Pity Guinea

Guinea doesn't make the news typically. However, it is quite simply an example of a country where the state is little more than an organised gang of thieves, using its monopoly on legitimised violence, to enrich itself and to pillage and oppress the citizens.

A military coup late last year, following the death of Lansana Conte (himself President since 1984 following a military coup, and then several highly questionable elections) meant it is today a military led regime, that has pledged elections within 2 years. The coup leader and effective head of state, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara has railed against corruption in the meantime.

However, as protestors filled the streets of the capital, Conakry, angry at Camara's announcement he wishes to stand in elections next year, the BBC reports soldiers have opened fire and massacred them. Reports range from 87 to 187 killed. Apparently soldiers have simply been let loose, and without control have assaulted people in the street and in their homes, with reports of looting and rape of women. Captain Camara has condemned the attacks, but claimed it was difficult to control the soldiers.

However, the Guinean army has a record of suppressing protests, having done so in 2007 with a general strike, and crackdown on the media. Guinea itself having suffered from insurgency of rebels from Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Guinea has 25% of the world's known deposits of bauxite, but with ample potential for other minerals and agriculture. Yet it is beset with decades of mismanagement, corruption and dictatorship. It is, for most, just another poster child of the failure of African leaders to provide the conditions for economic and social stability and growth, operating more as a kleptocracy than a government that defends the rights of its citizens and their property.

Meanwhile, a country with per capita GDP of only US$1002 per annum (PPP) has a 15,000 strong army destroying wealth and pillaging from the citizenry. Given Papua New Guinea has more than double that GDP per capita, as does Cambodia, it tells you just what a sorry state Guinea is in.

Gordon Brown promises bigger government

Gordon Brown has made his last speech as Labour Party leader at a Labour Party conference. In a call to arms, to fight the next election, he declared a host of new policies, policies which reflect how little he has learnt, and how dependent the Labour Party is on making people dependent on the state. He has said Labour should never stop in its goal to win the next election

He has announced:
- Electoral reform. Presumably, like the left in New Zealand in the early 1990s, he sees the future in coalitions with the Liberal Democrats, Greens or even Welsh and Scottish nationalists. For any politician facing certain defeat, calling for electoral reform is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
- A Nationalised Elderly Care Service: More government for the elderly, including “free” care in the home, which someone will be forced to pay for;
- Free child care for the poor, “paid for” by abolishing tax relief for middle income taxpayers. Given parents can’t let friends or neighbours provide it, it’s no surprise;
- Teenage single mothers to be put into government run homes to be taught how to be parents. Because it’s too difficult to teach them not to become parents or not to pay them to become parents?
- National ID cards wont be compulsory, which begs the question, why bother?
- “Create” 10,000 “Green jobs” by taxing those already with jobs and those who create jobs;
- Remove hereditary peers from the House of Lords (about the only thing I can seriously agree with);
- Expand the scope of Post Offices in banking;
- Raise tax “at the very top”, because nothing satisfies the left like punishing the successful to try to pay for its own profligacy;
- Tougher on crime, although he fails to admit the chronic under spending on prisons and the meagre sentences for violent offences, whilst the state focuses on hysteria over every adult being a potential pedophile;
- Promises on allowing weekend and evening GP visits, without addressing the chronic waste and production line standards of socialised free GP visits.

He claimed the Conservatives were wrong about the recession, yet fails to accept his own litany of mistakes from selling gold reserves to running perpetual deficits. He is proud of rescuing Northern Rock, when small to medium depositors were already protected from all bank failings by a deposit insurance scheme. Northern Rock could have been allowed to fail, and a strong message of restraint and risk management would have been taken by other banks. The wise could have taken over the weak, and future generations wouldn’t be paying the cost. Inflated asset prices (like property) would have been allowed to properly deflate, but Gordon Brown would have had to face thousands of mortgagees who stupidly borrowed too much to ride this speculative bubble. Instead, housing prices remain excessive. There was more worshipping of the NHS “which we love”, instead of noticing that for the vast increase in spending, there has been a 10% drop of productivity.

The unions are happy, which tells enough about how much he has swung Labour back to the left, back to more government, more taking from the productive middle income earners to give to the dependent and create more dependency.

So new Labour is old Labour, more government, no accountability for 12 years of deficits, wasteful spending and setting up the monetary and fiscal policies that saw the creation of the speculative bubble. A bubble that Brown hasn’t allowed to burst in the face of those who pursued it.

Gordon Brown thinks he knows best how to spend half of the money earned by taxpayers, and has been borrowing almost every year he has been in government, so that future generations can pay for the profligacy of the present. Millions of Britons live in ghettos of underclass, where many live in fear of petty crime and antisocial behaviour, unwilling to confront knife touting youths, whilst the state focuses on stopping people taking each others’ kids to sports events or babysitting them. Labour’s culture of dependency, of government solutions and strategies for everything, has been an abject failure.

Can there be hope that the other lot will be substantively better?

