.

The fallout of the fall of Afghanistan will last for years. America has shown that once again it lacks the national vigour, moral authority and self-belief to fulfil the objectives of its military interventions. Afghanistan is already being talked about as this generation's Vietnam. I think America's Suez Crisis might be a more accurate comparison, because it was that event that signalled the decline of Britain's imperial might more than any other. I feel sorry for the Afghans who must face the extreme theocratic and misanthropic whims of their new rulers, but I also feel a bit sorry for Americans, who must be bewildered at how the greatest military power in history has once again been made to look ineffectual and irrelevant.

The wishful thinking driving NZ's energy policy

This week the media and political classes were aghast at the revelation that New Zealand was importing record quantities of coal to fuel the Huntly Power Station. More than half of New Zealand's electricity is generated by hydro stations and recently the country has experienced less rainfall resulting in lower storage lake levels. Huntly is New Zealand's only large coal-fired power station and as such provides the perfect backup generating capacity, being able to be cranked up at short notice when other sources fail to meet demand. But instead of thanking the foresight of earlier energy planners for building a power station that could be used as a giant backup generator - providing the electricity that literally keeps people alive in the middle of a very cold winter - we have the usual whingers treating this blessing as a curse.

New Zealand is being set up for a serious fall in its energy policy. The Ardern Government has banned offshore oil and gas exploration, eliminating the best prospect for an independent energy future, and at the same time is pursuing a policy of being "Net Carbon Zero" by 2050. The radical Climate Change Commission, appointed by the Ardern Government, wants to go one better and eliminate the use of fossil fuels in all transport, manufacturing and other important economic sectors by 2035. The Government has already started to implement the Commission's recommendations by announcing special taxes on fossil-fuelled vehicles and subsidies on electric cars.

This is all delusional. The increased use of the Huntly Power Station shows that we do not have sufficient so-called renewable sources of electricity generation to meet current demand, let alone adding everything that presently drives our economy using fossil-fuels. Factories, farms, schools, hospitals and transportation all run mostly on petrol, diesel, natural gas and coal.

A modern internal combustion engine car can fill up with 50 litres of gasoline in a couple of minutes, and drive all the way from Auckland to Wellington, a distance of 650km, without stopping. The best electric cars today take up to 12 hours to fully charge and even if you believe the manufacturers' most optimistic claims about range, they will need to charged at least once more during the journey. The batteries add about half a tonne to the weight of the vehicle (compared to 40kg for that tank of gasoline), so you are using a considerable amount of the energy consumed just to carry the battery with you. And all that electrical power has to be generated somehow. Currently in New Zealand, as we have seen, the additional generating capacity can only come from imported coal.

There is a reason the world is powered mostly by fossil fuels and that is their incredible energy density. Petrol contains more kinetic energy than the equivalent weight of TNT, and a litre of petrol has more than a litre of hydrogen. That can of gasoline you fill up to power your lawnmower is still the most practical, portable source of energy ever developed. The best battery technology is at least two orders of magnitude worse in terms of energy storage. The only superior energy source in this respect is nuclear.

The Energy Minister, Megan Woods, talked about something called the New Zealand Battery Project, as if it would be the solution to all our future energy needs. This isn't actually an engineering project, as the name suggests, but a committee of eight people that "will evaluate the viability of pumped hydro schemes of various sizes". The committee comprises one electricity industry and one construction industry expert, with the remaining members being academics, environmental activists, local government bureaucrats and the requisite representative from a Maori tribe. Their only consideration of anything real is a speculative idea to build a pumped hydro storage scheme at Lake Onslow in the South Island, this in a country that hasn't built a large hydro power station since the Clyde Dam was commissioned in 1993.

If this Government is serious about becoming Carbon Zero, we need to start building power stations at rate never seen before in this country. We need dozens of new generation plants, not just a pie-in-the-sky hydro storage scheme. Ideally, these new plants would be nuclear-powered. The Chinese and Russians are the leaders in modular, safe, latest-generation nuclear power generation and we should be looking to invest billions of dollars in their technology. This is what the Government would do if it was serious about New Zealand being Net Carbon Zero. But the Ardern Government is no more serious about this that than they were about building 100,000 new houses.

