Stuff saves us from ugliness

Colin Ansell, President of the National Front (NZ) is in a thumbnail picture on the main page of Stuff (right). The full article avoids showing us this.

Appropriately so, because Ansell's ugliness is in his ideas as well as his face. After all, successful intelligent people aren't going to join groups made up primarily of poorly educated white trash (men) unless they have a racist psychosis.

It isn't a registered political party, it isn't even halfway to the minimum 500 members. Ansell claims he is no neo-Nazi, when he of course was, and is a convicted criminal for being involved in an arson attack on a synagogue (go figure why self proclaimed nationalists have problems with Jews, and deny being neo-Nazis).

Unlike the UK, which has seen the BNP get a councillor elected to the Greater London Assembly, NZ can be proud that it keeps this flotsam and jetsam at such a low political ebb. After all, you don't want to see Ansell's face twice!

Private prisons then?

Not PC and I share some discomfort about the private sector being involved in the delivery and operation of prison services - and Anti Dismal has written much about the issue too, interestingly noting the risks of privatising maximum security facilities. This point stands out in an article he quotes "Moreover, hiring less educated guards and undertraining them—which private prisons have a strong incentive to do—can encourage the unwarranted use of force by the guards. As a result, our arguments suggest that maximum security prisons should not be privatized so long as limiting the use of force against prisoners is an important public objective."

Let's be clear - contracting out of ancillary services at prisoners is no issue, and there may be a case for contracting out prison management. The key is the disconnect between incentives to HAVE more prisoners, and the public policy reason for prisons.

Ideally, prisons would be nearly empty because crime would be rare. Ideally, prisons would deliver people reformed and who would never be repeat offenders.

However, a private prison owner would WANT repeat offenders, and would WANT criminals to want to return. That creates incentives not only to not rehabilitate, but to make prison desirable. Hardly what any of us want.

The flipside is that paying prisons to be feared creat incentives for abuse, and for crimes in prisons to be ignored. As much as many of us have glee at rapists and murderers suffering violence in prison, if you want prison to be a place of corporal punishment you should be transparent about it - as in Malaysia. Don't pretend that a Darwinian approach to justice in prison is a civilised substitute.

So I am wary of privatising prisons, wary of profits from applying force to people, wary of the incentives and malincentives around it.

Indeed, as Not PC has already pointed out, why is National and ACT only pursuing THIS privatisation? Why don't the usual masses of the lumpenproletariat give a damn about prisons, when they go apoplectic about privatising TVNZ, NZ Post, Air NZ, Kiwirail or a power company?

Indeed, if any sector needs more of the private sector, it is education. Imagine if ACT's policy, same as the UK Conservative Party's policy, was implemented in some form - parents not paying twice for education.

Now that's a step towards privatisation that would excite me, privatising prisons worries me, especially when mixed with the attitudes shown here by some in government.

The vile surrender in Pakistan

What disappoints so much is how feminists have failed to rally in protest against the surrender of the Swat Valley in Pakistan to the Taliban. An action that will at the very least deny girls an education, and along with that the means to be independent, to move from the abject servitude to troglodyte men from the Dark Ages, and at worst threatens all people with the totalitarian theocracy of terror that Islamism offers as "morality".

I have written before of my disgust at the appeasement by the semi-failed state of Pakistan in fighting these barbarians, and the actions since the Taliban took over.

Now Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah have written in the New York Times about how the Taliban have now banned music, how people have been fleeing the area and how such appeasement emboldens the Taliban. "The Taliban also announced in the local mosque that every family in the village would have to contribute one young man to their ranks" conscription ISN'T peace.

Christopher Hitchens write in Slate that there is now a new trend of separating the moderate extremists from the extreme extremists "In the last few days, we have heard President Barack Obama musing about a distinction between good and bad Taliban, the British government insisting on a difference between Hezbollah the political party and Hezbollah the militia, and Fareed Zakaria saying that the best way of stopping the militants may be to allow them to run things in their own way".

Imagine talking about those good and bad Nazis, or Khmer Rouge.

Hitchens predicts disaster for the Swat valley "A state or region taken over by jihadists will not last long before declining into extreme poverty and backwardness and savagery. There are no exceptions to this rule. We do not need to demonstrate again what happens to countries where vicious fantasists try to govern illiterates with the help of only one book." Quite, but worst of all it will hurt far wider than the people of that valley.

"who will be blamed for the failure? There will not, let me assure you, be a self-criticism session mounted by the responsible mullahs. Instead, all ills will be blamed on the Crusader-Zionist conspiracy, and young men with deficiency diseases and learning disabilities will be taught how to export their frustrations to happier lands. Thus does the failed state become the rogue state. This is why we have a duty of solidarity with all the secular forces, women's groups, and other constituencies who don't want this to happen to their societies or to ours."

In other words, the war against terrorism is a war against the destruction of civil society by these forces of the Dark Ages giving themselves succuour and a land of people to enslave and bully. THIS is the battle that should unify secularists and those who support individual liberty and the rights of women as a part of that - yet they are mostly silent. Hitchens calls it shameful that this be left to happen "we shall long have cause to regret the shameful decision to deliver the good people of the Swat Valley bound and gagged into the hands of the Taliban, and—worst of all—without even a struggle."