Hey others abuse kids too

Oh really, as true as it may be, you do have to wonder at the wisdom of Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, reported as saying that child abuse is common in other churches too. He claims 1.5-5% of clergy are involved in child abuse, which even if conservative is disgraceful.

However, there is no penance in being a party to covering up crimes to finger point "them too".

Of course, protestant churches and preachers of other religions abuse children too. Who has ever denied this? This also gets exposed and continues to be a cause of concern, but this reminds of the Albanian communist politician who on Australian TV said "every country has political prisoners" to excuse the then Stalinist state's repression of dissent.

Until the Vatican demands that all those who have committed atrocities towards children stand up and give themselves up to the authorities, and excommunicates the guilty, it can hardly start pointing fingers at others. Its own house absolutely reeks.

Nanny State Beer

No. Really!

The Daily Telegraph reports "A brewer criticised for making what it claimed is Britain's strongest beer has unveiled an ale with a 1.1 per cent alcohol content, which it has called Nanny State."

Sales Director of Brewdog said "the new beer had such a low-alcohol content that the Government did not class it as a beer and it was not subject to beer duty.

There is more on the Brewdog blog. Including how Alcohol Focus Scotland doesn't think it is funny because it"proves that once again this company is failing to acknowledge the seriousness of the alcohol problem facing Scotland". Joyless little Nanny State worshippers who don't understand people don't like being told what to do.

Of course the test will be in the tasting, time to compare Nanny State to Tokyo (the highest alcohol content beer) methinks. By the way Tokyo includes hops from New Zealand.

George Wood urges caution on Auckland rail

While the outgoing Chair of the ARC, Mike Lee, plays politics (he is an Alliance member from way back) in demanding the government cough up money for lavish rail plans that haven't even had any serious investigation done, George Wood talks some commonsense in the NZ Herald. The basic questions that rail enthusiasts, like the ARC, evade and avoid, because they have a grand vision of changing Auckland.

Wood is concerned about accurate costings and whether all these projects are good value for money, he notes "The Northern Busway Project was a good case in point. The final costs were considerably greater (nearly double) than the initial early estimations.". The record of rail project in the US shows on average public transport projects finish 20% above budget.

"A few decades ago the majority of employment was in the Auckland Central Business District. People now find their place of work is in the outer suburbs where they live, or they travel to other parts of the region.

In the case of North Shore City, in excess of 60 per cent of workers do not have to leave that city to find work. These days the majority of the Auckland region's workers never have to travel into the Auckland CBD."

He's right, but the planners still think of Auckland in the 1950s or want to go back to it. Only 11.7% of jobs in Auckland are in the CBD. So you might ask why spending over a billion dollars to service those jobs is worthwhile, particularly when half the people in those jobs don't live anywhere near a railway station or line. Half as many jobs are in Mt Wellington and Penrose, but the planners have no interest in commuters going there.

"In the next three years the operational subsidies provided by ratepayers will amount to $43.3 million. The remaining 60 per cent of this three-year operational cost, which amounts to $108.2 million, comes from petrol taxes and road user charges paid by Auckland's motorists."

So $36 million a year in subsidies, for around 8 million trips a year. So that means every trip carries a $4 subsidy. You might think it would be better if fare payers could pay that, but even if they did, it wouldn't start to cover the capital costs.

"Once the new rolling stock is purchased someone, and again it will probably be the ratepayers and motorists, will then have to pay for the depreciation of this equipment. This will amount to around $12 million a year" Oh and you're forced to pay for the rolling stock new as well of course.

"In 2001 ... we were told that 25 million passengers would be using the metro rail network by 2015. We are still a long way off this figure. The Auckland Regional Transport Authority has now revised its target down to 17 million passenger trips by 2016. This is still a huge increase when last year's annual figure was 7.9 million."

In other words, the massively inflated targets for patronage aren't being met, so the targets get revised and history is rewritten. What does that remind you of?

"Buses operating in the region carry six times the number of passengers carried by our trains. Buses are a far more cost-effective means of providing transport services to all our communities."

Indeed he is right. Buses carry around 43 million trips a year, (2007/2008) compared to around 8 million on rail. Some bus services are unsubsidised, but the annual subsidy total in Auckland for buses is around $93 million, so around $2.16 per trip. Cheaper than rail certainly, and it would be cheaper still if the ARC hadn't poured so much into contracting over commercial routes, and decimating profitable bus routes with the competing rail services. Subsidies were only $45 million in 2005, with similar levels of patronage, so the ARC geniuses have more than doubled subsidies with no net increase in patronage. Given the big increases to and from the North Shore with the new busway, this means significant declines on the Isthmus. This was before the recession.

So while George Wood is largely right, I wouldn't take the ARC or the new Supercity as the great model in fiscal prudence in looking after public transport in Auckland. I most certainly wouldn't think Mike Lee has any good record in knowing how to spend ratepayers' money. It's about time Auckland and central government took stock before pouring more money into Auckland's public transport networks.