Ignorance Upon Uncertainty

It has been more than a week since I last posted and since then in New Zealand we have come out of Covid-19 lockdown Level 4 into Level 3. I have no idea what these levels mean in terms of detailed rules and the authorities seem to be making it up as they go along, with the New Zealand Police refusing to release their own advice about the legality of their enforcement of the rules. This Kafkaesque uncertainty is the hallmark of authoritarian governments everywhere - if the rules are arbitrary, you can always be deemed to be in breach of them.

I have imagined that among the small blessings of the lockdown, an increased appreciation for the value of the producers in society might come out of this situation. People have become aware that they can't take it for granted that their supermarket has plenty of the right type of toilet paper or packaged flour. They have also become aware that the people who run the factories, who drive the trucks that deliver the goods, or who stack the shelves in the stores, should be considered "essential workers" as much as the doctors and the nurses tending the Covid-19 patients. But most don't understand the workings of the complex supply chains that ensure the shelves are full with what they need, or how the packages that they order on Amazon or AliExpress miraculously arrive at their door from the other side of the world. It would astound most people to know that there is no central organising authority that operates those supply chains, but rather they are a result of the collaborative efforts of a myriad of businesses, big and small, all around the world.

Even worse is the fact that most people (including many of our leaders) don't understand how the broader economy works, and they don't seem to appreciate the economic and social damage that is being done with the Covid-19 shutdown. They believe the government can flip a switch and turn the economy off or on at will and that all will soon be back to normal. Employers are being criticised in the media for laying off workers or even for closing down, as if the proprietors of such businesses are traitors acting against the national interest.

Our prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, showed her utter ignorance of how the economy works - or worse, a Marxist understanding of the economy - with her comments that the private sector should value their workforce in the same way government does. This is particularly galling to business owners who are struggling because of her lockdown policies (which, as I have written before, are only necessary because of Ardern's early inaction to prevent Covid-19 entering New Zealand) and in increasing numbers are losing their life's work. Does Ardern not realise that every cent government spends ultimately comes from a private business somewhere? She is criticising private business owners for not being as generous as she is with the money she seizes from them!

Ardern's criticism came after one of her colleagues, Deborah Russell, in an example of the most breathtaking left-wing arrogance, blamed businesses themselves for not being able to withstand the government-ordered lockdown. The left likes to go on about victim-blaming but in typically hypocritical fashion are happy to engage in a little of it themselves when the victims are business owners.

Meanwhile the deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, leader of the "far right" New Zealand First Party, wants to "put up the shutters" to foreign investment and trade, returning New Zealand to the "Polish shipyard" economy of his mentor Robert Muldoon's government during the 1970s and early 1980s. New Zealand at the time had a protected manufacturing sector that produced shoddy, expensive goods; draconian exchange controls that meant you had to apply to the Reserve Bank to get a strictly-limited amount of foreign currency before travelling overseas; and - Muldoon's coup de grace - wage and price controls that meant a corner store had to apply to the prime minister personally if it wanted to put up the price of tea. The economy was Soviet in all but name and it is to this state that Peters wants to return this country.

The problem is not just with central government. Local councils refuse to cut back their spending in the crisis and are intent on increasing their tax take from struggling businesses and home owners. They seem oblivious to the evidence that many New Zealanders are already struggling to meet their existing financial commitments.

All of the Covid-19 assistance programmes have involved greater spending by the state. The Government is acting like a benevolent rich uncle, doling out wage and salary assistance, business loans and increased welfare benefits as if New Zealanders won't realise they will have to pay back every cent. Perhaps the Government is right to count on the public's ignorance - it is apparent that many people do not realise governments have no source of funds other the taxes they extort from hardworking citizens. Even government borrowing is just a demand on future taxpayers.

I don't see any evidence that Covid-19 will result in an increased appreciation for the producers in society. I think we are fated to repeat the mistakes of the past, whereby governments and the public regard the producers as milch cows, to be exploited until they are empty vessels, and then to be blamed for not being productive enough. Perhaps if the economic downturn from the Covid-19 is long and deep enough, governments will realise at some point that they need to release their grip on the producers' throats. I fear that may take many years.

Where to from here?

I won a wager yesterday. I had a bet with a friend that the number of new Covid-19 cases in New Zealand would increase from the low of 29 the day before (we had 44 new cases yesterday). These things never plot smooth curves and it was inevitable that there would be some ups and down within the overall trend. However, I remain confident that New Zealand has largely got the spread of this virus under control [update: we are back down to just 29 new cases today], which begs the question, where to from here?

