Nanny Tories to tax alcohol more

Why be surprised? It is in the school prefect, oh "the working classes as so incompetent we must save them" holier than though attitude that the party sadly personifies too often.

You see the problem isn't the drinkers, it is apparently those who sell to the drinkers. Well you shall not do that, of course young bankers who get bladdered on champagne wont be affected, after all drunk upper class people are just funny aren't they?

Nice cheap way to excuse not focusing the criminal justice system on real offenders.

Tories announce cuts

Conservative Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, presented his plan to cut spending to eliminate the budget deficit at the Conservatice Party conference. Is it bold? No. Is it acceptable? Just. Is it enough? Not by a long shot.

His ideas are:
- One year pay freeze on all state sector employees earning more than £18k a year, excluding the Armed Forces (this includes teachers, doctors and the police);
- £50k cap on pension payments for state sector employees;
- Reducing "size of the Whitehall bureaucracy" by a third;
- Abolition of "baby bonds" and welfare tax credits for those earning over £50.
- Increase state pension age to 66 from 2016 (for men);
- NOT to abolish the forthcoming 50p tax rate on earnings over £150k;
- Increase inheritance tax allowance to £1m.

To be fair he laid it into Gordon Brown saying:

“The Iron Chancellor has turned into the plastic Prime Minister. Free social care. Free hospital parking. Free child care places. We would all like those things. But where is the money coming from? He is treating the British people like fools,”

Quite right, but whilst this is a start, I still think far more can be done as I outlined before:
1. Abolish all corporate welfare, stop trying to pick winners;
2. Lead a call to cut the EU budget at Brussels;
3. Sell Channel 4, Royal Mail and the tolled bridges/tunnels of the highway network;
4. Cancel plans for a high speed railway, no new taxpayer spending on rail infrastructure;
5. Scrap the ID card scheme;
6. Scrap a wide range of government IT projects;
7. Scrap subsidising rural broadband;
8. Abolish regional development agencies;
9. Fund Scotland on a per capita basis, forcing it to make budget cuts;
10. Eliminate additional welfare payments for those on welfare who have extra children;
11. Negotiate an end to EU welfare tourism;
12. Freeze NHS spending, introduce charges for "no shows" at appointments and charge for more than 1 GP visit a year for those between 18 and 65;
13. Freeze all public sector pay until there is a budget surplus;
14. Terminate public sector pension scheme membership growth;
15. Abolish all NEW agencies established since Labour was elected.

So far we have only number 13. 1 out of 15 George, must try harder.

and I wasnt even being libertarian.

Is Maori TV rugby bid a breach of WTO obligations?

New Zealand is bound by the General Agreement on Trade in Services to have no limitations on market access in the audio-visual services sector and no limitations on national treatment. This was a commitment signed up in 1994 under the previous National Government. It has effectively stopped local content quotas being introduced on television and radio.

Whilst there remain no limitations on market access, it is the commitment to no limitations on national treatment that is at issue here.

National treatment means that you treat foreign owned suppliers on an equivalent basis to domestically owned suppliers. In practice this means NZ On Air cannot discriminate between broadcasters on the basis of ownership, and it does not. However, it becomes a little more complicated when we talk about Maori broadcasting.

New Zealand limited national treatment for Maori broadcasting as follows:

"The Broadcasting Commission is 3)directed by the Government, pursuant to the Broadcasting Act 1989, to allocate a minimum of 6 per cent of its budget to Maori programming. From 1995 all public funding for Maori broadcasting will be controlled by Te Reo Whakapuaki Irirangi (Maori Broadcasting Funding Agency)."

However, Te Puni Kokiri is responsible for the money being given to the Maori Television Service to bid for the broadcasting of the Rugby World Cup free to air. Not Te Reo Whakapuaki Irirangi (commonly known as Te Mangai Paho). Indeed you might ask whether bidding for broadcasting a rugby match is "Maori broadcasting" but it is moot.

That limitation does not apply as the money has not gone through the right agency. So the exception doesn't work.

Is there a potential breach of New Zealand's WTO commitments?

The state granting funding to a broadcaster that would not be available to a foreign owned broadcaster, for the same purpose, would appear to be so. Subsidies, you see, are meant to have national treatment.

TV3 and Prime should be entitled to national treatment, and be eligible for the same funding for a similar purpose, but are not. Indeed, one could not even begin to argue that there was a process to allow them to apply for such funding.

The foreign owners of both broadcasters could, theoretically, get their national governments to formally complain to the New Zealand government of this breach. Indeed, they could go to a WTO Disputes Panel and thoroughly embarrass the government as a result.

Wouldn't this have been picked up? Well no. You see Te Puni Kokiri is hardly versed in trade agreements. The Ministry of Culture and Heritage, which is responsible, was not actually responsible for broadcasting policy and GATS at the time it was signed. It was the then Ministry of Commerce (now Ministry of Economic Development). The institutional knowledge about this is not located in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage nor TPK.

I also doubt whether anybody thought it was necessary to get Ministry of Foreign Affairs sign off on this funding.

So the Parliamentary Question is:

"Has the Trade Minister received any advice as to whether the Te Puni Kokiri funding of the Maori Television Service to bid for free to air Rugby World Cup broadcasting rights is in compliance with New Zealand's international trade obligations? If not, why not?"

