Keith Johnson Wellington NZ

New Zealand Economy looks good – On the Ugly Dog Podium

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:20:00 +0000

PRIZE POOCH

I have previously termed the NZ Dollar 'one of the prettiest of the Ugly Dogs’. Just how pretty it has become in the pack of scrounging, scabby Western pie dogs can be illustrated by comparing the New Zealand economy against the economies of the countries of the European Union.

I’ll let the Economist magazine maps tell the story – I have added in the NZ figures. See:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/european-economy-guide

Incidentally, the NZ economic situation is even brightening in comparison to our neighbour Australia, where a budget deficit has been posted that augurs persistent future shortfalls. See:

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21578092-predicted-surpluses-vanish-over-horizon-feel-good-deficit

As for the political consequences of all this, it seems to spell disaster for all incumbents – again with the exception of New Zealand.

If the NZ Green Party [which appears to lead the charge on ‘economics’ among the NZ Opposition] cannot get its act together and present some semblance of being a trustworthy custodian of the economy [or NZ Labour cannot discover some as hitherto hidden talent], the NZ National Party looks set for re-election next year [possibly with a NZ First coalition partner].

For most voters, given a choice between a mangy mongrel and a yapping pedigree hybrid with multiple genetic faults, it’s ‘Better to Dog you Know’.

Meanwhile around a campfire many years ago

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Thu, 09 May 2013 01:37:00 +0000

MUM’S THE WORD - LOOK AT MOYEE!

“No! You hear me old man – give the Ashes to mother!”

“Pull the black bark [mate] – spit the worm!”

It seems that 15,000 years ago the English and Australians would have been able to communicate – even if there is a good deal of ongoing weathering of their cognates.

This discovery has been reinforced by work from the University of Reading which has identified a cache of words that embody prehistoric memes inherited from forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Their fireside chats about man and mum, and pulling the worms out of the bark, blackening them in the fire ashes and handing them around, may it seems still be reflected in the vocabularies of the language families that have been grouped together under the heading Euro-Asiatic.

Evolution dilutes infinitely but all traces of the original are hard to eradicate.

And if chimpanzees and humans share a 98% similarity in their stocks of DNA and about 95% in sequential terms, when insertions and deletions are included, it soon becomes clear that bits of us go back a long way. Such that evolutionary biologists have been noted as observing that once the fossil record gets to vertebrate proto-fish, things start to get boring.

The possible survival of bits of word DNA from the deep past is therefore not surprising, though there is a good deal of scepticism among experts about the methodology and outcome specifics of the University of Reading study.

As reported in Science Now, the Reading research team ‘found back in 2007 that most words have about a 50% chance of being replaced by a completely different word every 2000 to 4000 years.

‘Thus the Proto-Indo-European wata, winding its way through wasser in German, water in English, and voda in Russian, became eau [through aqua] in French. But some words, including I, you, here, how, not, and two, are replaced only once every 10,000 or even 20,000 years.

‘The new 2013 study, appearing makes an even bolder statement. The researchers broadened the hunt to cognates from seven major language families, including Indo-European, Eskimo, Altaic (comprising many Oriental languages), and Chukchi-Kamchatkan (a group of non-Russian languages around Siberia), which have been proposed to form an ancient superfamily dubbed Eurasiatic.

'Again, using only the word's frequency and part of speech, the model successfully predicted that a core group of about 23 very common words, used about once per 1000 words in everyday speech, not only persists within each language group, but also sounds similar to the corresponding words in other families.

'The word thou, for example, has similar sound and meaning among all seven language families. Cognates include te or tu in Indo-European languages, t`iin proto-Altaic, and turi in proto-Chukchi-Kamchatkan. The words not, that, we, who, and give were cognates in five families, and nouns and verbs including mother, hand, fire, ashes, worm, hear, and pull, were shared by four.

'Going by the rate of change of these cognates, the model suggests that these words have remained in a similar form since about 14,500 years ago, thus supporting the existence of an ancient Eurasiatic language and its now far-flung descendants’.

I love the idea that we can trace our roots way back and the idea that “spoken language can be transmitted through millennia with enough fidelity to give us information about our early history."

There is another angle to this though.

Although some of the words listed in the Reading study may have been matched by happenstance – or may be the equivalent of a redundant but lingering intestinal appendix [e.g. ‘worm’], the bulk are clearly very common. And this suggests in turn that they have observed Zipf’s ‘Law of least Effort’.

Linguist George Kingsley Zipf, published ‘Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology’ in 1949. He theorised that many behavioural phenomena followed an inexorable tendency for human beings to polish, conserve and popularize the most commonly used tools, words and meeting places. This principle has been applied to things as disparate as hammers, library classifications and cities.

It leads to rank-size relationships and helps to explain why Auckland continues to grow at the expense of the next ranked cities in New Zealand – Christchurch and Wellington – which are roughly half the size of the primate city. It also goes someway to explaining the seemingly inevitably skewed distribution of wealth in societies where less than 20 percent of the inhabitants generally have more than 80 percent of the wealth.

As for language, ‘the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.

For example, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). The second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), and this is followed by "and" (28,852). These ranking results are consistent with the Law of Least Effort.

So it is interesting to look at where the ‘Euro-Asiatic’ word fossils rank.

I had a quick go at picking them off the UK English Top 1,000 Words drawn from publications. Not surprisingly ‘worm’ was not there and neither was the word ‘ashes’.

But the rankings and frequencies are quite thought-provoking:

that – rank 10, frequency 55,871

not – rank 20, frequency 34,597
who – rank 51, frequency 11,758
we – rank 54,frequency 11,526
man – rank 76, frequency 7,868
old – 109, frequency 5,569
these – rank 125, frequency 4,372
hand – rank 138, frequency 3,924
those – rank 157, frequency 3,442
mother – rank 187, frequency 3,571
men – rank 207, frequency 2,743
woman [originally ‘wife-man’] – rank 214, frequency 2,697
gave – rank 238, frequency 2,053
whose – rank 294, frequency 1,615
fire – rank 316, frequency 1,461
black – rank 378, frequency 1,233
women – rank 456, frequency 1,031
spot [presumably related to ‘spit’] – rank 864, frequency 482
mother's – rank 929, frequency 476
thee – rank 976, frequency 335

To me they suggest a preoccupation with possession and identity [and patriarchy] which we may also have inherited as deep memes.

A Left-Libertarian Inheritance?

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Sat, 04 May 2013 08:24:00 +0000

HOW MANY SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMISTS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?

“None” argues NZ Journalist Jane Clifton in her recent article in The Listener on the ‘privatization’ of our electricity generation ‘companies’. “If market conditions are correct, the bulb will change itself”.

Setting aside the fact that our semi-state owned power utilities in New Zealand run on extraordinarily complicated EVA rules that allow them to play ducks and drakes with their capital valuations and game their pricing, in simulated rather than real competition, she has a point.

For myself, I term the pure devotion to markets that is an article of faith among the Neo-Liberal Right Libertarian economists: ‘One-armed Bandit Economics’. Pull the lever and the wheel of life spins. Anything other than an equilibrium solution delivers a line of lemons, whereas a line of $s at the sweet spot pours out a stream of cash.

Not of course that I am arguing against supply-demand analysis in general. The problem is that distribution effects get ignored – and these lie at the gist of the real-world political economy of market forces.

I used to work for the New Zealand Institute of Economics Research [NZIER], which is staffed with lovely, somewhat socially isolated, semi-autistic buffers who meet the Daniel McFadden ‘Everyman’ prescription of an Economist:

‘Sovereign in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk and relentless in maximisation of happiness through monetary reward’.

They were the very epitome of homo economicus. But one trouble that I had was reconciling their assessment of individual contributions to GDP per capita to the equally lovely but much less steely-eyed folk from the Intellectually Handicapped Children’s Society who wandered willynilly onto my bus as I made my way home to meet my boys at the school gates.

For as Daniel McFadden argues [across the population in general] ‘homo economicus is “a rare species”. Such that ‘what most economists consider anomalous is the norm - homo economicus, not his fallible counterpart, is the oddity’:

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21576645-nobel-prizewinner-argues-overhaul-theory-consumer-choice

And this has some interesting implications for the interplay between trust, altruism, dignity and monetary rewards.

Which brings me in a somewhat circuitous fashion to Egypt in 1943.

This aberration of neurones was sparked by a recent article by Dean Parker in the New Zealand Herald dated 15^th April 2013: ‘What did you do in World War II grandpa? Well, actually, I was appointed Prime Minister in Cairo’, at:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10879584

It reminded me that there was a strong Left-Libertarian movement among UK and Allied Servicemen during World War II which put income and wealth distribution issues much higher on the agenda. It led in fact to the short-lived formation of a distinct political party Common Wealth.

As good old Wikipedia explains for us Common Wealth was founded in July 1942 by idealistic British Liberals. ‘It drew on the egalitarian sentiments of the English populace and hence aimed to be more appealing to Labour's potential voters, rather than voters leaning Conservative’. The group called for common ownership, "vital democracy" and morality in politics.

‘Its programme of common ownership echoed that of the Labour Party but stemmed from a more idealistic perspective, later termed "libertarian socialist". It came to reject the State-dominated form of socialism adopted by Labour under the influence of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, increasingly aligning itself instead with co-operative, syndicalist and guild socialist traditions’.

One party proposal was that all incomes should be subjected to an absolute upper limit.

Another was Inheritance Restriction. And the Cairo Forces’ Parliament passed a Bill to this effect on New Year's Day, 1944, by a large majority.

Now these are ideas that seem evergreen to me.

And surely, if you are serious about homo economicus and the good that he can do for us all, not from his benevolence but the regard of his own interest, the last thing that you would want for him, from the point of view of society, is to trammel his enterprising spirit with inherited wealth and excessive rewards to his labours?

THE VALUE OF PREVENTING A FATALITY

Let’s take a short detour back to the wartime thinking of the Forces’ Parliament. The big difference between what the troops faced and what we face on a day-to-day basis is that they were avoidant about becoming one of the million Allied Forces combatants who were killed in WWII. Thoughts of death clarified the mind.

Exploring the economics of this takes us in an interesting direction.

Transport Economists like myself are well aware of the ‘Value of Preventing a Fatality’ concept. As its name implies, it attempts to quantify the cost to society of a life lost in road accidents, ‘as a measure of the aggregate willingness to pay for reductions in individual risk’.

It is if you like, the social ‘shadow price’ of your life and mine, taking account of average levels of income losses and all the community expenses associated with one’s premature demise by misadventure.

In the USA, a VPF is currently worth about $7.5 million.

During World War II, around 400,000 US lives were lost in the conflict. The numbers for the UK [including civilian casualties] were broadly similar.

Adjusted for inflation, $7.5 million in current dollars is the equivalent of about $700,000 in 1945 dollars. So, the loss of 400,000 lives had a social cost of around $280 billion in wartime currency. This compares to US and Canadian loans around $5.5 billion to the UK under the Lend Lease Programs [repaid incidentally with interest by 2006].

Coincidentally, the US National Debt stood at around $260 billion in 1945. Of course, all the bonds issued the US Treasury were honoured.

By contrast, the families of dead servicemen and women were never ‘paid out’ by the state to the full coin – theirs was a ‘shadow debt’.

As a war orphan, I cottoned on to this argument at an early age – and it has always made for a clear distinction for me between Homo Economicus and Homo Reciprocans.

Adam Smith himself did not recommend a dog-eat-dog world, even though he observed in the Wealth of Nations that: ‘nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog’.

Quite the reverse, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he has some sound things to say about reciprocity:

‘When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self–love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren.

‘Neither is this sentiment confined to men of extraordinary magnanimity and virtue. It is deeply impressed upon every tolerably good soldier, who feels that he would become the scorn of his companions, if he could be supposed capable of shrinking from danger, or of hesitating, either to expose or to throw away his life, when the good of the service required it’.

So it was a grave issue for men in the Allied Forces to watch black marketeers, desk wallahs and armchair Colonel Blimps prosper during wartime, with the option of passing on their wealth to their children to create a rentier class - while, by contrast, the wives and children of the servicemen themselves faced relative poverty and deprivation.

TIME TO RECONSIDER INCOME AND WEALTH LIMITATION?

Given what I have said above, it will be of no surprise that I regard as suspect many of the ideas of Right-Libertarian Economists like Greg Mankiw of Harvard.

I always kick the tyres of the argumentation jalopies that they drive. Greg and his friend Tyler Cowen claim that market freedom and personal freedom always go hand-in-glove [regardless of income and wealth distribution issues and never mind the wartime black market profiteers].

To quote Tyler Cowen:

'Economics is sometimes associated with the study and defense of selfishness and material inequality, but it has an egalitarian and civil libertarian core that should be celebrated. And that core may guide us in some surprising directions.

'Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality.

'Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people.

'The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently'.

But they although they quote Adam Smith with tut-tutting approval in his observation that: 'birth and fortune, as opposed to intrinsically different capabilities, are the primary reasons for differences in social rank’, Greg and Tyler take no account of the perpetuation and accentuation of privilege through the endorsement of excessive income rewards and the protection of heritable wealth.

Bah!

So I reacted recently when Mankiw argued [in a recent post on his personal blog] that the accumulation of $3 million or more in a SEP-IRA retirement account by America’s Older Citizens should continue to be immune from taxation.

He reckons that ‘exceeding $3 million in such accounts is not very difficult for an individual who is financially successful and frugal. Under current law, a self-employed person can put about $50,000 a year in a SEP-IRA. If he does that every year for 40 years, and his savings earn a return of 5 percent per year, he will retire with about $6 million’.

‘So, yes, President Obama's $3 million constraint would be a significant disincentive for saving. It would move the tax code in the wrong direction’.

But what happens to the money when death casts its final shadow price?

Surely, the accumulated funds are passed down to heirs and beneficiaries who benefit by ‘birth and fortune’ and not by capability?

As another Harvard professor Charles W. Eliot has commented:

‘Why do current valuation practices built into the tax code make it possible for investment partners to end up with $50 million or more in entirely tax-free individual retirement accounts when the vast majority of Americans are constrained by a $5,000 annual contribution limit?

‘A simple calculation shows that the US estate tax system is broken. Assets that are passed to relatives or other personal relations are often badly misvalued relative to what they cost on an open market. The total wealth of American households is estimated at more than $60 trillion. It is heavily concentrated in very few hands.

‘A conservative estimate given the lifespans of Americans would be that 2 per cent ($1.2 trillion) is passed down each year, mostly from the very rich. Yet estate and gift taxes raise less than $12 billion, or 1 per cent, of this figure each year’.