The prime minister appears to have no idea. Jacinda Ardern, at her press conference yesterday, said she will let businesses know the requirements for reopening two days before the Level 4 alert is lifted on 22nd April. It is obvious that Ardern has no experience running a business, because if she had, she would know that many businesses require more than two days to get up and running again - to schedule staff, reorder supplies, restart equipment, confirm orders with customers, arrange deliveries, etc. Not letting businesses know what they will and will not be allowed to do until two days before the lockdown ends adds more uncertainty to already difficult circumstances. The government came up with the impressive-sounding alert levels before we went into lockdown but it is apparent that they still have not developed the detail of what each level means.

The incompetence of this government has been revealed, as if there was any doubt prior, in its confused handling of the pandemic to date. Yesterday the prime minister announced that all international arrivals would be quarantined. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted! Why didn't she do this a month ago, or at least at the beginning of the lockdown, rather than now when we've almost contained the virus within the country? It is obviously a knee-jerk reaction to the calls for a border quarantine from the leader of the opposition, Simon Bridges, and his launch of a petition to that effect. It has the appearance of policy-making on the fly and demonstrates a complete lack of forethought.

It is clear that this government does not have, and has never had, a strategy for dealing with Covid-19. It didn't have any objectives for the lockdown (other than the very vague "eliminate") and it appears to have no fixed criteria for how we come out of it. Priorities become obvious when you have a clear strategy and objectives. If the objective was, for example, to keep Covid-19 out of New Zealand, then the first thing you would do is quarantine at the border. The biggest problem of not having a strategy is you don't know whether you're succeeding or failing, and you don't know what to do next. That is why the prime minister is deferring the detail of next stage until it is almost too late - she simply doesn't know. And if you are serious about your strategy you don't prioritise unimportant objectives like vaping regulation in the middle of a pandemic - they simply distract from your primary goal.

The best thing the government can now do is get the hell out of the way. The end of the lockdown provides an opportunity for Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues to pat themselves on the back and say to New Zealanders, "Over to you, now." Let us all get back to our jobs, studies and social lives, and let businesses and other organisations determine how they operate safely, given the relatively modest risks that remain. The authorities should focus on what they should've been focusing on back in February, which is keeping infections out of New Zealand, and tracking and isolating the few cases left within our borders. But I fear our socialist-nationalist-environmentalist government will find that course of action about as appealing as a child sitting on the sidelines of a busy playground.

Assessing the NZ Government's Handling of Covid-19

How has the New Zealand Government done so far in its response to Covid-19? Well, if you believe the New Zealand media, Jacinda Ardern and her government are just rocking it!

There is no doubt we had to take measures to stop the spread of the virus within the community. If you want to understand the strategy behind the containment, this article by Tomas Pueyo in Medium is the most informative I have read on how you bring Covid-19 under control. Different countries have had variations on the strategy and some of the most successful in containing the spread of the virus, such as Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (and yes, you weasels at the WHO, there is a country called Taiwan), haven't gone into the full lock down like New Zealand. These countries were better prepared for the outbreak, probably because of their experience with SARS in 2003. They tracked infections, tested extensively, and quarantined all those who test positive.

The preparedness of the New Zealand Government compared with these countries is poor. Our health system is still not in a position to do sufficient testing as the Government's own chief science advisor wrote in this report posted on Twitter by Joel Hernandez of the NZ Initiative. We need to do both virus antigen (to detect if someone is currently infected) and antibody (to test whether someone has had it and is now immune) testing to ensure we stop transmission in the community. Dr David Skegg, emeritus professor at Otago University's School of Preventive and Social Medicine, also told Parliament's Epidemic Response Committee this morning that New Zealand's response was inadequate and that in particular we needed to step up testing. Unfortunately, we can't step up testing because we still don't have enough test kits.

It is not as if the Government had no warning. I was warning on Twitter about the impact of Covid-19 nearly two months ago. Others such as economist Michael Reddell were blogging about the Government's seemingly lackadaisical attitude to the evidence coming from China and elsewhere about its potential impact on New Zealand. Obviously the advice of bloggers and tweeters weren't likely to carry much weight with the Government, but by mid-February another epidemiologist from Otago University, Dr Michael Baker, was publicly warning about the threat. Jacinda Ardern seems to have been particularly careless, reassuring us as recently as a couple of weeks ago that public events such as the Christchurch mosque attack memorial and Auckland's huge Pasifika Festival could still go ahead. You could argue that she may have had poor advice, but perhaps the single most important attribute of a good leader is to find and distil the best advice.

