Waitangi Day is the annual picking of a sore

Whilst Peter Cresswell makes much of my point for me, I want to add a couple of others.

It's easy to criticise those who embrace the notion of Maori ethno-nationalism (that being a nationalism based not on a shared history of a common political body, but based on an ancestral heritage), who engage in patronising monologues about "partnership" and "engagement" and "dialogue", when anyone who disagrees with them is simply branded as racist and ignored.

It's also easy to criticise those conservatives who are dismissive of anything Maori that makes them feel uncomfortable, who disapprove of the use of the Maori language, of Maori immersion schools (because they are Maori, not because they are state funded) or those who consent to using Maori customs on their own property or in their own business relationships, or indeed those who worship Maori supernatural beliefs.  For after all, if people want to embrace a culture and a language in their personal lives and openly express it, that is their choice.

However, what's largely ignored is that most people in New Zealand do not see Waitangi Day as a day to celebrate anything, except for a day off work.  So many see it as a day when they will be reminded by people who are themselves elites, on well above average salaries, frequently paid for by taxpayers, claiming there isn't "justice".  They will be reminded of the desire of these elites to take more of their money, through the state, to enrich a new generation of trough feeders.  They will have noticed that a generation of settlements are not seen as enough by the loud and angry, a group who have been influential in teaching a new generation of young Maori to share their view of entitlement, and belief in the legitimacy if not the wisdom of using violence to achieve their aims.  It isn't helped by a Race Relations Commissioner who is sympathetic to the view of those seeking to use the state as a way of extracting more money from everyone else.

Most people see it as rent seeking, by those who have not personally suffered any specific loss, and more importantly, being paid for by those who did not create the loss.

It is a sore around individual identity vs collective identity, and the role of the state in overriding the former with the latter.  It is one Don Brash clumsily attempted to raise in the 2005 election (Kiwi/Iwi posters were scratching the conservative "dismissive of Maori" viewpoint, rather than confronting the strongly held belief that there is a small Maori elite gaining rents from the state).   It is one that needs confronting, but wont be, as long as the Maori Party (which is patronised by such an elite) is necessary for a majority government.   Evading the debate or labelling all those wishing to engage in it as racists, is not going to make it go away.   Indeed, that very evasion is the source of vast clouds of irresponsibility that are allowed to wash over those who abuse their children, neglect their children and engage in a frenzy of mutual destruction of themselves and their whanau.

My second point is simpler, and easier to confront.

Titewhai Harawira is a thug.  She brutalised the mentally ill, and she is treated as deserving respect because of her age.  If she were a man of non-Maori descent, he would be treated by her sycophants and apologists for what he would be - a thug.

The mere fact this woman, who attacked Maori who were vulnerable, is granted a shred of respect, is disgraceful.  No one, Maori or otherwise, should give her a public platform and given the atrocious statistics for Maori on Maori crime, she should be ostracised, for she is part of the problem.  A woman who normalised and institutionalised violence, and has never offered contrition for it.  

John Key should ignore her, should refuse to engage with her, and she should be told why.  It's not her politics or that of her vile racist rent-seeking son (for there are many of that ilk), it's what she did.

Those who express concern over racism always say they want people judged for their deeds.  It's time to do just that.  Titewhai Harawira is a violent criminal offender, let's treat her as such.

HS2 - Why politics needs to get out of transport

The announcement today of the proposed route for the second phase of a high speed railway out of London beyond Birmingham to Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds should be read in future as a textbook case as to why politics needs to be removed from transport policy.  It is, encapsulated in a tidy package and £33 billion of money that will have to be borrowed from future generations, an almost perfect example of a political "boondoggle" as they are known in the United States.

Almost all of the claims made about this project are dubious.  It wont deliver economic nirvana to the areas it serves, it wont generate economic benefits above the costs of building it, and it is highly unlikely to regenerate more than a handful of small areas.  What it will be is a massive transfer of wealth from future taxpayers across the UK to a handful of construction companies, engineering consultancies, property developers and finally the relatively small numbers of people who will use the railway.

