Clark and Tizard on power

It's outrageous Clark has waded in on this, judging the contractor so quickly, instantly believing one version of events - but then she is Prime Minister and should be expected to have opinions on everything her subjects do.

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However I did laugh with this comment:

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"Labour MP Judith Tizard said when she was on the Auckland Electric Power Board from 1977-1983, it had a no-disconnections policy in cases when people genuinely could not afford to pay the bill."

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So you might ask why Auckland had a blackout due to underinvestment in its network some years ago?

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Desperately blaming the Nats for this - because of commercialisation of electricity, something that started under Labour, in fact Clark was in Cabinet at the time. Never mind it has nothing to do with that, never mind that it was a state owned enterprise that took over a locally owned company.

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Name one thing Judith Tizard has done for Auckland, and cutting ribbons on road projects that had nothing to do with her doesn't count.

Anti-globalisation protesters are communists

The usual travelling roadshow of naive young dreamers and old-fashioned hate filled socialists are causing trouble in Rostock, Germany, protesting the G8 summit. It should be noted Rostock is in the former GDR, which had the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker until 1989. The flying of the hammer and sickle flags there, when millions were watched and thousands imprisoned, tortured and murdered for questioning the GDR regime is disgusting.

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The rather inane BBC is talking about far left groups as if they are benign compared to far right groups. The communists protesting at the G8 are no better than neo-nazis, both back the oppressive use of state violence to tell people what to do and what not to do.

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There are reasons to protest at the G8. You could protest:

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1. Russia's continued slide towards authoritarianism.

2. The impoverishment of primary producers throughout the world due to heavy protectionism for agriculture by Japan, the EU and the USA, and the negative environmental impacts of that protectionism.

3. The unwillingness of the G8 to get the Doha round to make much progress in liberalising world trade (a major step towards lifting standards of living).

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The protestors are intellectually vapid. Poverty in African is largely due to governments in Africa being corrupt kleptocracies in many cases, more than happy to use aid to pay for their families to go on shopping trips in Knightsbridge, London. These countries do little to protect property rights (necessary for people to protect what they produce and own, and without that poverty exists) or have independent judiciaries and police. It also isn't helped by the lack of free trade in primary products, as the EU and USA subsidise exports of agriculture undermining the export competitiveness of many other countries, and block or highly tax imports from those countries.

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The protestors current pinup boy Hugo Chavez is now into shutting down broadcasters that disagree with him - the lack of interest in this by many on the left speaks volumes.

Urophilia or watersports

David Farrar has posted wisely on this, and I add just a few points:

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1. The acts depicted in the DVDs imported by the man concerned are legal, in real life. Anyone could undertake them in the comfort of their home and there is no crime committed. What the law does is criminalise the photographing, filming or even writing about it, and also criminalises those viewing any of the above. Yes urophilia erotic stories are a crime in New Zealand, though you'll find ample at Alt Sex Stories website, because, you see, such stories are legal in the United States (you know that bastion of Christian conservatism - the Constitution guarantees it as free speech).

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If you want to ban viewing acts that are legal in real life, then perhaps you should lobby to ban anyone peeing on any one else for sexual purposes, and that opens up a whole range of potential bans. Ones that religious conservatives, whether christian, muslim or others, would no doubt enjoy, but which would be a fascist imposition upon the private lives of consenting adults. Adults own their bodies, the state does not. I've known more than one woman who has said she likes watersports.

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2. Even regardless of legal status, urophilia (assuming it is consensual) is a victimless crime. Just because it is not something you would do, is not something that others should be stopped or criminalised from doing, let alone criminalised for reading about it or watching others do it. No doubt threesomes offend plenty of people, as does men dressing as women, women dressing as schoolgirls for sexual titillation of men, masturbating with stuffed toys, or indeed relatively common sex acts like fellatio and cunnilingus (if you need a link to find what they are then you shouldn't be searching).

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I remember when Libertarianz raised this very point when the Film Videos and Publications Classification Bill was in Parliament, pointing out how absurd it was that these acts are legal but depictions of them are illegal, and that pornography of urophilia is very widely available online because it is legal in the USA and many continental European countries.

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The response to this was that David Cunliffe simply went into a tyrade of "why should we do what the USA does" in an insulting rant, instead of debating the point. In other words, he lived up to the silent T in his surname. The point is, of course, that no MP wants to be known as a defender of free speech, for people who want to watch videos of those peeing. In fact the penalties were raised for producing or viewing urophilia, because it is in the same category as child pornography - being objectionable - which is absurd!

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However, the businessman in question is now getting his life ruined because Labour and National MPs prefer to side with the likes of Brian Tamaki. Even the Greens have said nothing and they like to claim they are "liberal" - my arse!

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Censorship law should simply be a reflection of criminal law, in that those who record real crimes with or as the offender are accessories to the crime, and the recording is evidence. Urophilia is not a crime, and any depictions of it should be nobody else's business. Otherwise you believe in patrolling people's bedrooms!