The most galling aspect of the current lock down is that we could've prevented it. If we had introduced strict quarantine at the border and made provision for widespread testing much earlier, like South Korea and others, we probably wouldn't be in the situation we now find ourselves. We all have to pay a high price to bring this disease under control and that cost is now as much in our liberty as our wallets. I don't think there is anything to be gained at this time in castigating the Government for their earlier inaction, but let's not give them undue credit either. Hopefully there will be a reckoning after all this is over.

At this stage, I'd give them a C-.

Thoughts on the Christchurch attacks

A little more than a week ago, I remarked to my youngest child that we are fortunate to live in New Zealand. Our country appeared immune to most of the craziness that infects other Western nations - the identity politics, the religious fundamentalism and the increasingly authoritarian excesses of governments. New Zealand seemed the least insane country in the world. But on the Friday of that week the illusion was shattered when a madman attacked two mosques in Christchurch, announcing that politically-motivated mass murder had arrived on our hitherto peaceful shores.

There was a brief period after the tragedy when everyone seemed to be equally shocked and the only comments were of sympathy with the victims and relief that the killer had been caught. Unfortunately it lasted no more than a few hours and all too soon those who saw the opportunity to exploit the terrible events to their political advantage began slinking out of their boltholes. We were all either victims or perpetrators depending on our group identity, they said, ignoring the emerging evidence that the heinous crime had been committed by an individual acting alone. Many were quick to blame the 'extreme right' despite the fact that the perpetrator's manifesto reportedly includes admiration for the Chinese Communist regime and casts him as a radical environmentalist. A particularly odious Australian senator blamed Muslim immigration for the killings (which really takes some gall), while politicians including former prime minister Helen Clark blamed lax guns laws and freedom of speech. A New Zealand Green Party MP equated the attack to 'the theft of land, language and identity of indigenous people', while another Green MP said it was caused by opposition to the United Nations' Migration Compact.

Last Friday afternoon at 1:32pm, exactly a week after the gunman began his act of mass murder, two minutes of silence were observed across New Zealand in memory of the victims. If that had been all there was, it would have been a fine gesture. However, prime minister Jacinda Ardern insisted that the Muslim call to prayer be broadcast on state TV and radio, and the state services commissioner, Peter Hughes, sent out an email to all government agencies ordering them to provide staff with facilities to watch or listen to the call to prayer. I happened to be at a government agency at the time and what I observed made me both bemused and extremely uncomfortable. The bemusement came from the sight of young New Zealand women wearing hijabs over their cut-off shorts and tank tops (which indicates they had sort of missed the point about the hijab), while the discomfort came from seeing our public servants file into meeting rooms to listen to observe a religious practice because they had been ordered to so by their masters. I felt I had to leave the building and I wasn't the only one to do so - a number of us gathered in a park across the road, where we sat in silence in the warm autumn sunshine, thinking about the propensity for evil that lies deep within the human heart.

I can understand why Jacinda Ardern might have thought the call to prayer was a good idea - a means to bring about reconciliation, no doubt - but to me it was a step too far and showed poor judgement in what otherwise has been a measured and conciliatory response by the prime minister. I am grateful that we live in a relatively free, open and secular society where people are at liberty to practice their religion or to not observe any religion at all, a freedom that is not enjoyed by many people across the world. But we do not preserve such freedom by abandoning our universalist principles.

The prize for the stupidest response to the events in Christchurch would have to go to the Whitcoulls bookstore chain, which in a demonstration of their utter ignorance decided to ban Jordan Peterson's book Twelve Rules for Life. Peterson, a clinical and academic psychologist, has made a career of studying the effects of political extremism on individuals and his book seeks to help disaffected young people jettison their resentment and build constructive and rewarding lives - in other words, he is the solution, not the problem, to that which motivated the Christchurch killer.

I hope that New Zealand will transcend this tragedy and become a stronger society as a result, but I think we have been damaged in way that is not immediately obvious, much as America was damaged by 9/11. It seems entirely possible that we will descend into the tribalism that increasingly characterises political engagement in much of the rest of the Western world - intolerance that breeds even more intolerance and ultimately that leads to tit-for-tat violence. It will be a tragedy of another kind were that to happen in the least insane country in the world. That, of course, was the killer's intent. 