One wonders when the scourge of Islamism will be serious enough for the Western left to unite in disgust, or for the so-called peace movement/feminist left to stand up and recognise that the greatest fight for peace and womens' rights today is against Islamists, who worship violence and the subjugate of women and girls.

Or perhaps it is easier to send faxes about pay equity?

ACC - monopoly without accountability?

What happens if you get poor service from ACC? Well if you are a claimant you can appeal to District Court, but if you pay levies, you have no recourse. In reality, you wont go to Court if you feel treated shoddily, or that your compensation is inadequate. Yes you can sue for exemplary damages, but that's rare.

That is the funny world of the state monopoly accident insurance system. You, as a private citizen, have no responsibility to insure yourself for hurting yourself or others. The state does it for you, after thieving your money. Employers pay through their own levies, which is a tax on your income. It reflects risks in different industries. However, for non-work injuries it is socialism in action - the levies reflect average risk.

I've blogged before about the deception of ACC, whether ACC affects the care taken by others to avoid injury or causing injury, and the benefits of opening it up to competition.

The left bases its support for ACC on a mix of ideology and a debatable report undertaken by accountancy firm PWC commissioned by ACC itself which said why ACC should remain a monopoly. I'll let you judge whether a consultant asked by a client with a vested interest in a particular outcome would dare challenge that or just present the case for that outcome.

I simply say that having a government statutory monopoly providing an insurance service cannot ensure equitable treatment of all those paying or claiming. Without competition, those paying cannot choose to pay for the best service and the most appropriate levels of insurance (and added value services), nor can there can be efficiencies in managing customers or much accountability for delivering the services customers want.

ACC is a pay as you go system, which is an unaffordable absurdity. It needs to face the pressures of competition, in the employer accounts as already reported, but also motor vehicle accounts and for coverage of non-employment based accidents.

The government should commission a serious review of the entire ACC system with a view as to how to restructure it to allow competition for ALL ACC accounts, which means maintaining the compulsory nature of personal accident insurance.

You see, unless the right to sue is returned, personal accident insurance has to remain compulsory, otherwise you can be injured by the negligence of another and have no recourse (or your insurer has no recourse). I believe there is a case to consider whether to permit the right to sue to return, but for now competition in ACC would go a long way towards holding that sector accountable - because for now you get a state owned monopoly, with a board appointed by a politician.

After all, who in their right mind would believe unionist Ross Wilson could run an orgy in a brothel, let alone the national injury insurance monopoly?

Say no to knighting Ted Kennedy!

The execution by the "Real IRA" of two British soldiers in Northern Ireland comes days after the British government announced that Senator Edward Kennedy is to get a knighthood, for of all things, services to Northern Ireland.

How ironic.

The "Real IRA" sprayed the two soldiers with bullets, including the two men delivering pizzas to them, one of whom was a Pole. They then approached the shoulders and shot them dead on the ground.

Charming.

According to the Daily Telegraph, the sectarian barbarians say Northern Ireland is still "occupied", even though most people in Northern Ireland are glad for peace, and even had the audacity to say that targeting the two pizza delivery men in their bombing was justified because they were "collaborating". What sort of peculiar insanity is it, except the kind of warped Orwellian doublespeak to say that a couple of young men simply making a living were in some way "collaborating" with the Army.

Furthermore, whilst Gordon Brown rightfully described the incident as "evil and cowardly attacks", Sinn Fein (you know, the other IRA's political wing)'s leader Gerry Adams didn't say it was evil.

No. It was "wrong and counterproductive" and "Those responsible have no support, no strategy to achieve a United Ireland." So as the Daily Telegraph's Philip Johnston says it is about tactics, not morality. How could it be, Adams happily believed in executions and violence for decades.

So what about Ted Kennedy? Well quite simply, the Senator for many years was one of the chief agents to raise funds and moral support for the IRA. Simon Heffer describes the honour as a snub to those murdered by the IRA.

We should never forget the support granted by NORAID to the murder and violence in Ulster. Kennedy's positive role in persuading the IRA to give up terrorism is little redemption for the decades he was funding it, and was only due to Al Qaeda's actions on 9/11 which make terrorism suddenly impossible for US citizens to support.

A growing movement is against giving this hypocritical amoral lowlife any honour, see here.

Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail gives a damning overview of the life of this scoundrel, including his reckless actions in killing Mary Jo Kopechne and being expelled from Harvard for cheating at exams.

Ted Kennedy exemplifies the worst of politics in the United States - a fraud, a thieving conniving pork barrel peddling image merchant who has supported murder and violence. A nasty piece of work if ever there was one. The last Labour government granted Nicolae Ceausescu a knighthood, which was stripped from him a day before his execution. Kennedy is no Ceausescu, but it would be nice if Gordon Brown and this Labour government remembered what an enemy to the UK that Ted Kennedy has been.