So you don’t have to be a full-blown Left-Libertarian to start thinking again about Inheritance Restriction – or indeed Income Limitation – in a world where income and wealth differentials are widening to Continental Drift proportions, output is stagnating, debt is accumulating like a Glacial Ice Cap, and rising generations [excluding a lucky few] are being short-changed and enervated by their bleak prospects.

I might even get a nod from The Economist here, which comments again with respect to McFadden’s explorations of behavioural economics that choices in life and public policy are ‘undoubtedly messier than standard economics. So is real life’. And likewise death and taxes for that matter.

All the World’s a Bathtub

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 03 May 2013 07:11:00 +0000

TIME TO DUCK

Back in 1975 I was a member of a team of consultants that developed a comprehensive Suez Master Plan which laid out a template for the reconstruction of the city following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The team was drawn from three UK companies, Sir William Halcrow and Partners [engineers], Shankland Cox [architects and town planners] and Economic Consultants Limited [which contributed the economists like myself].

The city of Suez had been heavily shelled during the war and was largely uninhabitable. The team members lived in Cairo [flats in Dokki and Zamalek in my case]. We went down to Suez periodically to undertake fieldwork, braving the trucks that hurtled towards us down the centre of the highway. Unperturbed, our drivers would hold their ground until – at the last minute – the truck would swerve off onto the verge in a cloud of dust and sand.

At one point, Bill Luttrell, who was the founder and owner of ECL, asked me to entertain 2 young men from an as-then scarcely known Japanese outfit called the Nomura Institute. They were keen to learn about the emerging trade that became international development consulting and had spent time with us in London at our tiny but charming office near Covent Garden [an old drum factory it was reputed] – they were then privileged to join us for a short spell in Egypt on their way back to Japan.

I remember bounding through the wartime rubble of the city up the banks of the Suez Canal to gain vista of the derelict waterway – and beckoning my charges to follow. Looking back, I marvel that we returned unharmed. I was blissfully unaware of the concept of UXOs [‘Unexploded Ordnance’] at that time – and it took an assignment in rural Cambodia in 2001 to bring me up to speed on the concept [or perhaps it would be better to say down to earth].

There’s a very apposite piece online that takes me back to time and place, at

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197705/suez.reborn.htm

As Elias Antar comments on Suez in 1977:

‘In Suez some 5,000 people remained - out of a 1967 population of 250,000. These few kept essential services going for the soldiers patrolling the canal, but rats, they said, far outnumbered the people. The scars were everywhere. In Port Tewfik waterfront restaurants were unrecognizable piles of rusty metal and torn concrete, and in Suez entire streets were devastated.

‘Shells had turned apartment buildings into huge, grotesque skulls with gaping eye sockets. At the Convent of the Good Shepherd, the roof of the church had been blasted off and the fortunes of war had torn one statue off the wall, but left another unscathed. All told, the Egyptians say, Suez suffered losses of about $650 million in destroyed housing, utilities and industries.
….

‘Little wonder then that the prospect of rebuilding the cities appeared far-fetched in the autumn of 1973. But with the war over less than a week - and the Israelis still in their cease-fire positions along the canal and around Suez - President Anwar Sadat appointed a Minister of Housing and Reconstruction and told him to start bringing the canal towns back to life.

‘The Minister's reply was typical. "I said okay I'll try," recalls Osman Ahmed Osman, archetypical "can-do" man and the Arab world's leading contractor. (See Aramco World, May-June 1974). Head of "The Arab Contractors Company, Osman Ahmed Osman," he had built airports, bridges, factories, housing and roads all overthe Middle East and - his crowning achievement - the Aswan High Dam, built in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Now, in the wake of war, he was faced with a challenge that in financial terms, was even bigger.

‘Osman, who has subsequently resigned from his ministerial post moved rapidly. By the spring of 1974, he unveiled a program that in fact, was a vision of the canal region during the next 25 years. Industry and agriculture would multiply the populations of the three cities. Free trade zones in Port Said and Suez would attract foreign investment.
…

‘Their orders were crisp and pragmatic: repair what can be repaired, tear down what must be rebuilt, and do it all as quickly as possible.

‘Which they did. A year after reconstruction began, some 55,000 apartments, 210 schools and 46 hospitals in the Suez Canal zone had been repaired, replastered or repainted. In Suez itself, some 60 apartments were repaired per day. Some of those repairs, it is true, consisted only of filling in bullet holes; but new housing was provided too. "In Suez we have built 7000 housing units from scratch," said Kafrawy and "some 200,000 people have returned."

I have a clear memory of Osman Ahmed Osman welcoming our team warmly – and then setting us firmly in our places by telling us that ‘they were happy to have British consultants because they came from a poor country like Egypt and were therefore easily able to relate to local realities’.

And life in Egypt was indeed very low-key at that time. Cairo still had the air of a blitzed London or a Comecon Warsaw - and the opening of a Wimpy Hamburger outlet was a major event. Groppi’s cakes and the Heliopolis Swimming Pool were the major resources in the battle to stem the blight of broken marriages among the expats, together with the cultivation of mordant humour.

As for the jokes, one was that the proof readers had messed up with the Draft Final Report and that it had gone to the printers advising the Port Authority in Suez to invest in ‘a Large Floating Duck’, rather than a Large Floating Dock.

So I felt a sense of belated fulfillment when I learnt that, as there is nothing new under the sun, a Large Floating Duck has been spotted in Hong Kong Harbour. All we need now is someone to tow over to the Red Sea!

The Wellington Mayoralty Race 2013 - Counting on a Bigger Field

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:03:00 +0000

[‘Mumbles Head’ (33) falls and interferes with ‘Any Currency’ (37) - while No 7 refuses and sneaks away, as his jockey weighs up a 'Tom Mix' style re-mounting. But Major Malarkey has gone through to finish.]

BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES

I am indebted to Mary Mountier of Waikanae for reining me in today with respect to the letter that was published in The Dominion Post last week announcing my run for the Wellington Mayoralty in 2013. I hear the thwack of her switch and my ears are pricked.

Clearly I deserve a good leathering for suggesting that there were only 14 horses in the 2013 Grand National at Aintree when there were in fact 40. But when all is said and done Mary, I have to thank you for spurring me on.

And surely, innumerate as I am, there is some point to what I am saying? A quick tally suggests that there were only 7 or so starters in Wellington in 2010 – and though I stand to be corrected, isn’t this only half of 14?

Looking back, this is how I remember the field:

1. Let’s Move Auckland to Cook Strait [Ben Caldwell] 60-1

2. Party Central [Kerry Prendergast] 5-1

3. Going to Pot [Al Mansell] 35-1

4. Little Blue Penguin [Celia Wade-Brown] 6-1

5. Peak Oil [Bryan Pepperell] 25-1

6. Scenting Success [Jack Yan] 10-1

7. Keep Water-free [Bernard O'Shaughnessy] 40-1

As we all know, it was a tight finish with Little Blue Penguin just edging out Party Central at the winning post. But I came away with the view that it was essentially a Two Horse Race for a Two Horse Town.

Anyone who is considering voting for me should be aware that I spoil my cats and kids, take Granny Naps every second day or so, and that as often as not, I can’t find my glasses. I do though have an abiding commitment to raising the real issues and keeping politicians honest.

What I would really love to see is at least half a dozen bright, articulate and committed young, independent-minded contenders joining the race.

And maybe Ben Caldwell needs to find a new mount for 2013. What about ‘Bridge to Sydney?’ That could be a possible outsider worth a bob or two either way.

EXPLORE

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:49:00 +0000

Over the Edge of the Wild

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:19:00 +0000

A NEW TOOK ON MIDDLE EARTH

‘.... and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.’

Disputes Advisor Golda Schrödinger has more helpful advice for Gareth Morgan and Bob Kerridge

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:46:00 +0000

OUT ON A LIMB

Dear Gareth and Bob

I am somewhat disappointed that you have not taken my advice about employing a professional mediator in your fracas about controlling the social nuisances created by cats and economists.

Apparently, ‘horrifying’ images have been posted on Facebook of the Battle of Paihia after Gareth termed feeding stray cats ‘vile', and cat lovers have been sending white substances in letters in return to presumed cyber-bullies - and threatening to picket and disrupt the forthcoming 54th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists.

Gareth, you are disturbing the equilibrium between Kelvin and Jane with respect to apples and bananas if I may borrow an example from your area of expertise – or perhaps it should be with respect to puss and possum.

Calling 86-year old Betty Chapman and her friends who feed the cats at Paihia ‘ignorant nutters’ and ‘clots from the SPCA’ does you no credit. It only encourages childish cat and mouse and tit-for-tat responses.

In this regard, I note that SPCA demonstrators marched and burned images outside the recent International Monetary Fund conclave of eminent macroeconomists in Washington, at which Nobel Prize Winner George Akerlof further inflamed matters by describing the current World Financial Crisis / Great Recession as being like ‘a cat stuck in a tree, afraid to move’.

Like fellow Nobel Alumnus Paul Krugman, who has called colleague Jeffrey Sachs’ mother ‘a hamster’, it seems that economists find it hard to stop clawing the scratching post to roll over instead for a tummy tickle.

And from what I read Gareth, the damage that feral and rogue economists can be every bit as bad as that of stray moggies or worse. Take for example the case of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s widely quoted academic paper 'Growth in a Time of Debt', which purported to identify a critical ‘threshold’ or tipping point, for government indebtedness.

They produced a research finding from extensive multi-country time series comparisons that put the cat among the pigeons so to speak on governments incurring debt during recessions. It ostensibly showed that that once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, economic growth inevitably drops off sharply as the servicing of public debt crowds out private enterprise.

But MIT researchers have discovered tomfoolery with the numbers by Reinhart and Rogoff – including an Excel spreadsheet coding error. In part because of this, public policy makers may have short-changed the unemployed and turned to austerity because they were given an excuse, not because they had to.

It seems that they were influenced by another cat up a tree which smiled disppearingly and never doubted that a baby thrown out with the bathwater could become a pig in a poke.

Maybe it is time to tone down the language and for cat lovers and economists to start talking to each other and not past each other. I find it useful in this situation to bring in some soft toys that can be cuddled and exchanged between disputants [obviously avoiding fluffy representations of members of the Felidae family in this case].

Both of you, please keep an open mind and a sense of humility.

As Olivier Blanchard, Chief Economist of the IMF said at the recent meeting “We don’t have a sense of the final destination. Where we end I really don’t have much of a clue. We don’t have a clue of what financial stability actually means”.

These are wise words that have healing powers.

And maybe Gareth you should listen to your fellow professional Paul. M. Romer who capped off the IMF conference by commenting:

“Five years into a crisis of this magnitude, we should be, ‘Oh my God, the cat has been in the tree for five years, it’s time to get the cat down out of the tree and figure out how to make sure the cat doesn’t go up the tree again.”

-------

Golda Schrödinger is a professional Disputes Adviser.

For more see:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8577241/Morgan-blamed-for-cat-killings

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10861953

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/business/solutions-remain-elusive-after-financial-crisis.html?pagewanted=2&src=recg

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0

The Sequel on Wellington Rate Rebalancing - 'The Policy is Ineffective, Dumb and Unfair'

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:05:00 +0000

THE FOLLOW-UP TO MY 17^TH APRIL ARTICLE

In my previous article: ‘Is Wellington City Council’s Rate rebalancing out of kilter?’, I promised a more detailed analysis when I had had time to absorb the information that had been forwarded to me by the WCC, in response to my Official Information Act request [see: http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/04/is-wellington-city-councils-rate.html]

For the record, my request was as follows:

'Kindly note that I am applying here, under the Official Information Act and Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act [to be within 20 working days, as mandated by law] for:

Copies of all policy documents and policy reviews 2002-2013 relating to Business Rating, Household Rating and Development Contributions - and the formulation and implementation of the policy of re-balancing the rate burden away from the business sector towards the household sector
A break-down over the period 2002-2013, by year, of the contributions of the above three forms of revenue by % and $ values
The average burden incurred [by household and individual business] with respect to the above three forms of revenue over the period 2002-2013, by year
Such forecasts as have been made of the expected revenue streams from the above three sources for the future’.

After sifting my trawl, the assessment that I provided on the 17^th of April still stands – and the single spreadsheet that I quoted gives the gist of the WCC’s serious response [I am happy to email this to anyone else who is interested].

Also included on the CD which the WCC sent were the 2005-2009 Development Contributions Policy Statements; the 2001-02 Funding Policy Statements; and the 2001-02, 2006-07, 2009-10 and 2012-13 Revenue and Financing Policy Statements.

On reading through a sample of the supporting documentation, I am struck again by the degree to which financial data and financial management issues are folded away from prying eyes – from potential view by both the Councillors and Mayor, and the public at large.

The finances of the WCC are appear to be run on the old army dictums like ‘It makes no difference which side the general is on’ and ‘Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last, and don't ever volunteer.’ You might very well say that the documents are convoluted, abstruse and calculatedly uninformative - but I could not possibly comment.

I did however, come up with an interesting statement on the Business-Household Rate Burden shift:

‘In 2000, the Council voted to alter the rates differential (the rates split) that decides the share of general rates only paid by residents and by businesses. Over a 10-year period, the balance will shift from a point where the commercial sector contributed 7.0 times more general rate (for a property of the same value) to a stage where they will end up contributing 2.8 times more to the general rate then the residential ratepayer by 2009/10.

‘The adjustments from 2005 were: 2006-07 to a ratio of 4.4; 2007-08 to 3.8; 2008-09 to 3.3; and for 2009-10 to a ratio of 2.8’.

And the amounts of money we are talking about here are substantial – as is the continued pressure from the NZ business community for further adjustments.

In the case of the Auckland Super City, last year’s differential was 2.63, with Mayor Len Brown committing to reducing this by 0.1 per cent per year to 1.73 per cent by 2020-21. But Auckland Business leader Michael Barnett is demanding that businesses to pay the same rates as households - a move that would result in a $200 million per year or 20 per cent rates rise for the residential sector.

THE RATING DIFFERENTIAL POLICY – THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY’S ARGUMENTS

The arguments in favour of continued rebalancing have been neatly summarized by BusinessNZ [Submission by BusinessNZ to the Department of Internal Affairs on the Department of Internal Affairs ‘Development Contributions Review Discussion Paper ‘ (March 2013)]:

'Sometimes differential rating is applied to the business sector on the unsubstantiated ground that the business sector benefits proportionately more from council services. A number of reports have found such thinking to be groundless, yet councils continue to apply significant differentials simply because they can, rather than on any principled economic basis.