No, we are not all responsible for murder

I was horrified, like all decent New Zealanders, to hear of the killing of young Britsh tourist Grace Millane on our shores. I have a daughter of Grace's age who is presently travelling overseas and I share every parent's fear of a similar thing happening to their child. I can only imagine what it is like to have such a nightmare become reality.

Grace Millane was killed, if media reports are to be believed, by a sole perpetrator. Unfortunately, human beings are far too capable of such malevolence and it is only the fact that violence is becoming rarer in human societies that provides some comfort and hope when these events occur. But what makes the situation worse is when certain politicians and activists use such a terrible occurrence to push their warped, collectivist view of humanity. 

The most significant reason for the decline in violence in the world (and you can acquaint yourself with the facts regarding this trend in Steven Pinker's excellent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature) is undoubtedly that great achievement of Western civilisation - the supremacy of the individual. It is our respect for the individual as the sovereign unit in our culture that has led the West to develop and codify the idea that all human beings have innate rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and to be treated fairly and equally under the law.

The idea of the sovereignty of the individual has a corollary - that individuals are responsible for their own actions. This idea is being abandoned for the political ends of those who see human beings not as individuals but as members of collective groups. We saw such attitudes on display in the responses to Grace Millane's murder from Robb McCann, the leader of the "White Ribbon anti-violence campaign", and New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Mr McCann was reported as saying, "We want to make sure that men don't grow up with the type of attitudes where they treat women like objects, where they think that they're superior and where violence occurs because they don't understand what a respectful relationship looks like." In other words, it wasn't a sole perpetrator who was responsible for Grace Millane's murder but all New Zealand men. Of course, men commit violent crimes more than women - that is indisputable - but men are also the victims of violent crime at a far higher rate than women (see the statistics for New Zealand here) and the vast majority of men never commit a serious assault on anyone.

Jacinda Ardern went further, issuing a tearful apology to Grace Millane's family on behalf of all New Zealanders. In my view, Ardern's response was plain wrong. New Zealanders collectively did not kill Grace Millane and therefore the prime minister should not be apologising on our behalf. It would have been appropriate for her to express deep regret and sympathy to the Millane family but not to apologise. What is the harm, I hear you ask? Well, it might just make the situation worse by sending a message that New Zealanders have much to be sorry about - that the murder of tourists is endemic to this country. The reality is that such murders are very rare and New Zealand remains a comparatively safe country. The prime minister would have been better telling the world what she and her government will do to further reduce the incidence of violent crime in New Zealand.

I have the utmost sympathy for Grace Millane's family and I feel a sense of shame that she was murdered in this country. But there is only one person who is allegedly responsible for Grace Millane's death, one individual who in this instance did not "understand what a respectful relationship looks like", and one who should be apologising (as if that could do any good). I trust that individual will be held to account. 

Sooner or later, Atlas shrugs

When the new government manoeuvred its way into power in New Zealand last year I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. The coalition agreements signed by the parties didn't look too extreme - they were promising to spend a lot more money but they weren't proposing to raise income taxes in this term. Their regional development policies, anti-immigration stance and ambivalence on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement actually looked a lot like Donald Trump's populist platform (although there is little in the latter that I support). The problem is that what was said in the coalition parties' manifestos and agreements was only part of the picture, as is now being revealed.

This government believes it can govern by fiat - the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, demonstrated this when she announced her ban on oil and gas exploration without even taking it to cabinet. Other policies that her government has announced include new petrol taxes, the introduction of a Zero Carbon Act (which, based on the government's own numbers, is estimated to reduce our GDP by between 10% and 22% by 2050), increased welfare payments across the board, and raising the minimum wage to one of the highest in the Western world. The government is also reviewing tax, through its Tax Working Group, and all indications are that it is likely to introduce a capital gains tax.

New Zealand used to be known for its light-handed commercial regulation but even under the previous National Party-led government, businesses faced a raft of new, expensive and intrusive regulations such as a new and far more onerous health and safety act, an emissions trading scheme, and further controls on development in the growth-killing Resource Management Act. While the previous government lowered company taxes early in its term, most Western countries have reduced theirs further with the result that New Zealand is now one of the most highly-taxed countries for business. All of this precipitous policy-making has understandably caused a crisis of business confidence and the new government's response has been to chastise business leaders for their lack of enthusiasm. Their bewilderment at the sudden loss of business confidence shows they are a bunch of dogma-driven, wilfully-ignorant, arrogant fools.