What is worse is that the Government portrays opposition to the project as being solely about people living along the line who will be affected by its construction and the noise, intrusion of a new railways through their properties.  NIMBY is a term used by anyone who wants to demean the interests of private property owners who don't want their property taken for someone else's purpose.  These NIMBYs wont stop the project.

However, the real opposition to the project is the shoddy business case.  You can always buy off NIMBYs with compensation and new routes (after all, it's just about borrowing more money from voters who haven't been born yet, so can't punish you for wasting their money).  It is harder to argue economics, especially when so few Ministers are able to tackle officials and lobbyists on the big issues, and when it is seen as being politically positive.

The opposition itself, the Labour Party, doesn't make that argument, because it simply can't, as it started the project in the first place.  

Besides, HS2 is a symptom of a wider problem.  The belief that politicians are able to make these strategic infrastructure decisions wisely.  Given the UK's history at failing to do so, you'd think they might learn.  Concorde, as beautiful and technically magnificent as it was, was an economic disaster and left no sustainable legacy for its monumental expense.  Indeed, the UK's entire commercial airliner manufacturing sector was largely decimated by inflexibility and state demands that it provide bespoke aircraft for the UK's then state owned airlines BEA and BOAC.  

So why is HS2 wrong?

Holocaust Memorial Day 2013

With so much media, so much exposure to violence and awareness of the grotesque cruel inhumanity that people can inflict upon others, it is not altogether unsurprising that a few are blase about the Holocaust.  The most recent utterance being the "Liberal" Democrat MP David Ward, who wondered how "the Jews" could suffer under the Holocaust and then oppress the Palestinians, as if a lengthy essentially civil conflict between two groups over one set of territory is akin to a government engaging in a systematic programme of rounding up and exterminating a whole segment of the population.  

I used to make that error.  When I was much younger, I saw it as one of many grotesque mass murders by governments.  Of course, Mao and Stalin murdered, starved and oppressed many many more than Hitler.  It really is splitting hairs about how morally empty they are in comparison, but there is a whole context of the Holocaust that needs to be made clear to all.

It really was different.

1930s Germany was a modern society.  Most people went about their business untroubled by the state, although it was increasingly clear that opposing the government wasn't a good idea, there hadn't been wholesale nationalisation of businesses big and small.  While media and education increasingly glorified the Nazi Aryan ideal and Germanic culture, they also spread the poison of virulent anti-semitism, setting the stage for the removal of all state legal protections for Jews (and others deemed sub-human), encouraging private and state boycotts, harassment, vandalism and assaults, and ultimately the state organised labelling, deportation, incarceration and ultimately execution of Jews.

There have been incidents of mass pogroms against groups, incited by political or religious leaders.  Rwanda's genocide is of that nature.  However, no other modern society, otherwise seen as civilised, engaged in organised, efficient eliminationist genocide. 

Of course, Jews have throughout history faced orchestrated organised discrimination and genocide before, but this is still in living memory, and it remains distinctive.

In 2008 I wrote:

Today Sunday 27 January is International Holocaust Memorial Day. It marks the day of liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. It is about remembering all those murdered by the Nazi state, from six million Jews to 200,000 disabled people to gypsies, Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, political dissidents from socialist to liberal persuasions. The utter complete dehumanisation of all those effectively declared "unpersons" by the Nazis remains a horror unparalleled in its comprehensive efficient single mindedness.

That today is what we should all commemorate.  Those millions executed, starved and tortured to death by the state, seeking to remove those individuals it deemed were not human.

I should not be demeaned by those politicians who dare try to compare such events to anything less than a systematic eliminationist slaughter of a whole category of people, by a government in peacetime (for it is a distraction to imply that this was an event "of World War 2", as if Nazi Germany would not have undertaken genocide had there been "peace" in Europe between states).  