‘Where councils have agreed to reduce such differentials, any reduction has generally proceeded at a snail’s pace, councils being mindful not to upset the majority of residential ratepayers who enjoy the advantages of a lower rates burden courtesy of the business sector.

‘In the past, a number of people have argued (and many still do) that businesses are advantaged relative to residential ratepayers because they can deduct rates for income tax purposes and claim a credit for GST paid on them.

'These claims have been discredited by reputable economists for the following reasons. First, a firm can only claim a tax deduction for rates because its income is subject to tax. Nobody could seriously argue it is an advantage to be subject to income tax.

‘Second, a GST registered person or firm can claim a credit for GST paid on inputs because supplies (outputs) are subject to GST. The net GST collected is paid to Inland Revenue, so a business receives no advantage.

‘BusinessNZ is concerned with any reference to the GST status of a business as an alleged justification for imposition of any local government charges. As implied above, we do not consider the tax status (including presumed tax status) of a business to have any relevance to the level of charge that a council can impose.

'An unprofitable business logically remains as liable for its use of Council provided services as a profitable one, given the cost of providing that service remains.

‘BusinessNZ remains concerned about the use of targeted rates (taxes) mainly because there is a danger these can simply be another way of raising needed revenue without taking the full implications of their use into account.

Well, I’m not sure who the ‘reputable economists’ are but commonsense suggests a few ripostes.

In the first place, a majority of households also pay income tax. And as most income tax payers are caught by the Pay-As-You-Earn system, there is very little wriggle room – in contrast to the case of business, where has been universally noted, big businesses in general and international corporations in particular have a multitude of financial bolt-holes, rat-runs and camouflage instruments at hand to minimize their liabilities.

Secondly, the bulk of New Zealand’s value-added Goods and Services Tax is paid by householders as the final purchasers of most products and services. This is in contrast to most producers who can offset much of their liability against the GST on input purchases. Why should not household ratepayers also have the opportunity to deduct the GST charged on their rate obligations?

Thirdly, poor households [the equivalent of 'unprofitable businessess' in this strand of argument] continue to pay rates, either directly as owner-occupiers [in additions to their bank mortgage repayment obligations], or as tenants who get rates passed through to them via their weekly rental payments.

Finally, there is the issue of comparing like with like – apples and oranges.

Take for example an inner city petrol station that has the same land value as a nearby apartment block. Is it really true that the demands on Council services are essentially the same? What about the extra demands on wastewater and effluent disposal? What about the extra requirements on road layouts and traffic management? etc.

Ah, you may say – but in the case of Central Wellington, a good deal of the economic activity in the business sector is office-based and therefore much more similar in general to households in its demand for Council services. I’ll come to that.

INEFFECTUAL, DUMB AND UNFAIR

I’ll preface the main part of my critique by drawing on today’s leader in the Dominion Post:

‘Wellington has been put on notice. The region's economy is stuck in first gear and there is now a real risk of it slipping behind other main centres.

‘A report analysing Greater Wellington's economic performance makes for sobering reading. Although there are some positive points – median earnings are well above the national rate, 40 per cent of workers are in highly skilled occupations and the region has good transport and other infrastructure – the negative aspects give cause for alarm.

‘The report, by economic researchers Infometrics, found that Wellington's economy has performed poorly compared with the rest of New Zealand in the past decade. Since 2001, regional gross domestic product grew by an average of 2 per cent a year, compared with the national average of 2.5 per cent. For the year to March 2012, Wellington was ranked 15th out of New Zealand's 16 regions for economic growth. Only Canterbury, reeling from the devastating earthquakes, fared worse.

‘Wellington was also ranked the lowest of the metropolitan centres for population growth in the past decade and, in recent years, it has attracted a declining proportion of skilled migrants.

‘The growth in employment since 2002 was likewise the lowest of the metropolitan regions, and the region is still too reliant on too few sectors, most notably the public service, for too many jobs. Only Nelson has a less diversified economy’.

But ‘hold the phone!’

Surely Wellington businesses have just been given a substantial supply-side boost from a reduction in local taxes / business rates? How is it that, having lifted the rate burden, households are getting less than no payback in the form of business investment, extra production and more jobs? A good question, I think.

And then there is the issue of who gains most.

As the Dominion Post leader noted Wellington has one of the least diversified economies in New Zealand – it is extraordinarily dependent on central government spending.

According to the Infometrics Report, Central Government Administration was the largest employer in Wellington in 2010, employing 19,610 persons and accounting for 7.8% of total employment in the region. By contrast this industry accounted for 1.9% of total employment in the national economy.

And over the past 10 years the top two industrial groupings in adding jobs were government administration and defence (10,400 jobs) and health and community services (6,610 jobs).

At a rough estimate, all told, a third or more of Wellington’s jobs are directly dependent on central government spending through government institutions [bureaucracy, schools and health care] plus their supporting contractors and sub-contractors.

And underpinning all this is the provision of serviced office space by property developers. So not surprisingly business and property services constituted the largest industry in Wellington in 2010 accounting for 15.7% of total GDP.

So let’s get this straight:

Wellington household ratepayers are being asked to defray the obligations of property developers who are renting most of their offices to the Central Government.

How dumb and unfair is that?

This drives me completely nuts with its illogicality. As does the claim of the National Museum ‘Te Papa’ on subventions from Wellington residential ratepayers!

For goodness sake, the national government should be putting money into Wellington as the capital city – and not taking it out. As I have commented before, if the residents of Canberra or Washington were asked to fund the Australian National Museum or the Smithsonian, there would be howls of outrage and derision.

And I will make a final point about apples, oranges and what’s simply fruity.

Again, as noted in today’s Dominion Post [‘Remote working paying off for SMBs’ by Claire Rogers]:

'A survey of 1047 small to medium-sized NZ businesses (SMBs) by Colmar Brunton for the accounting software company MYOB shows 18 per cent have staff working mainly away from the office, while 28 per cent said staff split their work between home and office.

‘Of those businesses that had staff working away from the office most or all of the time, 40 per cent saw revenue rise in the past year - compared with 28 per cent of SMBs whose staff only worked from the office.

'Those with staff mostly working remotely were 43 per cent more likely to have increased revenue in the past year than those without remote workers. They were also 21 per cent less likely to suffer a revenue decline’.

Sole operator or family firms are a major component of this growing trend.

And of course, those people who work from home are increasingly subsidizing the property developers in the CBD through the rating system. These residential ratepayers include a number of my friends here in Island Bay who run out-sourced export operations from a home office.

Now these really are the sort of people that Wellington City Council should be supporting!

A Sunday Evening Walk in Cheshire

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:30:00 +0000

GATHERED IN

Days of dust and hayseed set aside,

For once a gradely jaunty family ride.
Let's take a Sunday tootle in the car
And leave awhile the drudging, aching farm,
Where slog and maul are sanctified.

Ahead stand Beeston Castle’s broken walls
By Four-Lane-Ends and Bunbury Heath -
Beyond the fields and oaks the evening falls,
And trudging up, the plain is swath beneath.

Fifty summers now the scene divide

As hindsight strains to glimpse that far -
A family cut and kenched and tied -
Grey and faint the snapshot evening star.

Ashes scattered, stubble standing wide -

Seasons past, the scars of harvest hide .

Is Wellington City Council's Rate Rebalancing out of kilter?

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:29:00 +0000

SHIFTING THE BURDEN

Although it has been a bit like pulling teeth with a garlic crusher, I have finally managed to obtain a decent series of figures from Wellington City Council [by way of an Official Information Request] on the impact of its rates rebalancing policy on residential rate payers.

It will take me some time to fully analyse the figures but I’ll give you a preview.

In 2001-02, Wellington City Council [WCC] recorded revenues of $241.7 million with $63.9 million coming from Business Rating [26.4%] and $61.1 million [25.2%] coming from Household Rating. At this time $112.0 million [46.7%] was drawn from ‘Other Sources’ [i.e. fees; profits from council controlled organizations; and central government grants]. The only other strand of income was the Downtown Levy which raised $3.8 million [1.6%].

Projections for 2021-22 forecast revenues of $503.0 million [a doubling over 20 years]. Of the projected total, $180.2 million [35.8%] will be drawn from Household Rating and $129.4 million [25.7%] will be drawn from Business Rating. The additional sources of revenue are expected to consist of $13.4 million [2.7%] from the Downtown Levy; $5.0 million [1%] from Development Contributions and $175 million [34.8%] from ‘Other Sources’.

The expected relative shrinkage of the Other Sources contribution is worth noting.

In 2001-02, the average household ratepayer paid $1,053 per year. This rose to $1,884 in 2012-13. By 2021-22, the figure is likely to stand at $2,250 for per household rate payer.

I leave it to you to decide how far you think this is fair?

For a remedy, see: http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/keith-johnson-to-stand-for-wellington.html

Bill Roache, Keith Johnson and Coronation Street

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 02:07:00 +0000

FIFTY UP

Last Wednesday, I slipped out for the evening on one of my very occasional Surrogate Yummy Mummy solo nights out. I went along to the ‘COROnation Street’ Stage Show at St James Theatre in Courtenay Place.

The Show celebrates the plot lines that have sprung up, evolved and resonated since the TV show was first broadcast in Britain in 1960. The serial-soap ‘Coronation Street’ has been running for just on 50 years on New Zealand TV.

The Stage Show is a Lancashire Hot Pot with Bubble-and-Squeak concoction of meaty bits from old dramas, plot thickening and yesteryear’s sprouts and spuds fried up as circus slapstick, pantomime or Blackpool Pier special.

I generally enjoyed it, though sometimes it seemed [in a second choice off the menu cliché] a bit like eating old fish and chips that had been stored in the fridge. And I was struck by the advanced age of most of the audience and strained for a sniff of accompanying mothballs and embrocation.

It raised all sorts of emotions for me. About time passing, about the nature of place and the curious predicament that we find ourselves in nowadays in seeing ourselves and others age so obviously and then fade.

I had planned a heavyweight article about nostalgia and solastalgia but maudlin thoughts are not really appropriate for such a working class and Northern English series of story lines, in which the characters often pride themselves on their earthiness, stoicism and humour.

So I have taken some time to muse.

As a start, I went along to one of our bars in Courtenay Place, The Library, for a quiet beer and some time for reflection after the show. The North of England seemed a long way away from the gaggles of girls on hen night outs and smart young predatory foxes on the prowl. Smart and trendy versus eh-by-gum.

And I have since been catching up on some of the early episodes to remind me of what I used to watch back then, what I saw and what TV producers wanted me to see.

It is fascinating to contrast two clips from 1964. The first shows the opening episode of ‘Seven Up’ – the programme that provides a longitudinal study of the way in which British society is evolving by following a cohort of kids born in 1957 [unfortunately deleted from this site due to 'copyright' issues but probably still available on YouTube]. The second is a clip from Coronation Street in 1964 [see above].

The comparison shocked me.

The Coronation Street episode for my money is much more ‘real’ and dates better. In fact the early episodes of Coronation Street were remarkably punchy. They tell, for example, of mental illness and its stigma, political protest and its impact in dividing families, and the heavy-handed policing of the infringement of local by-laws on shop opening hours.

And the sets and camera work were innovative, as was the use of the back street scenes and the vernacular.

By contrast the pomposity of the opening trailer for ‘Seven Up’, with its James Bond-type music and the highly modulated ‘Received English’ of the presenter, immediately alienates modern viewers.

GREAT DIALOGUE AND ACTING TOO

If you watch through the Coro clip that I have embedded above, you can pick up on the disintegration of Ken Barlow’s marriage to Valerie [she who notoriously paid off all her debts to life at the wrong end of a faulty hair-dryer].

The acting is marvellous, as is the script:

Ken Barlow, the young school teacher, is upstairs lying on the bed. His wife Valerie calls up to him from the kitchen.

Valerie: “Ken your dinner’s ready!”

Ken: “Yeh!”

Val: “Pardon”

Ken: “Alright, I’m coming!”

Val: “It’s getting cold – I’ve done you some kippers.”

Ken: “What are you doing up there, anyway?”

Valerie comes into the bedroom

Val: “Ken?”

Ken: “What’s up? Nothing - I’m just having a lie down.”

Val: “Well, your dinner’s on the table. Are you feeling alright?”

Ken: “Yes. You know, it’s getting just about impossible at school”.

Val: “What is?”

Ken: “Everything. Every time the headmaster looks at me it’s like being cut with a knife.”

Val: “Look, are you coming down to dinner or not?”

Ken: “Valerie I’m talking about my life – not discussing the price of cabbages. I’m your husband”.

Val: “Well, I’m not your headmaster, I can’t do anything”.

Ken: “No true enough – you could be on my side. That’s marriage for you isn’t it – great institution!”

Val: “Oh it is. There are you are somebody agrees with you – that’s what you like isn’t it. I think marriage it’s terrific. Lonely but it's fun – there you are I agree with you.”

Ken: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Val: “About you ‘Luv’. It’s the only subject your interested in.”

Ken: “Is it? Is that why I’m trying to do something with my life – is that why I’m going through all this?”

Val: “Oh I’m not talking about that.”

Ken: “No of course you are not - because it’s important – because you might have to think. Because I might need your help and that wouldn’t do would it? No - all you’re fit for is mithering about me dinner.”

Val: “Oh stop it I’m your wife, I’m supposed to get your meals”.

Ken: “If I had wanted a house keeper, I would have married one. I thought I had married a person – someone with feelings - and someone who thinks about me. And you don’t even know what I’m talking about do you? You never did!”

After being roughly thrown aside, Val goes back downstairs. Ken continues to lie on the bed and starts smoking a cigarette.

...

Wow, I was struck by what a prat Ken was – and incidentally, how he spoke for so many of us Bright and Angry Young Men who entered the 1960s with a most distasteful combination of chips on our shoulders and extraordinary expectations / entitlements of the homage that we were owed by the less educated in general - and women in particular.

BACK TO ‘THE LIBRARY BAR’

As I mused over my bottle of best Emmerson’s beer in lone splendour on a two couch enclave on Wednesday, I was startled to find the entire cast of the ‘COROnation Street’ Stage Show plonk themselves down next to me for a wind-down drink at The Library Bar.

And I suddenly found myself addressing Bill Roache as Ken – how many times must that happen?