Sooner or later, as Ayn Rand said, Atlas shrugs. Most people are happy to go along with being taxed and regulated, accepting the view that some government intervention in the economy is the cost of a democratic society, but there is a tipping point at which the productive members of society refuse to continue to be the milch cows for the unproductive. This tipping point is recognised in economics by the Laffer Curve - the empirical observation that continuing to increase tax rates ultimately results in lower revenues. Of course socialist governments often solve the problem by bringing out the guns - as we have seen in Venezuela - but history proves that free men and women are far more productive than slaves and that liberal, capitalist societies outperform repressive ones on every measure. Wise governments recognise this and backoff on the socialist policies - as the government of Sweden has done in recent years.

I have written before about how New Zealand's so-called 'rock star economy' wasn't worthy of the name even before the current jitters. It will be interesting to see whether this coalition government backs off on some of its ill-considered, dogmatic policies. If it doesn't, I think New Zealand will continue to slide into economic ignominy.

New Zealand's very own Donald Trump

One of the most amusing news reports this week has been that of New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, angrily denying to the world's media that she is like Donald Trump. There is great irony in someone who has a carefully-crafted image as the leader of a new generation of caring, ultra-progressive politicians being compared to the 71-year-old, 'Make America Great Again' president, but a comparison between the Ardern Government's policies and that of the Trump administration shows that the world's media is not too far off the mark.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to pick up on the similarity in political positions between the New Zealand Labour Party and Trump's Republicans even before last year's general election. The article focused on the Labour's pledge to cut New Zealand's annual immigration by 30,000 (compared to an annual total of 72,000 new immigrants), but being anti-immigration is not the only similarity to Trump. Like the US President, the Labour Party entered the election opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement (although Ardern has since signed a renegotiated agreement that has made even Donald Trump reconsider his opposition to it). And the new government's billion-dollar-a-year regional development fund (which already faces accusations of corruption) is exactly the sort of cronyism Trump is pursuing under his misguided programme to reinvigorate middle America. Ardern has even supported Trump's recent bombing of Syria, albeit with some public reservations.

Many of the similarities of the Ardern government's programme to that of Trump stem from its coalition with the nationalist New Zealand First Party. Ardern might angrily deny that she is like Trump but she can't dodge the fact that her coalition partner is a 'Make New Zealand Great Again' party with all of the same xenophobic, anti-free trade, crony-capitalist leanings that characterise Trump's Republican administration. But Ardern and her party entered into the coalition with New Zealand First willingly and, as I have written before, without the mandate of even a plurality of votes. So, if she doesn't like the comparison with Trump, she only has herself to blame.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Fact Checking Ardern’s Speech on Climate Change

The New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern is touring Europe, glad-handing with the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, and she seems to regard climate change as the topic on which she will establish her credentials. Yesterday she gave a speech to university students in Paris in which she spoke about the supposed impact of climate change on Pacific Island nations. She peppered her speech with a number of hoary myths, which she or the officials that wrote her speech should have known were untrue.

She spoke of the serious impact of cyclones on these countries, which is very real, but she went on to blame "the extreme weather that now rages through these countries on a regular basis." Cyclones have always been a feature of life in the South Pacific and the implication that they are becoming more frequent is false. The figures from the Fiji Meteorological Service's Nadi Tropical Cyclone Centre (which is the designated Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre of the World Meteorological Organization) show the following number of tropical cyclones for each of the last five decades:

Decade	Tropical Cyclones
1970s	83
1980s	94
1990s	79
2000s	60
2010s	44

You can see that there has been no increase in the frequency of cyclones during this period at all and in fact the trend seems to be downwards.

Ardern then went on to say, "it is not only storms that threaten Pacific nations. There is already salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies." Salt water intrusion into fresh water aquifers in Pacific Island nations is indeed a problem, but it is not primarily due to climate change. This study by the US Geological Survey [PDF 32MB] examines the causes of the problem, which is mostly due to over-exploitation of the fresh water resources. As the article explains, "If too much ground water is pumped, a freshwater lens may shrink enough that brackish water from the transition zone is drawn into the well. This process, known as saltwater intrusion, can result in the need to shut down wells and may reduce the availability of drinking water." 

Finally, she repeated the oldest lie in the book when it comes to climate change and the South Pacific when she said "the oceans that have sustained local communities for thousands of years could soon rise up to swallow them forever." The idea that rising sea levels will inundate low-lying Pacific atolls is easy to accept but it is also false. 