Supplementary:

"How does the Trade Minister reconcile New Zealand's commitments to national treatment in audio-visual services with the granting of a subsidy to a New Zealand owned broadcaster to acquire broadcasting rights that could not and would not ever be available to a foreign owned broadcaster?"

UPDATE: This also applies to CER. New Zealand is bound to offer national treatment to Australian broadcasters. So there could be a breach of CER as well.

Manufacturing rights

One of the trends in recent years from statists of both sides of the political spectrum is the manufacturing of "rights". Not genuine rights, the rights to free speech, rights to control the use of your body, rights to your property, rights to interact peacefully with others. No. Rights to something someone else has produced which is to be supplied to you by force.

It started with the "right to life" not being the right to repel anyone else trying to do violence to you, but the "right" to compel others to provide you with food, clothing, housing and warmth.

Then came a "right" to education. A "right" to health care. A "right" to a job. Nobody asserting these ever wanted to make it clear what rights would be infringed upon to deliver this, or indeed what would happen if everyone demanded a "right" to a living and sat around waiting for it.

You see the difference between a genuine right (sometimes referred to as a negative right) is that your exercise of it does not take away from the right of others to do the same. My right to free speech does not take away from yours. Oh, and to be clear, my right to free speech does not demand anyone else supply a platform for it, but it does demand that others not stop me from producing or negotiating to acquire my own. For example, if blogger stopped allowing me to publish this, it wouldn't be infringing on my right to free speech, it would be asserting its own property rights. Indeed, it has granted me limited property rights here, so I can write as I see fit and can block commenters if I like - blocking your comments doesn't infringe on your right to free speech.

So called "positive rights", require taking from others. You see everyone on earth could have free speech, and it would take away from no one (except perhaps the superstructure upon which many regimes are built). However, to grant everyone a "right" to a home, education, health care, broadband or whatever is the latest trend, would cost. Indeed, assuming rights should be the same for everyone, imagine the cost. Notice how none of the statists arguing for such "rights" assert them across international borders. Your "right" to broadband doesn't apply in Chad, nor does your "right" to heart surgery. You might ask why not, if it is a "right". The truth is that it is no such thing - it is a claim upon others using language to place what is a fundamentally socialist concept on a higher ground than it actually is.

It is worth remembering the main reason "positive" rights came about was because the Soviet Union reacted against TRUE rights being advanced at the UN. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was created in 1966, as a Western attempt to push true freedoms onto the UN agenda. It is far from perfect, but does include rights to freedom from torture, the right to not be arbitrarily deprived of life, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of movement including leaving one's country, freedom of association, freedom of speech etc.

However, this perturbed the USSR, which of course routinely ignored all of the above. So it created the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It included a "right to self determination" (not individual self determination mind you), the rights to work, social security, a minimum standard of living, etc.

None of this really matters, as New Zealand is a signatory to both, but then, so is North Korea. The US did not ratify the latter, but did the former with reservations.

So why raise it now? Because Brendon Burns, Labour's Broadcasting spokesman, has said you have a "right" to watch the Rugby World Cup on free to air television.

Yes, presumably in asserting this "right", he should provide you with a TV as well as the programming. Indeed, why can't I assert this "right" in London? If it is a "right" then why not?

Brendon is of course complaining about the ridiculous taxpayer funded Maori TV bid, but it's not just about that. He wants state TV to carry it. He specifically shuts out Prime TV, because of coverage reasons, and ignores TV3. So in other words, the Labour Party wants to force the NZRFU to give TVNZ the rights to broadcast the Rugby World Cup. Nationalisation of programming if ever it was.

Of course it is genuinely pathetic. Nobody has any "right" to watch anything. The Rugby World Cup is no more special than watching M.A.S.H, Ed Edd and Eddy, Bro-Town or championship fencing. Just because a lot more people want to watch it, doesn't mean there is some magical "right" imposed on the suppliers of the Rugby World Cup to hand over the rights.

Tory conference

Given that the current Labour government in Britain is morally bankrupt as it:

- Calls for MORE big government to try to get elected;
- Lies about the need for spending cuts, then admits they are needed after no one believes it.

and is third in the polls, you might hope the Conservative Party would be worth looking forward to.

Well the party conference is a chance to present itself as a government in waiting, so what have we seen so far?

- Boris Johnson demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, even if every other country ratifies it. I'll believe it when I see it, as William Hague has said the CURRENT policy is a referendum. Frankly, all that matters to me is that the UK relationship to Brussels is renegotiated;
- Promises that every town will have a school for tradespeople. Oh dear.
- Boris Johnson noting that he has freezed the Greater London Assembly portion of Council tax for another year, and will again next year, and wants the forthcoming 50p tax rate abolished;
- National Insurance (a tax) to be abolished for new companies for the first two years;
- Waffle about cutting "NHS red tape" to save money;
- People on incapacity benefits to face tough tests to check if they are capable of working.

Yawn.

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph made a great point when she demanded the Tories put forward the moral case for spending cuts.

"The Conservatives must stake their claim to be the party that has a positive account, a morally attractive case, for saying that public spending – which is to say, the power of the state – can and should be reduced permanently. Sounds like heresy? Only if you buy into the lexicon of the Labour-Guardian-"equality" lobby – which is, of course, precisely what Mr Brown wants you to do."

"David Cameron's Tories can present themselves as sole custodians of the future in which a smaller state will mean a stronger society."

I'm not holding my breath. This is, after all, the party that still believes in stopping a private company expanding its airport.