He is a charming guy who will talk to anyone and we chatted briefly about his school days at Rydal School in North Wales where he was a contemporary of my brother-in-law, and his home at Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Like many Northern men who were passably good-looking when we were young, I owe a lot to Bill and the Beatles for stamping my passport to Lothario. There was a time when we were fashionable. But, come to think of it, he still is.

As Bess Manson explains of the Auckland Show:

‘A giggling gaggle of women a third his age cluster around William Roache at the bar. Freshly lipsticked and highly coiffed, they hone in on the star of the COROnation Street stage show after its opening night like birds do to prey.

'They want another photo with him. They want to snuggle up real close for their own personal encounter with the tousle-haired actor.

‘Roache, a glint in his 80-year-old eyes, obliges.

'The older audience members - and there are many many pensioners - are equally fawning.

‘Loitering in the Auckland Civic Theatre's lobby to catch a glimpse of him, their adulation is palpable. He's been in their front rooms for half a century. His unyielding dullness filling our screens and, apparently, fuelling some pretty intense fantasies for some viewers. Seeing him in the flesh must be quite surreal.

'Roache links arms with one after the other, smiling, kissing, signing. Maybe the actor really has bedded the thousand or more women he alluded to in the press last year.

‘As Roache himself said: "There's life in the old dog yet!"

'Any thought to the controversy Roache stirred up in recent weeks - he implied victims of sexual abuse are paying for past sins - appears to matter not to any of these Street-struck fans.

‘His second newsworthy comment, flirting with a daytime TV presenter last month telling her of his urge to smack her bottom "You naughty girl", seems only to have added fuel to this playboy's fire.

‘Eh oop, there's nought as queer as folk.

'While his alter ego, Ken Barlow, has had a pretty good innings with the ladies over the past 50 years in sunny Weatherfield, Roache's popularity is perfectly astounding. For the women of Auckland, he's hotter than one of Betty's famous hot pots’.

But I’m a pale imitation of the real thing and I decided to finish up my beer and get home to the kids. Val and I have as much in common nowadays.

And I have subsequently made a vow to can the line: ‘I’m trying to do something with my life – is that why I’m going through all this?’

After all, I’m generally the one who has to mither about dinner.

Chris Trotter and Margaret Thatcher - “Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest”.

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 01:06:00 +0000

JUDAS SHEEP BLEATS ON TREACHERY

Chris Trotter quotes Diogenes from the Latin in writing on Mrs Thatcher’s demise, with the observation: ’Of the dead speak only good’. He and the lady in question share a penchant for pompous quotations, though she favoured St Francis of Assisi.

[See: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/chris-trotter/8539407/Divided-left-an-asset-for-Thatcher].

Although he writes ‘From the Left’, I have long regarded Trotter as a Judas Sheep who connives to herd the left-leaning up to the right-wing boners for electoral gutting. He presents a scene of innocent and unwary idealists trotting up the ramp to the knife of political obscurity - before sidling off to get his scoop of calf-nut concentrates from Fairfax Newspapers.

And thereby he confirms a prejudice elsewhere among the electorate that the Left is largely composed of a flock of loony losers who can easily be led by the nose - silly sheep to be rounded up and trucked by Napoleon and Squealer from Animal Farm.

To quote the New Zealand poet Francis Duggan:

'In the Human World are born leaders too just like the Judas Sheep

And for themselves and their close kin huge financial rewards they reap
But humans have a sense of right and wrong and a sense of guilt and shame or so we have been told
And some of our leaders are far more narcissistic and at heart far more cold.’

I do my best not to read too much of what Chris Trotter writes – apart from a quick speed-read skim as a nod to inclusivity.

As with the other regular columnists of the NZ Dominion Post [who do a great job in proving all too obviously that, like the conventional Press in general, the newspaper has an agenda to mould public opinion rightwards], he is best left largely disregarded.

I once tried reading Trotter’s book ‘No Left Turn’ to fill in some blanks on New Zealand politics. It didn’t help much.

As Chris says in the Foreword to his book:

'One of the most enduring myths of the English-speaking peoples is that King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Its deep attraction lies, I believe in its promise of the perfectibility of political institutions’.

I would have to say that this is much in contrast to my own views which tend to the ‘power corrupts – trust nobody – keep the bastards honest’ manifesto.

Trotter’s post-Thatcher article starts with the statement that: ‘Perhaps the kindest (and certainly the truest) observation I can offer about Baroness Thatcher is that she tested the British Left and found it wanting’.

He goes on to argue that:

‘What she was able to do, however, was unite that large Right-wing minority and bind it ever more tightly to the Conservative Party's increasingly radical economic and social programme. The middle-class voters who, under the hapless Ted Heath, had all but given up hope that the "lower orders" would ever be put back in their proper place, were inspired and invigorated by the Tories' Iron Lady.

'This unity on the Right was not, however, answered by unity on the Left. The Right of the Labour Party simply wasn't willing to follow Tony Benn into the territory that the logic of the party's socialist ideology dictated.

'Egged on by the Right-wing British media (which needed no assistance in recognising an opportunity to divide and conquer when it saw one), the 15 million to 17 million British voters who opposed Thatcherism fruitlessly divvied up their support between Labour, the Liberal Party and the Labour Right's breakaway Social Democratic Party.

'In sociological terms this splitting of the Left reflected the tertiary-educated, professional middle class's political refusal to surrender either status or taxes to working-class people.

'Because when the chips were down (and Thatcherism made damn sure the chips were always down) even these ostensibly "conscience-driven" members of the British bourgeoisie continued to regard the working class as their social and intellectual inferiors.

‘As Lady Thatcher set about defeating the organised working class in the mines and in the factories, their social betters were waging a parallel campaign of class warfare inside the Labour Party’.

'OSTENSIBLY CONSCIOUS DRIVEN?'

As someone who left the UK Labour Party in March 1981 to immediately join the emergent Social Democratic Party, I feel the need to register my disagreement and state a few facts.

In the 1960s, it was widely rumoured that the UK Labour Party had become hopelessly corrupted in many of its coalfield and rust belt heartlands. I worked as a young bureaucrat for the Department of Economic Affairs in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the period 1965-1966 and was all too soon aware of whispers of skulduggery.

The Chairman of the Northern Regional Economic Planning Council [for which we provided the secretariat] was an ostensibly affable man named T. Dan Smith, who was the local Labour Party Boss. He had made a fortune from contracts that he had gained for his painting company - there were endless lines of stark new Stalinist multi-storey council flats that needed to be painted.

He was known locally as The Mouth of the Tyne and it was his ambition to turn Newcastle into the Brasilia of the North.

Smith ran a Bentley with the registration TDAN 65.

And the Minister for Economic Affairs, George Brown, used to come up occasionally to visit our tower block at Gallowgate - and chase the secretaries round the back stairs in a ‘tired and emotional state’.

Smith was first charged with bribery in January 1970 and although he was acquitted, this ended his political career. In October 1973 Smith was again arrested on corruption charges and sentenced to six years' imprisonment.

Smith's story was taken up in Peter Flannery's play, ‘Our Friends in the North’, which became an acclaimed BBC TV series in 1996.

Even back in the 1960s when I was in Newcastle, people would say ‘if you think corruption in the North is bad, you’ve seen nothing in comparison to what will come out in the case of South Wales’. This story never broke - the Wilson Government swept it under the carpet.

So for Chris Trotter to witter on about the treachery of those who joined the SDP is a bit rich.

It wasn’t a matter for most of ‘tertiary-educated, professional middle class's political refusing to surrender either status or taxes to working-class people ... because as ‘ostensibly "conscience-driven" members of the British bourgeoisie they continued to regard the working class as their social and intellectual inferiors’.

The 1984-85 Miner’s Strike was lost primarily because the electorate as a whole no longer trusted organized labour.

Chris Trotter may want to believe that the Miners’ Leader Arthur Scargill could have been the Once and Future King who:

'defeats the evil that besets the island of Britain and institutes a reign of virtue and justice symbolised by his order of knights, among whom there is no order of precedence except that determined by character and integrity’

But many will disagree with his judgment.

[As he aged, Arthur continued to clip the ticket from the declining stock of union dues, with the National Union of Mineworkers paying £34,000 in annual rent for his apartment overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral in London, without the knowledge of NUM members or many senior officials.

NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen, is reported as saying: "I honestly do believe that Arthur, in his own world, believes that the NUM is here to afford him the lifestyle that he's become accustomed to ... I would say it's time to walk away, Mr Scargill. You've been found out. The NUM is not your personal bank account and never will be again."]

The truth on Mrs Thatcher’s success as a politician is much more basic. She came across as honest [like it or not] – and she effectively cleared the card table of political bargaining chips by a colossal, foolhardy but stunningly rewarding gamble on re-taking the Falkland Islands.

As a foot soldier for the SDP/Liberals who fought as the candidate for Cookridge, Leeds in the Local Council Elections in the spring of 1982, I had first-hand experience of the overnight groundswell that lifted the Tories, as the Iron Lady flexed her visor by sinking the Argentine battleship ‘The Belgrano’.

On one memorable occasion on a cold night in a council estate, one of the working class locals put me straight as I stood on his doorstep canvassing:

"Eh lad tha's got no chance. That Mrs T – she’s doing grand. If you broke open my bone, you would find they were red, white and blue inside!"

So I cock my snoot at you Mr Trotter – you don’t know what you are talking about. Of course it is true that some of us were not willing 'to follow Tony Benn into the territory that the logic of the party's socialist ideology dictated'. We didn't like being led and we didn't like being sheep.

By and large, we had character and integrity and we stood up for our principles - that is surely the kind of politics that should be encouraged and not denigrated.

POSTSCRIPT

Also see Howard Jacobson:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-have-so-much-to-thank-thatcher-for--how-to-be-together-in-avidity-and-envy-8570171.html

For the Record

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:13:00 +0000

Maori owe a lot to Pakeha [or at least Pakeha-Maori]

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:57:00 +0000

RENDER UNTO VICTORIA WHAT IS VICTORIA’S

In January 1850, Britain’s Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston became enraged at the Greek Government’s long record of dishonesty, incompetence and hostility to the trans-national banking sector. And after the Greeks reneged on all their outstanding debts to British Subjects, he ordered a naval blockade of the Greek coast.

As the historian E.L. Woodward explains:

the ‘immediate circumstances of this action were a little ridiculous. One Don Pacifico, a Portuguese money-lender who claimed British citizenship on the grounds that he had been born in Gibraltar, asked for a large sum in compensation for the pillaging of his house in Athens. Palmerston took Pacifico’s exaggerated complaints at face-value and treated it as the last count against the Greek Government ...’

As it was explained to me in History Class back in the 1960s, this confirmed the doctrine of ‘Civis Britannicus Sum’ under which the King or Queen of the United Kingdom could request from foreigners [according to the Preamble in your passport] your safe passage hither and thither without let or hindrance – on pain of gunboat.

Fittingly, unlike the application of ‘Civis Romanus Sum’ to St Paul, which was applied in matters of freedom of thought and religion, the British equivalent was applied to dodgy banking.

It does raise an interesting issue though for New Zealanders in general - and Maori in particular - as to what was actually intended by Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which reads:

‘In consideration thereof, Her Majesty the Queen of England extends to the Natives of New Zealand Her Royal Protection and imparts to them all the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects.’

Particularly, as this is in marked contrast to the provisions of other deeds of cession / acquisition across the British Empire.

For example, the Deed of Cession of Fiji to Great Britain (1874) summarises the expected outcomes under Article 7, in the following terms:

'That on behalf of Her Majesty His Excellency Sir Hercules George Robert Robinson promises;

1. that the rights and interests of the said Tui Viti and other high chiefs the ceding parties hereto shall be recognised so far as is and shall be consistent with British Sovereignty and Colonial form of government;

2. that all questions of financial liabilities and engagements shall be carefully scrutinized and dealt with upon principles of justice and sound public policy;

3. that all claims to title to land by whomsoever preferred and all claims to pensions or allowances whether on the part of the said Tui Viti and other high chiefs or of persons now holding office under them or any of them shall in due course be fully investigated and equitably adjusted’.

No British Citizenship here, even though any ‘financial liabilities’ to the banking sector are given an explicit mention!

MAORI OWE A DEBT GREATER THAN THEY ACKNOWLEDGE TO PAKEHA [-MAORI]

I had been thinking about writing on the Treaty’s Article 3 for some time – but another delightful re-run from TVNZ’s ‘Heartland’ archive stock of ‘Country Calendar’ programmes finally got me going. You can see some of the stash [but unfortunately not the one to which I am referring] at:

http://tvnz.co.nz/country-calendar

The programme in question catches up with the contemporary Maori descendants of a couple of notorious and colourful ‘Pakeha-Maori’ – that is Europeans who slipped the leash of civilisation and embraced the Maori way of life [and their women] prior to 1840.

In particular, the episode covered the story of ‘Barnet Burns’ and the descendants of his son Hori Waiti [George White] by Amotawa the daughter of a Maori Chief Te Aria of the Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare hapu which was part of Te Uranga Wera or the ‘Burnt Post’ tribe on the East Coast of the North Island.

Barnet was reputedly born around 1805 and spent less than 4 years living in New Zealand and trading flax and muskets between February 1831 and October 1834 – during which time he was, according to his own account, married to a Maori princess, captured and nearly eaten by a Ngai Te Rangi war party from whom he escaped half-tattooed with a facial tā moko, and ultimately appointed Chief of a tribe of over 600 people.

There are a couple of entertaining articles on the Internet about Barnet, so you can catch up on them through the links below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnet_Burns

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b50/burns-barnet

Suffice it to say that he was a man of mystery, proven braggart and stranger to the truth who died as an alcoholic. Some of the best quotes:

‘So here I was amongst a set of cannibals ... not knowing the moment when they might take my trade from me, and not only my trade, but my life’
On his settling in England in 1836, ‘Barnet Burns styled himself as Pahe-a-Range and in May 1836 he appeared at the Chichester Mechanics' Institution, where his lectures were described as one incongruous jumble of impudence, of ignorance, of low wit, and bare-faced presumption’
And in 1844, one of New Zealand's early colonist-entrepreneurs, Jerningham Wakefield, recorded being unimpressed by one of Burns' lectures described how the lecturer ‘dressed with sandals and strings of beads on his legs and wrists, a leopard-skin petticoat, a necklace of pig's tusks, and a crown of blue feathers a foot long - sings NZ ditties to a tune! - and talks gibberish, which he translates into romantic poetry’.