So I urge you to spend a moment in quiet reflection, of those who suffered, died, fought and resisted those who wanted them dead, for no reason than their ancestry, their education, their wealth or their private beliefs.   Bear in mind those today, who continue to deny it, who diminish it and who relativise it, and what you can do to keep the memory alive of the unthinkable.

The victor vs the guilty and the scared : UK in the EU

David Cameron has laid it plain - if elected as a majority government in 2015, the Conservatives will offer a referendum on membership of the EU in 2017.

The intention as described in his speech today, is to renegotiate the UK's membership in the EU, with more openness, more flexibility and a relationship with more direct accountability, so that a referendum would mean that a "yes" vote was for a new EU relationship.  "No" of course, would mean departing the EU.  What isn't clear is what would happen if there was not to be a new EU relationship that made a substantive difference to the status quo.

David Cameron is obviously driven by politics.  He wants to sideswipe UKIP, so that its primary policy is, essentially, his.  Why vote UKIP (and risk putting Labour in) when you can vote Conservative and have your say on EU Membership?  Labour leader Ed Miliband has made it clear he doesn't support a referendum because of "the uncertainty" it creates, and the beleaguered Liberal Democrats have long had a love affair with the European project.

However, there is more to it than that, he wants to send a clear message to other EU Member States that  they better negotiate a good enough deal for the UK that he can sell it to UK voters, or those voters will say "no".

You see voters wont be choosing between the status quo and a new relationship that has yet to be negotiated, they would be choosing between a new relationship and leaving the EU.   So something will have to be negotiated.   That puts pressure on those Member States keen on the UK remaining to compromise significantly, for the consequences of failure would be considerable.

It's telling though that the consequences of a "no" vote remain vague.  For most campaigners for a UK exit from the EU, in UKIP, don't want to abandon the single market, they just want to abandon the customs union, EU law and the financial transfers to support EU programmes.  They want to keep open borders for trade and investment.  However, to say "no" to membership of the EU doesn't actually say that.  It is throwing it all away and starting from scratch.  That's a strawman that suits supporters of the EU, but isn't what UKIP wants and isn't what almost all opponents of EU membership argue.

However, what is this all about more fundamentally?  Why is there such antipathy towards the EU in the UK?  Why is there such a different attitude on continental Europe?

It all goes back to history and how it is taught at school to children in Britain and on the continent.  

The British view of history before the EU is fairly simple.  The UK fought and won World War 2 (yes with American help), as such it contributed to being a bulwark against Nazism and subsequently against the threat of Soviet invasion from behind the iron curtain.  Deep in the British national psyche is this belief in the justice of this win, that Britain protected Europe from freedom.   Britain doesn't and didn't see the European project as doing that for Britain, but as being a way of opening up markets and allowing trade and travel.  Britain didn't see it as a way of sharing its welfare state with those from far poorer countries.  

The countries on the continent think quite differently.  The citizens of the countries that believe they were victims of World War 2, i.e. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, believe that the European project is about peace, and is about defusing centuries of nationalist tensions and rivalries.   It is seen as protecting their freedoms, bear in mind these countries all endured years of Nazi occupation and fighting in the streets and fields of their countries.  Britain had the Blitz, but it was never occupied.   The strong belief that the EU is the foundation of keeping the peace in Europe endures because there are generations still alive who can tell tales of horror and poverty of how it was before.   That tale isn't told in the UK which won, rather than was occupied.

The citizens of the countries that fell on the wrong side of the iron curtain think differently again.  For them,  the war was followed by over 40 years of tyranny and totalitarianism.   For them, joining the EU (and NATO) is about turning away from Moscow and turning towards the West.  Notwithstanding the money that comes from EU cohesion funds for being the poorest countries in the EU, the likes of Poland, Romania and Latvia see the EU as part of their process of civilising government, of tackling corruption and promoting core principles such as the separation of powers.   Their view of the EU is understandably different given the darkness from whence they recently emerged.