Sea levels are rising globally by a few millimetres per year (and have been since well before the Industrial Revolution) but according to this 2010 Australian study, "the analysis reveals a consistent trend of weak deceleration [of sea level rise] at each of these gauge sites throughout Australasia over the period from 1940 to 2000." Furthermore, research by Auckland University scientists reported in this 2010 article and in this 2018 study of Tuvalu (one of the nations Ardern gives as examples in her speech) shows that far from being being swamped by rising seas, most Pacific Island nations are actually increasing in size. It is true that there is a problem with coastal erosion on many Pacific islands but, like the salt water intrusion, it is a problem of resource use by the locals - in this case deforestation and over-development of coastal land.

Climate change is the least of the problems for Pacific Island nations, despite what Ardern would have us and her European hosts believe. Poor governance and corruption in the islands and trade protectionism by countries such as New Zealand and Australia (which have completely destroyed the export trades of most Pacific Islands and therefore their economic self-sufficiency) are the main factors driving unsustainable resource use in the islands. These are the issues Ardern should be addressing if she is serious about the welfare of our Pacific Island neighbours. But I suspect she is far more interested in promoting herself on the global political stage than solving real problems.

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.

Secret deal confirms new government's illegitimacy

New Zealand has suffered a non-violent coup d'état. What else would you call the seizure of political power by a bunch of parties, none of whom got anything like a plurality of votes let alone a majority, through a secret agreement that they are not prepared to disclose to the voters? It is certainly not democracy. National Party leader Bill English has called for the release of the secret agreement but new prime minister Jacinda Ardern has refused, despite claiming her government would be more open and transparent.

These people work for us, or at least that is meant to be the case in a liberal democracy. How dare they negotiate a secret agreement to hold power without disclosing to us what is in it? It is bad enough that our MMP electoral system allows power-hungry minority party politicians to hold us all to ransom without them doing secret deals over our how our country is governed. 

I have written before about how this mongrel coalition has no legitimacy and this secret agreement only adds to its bastardy. Readers will know that I am no fan of the National Party, but it is the party with the most right to govern in this country because it got a plurality of support in the election. Bill English should go further than his call for the release of the secret agreement and commit his party to do its utmost to bring this government down as soon as possible.

In Defence of Capitalism

The newly-elected (if you can call her grapple for power ‘elected’) New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Arden, has criticised capitalism in her first interview. She said, "If you have hundreds of thousands of children living in homes without enough to survive, that's a blatant failure." The statement is simply untrue. There are not hundreds of thousands of children in New Zealand "without enough to survive." New Zealand has one of the most generous welfare systems in the world and no child is dying from deprivation unless it is caused by the criminal neglect of parents or caregivers, which is thankfully rare in our society. 

Ardern is employing the classic statists' ploy of creating a strawman issue to knock it down with the perennial solution - more taxes, more state control and more power for herself. The truth is, the natural state of humanity is subsistence living. Human beings lived in abject poverty for most of their existence. That began to change early in the 19th Century and today fewer than ten percent of the world's population still lives in historical levels of poverty, a dramatic fall as shown in the following graph. This trend is, of course, against an exponentially growing world population so the absolute numbers of people better off is a double-exponential graph.

What caused this dramatic change over the past two hundred years? It was a combination of events that we collectively call the industrial revolution, but that was the outcome rather than the cause. Historians disagree on the number and precise definition of the factors, but most are in general agreement about the nature of them. They include greater individual freedom, acceptance of the concept of intrinsic rights, and respect for the rule of law and property rights (and the importance of the latter is well-documented by respected Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto). These things provided the foundations of functioning free markets that allowed people to produce more than they could individually consume and to exchange and invest the surplus to produce even more. It meant the value of an individual's labour grew as the wealth that could be generated from that labour grew. The fact that it reduced the proportion of the world's population living in poverty at the same time as the population was growing exponentially meant that the increase in wealth was widespread and was not confined to a small elite.

The problem with defending capitalism is there is no generally accepted definition of what it means. Jacinda Ardern undoubtedly uses the Marxist definition, which is something like the exploitation of labour to provide a return to those who control the monetary resources. Marxists see the economy as a zero sum game and believe any return on capital is money taken from the pockets of workers. This is demonstrably nonsensical - capital enables us to leverage the very limited physical capacity of human beings to produce far more than the sum of individual workers' efforts. A person cannot produce a car or an iPhone, or even a pencil, on his own. Capital is the multiplier that enables people to produce these things, and in far greater numbers and for far greater reward than they could without capital's leverage effect. But capitalism is about more than capital (which is, incidentally, why I am not a fan of the term). Capitalism is the economic, political and social system that enables us to make the most valuable and productive choices with our resources, including our individual labour. It enables us to use our lives to the greatest value. The critical element is individual freedom - the freedom to make personal choices.