I was fascinated to find though that he had a connection to Jamaica that has some resonance to one of my recent articles about the pervasive influence of slavery:

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/responsibility-for-slavery-whiteys-we.html

Barnet Burns claimed to have been born in Liverpool around 1805 and to have shipped as a cabin boy around 1818, eventually deserting his ship in Kingston, Jamaica. While there, he took up with Louis Celeste Lecesne, a relatively successful merchant who was following in his father's footsteps. Louis was 6-8 years older than Barnet. The two men appeared to have travelled together to England around 1825, with Lecesne assisting briefly in the continued education of his friend and charge.

Lecesne became a major figure in the Anti-Slavery Campaign and you can check out his story at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Celeste_Lecesne

Prior to settling in England around 1825, Lecesne had been the subject of a cause celebre in which, as a ‘person of colour’, he was accused of being an alien who had entered Jamaica from Haiti on false papers. The presence of educated, mixed-race traders like Lecesne posed a problem for the authorities as it breached the general rule that skin colour and slavery could be equated.

The Jamaican Government under the Duke of Manchester sought to prove that Lecesne was guilty of a conspiracy then under the 1818 Alien Act and that he could be repatriated to Haiti, following the confiscation of his goods.

A lengthy court case ensued which Lecesne and his brother-in-law John Escoffery won by proving that they had been born in Jamaica of Haitian immigrant parents. However, the determination was not accepted and the case eventually reached Westminster.

As Hansard reports of the Proceedings in the House of Commons [May 1824]:

‘Dr. Lushington rose to present a petition to which he requested the attention of the House, and particularly of ministers of his majesty's government. If the facts alleged were true, there never was a case which called more loudly for their interference; not only with a view to do justice to the oppressed, but also to punish the oppressors.

‘The petition stated, that the petitioners are freemen of colour, natives of Kingston, in the island of Jamaica, where they had constantly resided; that they were married to women, also natives of that island, and had each four children—that they were engaged in business as liquor-merchants—that they held the rank of serjeants in the militia, in which they have served since the year 1813;

‘and that they possessed property in the island, consisting of houses, land, and slaves: that about the latter end of September last, the petitioners underwent an examination before certain magistrates of Kingston as to the proofs they possessed of being British-born subjects, when they produced, in support of that fact, the certificates of their baptism, and other necessary documents

'and that on the 7th of October following, petitioners were apprehended, and carried to prison, for the purpose, as they were informed, of being summarily removed from the island of Jamaica, as aliens, and dangerous persons; but a writ of habeas corpus having been issued, on their application to the grand court of the island, their case underwent a full and minute investigation before Mr. Chief-justice Scarlett, and the two assistant judges, Mills and West, on the 25th of the same month;

'and that the sentence pronounced by the court was, that the petitioners were both British-born subjects, and as such entitled to their discharge, and to the enjoyment of all their privileges as British Citizens’.

So, across the British Empire, a legitimate claim to British Citizenship was a very big issue.

As for Barnet Burns, nobody seems to have ever questioned whether or not he had been born in England – or whether or not his moko concealed a somewhat swarthy face?

I note only, with respect to his presumed birthplace, that:

A search of the online parish records for Kirkby [Liverpool] does not disclose any record of the birth of a Barnet Burns – or indeed of any Burns family members in the decades surrounding 1805
Kirkby Ireleth [where some Burns family members are recorded] is in Cumbria and is not to be confused with Kirkby in Liverpool.

Following this up, I had a look online at the 1852 Census for England and Wales – and found Barnet with his wife Rosina [described by one commentator as a ‘pedlar’ who used to play tunes on variously filled glass tumblers].

The pair was lodging in a boarding house at 167 High Street, Linton near Ely in Cambridgeshire. Rosina is described as a 50-year old Professor of Music who had been born in London. As for Barnet, he does not record his birthplace as Liverpool, rather he describes himself as a 44-year old Lecturer who was a 'British Subject'.

It is my guess then that Barnet was probably born in Jamaica. And that in the lead up to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, Barnet and his fellow ruffian Pakeha-Maori [many of whom shared an unconventional history] made their guests very well aware of the virtues of being classed as British Subjects.

If I’m right, Maori got a good deal from the hospitality that they extended to people like Barnet.

Though the Treaty of Waitangi has created many problems, nobody has ever questioned Article 3 – and it may well have never been written in had it not been for Fifth Column Pakeha-Maori who knew its implications all too well from their experience in other corners of the British Empire.

Nigeria's Road System - the physicality may seem enjoyable but the rudderless emotional anxiety chokes!

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 02:27:00 +0000

AND TIME YET FOR A HUNDRED INDECISIONS – AND FOR A HUNDRED VISIONS AND REVISIONS

There are those, who like the Flying Dutchman of old, are condemned to roam the broad world of pain producing an endless series of consulting reports on Development Issues in expiation of some ancestral sin or dreadful crime.

I was once one – and I still hanker to ship if I can find a berth at my age - Davy Jones notwithstanding.

Some time ago, I was contacted by the wife of an old colleague. I had shipped with him on a Regional Planning assignment in Malaysia and she reported that they had broken up and that he was now retired. Apparently, as she reported in not altogether complimentary terms, he was spending a good deal of time in his garage, rifling through the piles of old consulting reports that threatened his car with rust.

As someone who at one time had proudly retained and shelved copies of 30 or so industrial pre-feasibility studies for Morocco in preparation for being asked to cost a car battery assembly factory or a tyre retreading facility at some point in the future, I can empathise.

But I was able to report to the lady in question that frequent house removals and relationship break-ups had reduced my stock of reports to manageable levels.

The fragments that are left are a strange melange.

But I do have one report from Nigeria that has survived, namely the Inception Report for the ‘Establishment of a Regional Plan for Kwara State – Nigeria’ [March 1976]. So, in the light of my previous article on Chinua Achebe, it was natural for me to rummage through my garage for the document.

I have to say that I was somewhat surprised at how good a read it is overall.

Maybe I’ll write again at some point on its methodology, assumptions and shortcomings but I was struck most immediately by what it had to say about the relationship between transport and development, so I’ll restrict myself to that topic in this article.

And I‘ll focus on its comments on the National Framework for the Suggested Outline Regional Strategy, repeating what it has to say verbatim.

TRANSPORT, GROWTH AND INEQUALITY

‘The seven immediate objectives of the Third National Development Plan, 1975-80 are as follows:

a) to increase per capita incomes

b) to distribute income more evenly

c) to reduce unemployment

d) to increase the supply of high level manpower

e) to diversify the economy

f) to balance development

g) to promote the indigenisation of economic activity.

These objectives can be grouped into two classes: those seeking economic growth a), c), d) and e); and those seeking an equitable distribution of income between the different geographical areas of the country (objectives b), f) and g). The major planning problem is to devise a strategy which reconciles the two sets of objectives.

Fortunately, in the Nigerian context, the outlines of such a strategy can be derived from the geographical base.

The first major component is the presence of distinct crop-ecological zones which trend broadly from west to east. They are largely determined by the regular decline in annual rainfall from the south to the north of the country. The regularity of the rainfall gradient is also a function of the fact that Nigeria has few major topographic variations.

The significance of the crop-ecological zones lies in the fact that they give rise to different types of commercial and subsistence economies. These must be linked to stimulate the development of regional specialisation in agricultural crops based on comparative advantages.

The second major component is the importance of access to world markets through the ports. The railways that run inland from the coast have led to economic growth based on staples like cocoa in the south-west, oil palm in the southeast and groundnuts and cotton in the north.

The third major component is the presence of the three strong cultural groupings formed by the Yoruba, Ibo and Hausa respectively.

From an economic viewpoint, the presence of the north-south transport corridors, which link the various crop zones to each other and the coast, has particular significance.

Indeed Barbour remarks on the past development of Nigeria that: ‘The idea of a port or coastal station with its “hinterland” was one of the best regional planning concepts ever used in West Africa [‘Planning for Nigeria, edited by K.M. Barbour (1972), page 63].

What is now required is to take this concept and re-examine it in the light of the growth of the Nigerian economy and the nation’s aspirations.

As a start, it is useful to adapt the spatial model for development that has been proposed by E.J. Taafe, R.L. Morrill and P.R. Gould [Geographical Review: 53 (1963) pp 503-529].

An abstract representation of the transport network is given below.

State A represents the existing situation, in which major transport arteries traverse the range of crop-ecological zones, dividing the country into distinct port hinterlands. In Nigeria, the principal ports are Lagos and Port Harcourt and the railways are the main arteries.

In addition to the north-south routes, there are feeder routes which link subsidiary centres in each zone to a collector node on the main corridor. Roads rather than railways fulfil this function, and Ilorin is a good example of one of these collecting points.

Moving to the future, it appears likely that major west-east routes will extend to create a rough transport grid. This process of linkage along the crop-ecological zones is illustrated in Kwara by the upgrading of the Ilorin-Okene-Lokoja-Ankpa route. Additionally, there will be continuing effort to increase overall accessibility by reconstructing the local road system [State B].

At the broader national scale, one can expect the development of new north-south routes such as the proposed Federal road from Calabar to Yola, and the construction of diagonal links such as the Lagos-Benin-Onitsha-Enugu road.

Further into the future, in State C, one can look forward to the strengthening of diagonal links throughout the country and the possibility of a much stronger role for a new central hinterland routeway.

In the case of Nigeria, for freight it is immediately obvious that this could come about from the development of the lower Niger River for waterborne traffic between the delta and Lokoja. Beyond Lokoja, the route would continue northwards overland, making Abuja, the new Federal Capital, a focus for secondary and diagonal links.

The sketch that the model offers of the future is certainly open to question on points of detail, but it does suggest possible trends. The best way that the country can meet its objectives of continued economic growth and the equitable distribution of income, is to plan for the systematic development of the whole country using the nodes created by the intersection of local, lateral, major hinterland and diagonal route-ways as poles of growth.

A dense basic grid will ensure that all the economic opportunities can be exploited and that government expenditure can be channelled effectively to deprived areas.

The major links will strengthen or decline in importance as particular trade flows wax or wane, but they will always retain their relevance to the basic planning structure’.

... and in many ways, Kwara is a microcosm of Nigeria’ [see maps below].

SOUNDS SIMPLE ENOUGH, SO WHAT HAPPENED?

I’ll start with a couple of reflections on the strategy it outlines.

First, I was struck by the unapologetically geographical nature of its analysis and recommendations. Secondly, it all seemed simplistic and obvious, almost to the point of drawing a mud map on the ground with a stick. But then again it was written nearly 40 years ago – what can you expect?

But let’s look more carefully.

Given the seemingly commonsensical nature of the strategy I was confident that if I consulted a modern highway map of Nigeria, it would show that the E1 Expressway from Lagos had been extended from Ibadan to Ilorin and beyond; that there were high quality ‘laterals’ [e.g. from Ilorin to Lokoja]; and that there was a new direct line expressway from Lagos to Abuja [a ‘diagonal’] with new radials fanning out in all directions from the capital. And that the roads would have been properly maintained.

Let’s take the Lagos-Abuja journey as an example. Here there are three options:

1: Lagos - Benin - Auchi - Okene - Lokoja - Abuja

2: Lagos - Akure - Owo - Ibilo - Okene - Lokoja - Abuja

3: Lagos - Ilorin - Jebba - Bida – Abuja

All of them are variously indirect and unsatisfactory.

As for outcomes, it is always best if a local tells the story - and Kunle Shonaike does a great job of this in Punch Nigeria [April 7, 2013]:

‘The drive from Lagos to Ibadan and Ibadan to Ife-Ijesha roundabout on the way to Aramoko, in Ekiti State, was so bad that the multitude of potholes on the road and the violent vibrations affected the sturdy vehicle I drove and it eventually culminated in the damage of its brake-pipe supplying fluid to the front callipers.

‘I started observing the flat brake from the junction where we turned into the newly resurfaced and relatively smooth road to Aramoko from the sprawling Ijeshaland. The peculiarly funny thing about this road is the heaps of sand strategically poured on the road to discourage big trucks and luxury buses from plying it (I guess so that they’ll not quickly wear the road down).

'At Aramoko, the convoy waited and we took time to improvise a form of repair on the kaput brake system of our SUV. And soon after leaving Aramoko, it disappointingly dawned on me that the Aramako-Ifaki-Ikole to Ijumuland’s road in Kogi State was a fraud. I have heard so much about the “performing-governor-story” of Gov. Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State.

‘But as a former Georgia State (in the USA) Department of Transportation engineer in charge of examining the quality of roads built with Georgia’s tax payers’ money, the quality of “patch-patch” work I saw being laid on that stretch is nothing but a fraud to me; it’s just a “wash-wash” job that’ll soon peel off in one or two rainy seasons! I can bet my last bottom dollar on that.

‘But if that stretch sets us back, the treacherous nature of the contraption called the Lokoja-Abuja road should make our leaders in Abuja cover their faces in shame.

‘I kept thinking, “If these irresponsive lot do not bother to sort out the death-trap that feeds our federal capital from the southern part of the country, how can we expect them to ever do the Lagos-Badagy, Abeokuta-Sokoto or Lagos-Ibadan express ways or the commercially and strategic Second-Niger Bridge that are light years away from their delusive cocoon in Abuja?”

‘Lastly, entering the infrastructure-rich Abuja presented little respite: The newly built roads look and feel fantastic, but somebody forgot to put night-luminous road directions. So, driving on the sexy roads at night becomes like an experience with a harlot: the physicality may seem enjoyable but the rudderless emotional anxiety chokes. What a country!’

And what the World Bank has to say about all this is pathetic in the extreme:

http://www.infrastructureafrica.org/system/files/library/2011/07/CR%20Nigeria.pdf

Sadly, it seems nobody anymore has any sense of spatial strategic thinking – and if anyone ever had any sense of the importance of recurrent versus capital expenditure, it has disappeared.

As the World Bank maps shows [below], the Nigerian national highway map is like a lost late lunch of half-digested spaghetti!

And if anyone at the NZ Architectural Association or the NZ Green Party wants to test the notion that if you spend parsimoniously and unwisely on roads, people will shift from cars to public transport and you will wind up with a paradise for cyclists, Nigeria is the place.

For Chinua Achebe

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:06:00 +0000

ONLY ONIONS BRING TEARS

Nigeria’s first university opened in 1948 as University College, Ibadan. The Department of Geography was there from the beginning and its foundation Professor was Keith M. Buchanan. Keith died at his home on the Kapiti Coast, Wellington, New Zealand in 2002 aged 78, much respected in his field.

Among the first student intake of the future University of Ibadan was Chinua Achebe who had been awarded a bursary to study Medicine. After an unhappy year, he switched to English, History and Theology. Chinua has recently died aged 82 – an acclaimed giant in world literature.