Finally there is the guilty. Germany (and it wouldn't admit it, Austria).  Germans have hammered into them war guilt, Holocaust guilt, combined with part of the country also carrying relief of having emerged from the same totalitarianism as its eastern neighbours.  For Germany the EU is a way of doing good, of fueling prosperity, human rights and values of freedom, secularism, tolerance, productivity and accountability.  Germany embraces it as salving its conscience over what happened in the war, and what happened in the countries that were occupied.   

So Britain comes from it differently, and has done so fairly consistently.  Britain has long been critical of the Common Agricultural Policy, and gained a partial rebate of its contribution as a result.  Britain has long pushed for reforms for greater transparency and accountability for EU budgets for controls on major projects and scepticism over the growth in EU regulation and spending.

However, it is now coming to a crunch.  There is a profound widespread opposition among many in the UK to EU Membership, not because of free trade, not because of free movement to travel, but because of opposition to petty regulations, opposition to EU spending not only on a profligate polity and bureaucracy, but to well-heeled industrial farmers in France, to spendthrift Greek infrastructure projects.   There is opposition to people from poorer EU Member States claiming welfare benefits, free health care and education, having paid no tax in the UK.  There is opposition to mass uncontrolled migration from those countries.  

Some of the fears are genuine, some of them are beat ups, and there is a lot of bluster about how much the EU costs the UK budget, lots of nonsense that the European Convention on Human Rights came with EU Membership (it comes with being a member of the Council of Europe) and that all the EU brings is regulation (when it also brings prohibitions against governments subsidising businesses that compete with those from other EU Member States).

However, EU Memberships is a constitutional matter.  EU law is supreme in the UK, the UK government is bound to implement most EU law (it needs to negotiate a specific opt out or conditions otherwise, which it also needs agreement on).   The EU takes a small portion of national VAT revenue to spend on the Commission, and the European Parliament is not sovereign, the European Council is.  So imagine a supranational government where the elected representatives of the citizens are not in charge.

It is right for the UK to renegotiate its membership of the European Union, and I will write about why later.   What is wrong with the EU is plenty, what is good about the EU is few, but significant.   I believe it would be great if the UK could renegotiate EU Membership and indeed the European Union on grounds that would be outward looking, liberal, and working towards less laws, except those to bind the economic and social freedoms that Europe should be famous for.

However, I don't believe that this can happen, I don't believe any UK government can remotely negotiate EU Membership that can deliver more freedom and less government (because they don't believe in it at all), and I don't believe the EU is compatible with that.

Davos - when will someone talk about the elephant in the venue?

Regular readers of my blog know my views of the annual World Economic Forum at Davos.

In 2009 I wrote:

There is not inconsiderable hype in the business world and among some in governments about the annual exercise in mutual onanism called the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland. Like many conferences of high profile people, one of the key objectives is to get people to agree and put out nice sounding statements that will offend no one and look like some enormous intellectual capital has been applied to the economic issues of the world.

Liam Halligan at the Daily Telegraph calls for this year's WEF to actually do something useful, like dealing with the elephants in the economic room that never get discussed, because to do so would embarrass the inept, timid and unprincipled politicians that scurry about the venue at Davos, seeking to appear important and competent.   He focuses on the US fiscal cliff and the unsustainability of the "Western model" of growing state dependency, deficit spending and public debt.

However, Davos wont do that.   It didn't identify the financial crisis, it didn't debate solutions, it hasn't really done much at all over the years.   It does involve a lot of networking and back slapping.  Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times has written about how many of the prophesies at Davos prove to be far from true, like Bill Gates predicting Google didn't really have a business, how Ken Lay CEO of Enron was a keynote speaker in 2001 (yes the one convicted of conspiracy and fraud)  and how C. Fred Bergsten, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said at Davos 2008 that it was inconceivable that there could be a world recession.

It's hilarious, for an event where the cost to send a delegate is a registration fee of US$20,000 a head, plus accommodation, airfares and other expenses of course, add a zero or two if you actually want to speak.