Tfl incompetence

On Sunday my girlfriend and I were driving to Norfolk, with a rental car (and don't give me "take the train" finger pointing, as the car was full with possessions as she is moving there for five days a week for work reasons), and to undertake this journey should be straightforward. We live not too far from the A406 North Circular road (around 40% of a circular route) which is 3 lanes in each direction over much of its length.

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It was a wet day and a busy one, with a considerable amount of holiday traffic - including some tube replacement buses - and so you might wonder why Tfl authorised its contractors to close to one lane each way the underpass (under a railway line) between New Southgate and Colney Hatch lane. Why were the second lanes closed (the road already narrows from 3 to 2 lanes each way because this is the beginning of an awful gap in the A406)?

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Very simple. Contractors were scraping unauthorised posters from the walls of the road underpass.

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Were they doing this on a roadway? No, in fact there are very wide footpaths where the workers were working. Traffic passed beside them quite safely (as pedestrians can walk through this underpass).

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Were they doing work in the road median? No! The only reason the central lanes were closed was to create a space for the contractors' vehicles to be parked!! Parked!!

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The resulting tailback added 20-25 minutes to a journey of about a mile eastbound, it was easily a 2 mile tailback westbound.

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So for some inexplicable reason, TfL authorised the contractors to close lanes in the middle of the day so that some cleaning activity could be carried out. Now, let's just assume for the sake of argument that it wasn't just to park the trucks somewhere (there is an adjacent service station and vehicles could have been parked less than 100m further away on the road without closing both lanes), and there is work in the middle of the road...

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Why isn't this work carried out at night? Dare I say, in Australia and New Zealand such work on a major arterial route which halves the capacity of the route would be carried out in the wee small hours. Yes you pay people more, but this is nothing compared to the cost in lost time, fuel and the safety risk of traffic slowing from 50mph to a stop-start crawl - something that clearly doesn't seem to matter to Tfl. Heaven help you if you catch the Northern line replacement buses that were stuck in the jam in the other direction.

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I can put it down to either:

- Sheer incompetence either driven by failure to appraise whether it is cheaper for London to pay to do this work at night or to do it on the cheap, and create huge traffic jams;

- An obsession with public transport and little interest in highway management, and little interest in minimising congestion through better traffic management.

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Tfl should be split in two - one body dedicated to managing public transport franchises and another dedicated to managing London's highway network. The latter should have a hypothecated stream of funding prioritised to road maintenance, with specific output goals of minimising incident or planned congestion, and maximising the efficient and safe operation of the network. To do this means a major political change in the Mayoralty and the Greater London Assembly. London has one of the worst urban highway networks in the Western world, the north circular (A406) is incomplete and erratic, the south circular (A205) is a circular by signpost only, it is about time that London's road network was properly managed and funded. London's road users already pay enough to use it!

Removing accountability for highway funding

What do you do when a Crown Entity isn’t performing? Do you fire the Board, do you require its funding body (which is meant to be at arms length and independent from the other entity) to hold it to account? Do you stop telling it what to do, which overrides its usual processes for determining how best to perform its tasks? No – if it wastes money, you merge it with its funding body – so that it doesn’t even need to justify to another entity what funding it needs – it can fund itself!
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That is the main announcement by the Minister of Transport with the “Next Steps in the Land Transport Sector review”. It wont result in more efficient outcomes, it will result in the abolition of a structure that has been touted around the world as being a leader – what it will mean is that Transit will no longer need to bid for funding for its projects – it will simply ask itself, and local authorities will need to ask Transit. Transit Chief Executive Rik van Barneveld must feel burnt perhaps as much as former Land Transport Safety Authority Director David Wright, when LTSA was abolished, largely because of ongoing political disenchantment with its performance. Now Transit is in the gun, and while not blameless, it is more the fault of Ministers who would not let the system do what it is meant to do – Minister much prefer to meddle and interfere. Van Barneveld must wonder what he could have done, as he has been adept in responding to Minister's calls, and he is far removed from David Wright, who had little understanding of how much the LTSA was hated by the public, and how much Ministers were concerned about this.