Both men influenced me and my understanding of the world – Achebe profoundly. As you see from my header, when Queen Elizabeth II made a State Visit to Nigeria in 1956, she was heads and tails were palms. Chinua Achebe flipped the coin - and gave currency and voice to the African face.

And I find the interplay between the narratives of the two alumni fascinating.

Let’s start with Keith, my namesake.

Keith Buchanan [in collaboration with J.C. Pugh] published in 1955, what to a dreamy youngster like me was a wonderful book, ‘Land and People in Nigeria’. I can still remember poring over the text and illustrations during the long, dark winter’s evenings in our farmhouse in Cheshire.

For me, studying Geography was pure escapism. In my mind’s eye, I could conjure steam trains from the cross-hatched lines denoting railway lines; I could visualize camel caravanserai trekking into the desert where the isohyets ran thin; and a street map of Buenos Aires would see me there exploring the boulevards along Avenida 9 de Julio.

But Buchanan and Pugh did better. They provided line drawings of ‘euphorbia-girt villages’ on the Jos Plateau and they quoted Hausa Proverbs. It brought Nigeria to life to me.

For years, I would interject my favourite Hausa bon mots into conversations, when they flagged: ‘Komi kyaun ba ta yi tafannuwar, kamar albasa ba’ [or something that has some vague resemblance to that – we are talking 50 years ago].

Apparently, the proverb [in its true form] means something like: ‘However fine the garlic, it is not onions’.

And what you may ask is its point? It’s all about people and places and being in the right place with your kinfolk. If a stranger from a different tribe visits, he is fine – the highest quality garlic if you like. But he doesn’t know his onions – he doesn’t have a place around the cooking pot where your own people are king.

As a young regional planner / economist, in the period 1976-79I spent a good deal of time in Nigeria. Nobody ever understood me when I quoted the proverb but I grew to learn that it spoke of a deep tolerance of other cultures that went hand in hand with a pride in one’s own.

The really great thing about being a European in upcountry Nigeria in those days was that you were just from yet another tribe – a nuisance to be tolerated or a guest to be celebrated – but never the real McCoy, and therefore never worth taking over seriously.

Of course, this had its dangers. As Chinua Achebe comments:

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

RADICAL HUMANISM, POWER ELITES AND CULTURAL LIQUIDATION

But the unity of the Europeans is also skin-deep in places. Like the other Keith, I was a product of Britain’s fractured tribal identities, class distinctions and noblesse oblige burdens.

When I read some of what Keith wrote, I hear myself as a young man from The North in the 1960s full of crusading fervour, with no-shoulder unchipped. As for windmills, neither of us could pass one without trying to lance it.

Writing as the descendant of Scots, who was born in England and got his first job as an academic in Wales, KB starts an essay on ‘Economic Growth and Cultural Liquidation: The Case of the Celtic Nations (1977)’ in the following uncompromising terms:

'This makes no claim to be a detached and objective paper. I write as one who has lost the Language my ancestors spoke many generations ago and who has only a slender knowledge of that other Celtic language my children learned in a tiny school close to the silver Welsh Sea.

'I write as one who has in many lands seen “the immeasurable destructive potential of indiscriminate economic growth who has seen, in the words of the greatest living Welsh poet:

‘Behind the smile on times’ face

The cold brain of the machine
That will destroy you and your race.

[R.S Thomas]

... I write as one who (perhaps against all evidence), is unprepared to believe that our Affluent Society, our technologically sophisticated yet socially disintegrating society of Chrome, Cream and Crime, is the only possible type of society.

'We have lost the old tongue, and with it

The old ways too ...
... the language, for us
Is part of the old abandoned ways’.

[Herbert Williams]

In ‘The Geography of Empire’ (1972), Keith rails like a half-starved, half-mad prophet:

‘At first sight, the seventeenth century writer John Donne would seem irrelevant to the analysis of modern imperialism. But the John Donne of whom I think is not John Donne the poet, the rumour-ringed, enigmatic, sensuous adventurer, but John Donne the preacher, the passionate, compassionate and probing Dean of St. Paul's.

‘And when I think of John Donne in the context of this paper I think of his sombre and fearsome warning: "Foole, this night they shall fetch away thy soule".

‘For, as I see it, these sombre words can be extended to the long night of colonialism and the tormented neo-colonial night which has followed. The physical spoliation of those who lived, who still live, in the dark night of imperialism, the filching away of gold and copper and foodstuffs and fibres, is something all can see - but this material impoverishment may well prove to be of less significance than the undermining of indigenous cultures, the destruction of the personality, the stealing of the soul of those colonised.

‘Moreover, as we shall see in this paper, this "stealing of souls", this cultural imperialism, is by no means a thing of the past, for, as the old forms of imperialism withered, new, more sophisticated and more subtle forms have taken their place ... The physical pillage of the world by the developed nations continues and to this has been added an even more destructive and pervasive intellectual pillage.

[See: http://www.big-lies.org/american-empire-and-other-empires/american-empire.html]

Keith was in the words of his NZ colleague Ray Watters a ‘radical humanist and polemicist, a socialist, a champion of the dispossessed, and an unrelenting critic of orthodoxy, capitalist regimes and power elites’ - or what I sometimes term myself a Left-Libertarian.

But another geographer R.D. Hill flips the coin here and is ambivalent in his praise:

'Buchanan’s research and fieldwork in China, undertaken from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, when both were difficult, were marred by his lack of Chinese. Nevertheless he was a notable student of the People’s Republic at a time of great interest, great ignorance and great polarization of viewpoints.

‘Buchanan was a fierce “Cold Warrior of the Left”, unpopular to the point of being perceived as a threat by the forces of reaction.

‘But he was far too individualistic and idiosyncratic ever to make a formal political commitment or develop a consistent political stance other than that of a romantic revolutionary, happy enough to feed the backyard furnaces of the Great Leap Forward and to be a thorn in the flesh of New Zealand and American politicians and bureaucrats of the Cold War –

... ‘but too comfortably bourgeois in his position as professor of Geography at the Victoria University of Wellington to “forsake all” in the manner of Rewi Alley and commit his life to the betterment of the proletariat and the peasantry.

So there we have it – passionate, opinionated Europeans both clever and foolish at the same time. Well meaning to an apostrophe but determined to have the edge in the argument and in worthiness. It only remained for Geography [and China for awhile] to be overwhelmed by the cleverness [and foolishness] of Marxism.

AUTHENTICITY, DIGNITY AND A DIFFERENT ORDER OF REALITY

“If you don’t like someone’s story,” Chinua Achebe told The Paris Review in 1994, “write your own.”

This was as much advice to Europeans as it was to Africans.

With a light mastery, he flipped the coin.

In the words of the white South African writer Nadine Gordiner:

‘I read his work with the sense of extraordinary entry into a brilliant (I do not use that word fashionably or lightly) mind, a writer's continuing achievement of penetrating the variety, possibilities, mystery of being human in the presence not only of one's own people and country, but of the world’.

And Nnaoma Cassidy Ibe has this to say:

'He wrote with passion without minding whose ox is gored. His pen was indeed relentlessly fearless, as he tried to communicate the deep thoughts that flowed from the innermost recess of his literary being.

‘He was simultaneously a novelist, poet, broadcaster, professor and critic. Achebe wrote more than 20 works, some of which were fiercely critical of politicians and a failure of leadership in Nigeria. The most widely acclaimed of his works, Things Fall Apart is generally regarded as the most widely read book in modern African English literature.

'Things Fall Apart is a story that transcends. It has classic qualities that a typical African can confidently say, “this is my story”: from Nigeria to Kenya, from Senegal to Zimbabwe, from Morocco to Tanzania, from Sierra Leone to Rwanda. If you want to know how proverbs are used in African literature, rush to Achebe.

‘He was a warrior, a literary ‘four-star general’, who went to the battlefield and emerged undisputedly ‘the champion’. All through his life, he was armed with every necessary ‘machinery’ a 20th century writer ought to be armed with. Truly, he paid his dues perfectly well. He was an embodiment of the fight against injustice, within and without.

‘He was a whistle blower. He blew the ‘whistle’ when it was most necessary. In his Things Fall Apart, he blew the whistle against Joseph Conrad (Achebe in 1975 went ahead to describe Conrad as a ‘bloody) and all those misinformed white folks that viewed Africa from subhuman lenses.

‘Today, Africans have understood that they can tell their own story and tell it so well. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has wonderfully demonstrated this fact).

'Twice, he was offered national honours (under Obasanjo and Jonathan respectively); twice he rejected it on two justifiable grounds: (a) because of the existence of a cabal, (in his own words “a small clique of renegades”) that has turned “my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom” (b) in my opinion, I believe strongly he did not want to share a national honour with personalities whose characters are ‘recurringly questionable’.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie herself writes:

‘Things Fall Apart’ is the African novel most read – and arguably most loved – by Africans, a novel published when ‘African novel’ meant European accounts of ‘native’ life. Achebe was an unapologetic member of the generation of African writers who were ‘writing back,’ challenging the stock Western images of their homeland, but his work was not burdened by its intent.

‘It is much-loved not because Achebe wrote back, but because he wrote back well. His work was wise, humorous, human. For many Africans, ‘Things Fall Apart’ remains a gesture of returned dignity, a literary and an emotional experience; Mandela called Achebe the writer in whose presence the prison walls came down’.

As for me, Dr Keith Johnson, the eager young technocrat and project manager for the preparation of the Kwara and Benue Regional Plans [and economist for the Bauchi-Gombe Slum Upgrading and Low Cost Housing Project], in the period 1976-79, I both loved and hated Nigeria. As my driver Lawrence once said [he was an Igbo like Achebe], there is ‘too much suffering in dis Nigeria’.

But you had to love the people – and reading ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘No Longer at Ease’ back then, I suddenly saw myself reflected. Well-paid, having made it, a global citizen ... insecure, cut-loose from my roots, facing a switch-back ride of social change, adrift in materialism and greed, threatened by anomie and dystopia.

After all:

"It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning."

It was nice / is nice that well-meaning Europeans want to write other people’s stories but Chinua Achebe forced the onlookers to confront the images that fade away mirror upon mirror in Africa. We are not Black, we are White - but as the images recede it is clear that we are all simply human and that if I close my eyes, I can begin to understand.

NZ Law Commission and Leveson - Confusion Worse Confounded

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:07:00 +0000

PRINTING PRESSES SQUEAKY AS THEY FEAR SILENCE

‘Within the next decade it is conceivable that there will be few if any printed daily newspapers. Over the same time period there is likely to be an exponential increase in the amount of audio-visual content accessed on-demand via mobile and other devices.

‘In this converged environment consumers must be confident that consistent standards apply to similar types of content irrespective of the format or platform by which it is accessed’.

[NZ Law Commission’s Report: 'The News Media Meets the ‘New Media’', March 2013]

There seems to have been remarkably little content in the mainstream newspapers here in New Zealand on the recently published deliberations of the NZ Law Commission on 'Media Rights, Responsibilities and Regulation in the Digital Age’.

After my heading quote from the document, you would think that this would be front-page news for the papers. It isn’t.

Partly I suspect because conventional reporters don’t really understand the issues, coming as they largely do from the ‘old school’ – and partly because there are vested interests that newspaper proprietors cannot be seen to defend too overtly.

They fear online competition from Blogs and yet every newspaper now has its own webpage. So the question arises ‘When is a Blog not a Blog?’

As has been commented in the UK Independent on the outcome of the UK Leveson Inquiry:

‘The Index on Censorship warned that by extending regulation to the internet Britain had “abandoned a democratic principle.”

The Royal Charter’s definition of a relevant publisher as a website containing news-related material “means blogs could be regulated under this new law as well."

Index on Censorship also commented: “This will undoubtedly have a chilling effect on everyday people’s web use.

“Bloggers could find themselves subject to exemplary damages in court, due to the fact that they were not part of a regulator that was not intended for them in the first place. This mess of legislation has been thrown together with alarming haste: there’s little doubt we’ll repent for a while to come.”

Carla Buzasi, editor-in-chief of Huffington Post UK – which competes online with newspapers currently regulated by the Press Complaints Commission and subject to its successor – joined the uproar.

Huffington Post UK heavily relies on content provided free by a mass of contributors.

Ms Buzasi said: “We are concerned that new regulations appear to have been rushed through by politicians with little thought given to defining the terms. We know that ”news-related websites“ are covered, but we are told blogs are not.

”We have over 6,000 bloggers, so are they covered by the regulation? No politician seems to have had this discussion, and it appears to be paving the way for legal challenges across the industry.“

[See: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/q-when-is-a-blog-not-a-blog-a-when-it-falls-under-the-postleveson-regime-8541137.html]

The New Zealand situation is no different.

CAN I QUOTE YOU ON THAT?

The no man’s land between the mainstream ‘newspaper’ and ‘new media’ online channels is a minefield through which bloggers wander, increasingly distrustfully.

Have a look at:

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/newspapers-respond-to-copyright-row-1.1070533.

According to Irish Reporter Laura Slattery, the National Newspapers of Ireland Group argues that:

‘The display of links to newspaper articles online is “an infringement of copyright” when it is done “for commercial purposes”.

However, ‘The Irish Times, which is a member of the NNI, said it supported “the NNI position that copyright over newspaper content should be protected”. But it also said it encouraged linking to its articles.

“We recognise that linking is the lifeblood of the online world and we encourage our digital community to share links as widely as possible. Therefore, The Irish Times does not see links as copyrightable and will not attempt to impose any restrictions on the posting elsewhere on the Internet of mere URLs that refer to its content,” said Hugh Linehan, online editor of The Irish Times.

“We have no problem at all with anybody linking directly to our articles. However, The Irish Times takes issue with automated ‘scraping’, summarisation, and aggregation, of its content,” he said. “All commercial reproduction or republication of The Irish Times’ content is subject to licensing requirements that the Newspaper Licensing Ireland oversees.”

You can immediately see that;

· there is dissension and confusion in the ranks of the conventional media

· the quotations and URL postings that I have pasted in above could be snuffed out by the presumed protection.

But you may say: ‘Surely, it is a matter of scale?’ And a matter of 'harms' - both perpetrated independently and reiterated?

It’s not so clear cut – let’s take some more quotes from the UK Independent

[at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/websites-lead-growing-backlash-over-leveson-deal-8541290.html]:

'Small-scale bloggers

‘Bloggers are potentially at risk from the charter’s definition of a publisher, which extends to “a website containing news-related material” or “opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs”.