No doubt the business people attending see value in networking and discussing opportunities, but it is the fact it provides a forum to ignore some serious home truths about public policy in governments, whilst politicians are there talking about everything, but the hard issues, that makes the Forum more hype than substance.

No serious scholar of economics or finance would look at the Davos World Economic Forum as a locale of intense debate and discussion about any need for serious systematic change to domestic or foreign policy in any countries.

So what SHOULD be talked about?

How about this:

- The budget deficit and public debt of the United States, exacerbated by the unsustainability of social security and Medicare, and how it requires the US to choose between serious cuts in the role of the Federal Government, or serious increases in taxes, and what both options mean for economic growth and the long term future of the United States as the world's leading economy;

- The future of the European Union, particularly the nationalisation of southern European public debt by northern European economies, and how unsustainable the widespread European model of ever growing public spending and regulation of the private sector has proven to be in sustaining growth, employment and confidence.  In other words, how will Europe grow when so much of its economy and society is dependent on internal transfers;

- The risks and disappointment that quantitative easing/money printing/debasement and devaluation of currencies has proven to be in re-invigorating those economies that have engaged in it, and the emergence of new asset price inflation bubbles fueled by the fiat money manufacturing process.  In other words, real debate about the use of monetary policy to create money and the chimera of the short term "success" it creates.  Is there starting to be a shift back towards commodity money as a source of store of value?;

- The opportunities trade liberalisation in good and services can have in promoting economic growth, reducing poverty, increasing employment and improving the environment, if only the US, EU, Japan, China, India and Brazil could get their act together and launch a new WTO trade round, and how the creeping protectionism globally threatens to cause much harm.  How could world leaders catalyse a new open trade round for the 21st century?;

- The corrosion of economies and societies by corruption, through the effective confiscation of wealth by corrupt politicians and business owners using state regulation, protectionism, subsidies, exemptions from legal enforcement of contract, tort, criminal and property laws.  How critical it is for developing countries to seriously tackle corruption, with open independent courts, open free media and political systems that allow voters to remove those in power readily, and to protect the rights of all citizens from infringement by government, by gangsters and other thugs.  What does failing to do this encourage in terms of net emigration, the lack of interest from foreign investors beyond extractive businesses?

- The qualitative difference between governments cutting spending on consumption, and increasing taxes on wealth and income creation, and how one helps to create economic growth, whereas the other stymies it.

It wont happen.  Economic vandals like Gordon Brown will be speaking, a man who was one of the world's worst dealers in precious metals, but also an egregious creator of rampant state dependency and an unsustainable economy fueled by an endless addiction to promoting private and public sector credit.  His personal behaviour was notable for paranoia and an egotistical over-estimation of his own intellect and perspicacity, he shouldn't be speaking in polite company.

It includes Eurocrats, who demand austerity from Member States but more money for their own, unaudited, intergovernmental organisation.  The leader of a company that facilitated a country lying about its public spending and then seeking to profit from it.  A communist and finally a serial bigamist who jokes about rape.  Pardon me if I am not impressed by a group that invites individuals with such questionable intellectual and moral credentials.

Of course the World Economic Forum includes meetings in secret, but who really will take on the corruption,  the wilful deception by politicians of the monetary and fiscal positions of their countries, including those who promised unearned money, goods and services at the price of bankrupting future generations?

It wont be happening in Davos.

Yep, it's not worthy of the esteemed individuals who actually do attend.

Move along, there isn't a lot to see here.

UPDATE:  Helen Clark is at Davos.  Who is surprised? 5 star hotels, schmoozing and pontificating, whilst escaping the excoriating criticism of the substandard subsidiary of the UN she leads.   She is keen on how austerity is impacting on development, code for "how dare developed countries cut spending on aid funnelled through intergovernmental organisations because they have the temerity to try to balance their budgets by means others than taxes".  Rich, of course, for an international civil servant who pays no tax.