The arrogance of politicians like Jacinda Ardern is that they believe they are smarter than the countless people in a free market who make decisions about what is of most value to them, their families and their communities. They think they understand the incredibly complex system that is the modern economy better than the collective knowledge of all the people within it. In Ardern's case, this is spite of the fact that she has never had a full-time job outside of politics. She talks about housing as if she believes that she can create more, and more affordable, houses than all the builders, architects, materials suppliers and contractors in the market. She believes she can make better purchase decisions than all the buyers could make, and better financing decisions than all the bankers, if left to their own devices. The truth is that it is the interference of successive governments in the key market areas of building, land use and mortgage lending that has caused the current housing shortages and excessive prices, and Ardern's further interference will undoubtedly make those problems worse.

You would think a 37-year-old who had never held a truly productive job in her life would have a little more humility than to criticise the economic system that has lifted the vast majority of the world's population out of poverty.

Good luck with that, Jacinda

The people have spoken - well, a minority of them anyway. We have a coalition government that doesn't even have a plurality of the votes. After a month of dithering, the leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters, who lost his own electoral seat in last month's election and whose party was reduced to 7% of the vote, decided to form a coalition with the New Zealand Labour Party. Combined, the two parties won 44.1% of the party votes - less than the National Party's 44.4% - and yet they have been able to form a government because the Green Party, with 6.3% of the vote, is prepared to support them on 'confidence and supply' (i.e. on budget votes). 

It is not as if the partners to the polyamorous affair have much in common. New Zealand First is a nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigration party and its leader moulds himself on Robert Muldoon, the authoritarian New Zealand prime minister from 1975 to 1984 who took the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Labour is a classic, left-of-centre social democratic party, and the Greens are a typical 'watermelon' alliance of environmentalists and Marxists.

The new prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is not only New Zealand's youngest premier in over a hundred years, she is the least experienced, having never held a full-time job outside of politics and never having held even an executive position in government. She will need to rule over a rag-tag coalition with less mandate than National to govern and to keep the oldest political fox of them all, Winston Peters, from eating all her chickens. I give it less than twelve months until her government disintegrates and we have another election.

In the meantime, I wish Jacinda Ardern and her coalition good luck and implore them not to stuff up our great little country too much before the big kids take over again.

Greens enable Winston Peters to hold NZ to ransom

I wrote recently about why I thought New Zealand's electoral system was the dumbest in the world, and so it has proved to be. Nearly a month after the election we still don't have a government and while I don't think this is in itself a bad thing, watching our politicians jockeying for power has been unedifying. All the blind ambition, self-aggrandisement and incompetence we have come to expect of our politicians has been on display.

The uniquely unqualified, inexperienced and unproven Labour Party leader, Jacinda Ardern, who will become our prime minister in a Labour-led government, has been displaying a quiet confidence in her public comments. Bill English, the current prime minister and leader of the National Party, which won the largest share of the vote, is more inscrutable. Meanwhile, Winston Peters, whom the media have dubbed the 'kingmaker', cannot contain his delight at being the centre of attention again and continues to make the country wait for his decision. As the Guardian newspaper put it, Winston Peters and the anonymous board of his nationalist New Zealand First Party are holding the country to ransom.

This is all pathetic but the prize for the most damaging self-indulgence must go to the Green Party, the leftist environmentalists who have refused to consider negotiating with the centrist National Party, preferring to give Labour their proxy in coalition negotiations. This has, of course, strengthened Winston Peters' hand, an outcome for which their supporters surely could not have voted. A National-Green coalition could govern without New Zealand First's support and thus even the pretence of negotiations between these two parties would have taken the wind out of Winston Peters' sails. Many commentators have expressed disappointment with the Green's holier-than-thou attitude with even former Party MP Nandor Tanczos calling for his party to enter into negotiations with National.

Winston Peters may be holding the country to ransom but it is the Greens who have given him the means to do so. I hope the voters remember that when it comes to the next election, which, I am picking, may be not that far away.