Mad woman costs us all

This has me absolutely furious. The silly bitch who stabbed a pilot because of her deranged desire to be flown on a small plane to Australia (which wouldn't have made it) is now going to be an excuse to grow the state - yet again.

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One of the few reliefs of flying provincially in New Zealand is not going through the bloody silly nonsense of security checks before boarding turboprop aircraft. You know, much like we don't do it for passengers on buses, or people driving cars or trucks, even though all of those kill more people every year than aircraft do.

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However no, the Dear Leader Helen Clark, responding to the kneejerk reaction no doubt of the safety fascists, has said that "tighter security was inevitable".

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Why Helen? Because a mentally disturbed woman has undertaken a one off attack?

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The great logic is from Helen:

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"It was my understanding that we operated the same general rules as in Australia [but] it's now clear to me that there is a size of plane we're flying in this country which, in Australia, would be a jet plane. We apply the same jet plane rules but we have rather a lot of turbo-propelled planes in this country of some size. So that raises some issues."

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Except Helen a turboprop is not a jet plane, and besides which, why the hell does it matter?

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This will mean more money for the Aviation Security services then and "Tighter screening is likely to impose extra costs, however, and Miss Clark indicated that those were likely to be borne by passengers on a user-pay basis."

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Hold on, user pays? Shouldn't this be on an "abuser pays" basis? Shouldn't the woman concerned be required to pay the full costs of health care, damage and delay she has caused? Why should the 99.999% (rounded down) of airline passengers pay more to be screened for an extraordinarily rare event when they are far more likely to be killed or injured being driven to their flight?

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I know why, because one reason this incident happened is because the state failed... as "She acknowledged, meanwhile, that the woman at the centre of last week's incident, Asha ali Abdille, had "presented a range of agencies with serious issues for quite some time"."

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Marvellous. So Air National could sue them for this? Hmmm.

Archbishop of Canterbury believes in competing laws?

"An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger" he is reported to have said according to the BBC.

He is quoted as saying "the UK had to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system." So what? In fact a lot more than simply Muslims do not relate, there is a whole underclass of yobs and obnoxious oxygen thieves that don't relate.

However, why is that a reasons to surrender the British system?

"There's a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law"

PM Gordon Brown has rejected this, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has said "We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another".

Unfortunately in New Zealand we do, and the leaders of neither major political party want to change that, whereas in the UK the leaders of both major parties and the major third party don't want it.

and so Transmission Gully?

Martin Kay from the Dominion Post is interviewing his PC by speculating that "The potential for private investors to pick up the $470 million shortfall for the planned motorway is firmly on the table"

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Given that the legislation to do this has been around since 2002, and that there has been some private interest in this, it is hardly a surprise. However, Martin Kay has clearly missed a major point. The proposal for the Waterview project is (presumably) that the full cost of the project is financed by the private sector. Suggesting the private sector finance less than half of the cost of the project, while taxpayers subsidise the rest means that taxpayers are subsidising the return to private shareholders. Indeed, the noise from potential "investors" (nice to invest some money and get a return from the money "invested" by the state too) a few years ago was that they would happily help with financing, building and operating Transmission Gully, if the government coughed up the majority of the cost.

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The truth still remains that Transmission Gully has low traffic volumes, is not viable as a toll road (even if the current highway is also tolled) and the $955 million putative cost is about to undergo the same type of inflation that Waterview Connection has. Let's not pretend that a costing that is now nearly 3 years old remains accurate in todays money, it is $1.04 billion based on inflation alone. The current detailed investigation phase will probably uplift that by another 20% I suspect. The $485 million "promised" hasn't increased to compensate for that. Again it's a road that the users wouldn't pay for if they had to, nor would those who directly benefit from it, so why make others pay for it?

What do the "anti-war" left think?

I’d have thought the leftwing blogs that claim to care so much about death and destruction in Iraq would be outraged that the Islamist insurgency is training children and using people with Down’s Syndrome to bomb civilians.

However, I have yet to see a single post from the left outraged by it. Surely it can't be because the insurgency is fighting the USA? Surely that doesn't justify using innocent people to bomb innocent people?

My question is this. Do those who opposed the invasion of Iraq and overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime support or oppose the Islamist insurgency there?

Quite simply, if you have strong views on waging war against the Ba’athist Iraqi government, presumably you should also have views on waging war against the current one.

Emirates first to fly whalejet into NZ

Those looking forward to flying on the "superjumbo" new Airbus A380 from a New Zealand airport look like they'll have to wait a year. Emirates is the first airline to announce flights with the A380 to/from Auckland. According to Business Traveller, Emirates daily flight EK 412 from Dubai to Sydney (and EK 413 in reverse) will be flown by an A380 from February 2009, and the flights will be extended onto Auckland (the flights currently continue to Christchurch). Emirates will be the third airline to fly the A380 starting September 2008.

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Presumably there will be some rejigging of flights between Auckland and Christchurch, unless Emirates is dropping Christchurch, but anyway Emirates does promise its A380s will introduce new first, business and economy class products on board. That will be interesting given the world beating Singapore Airlines products on its A380s, although the number of seats Emirates is installing on its A380s will range from 489 to 600, whereas Singapore Airlines only has 471. I suspect Emirates will be flying the low density long haul version on this route though, as it seeks to compete with Singapore Airlines, Qantas, BA and Virgin Atlantic for the lucrative Sydney-Europe routes.

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Anyway it will be good to see the whalejet flying regularly to and from NZ. This will undoubtedly put pressure on airfares in all classes. Frankly, the odds are that no other airlines will be flying A380s to NZ in the near future. The other airlines that have ordered A380s that currently fly to NZ are Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Thai, Korean and Malaysian. Out of them only Qantas and Singapore Airlines currently fly their biggest aircraft (747s) into NZ, and in both cases the majority of their flights are on smaller aircraft. I doubt it is worthwhile either Qantas or Singapore Airlines flying such large planes on any of their services to NZ.