‘Index on Censorship’s Padraig Reidy said: “If I have a blog which almost no one reads but then I write a post which Justin Bieber retweets I could suddenly have a million readers. Does that mean I have to sign up to the system?”

Political blogs

‘Bloggers initially thought that press-regulation reform would not affect them. But the unclear wording of the document suggests that all publishers of “news” could be liable to complaints and potentially to exemplary damages if they fail to sign up.

‘Paul Staines, the founder of the political blog Guido Fawkes, believes the charter’s lack of clarity gives great cause for concern for bloggers. He notes that even the websites of the main political parties were involved in publishing “news”.

‘But he is confident his own overseas-registered site is safe. “We’ve been going for nine years and have never been successfully sued so I take a very sceptical stance towards the effect it could have on us. We’re certainly not going to join any regulator. People will be encouraged to sue but our servers are in California so what are they going to do – send a Royal Navy gunboat?”

We can note though that there are increasing pressures for EEC and global conventions - and here in New Zealand the Kim Dotcom case, with its attempted abnegation of habeas corpus in favour of international extradition, provides some chilling frissons of concern.

IT’S ALL ABOUT MONEY AND INFLUENCE

Getting back to my header quote, and the illustrations above it, you can catch up with the financial and influential issues at:

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21567934-after-years-bad-headlines-industry-finally-has-some-good-news-news-adventures

http://newsosaur.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/digital-ad-share-dives-sharply-at.html

http://newsosaur.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/whats-next-for-press-they-dont-know.html

The top diagram is from The Economist online and my quotation would presumably be covered by the National Newspapers of Ireland Group’s statement – as long as they think that my Blog remains largely unread and that my Google Adsense revenues are derisory [which they are].

The two lower diagrams are from the Newsosaur Blog – and my quotation is presumably welcome because it publicises the site.

Perhaps you can sort out the legal and ethical differences for me?

Arrivederci / Animadverto vos iterum

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:50:00 +0000

IT BLOWS SO HARD – T’WILL SOON BE GONE

Evans D. Martin, Evans D. Morgan and

If I remember right -
There was a third 'Juffy' Evans at class roll call.
We also had a D.J Roberts and an A.W. Roberts.

Chester is very Welsh for an English city

The surnames said it all -
But then again not using first names is very English.

I once went to school with a rose

In my lapel for St George’s Day –
I was a strange child.

So it was with fascination
That I find Dai Morgan Evans hosting:
‘Rome wasn’t built in a Day’.

It was a long time ago but

We both loved archaeology -
Our heroes were
Glyn Daniel and Mortimer Wheeler.

As D.M. said a couple of years back:

‘I'm fairly ancient - I'm 66, so I've been around for a while.
I became interested in the Romans by being brought up in Chester’.

As his classmate, I was super impressed that he studied Anglo-Saxon
At Robin Alden’s Georgian townhouse in Abbey Street -
After school!

As a country bumpkin, I had 90 minutes travel either way
And had to talk to the cows along the Long Lane -
As I biked home to the farm from the C84 bus.

But Dai and I

[or David as I remember him] -
Were bonded by relics, ruins and inheritance.

Again I was super impressed that he was one of the Ordovices

Who was still living near the Land of his Fathers - Wales
[‘A place of bards, bigots, tenors, drapers, milkmen and journalists’] -
When I was a sort of war orphan who was a bit of a
Spare wheel.

But I hung on to the fact
That my step-dad was an English yeoman:
‘Cheshire born
And Cheshire bred
Strong in the arm
Quick in the head’.

One time, D.M. and I took part in a dig

In Watergate Street -
Hoping for evidence of the Roman docks.

We got down about 10 feet

And found planking – but it was still fresh -
The ground had been used in WW1
As a training area for digging trenches.

Nothing changes that much.

The Ordovices got a pasting

When Caractacus or Caradoc ap Cunobellin
Lost the Battle of the Wrekin or Caer Caradoc -
around AD 51.

Craddock took refuge with the Brigantes

[My lot, I have since found out
Through YDNA testing] -
And our Queen handed him over to -
Publius Ostorius Scapula in chains.

Paraded as a trophy in the Eternal city,

He had this to say:
'Does it really follow that everyone should accept your slavery?
And can you, then, who have got such possessions and so many of them –
Covet our poor tents?’

After that the Cornovii, who wore bulls' horns and had hill forts

[My Cheshire relatives],
Used the Pax Romana to build Uriconium into
Britain’s fourth city.

They were descendants of Himilco

The Carthaginian -
So they knew their
Elephants [and cows] as far as the Romans were concerned.

They were a cunning lot, with an eye for

A bargain and what is practical –

And reinvented themselves again under the Angles
As the Wrekin Set -
With Chester and Shrewsbury
And their department stores and tea houses -
Browns and Quaintways -
Very nice too!

And 'the gardens of Blandings Castle
Are that original garden -
From which we are all exiled'.

Plus Ça Change!

My uncle had a farm and then a pub in South Shropshire.

And my cousin [another David] and I
Cycled over once from Wenlock Edge to Wroxeter -
And brought back some shards of Samian ware.

'What’s that rubbish?’ his dad said.

That David died of AIDS in the 1990s.

As Housman has it:

‘On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger

When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman

At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon’.

NOTE

For more on D.M's Roman Villa reconstruction at Wroxeter / Uriconium, see:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/rome-wasnt-built-in-a-day/articles/roman-villa-virtual-tour

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/rome-wasnt-built-in-a-day

For an update on the Cornovii at Blandings, see Carol Midgely’s article at:

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2010/03/anthropology-of-indigenous-english.html

The NZ Law Commission's Bloggy Moggie

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:14:00 +0000

[Credit: Motella]

FINE-SOUNDING LEGALISM

The New Zealand Law Commission has just released its omnibus recommendations on media probity and governance.

Currently the print media in NZ are covered by the voluntary, self-regulatory Press Council, while telephone and radio are accountable to some degree to a statutory Broadcasting Authority. There is no specific provision governing the responsibility and accountability of internet publication.

The New Zealand example is clearly of wider interest, given the UK’s decision in the light of the Leveson Inquiry to establish a watchdog by Royal Charter.

As reported in today’s Dominion Post [see http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8474375/New-media-complaints-body-proposed]

‘NZ Law Commission President Sir Grant Hammond says that unlike the Leveson inquiry, his review was not driven by a crisis in confidence in the mainstream media.

It was prompted by concern about "gaps and disparities in the legal and ethical standards and accountabilities that apply to news and current affairs" through the rise of online news.

"At the moment New Zealanders wishing to complain about unethical, damaging or inaccurate news content confront a confusing mix of standards and complaints processes - or none at all - depending on whether the content has been created by a broadcaster, a newspaper company or an online publisher”.

Internet publisher who join the body would be eligible for legal exemptions and privileges currently available to the mainstream media, including from Privacy and Defamation Act and gain an endorsement providing "a form of quality assurance and reputational advantage."

The proposals can be accessed at:

http://www.lawcom.govt.nz/sites/default/files/publications/2013/03/r128_new_media_summary-recs.pdf

With respect to blogging, the NZ proposals make the following comments:

‘We also recognise though that the majority of individuals using digital communication technologies, including many bloggers, will choose to sit outside our proposed new complaints body and will not be covered by its standards.

‘However, they will be subject to the law of New Zealand and also the various measures we have recommended in our earlier Ministerial Briefing Paper to combat communication harms.

‘These include a new criminal offence covering highly offensive communications; changes to the Harassment Act to ensure it can be readily applied to digital publishing; and a new Communications Tribunal capable of providing speedy and efficient remedies, including take down orders, in instances where digital publishing has resulted in serious harm to an individual.

‘The dependencies between the two packages of reforms are intentional and together they are intended to provide a flexible and proportionate response, suited to the converged digital environment'.

IF YOU TWITTER WHO BELLS THE CAT?

It seems to me that a lot of questions are left unanswered.

My concerns have always been that the Old Media, with its back against the wall, is desperately seeking the means to staunch the leaks to its previous near monopolies of day-to-day publication, ‘ads’, and political stretch and spin.

Disputes and suits are likely to arise in future on copyright issues, relating to unpaid or supposedly 'stolen' online access and use of such material in blogs, even if the content has already been printed and disseminated in hard copy. And on the circumstances in which such cross-referencing can be judged ‘unethical, damaging or inaccurate’, when it is applied in blog commentaries, satires and comparisons that bleed away advertising revenue, readership and political influence.

The parallel Ministerial Briefing Paper on Digital Communications [that has been referred to above], makes the following comment:

‘We are alive to the fact that there may, however rarely, be a well-resourced complainant who brings a claim to court with a view to exploiting a resource imbalance between the two parties.

‘In such a case we believe that the defendant should have the right to request, and the court to order, that the matter be transferred to the tribunal. There is such a power in section 37 of the Disputes Tribunal Act 1988’.

See: http://www.lawcom.govt.nz/sites/default/files/publications/2012/08/ministerial_briefing_-_harmful_digital_communications.pdf

For starters, these processes and their costs to individuals may themselves deter access, synthesis and online publication.

And whether the proposals are either here or there in practical terms, depends entirely it seems to me on: the quality of the appointments that are made to the bodies in question; the commitment of the Government of the Day to personal freedom over financial and business interests; and the ethics and purses of the mainstream media hacks, barons and moghuls.

For some of my previous comments on these issues, see for example:

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/threats-to-democracy-of-distribution.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2011/04/language-secret-weapon-at-risk-of.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/disruptive-technology-not-fathomable.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/tale-of-two-little-mavens-one-was-good.html

The internet has enormous potential to transform society for the better by informing citizens and increasing opportunities for political participation. And I am sure that Edmund Burke no less would have cautioned against the dangers of muzzling the knowledge that it ‘springs up, increases and multiplies, irrepressible, incalculable’.

NOTE

For what is already technically possible in a worst case scenario interventionist state, see:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-21743499

Keith Johnson's Australasian Bestiary - the Koala

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 01:11:00 +0000

BUNYIP'S BLUES

Whiskery chin and whiskery chops
Snoozing in the broad tree tops
Dreamy eyes and whiskery ears
They sleep away the furry years.

A nose that’s hard to see around
And legs that bandy on the ground.
Perplexed and up a gum tree,
You can often just their bum see.

Now Uncle Wattleberry’s a fine example
Whose sideburns sprouted more than ample.
So much his house among the trees
Even whiskered in the breeze.

His nephew Bunyip though was not impressed
And thought his uncle over-dressed -
And with their space by hairiness pervaded
Young Bluegum shaved and fur-pomaded.

He took to dining on the trunk below
But listless gummed his soup with woe
As lizards borrowed or much worse stole
His cough-drop pottage from the bowl.

Said Bunyip:

“Whiskers alone are bad enough
Attached to faces coarse and rough
But how much greater their offence is
When stuck on Uncles’ countenances.”

His uncle thus replied:

“Shaving may add an air that’s somewhat brisker
For dignity, commend me to the whisker
As noble thoughts the inward being grace
So noble whiskers dignify the face.”

Now this lingo sparked a blue and Bunyip lost his rag
So much, he did a bunk and upped and humped his swag.
And if you want to know the outcome of his walkabout intentions
Consult ‘The Magic Pudding’ [Albert], on his stew and jam indentions.

[Quotations and illustration from 'The Magic Pudding - the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum' by Norman Lindsay (1918)]

Now for Something Completely Different

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:17:00 +0000

GIRL ON GIRL ACTION

While I was out titivating the driveway a few months back, I got chatting to our beautiful blonde postie [post delivery girl]. I had remarked that she must get very fit walking Wellington’s hills and I reminded her that one of NZ’s premier poets James K. Baxter had also been a local postie.

The obvious follow-up in my chat-up line was whether she was also a competitive runner or biker? [I haven’t entirely lost the knack – or maybe it was just a reflex action like an old dog chasing cars in its sleep].

She then volunteered that she had become addicted to Roller Derby but that despite her strength and stamina, she had so far been unable to get into the first team of our Richter City Rollers team [‘Richter’- after our proneness to earthquakes]. She also gave me a brief intro to the rules and suggested that I try it myself [as a spectator].

So last night, I put on a surprise package for the family which consisted of a mystery tour to the Chicago Bar on Queens Wharf and then tickets to the 2013 Season ‘Aggro’ Opener between the Wellington Richter City Rollers and the Auckland Pirate City Rollers.

While my wife was initially sceptical and the boys started listless and grumpy, we were all soon totally enthralled.

For a similar epiphany the report by Wellington’s Blogging Chick [at: http://bloggingcafechick.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/richter-city-roller-derby.html]

There is just so much in-your-face speed, noise, exuberance and louche sexitude. I adored the girls’ names - a sample:

‘Jem Molition, Suffer Jet, Switchblade Betty, Rusty Stiletto, Princess Slayer, Lady Trample, Myrtle Kombat, Sick Puppy, Sugar Gorilla, Machete Confetti, Scary Maclary, Venom de Plume, Gin & Toxic’.

And as ‘Heidi Contagious’ comments on the costumes:

‘In derby there isn’t an official dress code but I’ve observed some unwritten rules like, black is good (but hell when is it not?), Goth works, frilly knickers absolutely, bright coloured short skirts, fishnets (a wardrobe staple), leopard print (a winning choice by Smash Malice), tight shorts, knee high socks with optional print – tartan, skulls, stripes and accessories – earrings, necklaces, belts’.

This is all very Autumn-Winter 2013, as my recent Fashion Page explained.

With the names, the athleticism and the camaraderie, it reminded me of my much beloved Mother Hash, the Manila Mens’ Hash House Harriers - except to say that the Hash is positively sophisticated and even effete by comparison. I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall in the dressing room or the après derby drinks [always assuming I wasn’t swatted].

There was tragedy just before the end of the first half when our key jammer 'Skanda Lass' was stretchered off in tears of pain and frustration [it has taken me 24 hours to figure out that her name is not a Nordic reference, and that instead it is a pun on the word scandalous]. She was subsequently reported as OK.

We had to leave to get the boys home soon after this and things were looking bleak for the Richters.

Anyhow, it seems that they won 194:192 - after putting their heads down and getting their leotards swinging in the last tight stretch. Wunderbar! and Magnifique! [or should that be 'Wanda Bear' and 'Maggie Physique'?].

Summing it all up, my wife's view was that it was pretty 'Virginia Dentata'. I'm not quite sure what this means but I'll pass it on as a feminist insight.