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The announcement today that the government wishes to merge Transit New Zealand (which is responsible for operating the state highway network) with Land Transport New Zealand (which allocates funding to Transit and all local authorities for land transport) will be a disaster. You see, Transit and Land Transport NZ WERE the same entity until 1996 – it is the reason Transit has the name “Transit” which everywhere else in the world means “commuting”, because Transit used to run the state highways and allocate funding to, well, itself and local authorities.
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The problem before was that, as is unsurprising, if you are a funder and a provider, you’ll fund your own activities first, and treat the bids for funding from the 85 local authorities as secondary. So Transit was split, and Transfund was set up as a specialist independent funding body. Transfund has since been merged with the Land Transport Safety Authority to become Land Transport New Zealand. However, in recent years Land Transport New Zealand/Transfund has been less than proficient at holding Transit to account for its spending decisions. Why?
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Firstly, contrary to official advice, Labour has refused to remove common board members between Transit and Transfund/Land Transport New Zealand. Jan Wright and David Stubbs were until recently, Chairs of Land Transport and Transit respectively, but also sat on each others Boards. Garry Moore incredibly, as Mayor of one of the local authorities that bids for funding from Land Transport New Zealand, is on the Board of Land Transport New Zealand AND the Board of Transit. Now this isn’t intended to cast aspersions on any of these people, but how can you expect Land Transport New Zealand to hold Transit to account, when it has common board members.
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Furthermore, the ability to hold Transit to account has been severely compromised by Ministers telling Transit what they want. Transit isn’t simply sitting back and evaluating what projects need building, it is getting political direction that Ministers expect certain projects to proceed because Ministers think they are a good idea. Of course when there are political expectations, costs go up and when contractors understand that there are political expectations, they ask for whatever they want from Transit – then Transit asks Land Transport New Zealand, and it is also expected to fund what Ministers want (even though legislation is meant to ensure Land Transport NZ is statutorily independent from Ministers).
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One of the criticisms of Transit has been that costs have got out of control, when in fact, this is the fault of a combination of:

- the Land Transport Management Act (blame Labour, Greens and United Future) for encouraging expensive “green plating” of road projects;
- Land Transport New Zealand for not being pro-active in disciplining Transit as to how much project scope creep should be limited;
- Ministers who wanted projects progressed with little regard for cost;
- Transit itself, when statements were made that projects should be progressed “regardless of cost” (in reference to Transmission Gully), in addition if Transit was unhappy with either Land Transport NZ or the Ministry of Transport’s monitoring, it would meet with Ministers directly. Indeed, government appointed board members would always have direct access to Ministers, overriding the independent advice of officials.
- the Clark Labour Government attitude to official advice that went contrary to policy, which tends to suppress the “free and frank” expression of views that officials are meant to be able to share. In this environment, telling Ministers that the people they have appointed (e.g. the President of the Labour Party) are not doing their job properly would have been a CLM (career limiting move). The introduction of a regional fuel tax is a classic example, it failed miserably in the past, but Ministers did not want to hear advice on this.
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By contrast, what should happen is that Transit is entrusted to manage the state highway network, identify problems (congestion, safety, inefficient routes) and prepare a programme of works, evaluated on the basis of cost and benefit, and present these to Land Transport NZ for funding. Land Transport NZ should, when looking at Transit’s programme and the programmes of the 85 local authorities, prioritise spending across them all – with reference to the government’s strategic transport objectives.
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In the past, when economic efficiency was the primary measure of spending on roads, in most cases the best projects, for the money, were implemented. There was a tendency to be risk averse and not advance more expensive, high risk urban road projects, prioritising rural realignments and the like. However, by and large, the system did ensure high value for money, and kept control of costs. It was helped by any increases in funding being rather discreet and progressive.
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Today, economic efficiency is only one factor in deciding what roads to build, and Labour has increased funding for roads many many times over, at a rate which has been inflationary. In short, Labour has so dramatically increased funding that Transit has been stretched to get things going – and that stretching has meant more staff, more contractors and the contracting industry demanding more and more to meet demand. You don’t go from having only two large road projects under construction in Auckland at any one time to eight without the cost going up. ^

In addition, as Labour has demanded that certain projects “must” proceed, then contractors understand the market when the government isn’t going to say no. In the past, plenty of projects were delayed because detailed investigations saw the costs skyrocket, putting discipline on those costs and seeing funding go elsewhere for more worthwhile projects – now everything is going to get built.
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The only bright side of the announcement is that all fuel tax revenue will be dedicated to the National Land Transport Fund. This should be welcomed, and in fact is simply applying 2005 National Party policy. The other point to note is that National Spokesman Maurice Williamson has it dead right – which also should be welcomed. Maurice should know what he is talking about, he was the Minister who split Transit up in the first place! Kudos for Maurice for taking a responsible stand on this.
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The Greens will like this, because they don’t really believe in financial accountability and economic efficiency and will hope that Transit’s road engineer culture will get watered down – when they should be considered that the new entity will prioritise state highways over everything else. The Greens have long hoped they could dramatically change transport policy, they have, as well as presided over the biggest road building programme New Zealand has seen since the 1960s. I suspect that Peter Dunne wont care as long as Transmission Gully gets funded (since it is his own pet piece of prime pork), and neither will Winston care as Harbour Link (Tauranga's second harbour bridge) has already been funded (Winston's pork).

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Personally I like the idea that Transit be made into a state owned enterprise and its gets funding from Land Transport NZ based on a per km payment for all the traffic on its network (based on fuel tax/road user charges) and then spends the money on its network. Then motorists can contract separately with Transit (opting out of road taxes) to use its network.