Keith Johnson's Australasian Bestiary - the Kangaroo

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:20:00 +0000

KISS ME KATE - CAREFULLY

Poets often use many words

To say a simple thing.

It takes thought and time and rhyme

To make a poem sing.

With music and words I've been playing

For you, I have written a song.

To be sure that you'll know what I'm saying,

I'll translate as I go along...

Hum with me the tune

And let us play amid the Bush

Let us come together soon

To consummate our crush.

In other words,

Bounce my way.

In other words,

Share the hay.

Leave the billabong

And let me sing forever more.

You are all I long for,

As I take your tender paw.

Careful with those shapely legs

And watch when you get toey

Treat me like a tray of eggs

If you plan for us to joey.

Fill my heart with song,

And let it sing forever more.

You are all I long for,

All I worship and adore.

In other words,

Please be true.

In other words,

I love you...

Katie Kangaroo.

Basin Reserve Update – 21st March 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:22:00 +0000

FROM 'A' TO 'X' VIA 'RR' AND BACK

I went along to the Strategy and Policy Meeting of Wellington City Council today, as I have an interest in the integrity of its Assessment of Alternative Options for Transport Improvements at Wellington’s Basin Reserve.

For further background see:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington-central/8446846/Vivian-St-bottleneck-options-up-for-debate

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/8371794/Flyover-review-a-waste-of-money

and my articles at:

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2013/03/a-roundabout-way-to-reach-square-circle.html

http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/peter-jacksons-hobbit-sequel-stoppits.html

Getting back to the S&P Committee, a Report had been tabled that had cost at least $50,000, including payment to an architect Richard Reid for some concept drawings for his Option RR [see above – his map is like a maze from one of those books that my kids used to love a few years ago – I can’t for the life of me disentangle how the lines of traffic mingle, overlap and cross as they are intermittently interrupted with what I assume to be foot-bridges. You have a go].

Purportedly, it shows that additional lanes [from whence?] and changes to traffic signals will be sufficient to future-proof the route without grade separation.

It also considered Option X – a more serious but highly ambitious design from the Architecture Centre which:

‘proposes a tunnel to the NW edge of the Basin Reserve, for EW traffic and the redirection of all southbound traffic along the western side of the Basin Reserve and the development of a landscaped park on the eastern side’.

The report concluded that any improvements in traffic flows would be attained at significant additional cost; incur negative impacts on some local roads; and result in ‘the creation of a complex network of roads at different levels at the NW edge’ [see below for a map and some alternative concept drawings for the 3-tier set of flyovers / over-passes].

The report concluded that the New Zealand Transport Agency’s Option A [which itself includes a ‘flyover’ or bridged section along the northern boundary of the Basin Reserve to ‘grade separate’ NS and EW Traffic]:

is best in delivering on the multi-modal and strategic outcomes sought by the Council
has an impact on urban form for which a range of mitigation options may exist.

Accordingly the Report recommended that Councillors note that:

‘Option A is the best of the alternatives evaluated’.

THE MEETING

I would have to say that Mr Reid did not impress me. He spent his entire presentation on criticising Option A and said next to nothing about his own ideas. I asked him about this and he prevaricated in a conspiratorial manner, demanding to know who I was and informing me that the concept was ‘confidential’. So much for transparency in assessment and decision-making!

The thought crossed my mind that the poor unfortunate was being used as a 'road-block' by those who are opposed to any increases in road capacity as a matter of belief.

Mr Marriage from the Architectural Association was similarly high-horsed about Option A and dark-horsed about his own Option X. Some of what he said was totally biased. For example, he claimed that traffic levels were falling.

Just to pick up on this.

The Wellington NZ Airport Master Plan 2010 provides the following forecasts:

a doubling of annual passenger numbers, from five million to about 10.5 million in 2030, at an average growth rate of 3.4% per year
a 10% increase in air movements, from 114,400 in 2010 to 126,100 in 2030
a doubling of airport related traffic from 11,439 vehicles per day in 2008 to 22,420 vehicles per day in 2030.

The Mayor added that, should the airport runway be lengthened and adapted to receive longer-haul aircraft, an additional 400 passengers a day would land [this would add another 250 vehicles per day].

And the recently proposed Maranui Marine Education Centre is forecast to generate 180,000 to 220,000 visitors per year or 300 - 400 vpd if it is implemented.

I could go on a mention current and expected expansion in the retail, wholesale, sports and recreation and film and IT sectors along the EW transport corridor.

Anyhow, the Architectural Association are very poor losers, as can be picked up from their pre-emptive strike in yesterday’s newspaper:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/8445288/WCCs-Basin-flyover-report-blasted.

If someone offered the opinion that they are ardent self-promoters for whom other peoples' money is immaterial, I couldn't possibly comment.

I have to say that, in my view, John Morrison came out on top on this one. John drolly asked why the expected noise and visual intrusion from a flyover on the northern edge of Basin Reserve was any different to the current noise and visual intrusion on the western edge where the road surface is currently as high as the proposed flyover.

Particularly since [as with the western boundary] a new stand would be built to mitigate adverse effects under Option A. And - under Options RR and X - traffic noise and visual intrusion would be significantly exacerbated on the western boundary.

DEALS DONE AND THE CHICKENS HOME TO ROOST

Then began an inordinate amount of grand-standing [both cricket and otherwise], grandiloquence, posturing and puffery from the Councillors. But at least at this meeting Councillor Helene Ritchie didn’t suddenly pull out a stuffed penguin from her handbag, as she is prone to do.

More seriously, fresh-faced Justin Lester put the cat square among the penguins by successfully tabling an amendment that read to the effect that:

‘Wellington City Council does not support a Flyover at the Basin Reserve’.

This raised temperatures and hackles.

Clearly, it went both against the recommendations of the Report and the previous assurance that had been given by Mayor Celia Wade-Brown and Councillor Foster of the Council’s neutrality towards the NZTA’s tabling of Option A for a Resource [i.e. development] Consent with the Environmental Court.

An even more florid flurry of rhetoric and flannel followed.

Mention was made over paving over Venice’s canals and lagoons for roads, allusions were made to using ferries to pick up and drop off airport passengers at Shelly Bay wharf; and Birmingham, UK was singled out favourably for demolishing flyovers;

[see http://imagesofbirmingham.photoshelter.com/image/I0000qPBBhn3ZY5s?]

All sorts of other allusions made their appearance including the Yellow Brick Road; Eeyore [who was somewhat unjustly singled out for sloth and indecision when, as I remember he was quite enterprising and built himself a house – except that it was indistinguishable from a pile of sticks]; and a large number of dinosaurs [more than enough to stock Jurassic Park].

Anyhow, Councillor Foster was faced with a real dilemma. He wanted to support Councillor Lester because this is where he judges the majority of the vociferous voting public stands but he feared a backlash in the media from flip-flopping and a demonstrated lack of integrity in dealing with NZTA.

And Councillor McKinnon a known proponent of Option A had to leave the meeting before the vote. This left Foster with the real possibility that Lester’s amendment would be adopted.

But, as I understand it, back room deals were done after lunch. Foster had gone along to the NZTA and its officials had told him, not altogether surprisingly, that they would very much resent the Council reneging on its previous position. Disaster therefore loomed unless a formula could be devised that:

let the Mayor vote for the amendment to satisfy her Green Constituency
let the supporters of the amendment come close to winning but not actually win.

I was told long before the vote that it had been stitched up. This is the way it went:

For: Justin Lester, Stephanie Cook, Iona Pannett, Paul Eagle, Helene Ritchie, Bryan Pepperell, Celia Wade-Brown

Against: Leonie Gill, Ray Ahipene-Mercer, John Morrison, Andy Foster, Jo Coughlan, Ngaire Best, Simon Marsh

Absent: Ian McKinnon [Against].

As the vote was 7:7, Foster was able to cast his extra vote as Chairman against the amendment and it was lost.

I went home at this point.

Nobody had got exactly what they wanted, constituencies remain largely massaged and therefore loyal - but chronic uncertainty about what may eventually transpire remains.

I was quite touched though to see clucky old biddy Helene Ritchie complaining vociferously to the Cub Reporters about Foster’s duplicity in abusing his casting vote privilege. My dear old chook, it had all been long decided beforehand!

POSTSCRIPT

For some of my own credentials in this professional arena, see for example:

http://www.transport.govt.nz/land/Documents/NZIER%20-%20AKL%20Road%20Pricing%20-%20Desktop%20research%20Econ%20Impacts.pdf

Black-pleather peplum with tartan slippers, a bogle, bling and a pin-on fluffy is the way to go

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Johnson) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:51:00 +0000

THE FASHION COLUMN – AUTUMN / WINTER 2013

Wellington Fashion Week is just around the corner from 3rd to 7th April 2013. See:

http://www.wfweek.co.nz/

And I had a deep and meaningful discussion this morning with my column understudy and prominent fashionista Freya, at the Maranui Cafe. We reviewed what is trending, in the light of the issue today of the autumn / winter edition of The Fashion Times by our premier Wellington department store Kirkcaldie and Stains. See:

http://kirkcaldies.co.nz/

We summarize the trends, together with our comments below.

THE CHANEL JACKET

The Chanel style for this winter is amazing and it is a must have fashion investment.

Try applying the perfume and discarding the jacket together with its foundation layers – a great way to make friends quickly.

TWEED / PLAID

Team your tweed jacket with leather to give it an edgy twist or accessorize with tartan scarves, shoes, collars or bags. Layer with heavier tartan items and don’t be afraid to wear print on print.

Add a haggis-skin bogle to button under the left armpit – forget to shave beforehand for a few days.

THE PEPLUM

The peplum still reigns supreme in its ability to create shape and hide any unflattering bits. It celebrates a waist-to-hip curve, and when wearing a skirt it looks great if the skirt ends at the knee or just below where your leg shape narrows.

Why not go ‘all-out’ and settle for a pleather peplum? For the less well-heeled, a size 16 bling-encrusted Polar Fleece can deliver much the same effect.

THE BLOUSE

Nothing quite ties a look together than a romantic blouse, complete with a bow-front tie or ruffled neckline. Fabrics range from fine silks to love-worn cotton, and they can be found in almost any print.

I’m not quite sure what is meant by love-worn cotton – can anyone help on this?

THE PUFFER JACKET

Puffers are warm, elegant, luxurious and wearable, with or without hoods. The latest designs have improved technically as well as giving more flattering and body slimming shapes by being longer and cinched at the waist with a belt.

It is time to break out that lovely old anorak that you have been saving for special occasions.

FUR

Two of the top trends this winter are fur and leather. You will see fur on coat collars, on hats, and as trims. Faux fur has come a long way over the years, it is now hard to tell the faux from the real!

Leather is teaming up in an array of cuts, styles and colours that are made for contemporary and modern women for a lethal combination. The focus this season is on coats, leggings and skirts, making these sexy and stylish in a ‘dare-to-wear’ mode.

If you don't want to wear real leather, then there is a huge array of garments using 'pleather' - good old PU used in many stylish ways. One modern way of incorporating leather is in the use of insets into outfits made of other fabric.

Leather is a luxurious material and looks good by itself and is already quite attention-grabbing, so adding funky accessories incorporating fur adds extra oomph.

Remember fur is easy on the grasp and leather hard on the grope. Sort out your priorities beforehand. See the leather bra below:

BAROQUE

This trend sees embroidery, tapestry or gold leaf and takes its cues from all things ornate:

Embroidery, needlepoint and tapestry
Gold, gold and more gold. Gold hardware, gold embellishments, gold thread
References to artworks, sculpture or interior design.

If you cover yourself in gold coins, cups and ornaments be sure not to leave a bare spot that can be hit by a Lake-land archer like Bard. Don’t wear that special ring – if you do nobody will be able to see you.

RISE OF OVERSIZE

BIG is beautiful. Cocoon coats, pillow-sleeved jackets, billowing trousers and softly structured skirts. Shoulders are dropped and skirt lengths are long. Contrast volume with slim-line structure in a stylish pairing of opposites.

Pillows and billows will blow you away in the Wellington Winter – but not far!

WINTER IN BLOOM

Flower prints are everywhere from small bouquets to large single flower prints. Think nipped-in waists, floral belted trench coats and eastern obis. Puff sleeves, gathered waists, and art gallery floral prints.

Cheeky cheating: take your old Burberry or Aquascutum and tie dye it with floral cut-outs. Make sure the obi isn’t on the endangered species list and be prepared for quarantine at customs if you import one.

STRIPES AHEAD

Stepping into winter comes all things stripy – not just straight lines, but garments with a mix of angles. Instead of just seeing leopard or zebra stripes, we are seeing animal faces or motifs on t-shirts, knits and accessories.

Try to avoid the pajama look – if you must, wear them inside-out and sew some fur or leather over the size label. Or pin one of your tot’s fluffies in a prominent position – negotiate first to avoid a melt-down.

WHITES AND OVERSIZE LAPELS

While this winter can be all about crisp tailoring or fairy snow queens, there are no rules about fabrics. White wears well with gold. The wide-boy look is a must-have this season as an accompaniment to the black and white smoke from the log-burner.

Pope Benedict really showed us how to wear Baroque. He also showed us that very wide-lapelled white suits plus gold bling can look stunning with a tasseled mini-beany.

GOTHIC REVIVAL

Black is Back [actually it never went away in Wellington]. It is not just about the Little Black Dress. Pair it with an androgynous velvet suit or a feminine black lace number – let the imagination go wild. Add embellishments such as beading or sequins, or go for clothing with leather trims or panels, colour accents or sheer fabrics.

Red, representing passion and heat is also in. Avoid garlic and crucifixes, steer clear of the dawn and don’t get boxed in.

FOR A MORE SERIOUS SHOW-CASING OF WELLINGTON’S MARVELOUS TALENT - SEE:

Love Hotel, at: http://www.lovehotel.co.nz/about.html

Visage, at: http://www.quinnsmerivale.co.nz/2012/12/12/new-visage-winter-stock-by-our-very-own-robyn-mooney-now-in-store/

Sabatini, at: http://www.sabatini.co.nz/

Jane Daniels, at: http://www.janedaniels.co.nz/

Lucabella, at: http://www.zebrano.co.nz/lucabella-winter-13

NO DUMB BROADS IN WELLINGTON

My header picture shows the NZ fashion model Rosie Herdman reading George Orwell between catwalks. Rosie is the daughter of one of our good friends. Unlike Rachel Hunter who boasted about 'thinking about absolutely nothing between takes' [Rachel is from Christchurch], Wellington ladies match beauty and brains.